Category: Greatest Hits

Announcing the First 366 Weird Movies Video Reviews

Howdy gremlins and goblins! Just a minute while I talk to some old people:

(This domain goes back to 2006, and I still get fanmail from my old material, so I know some old-timers have followed on. You folks know that my longest-continuous blogging gig is 366WeirdMovies. So if you know my review history, you must be on pins and needles wondering which film I selected for the very first video review. (Actually I know you all are wondering, I’m just stalling for the suspense.)

Anyway, for the rest of you: Hey kids I video-reviewed an old horror movie! It’s 1974’s Legacy of Satan, a movie not quite weird enough to be honored on The List, but worth an eyeball that seeks out weirdness. Made in partnership with some colleagues of mine from there, Giles Edwards and Greg Smalley.

But let me back up a bit here while the piano player warms up the lounge for me, because the story of how this project came together is gonna blow the training wheels right off your unicycle…

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Epiphanies After the Apocalypse

I survived the cyberpunk end times, and never got to assemble my own Mad Max warrior tribe. I got my COVID shots and never got weird mutant superpowers. I ventured out of my survivalist seclusion and found out the world is going to keep going.

Recently we’ve all emerged from COVID quarantine, and my household bravely ventured out to public life again. My first time dining out at an actual restaurant took some adjustment.

My darling wife of 30 years, Mrs. Penguin, could not afford to lose her cool. She is a patient woman, and I speak here as a man who is an expert at being impossible to take out in public. She sat in Felix & Oscars enjoying her personal pizza and margarita, happily munching and slurping away. I was eating too, but nervously. My sweaty hands gripped the table. My eyes scanning madly from side to side around the room. I assured her that I too, was having fun.

But inside my dumpster of a neurotic brain, I was screaming: “AAAAAAAAAAHHHH! I’M SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE!!!!”

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Greatest Hit : Why Would You Want To Do That?

The below is a post from November 6th, 2011. NINE YEARS AGO AS OF THIS POSTING. It was posted on my old open source blog and got popular enough to get passed around most of the very news sites I talked about in there. Much water has gone under the bridge since then.

I STILL want Dillo! I just gave up and use Lynx for that function now. I couldn’t get Dillo to even compile on a modern system without maintaining it myself. There are thousands of journalists out there that struggle with this same problem every day; they need to get the facts, and all the facts are behind either paywalls or a million popups and autoplaying videos. I wish we just had a blogger’s equivalent of a Press Pass.

I also no longer run any of the below Linux distros. I’m on the Mint bandwagon now. It’s been the default “works out of the box” Linux distro for a few years, but God knows what I’ll have to resort to if Mint gronks.

Anyway, I’m reposting this NINE YEAR OLD post because people loved it and linked to it. Do not be surprised if it is out of date, because it is an old post. Got that?

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My 123ish Posts : An Updated Link List

One of my clients, 123ish.com, is an international platform which has been gracefully accepting some of my most maddened rants over the years. Sadly, they do not have a way to link to an author’s page using their set-up. So from here on out, I will maintain this specific blog post and link it from this site’s front page, serving as a pseudo-directory to my work over there.

Links to all my 123ish.com posts in chronological order (bottom = newest) after the jump:

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Linux Gaming Roundup : Help, I’m Kinky For Bowsette!

I’ve been a busy game blogger lately, but before I get into Linux-specific gaming, I’d like to share my latest crush: Bowsette!

In the grim future of Bowsette there can be only war!

Bowsette is a fan creation I covered in my write-up of the top weirdest moments of the Mario / Donkey Kong franchise. As a Gen Xer, I’m in a unique position to sum up the scope of the historic Donkey Kong and Super Mario franchise. I was there twoscore years ago, a greasy triangle of disgusting pier joint pizza in hand at the Balboa Fun Zone witnessing the dawn of the Donkey Kong original arcade machine. (You can still play that on Linux, if you bootleg the ROM and load up Mame.) I catalog the weirdness from that day through all the magic mushrooms down to modern-day 4chan and its Bowsette abomination.

See, I understand where it comes from. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (2014) for the Game Boy Advance and Wii U had this moment where they decided a female-possessed Bowser would make a fun boss fight, namely Bowletta. Fans instantly repressed the memory until it manifested itself years later on image boards. Every fetish has a childhood trauma behind it.

As wrong as Bowsette is, on the teeth-grinding irritation level of Brony culture, it still feels like it belongs in 2020 pop culture somehow. It was inevitable. Torment the proles enough and even their escapism becomes twisted.

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Fingerprint Readers : History’s Oldest Biometric

Disclaimer: This post originally appeared on a tech blog. It is reused with permission.

In the world of technology, biometric identification has been slowly creeping from the world of science fiction to fact. On the most far-fetched front, we have iris scanners, predicted by movies such as Minority Report. On the less fantastic front, voice recognition systems have become a more common technology, though we’re still working out the kinks. Facial recognition is also getting good enough to prompt Jamie Zawinski into being fascinated by “dazzle” methods to defeat facial scanning. But the most reliable form of biometric identification has actually been the fingerprint reader.

Scotland_yard-fingerprint

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A big damn update on everything I’ve been working on

Hello! Why, this is my own website! I remember this place! It’s where I come to blog some more after blogging for clients all day. Let me tell you, it’s hilarious to be in content marketing and have your own site be in the depths of Google’s 35th page of search results for anything at all. “Yeah, but my clients’ sites rank high…”

Latest boof THC cart bust: Green Box, a product I traced to a guy in Inland Empire, Cali, who takes vacations to Maui, rents the penthouse suite at Vegas casinos, orders the most gourmet cuisine from the finest restaurants, Instagrams all that, and still can’t afford a license for his bunk ass vape cartridge brand. Dude lives like Scarface before the fall, but it’s a fascinating look into street cart culture. If I turn up mysteriously dead, it was this guy. I love my job.

Second-latest boof THC cart bust: Fiyaman Extracts, which can afford to hire Tommy Chong to endorse them but also – surprise! – can’t afford a license for their black market, heavily-counterfeited product. I love my job.

Drama of the month: When I busted yet another boof cart brand, Gold Coast Clear, the seller showed up in our forum on DabConnection to snivel that our exposure hurt his little business and demanded we take it down. You know, because that’s more important than when 15-year-old kids die from vaping boof. So I got pissed enough to deliver one of those epic irate rants I’m famous for, titled “if we get your brand mistaken for fake, IT’S YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT!” If you read nothing else by me this year, do not miss this.

I love my job even more.

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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Unix!

DISCLAIMER: This post originally appeared in another technology blog that is now defunct. It is reprinted here with permission.

In the year 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie led a team of programmers at Bell Labs to develop the Unix operating system, which was to be a successor to Multics. It proved to be a smashing success in the growing computing field and became the standard for operating systems for the next two decades. In the year 1991, a Finnish programmer name of Linus Torvalds had an itch to develop a Free and Open Source (FOSS) port of Unix, and announced his intentions on Usenet mailing lists leading to a famous debate with one computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum.

We today know Linux as the root of the Android operating system, dominant in the tablet and smartphone market by as much as 85%. But what many people don’t realize is the huge amount of other attempts that were made to create the perfect Unix-like operating system. Like settlers braving the snow to lead a wagon trail out west, the early days of computing marked many attempts to forge a settlement in the digital wild west, and many met defeat. The players in this epic saga might surprise you.

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Our Continuously Evolving Relationship With AI

DISCLAIMER: This was originally posted for another tech blog which has since gone long defunct. It is reposted here with permission.

You can’t deny that we live in exciting times for technology progress. Between IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Assistant (formerly OK Google and Google Now), we are well into the dawn of AI personal assistants which can carry on a minor conversation with you, albeit a limited one resembling a customer service call. Just for some context, here’s what science fiction imagined AI assistants to be like only a few decades ago:

Not only does the Star Trek computer speak in a harsh monotone, but it has wimpy access times too. You’d think a civilization with faster-than-light space travel would have figured out how to cut network latency.

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An Affectionate Look Back at the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

DISCLAIMER: This is an old post from my previous geeky technology blog. It is reposted here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).

People from about Generation X or so today cut their milk teeth on these classic platforms, and today they’ll be all too ready to shake their cane at you and tell you about how it was in the good old days. Their memories of their first BASIC program or first addictive game are tied in with their first love and first beer. Amiga, Apple ][, NeXTSTEP, and the ZX Sinclair still have their cult following going strong today. But it is the ZX Sinclair Spectrum that is particularly remarkable, and foreign to the rest of the English-speaking world.

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