Tag: lists

New at 123ish: Unique Desktop Toys For Office Fun

I don’t miss much about the corporate 9-to-5 (cubicle slave #X197532), but one thing I do get nostalgic for is all the dumb things people would do to amuse themselves to alleviate office tedium. I did a whole review of unique recommendations for office desktop toys. These are all non-electronic diversions too, so you can rest your bloodshot eyes from glowing screens too.

The pic is, of course, from Terry Gilliam’s epic 1985 film Brazil. Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) twiddles with this decision toy with ‘yes’ on one side and ‘no’ on the other, with a weight that drops onto a wedge to randomly fall on either side. It’s a perfect metaphor for the movie’s dystopian universe, where everybody endures only having the illusion of free will. It’s where, for all the good anything does you, you might as well go through life making random decisions.

Always wanted to find this toy in real life, but probably not looking in the right place. In the meantime, check out my recommended list, you’ll find many surprises!

 

You know what I haven’t blogged about in awhile? LINUX!

Anybody out there remember the elder days of yore on the web, when I was one of the few bloggers to talk about Linux and FOSS? I figured it’s time to update distro recommends for a new generation. So here’s the top five Linux distros for every kind of user.
As usual, I dodged the trendy meme distros in favor of time-honored practical systems for anybody from the most clueless newbie to the salty veteran power user. Wow, it has been a long time!

Follow on for one of my classic Linux essays, the final battle report of the Microsoft vs. Linux wars:

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New at 366Weird: The Manitou!

Over at 366 Weird, my latest cinematic safari is a special treat: The Manitou (1978). A serious contender for the campiest Exorcist ripoff ever made, it’s a thrill ride of one “WTF?” moment piled onto another.

Whose idea was it to cast Tony Curtis in the lead? Who decided “native American medicine man” is a close-enough substitute for Catholic demons? Why did the 400-year-old medicine man pick this woman out of the blue to incubate his neck-rupturing reincarnation? Why did they go with a frozen hospital with meat-popsicle nurses frozen mid-wave? Why is this suddenly turning into 2001: A Space Odyssey? And why is it always black magic or white magic, doesn’t magic come in any other colors? We will never know, but even the late, great Roger Ebert had to warn people to set down their coffee before continuing the review.

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A Magic: The Gathering shopper’s guide

Conventional wisdom among spike tournament players is that you NEVER, ever ever buy boxed MTG products or even booster packs. Yeah, but like all absolutes, isn’t that not always true? Here, I define some of the typical boxed products that at least come close to a decent value for the money, pointing out the “Best Magic! the Gathering Sealed Products.”

And I’m of course speaking as a collector and player myself. Strategic MTG investment has worked almost like a second career with me over the years. Keeping an eye out for good value purchases I can break up and sell for individual value helps me stay in the game, even on my pauper-level freelancer budget!

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IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art

So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.

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Two IMGUR Galleries Revisit Nightmares Of 20th-Century Kitsch

I don’t mean to gripe, but Millennials sure demand a lot of attention. There’s twenty stories about them per day; they’re killing this thing, they’re embracing that thing, they have it tough because this, they react because that.

Meanwhile, Generation X is over here passed over both ways. We got a couple minutes in the spotlight in the 1990s and that was the end of us. Which suits most of us, but when I keep hearing about how rotten the Millennials have it, that’s the part I get sick of hearing about. Money did not rain from the sky before Millennials were born. Somehow I jumped directly from the have-nots line to the “privileged elite” line while still being the same broke-ass slacker I was in 1990.

As an example of Generation X gripes we never got the chance to air, I present “Kitschy Nightmares From Satan’s Thrift Store” and “Vintage Magazine Ads,” both wry observations of pop culture in the mid-20th century. This, kids, is what your poor papa and mama had to live through. Which is why we’re so funny.

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Gimme Your Weird Love: Our 366Weird Picks For Valentine’s Flicks

Valentine’s Day just got very warped: Three of us weird cinephiles (your humble author included) pick our top five weird movies to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Is your vision of love bizarre and unconventional? Do you hope to win a mate over by your quirks alone? Is your idea of the perfect couple closer to The Addams Family than mainstream rom-coms?

Well you got 15 (don’t sweat the math, I checked) certified weirdest movies to choose from to mark this pesky wanna-be holiday. Giles even wrote a poem about it! What a hoot!

XOXOKQ : But bonus content has since been added:

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Geek Gifts Lists: Valentine’s Ideas

So it’s almost Valentine’s Day here, and you know we’re all about the geek love at Penguin Pete’s! I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but conveniently one of my gigs is at Krononaut, which curates lists of cool stuff we find on Amazon.

What’s the difference between that and the zillion other Amazon list blogs out there? Well, we make sure the product is in stock, has a price range in the median of ~$40 for a comfortable disposable income budget, and we organize things by theme. If you happened to be looking for a certain niche item, you can search Amazon and wade through pages of irrelevant results, or grab one of our lists and have a concise assortment between six and ten items long that’s targeted exactly at what you were shopping for. Sound nifty? You’ve no idea!

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Reasons Why I’m Not Popular On Social Media:

  1. I’m not suicidal. If I was, I wouldn’t be burdening millions of strangers with my tragic situation.

  2. I’m not bent, broken, destroyed, or despondent of all hope, and even if I was, the last thing I’d do is reach out to the Internet for support. I would go to the doctor.

  3. I never did heroin, so I have nothing to celebrate being two weeks clean and sober from. I would think I would get credit for never having done heroin in the first place, but apparently you’re only a good person if you did do heroin, then quit and brag about it.

  4. I get my pets the old-fashioned way from a local shelter, not rescuing a shivering abused stray from a dumpster and nursing it back from the brink of starvation. It’s my fault for not staking out dumpsters more.

  5. I’m not at all socially awkward. I’m perfectly comfortable making eye contact and small talk. I’ve even managed to stay married for a sustained length of time. Damn me for working to be such a well-adjusted person.

  6. I don’t have fourteen grandmothers who die every month so I can post memorials about them.

  7. I never had cancer, so I can’t kick its ass. I’m smoking as fast as I can over here, but no luck.

  8. I’m not blown away by nostalgia for something that just happened, nor do I consider myself in an exclusive club just for remembering something that a bunch of other people remember.

  9. I don’t know the names of any porn stars. This is because I’m simply not that impressed with porn to follow it that closely.

  10. I don’t get into petty fights with my work partners, rage-quit, then miraculously land a new job offer the next day with a prestigious company at twice my former pay.

  11. I don’t get disproportionately outraged over minor inconveniences. If it happens to me, I figure it’s probably happened to several other people who didn’t feel the need to make a big scene about it.

  12. I use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Should I sue my school for making me unpopular?

  13. I don’t pimp my children in staged “pranks” which will traumatize them for life. I had kids because I wanted to raise human beings, not for access to slave labor to enhance my ego.

  14. Most things do not offend me. Even when they do, I get over it fast.

  15. If I see a celebrity, I leave them alone because I think that’s what they want. Consequently, I have no archive of selfies of me next to famous people with a strained smile trying to be polite.

  16. I don’t get outraged at people not being the fans of the same media franchises I’m a fan of.

  17. I’m not threatened by people from other demographics, so I don’t post anything bigoted about them to be validated by other people with the same bigotries.

  18. I do not have anybody bake me a cake themed after anything in pop culture. I don’t even like cake. If I’m hungry enough to get food, I’m too hungry to take its picture before I eat it.

  19. I don’t spontaneously repost, like, and share everyone who does any of the above.

  20. I don’t consider it worth the effort to lie about any of the above.

 

I’m just an old man who doesn’t get it, I guess.

 

New post up at 123ish: The Putin-Trump Madness Vortex!

I know the story has dominated the front page and top of the news hour for the past two years now, but I fear most of you out there just haven’t been impressed with what a huge global thing this Putin-Trump collusion thing is. Visit my recap of the most insane depths of the story by way of conspiracy theories rotating around Vladimir Trump, Donald Putin, or both. In my tribute to the late, great Robert Anton Wilson, I just dig up the rumors and mix them all up in a tasty crazy salad and serve them cold.

You think you’ve heard it all about this story, but did you hear about the time traveler theory? The killer mutant robot squid-octopus? The slave-children of Mars? I rounded up more crazy theories than a Russian hooker can pee on. If you’re scared from realizing you don’t know what’s truth and what’s fiction anymore – you’re not nearly scared enough!

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