Some friends and I have started a retro game “book club” of a podcast, called the Doki Doki Game Club. Continue reading Doki Doki Game Club – Episode 01: Little Nemo – The Dream Master →

You may recall that with retro 2 CRT TVs, one of which being 200 lbs, I built a custom stand for them. The end game was to get multiple vintage* consoles going to either TV, in whatever configuration desired. To do that, I had to create a mesh of cables and switches, that look something like this:

The Fucking Champs are dead. Long live The Fucking Champs!

The Champs are done, and have been for a while. Tim Soete allegedly moved to South America, Phil Manley continues with a myriad of other musical projects, and Tim Greene fills his gear-head needs exclusively through running Louder Studios. However, in the Champs’ wake is a riff legacy that a few brave souls are willing to shoulder.

Continue reading Champs-like →

Now that I’ve got room and I don’t plan to move houses again: let the hoarding commence.

I picked up a NES and I have a list of games that I aim to amass. Then I found a 27″ Magnavox CRT TV for $5 at my community’s yard sale. Why CRT? Some people even swear by CRT monitors for modern usage, but I don’t go that far. I simply think that if I’m going to be firing up old console hardware, I should also use retro display hardware. Continue reading Dick’s Retro Gaming Center v1 →

I began writing this ProtoPost about RSS several months before Google announced the sunset of its Reader project. Then, when that happened, I set about revising this as a search to weigh the different RSS readers to take Google Reader’s place. After that I let it stew a while until pretty much completing most of my wishes for RSS, so that is what I am here to discuss. Continue reading I Am An RSS Junkie →

A Shizz friend of mine has run a Tumblr blog for almost a year now that I participate in: beercanonground.tumblr.com, or just BCOG. It is, as the name suggests, a collection of photos of beer cans atop this here Earth. Here are a couple of my submissions.

You can submit your own photos of BCOGs via this link: http://beercanonground.tumblr.com/submit

I was going up some escalators in the mall this weekend, and there I saw a USPS logo they haven’t used since I was 14.

This was the first time I’ve seen this in a long time. It was the first time I saw it as it was supposed to be.

Meet the USPS EagleMan, the mascot for the US Postal Service who delivers your mail. I never figured out why his collar was so fucked up. I figured it was a 70s disco collar or something. That was obviously his beak, so I just had to do a little mental acrobatics to make the rest of it fit.

I’ve been interested in new types of cooking since I read Michael Pollan’s book Cooked last year. The book divides itself into the 4 classical elements as means of transforming raw materials into “cooked” food: Fire (no explanation necessary), Water (cooking in pots), Air (making leavened bread), and Earth (fermentation).

In the Fire section, Pollan follows a few practitioners of the Carolinian whole-hog barbeque tradition, where meats are cooked over low heat overnight. I’ve dabbled with his takes on the last 3 elements, but, up until buying a house this passed fall, I haven’t had the yard space to try ambitious grilling projects. Now the time has come. Continue reading Pig Roast →

Dan “Danimal Cannon” Behrens brought the band Critical Hit to the attention of my corner of the Internet (at www.TheShizz.org). Critical Hit is a list of physically attractive musicians who play covers of game music as arranged by someone who doesn’t play in the band. This isn’t yet the part that disturbs me. The fact that their covers are plastic and only 1 member of the “band” plays at a given concert is a little but not overly unnerving. What bothers me is that Danimal’s revelation that my last decade of regularly packing myself in a small room with a bunch of sweaty nerds to listen to guitars wail to Castlevania now makes me marketable demographic.

This weekend, Buff and I hosted a St. Patrick’s Day dinner for some close friends. Shepherd’s Pie (actually, Cottage Pie) and green cabbage were served, and I got the inspiration to try to make Black and Tans to drink. Continue reading Black and Tan Spoon →