Tab Clearing...

• "How were those 'Freedom Fuel' stations selling gas so cheaply?" you ask. Well, you may wanna sit down for this one.


• A petri dish of human brain cells is in hell. Sort of.


• One of the last great stop-motion animation SFX houses is closing its doors. Check out all the great memorabilia from '70s-'90s sci-fi and fantasy movies in the photos at this link!

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Tab Clearing...

• What a Monopoly vendor learned when making things in America.


• Flock pitched a plan to turn Uber and Lyft drivers into roving surveillance vehicles.


• Hello Local Business, your AI ads are costing you customers.

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Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends...

Me, Last Year: "I need to upgrade my Mac Mini to keep running Photoshop for work. I can save money by getting the smallest HDD since I never play games anymore."

Me, Last Week: "I need to de-stress. Maybe I'll take up WoW again."

Me, Yesterday: *googling 'how expand mac mini hard disk cheaply'*

When your first hard disk was a 20MB Seagate, it feels wild that with just MacOS, MS Word and Excel, Photoshop, and World of Warcraft, you've filled a 256GB HDD to the point that PShop is howling about its scratch disk size every time you open it.

"My little dude, nothing I ask you to do really requires much of a scratch disk."

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Gamification!

Adult chores would be better if they were more like World of Warcraft daily quests.

If I could turn in five mown lawns or ten folded laundry baskets for a special title or a pretty hat or a magic sword, life would be way cooler.

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Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be

Did you know you can get lots of TV for free? It's streaming through the air, all you need is one of these things. It's silly to pay a cable or satellite provider to get local network channels when antennas still work.

The cool thing is that in the age of digital broadcast television, every station gets a handful of additional channels, and they stock these with a host of channels very reminiscent of the old local UHF stations that played reruns and syndicated shows.

My favorite is MeTV and not just for their Saturday morning cartoons. They also have a great Saturday evening lineup* that kicks off with Svengoolie, a classic b-grade monster movie show with a cheesy host character.

Last night they showed the original Friday the 13th, which I hadn't seen since it was still fairly new.

I was in eighth grade, spending the weekend at a friend's house playing Dungeons & Dragons (Module B2, if you must know), and my friend had an older sister who was so cool because she was in college and drove a late '70s Firebird, and she asked us "Hey, do y'all wanna see a scary movie?" and of course we said yes, so we watched the camp counselors at Crystal Lake get massacreed on HBO.

Friends, it scared the pee out of younger me. Like, nightmares and stuff. Put me clean off horror movies... especially of the slasher genre ...for the next decade.

Looking back now, no wonder Stranger Things was right in my wheelhouse.

Funnily enough, that salaciously scary movie I watched in '81 or '82 took surprisingly little editing to be okay for broadcast TV in 2026. They blurred some boobies and might have cut some dialog, but it looked like most all of the gruesome stuff was still there.

Also, it really wasn't scary at all. I didn't jump at the jump scares and the slasher stuff wasn't very gross by modern standards. It was all kinda cheesy in fact. Ah, well.

*After Svengoolie, you get the Adam West Batman, Star Trek (TOS), and Adventures of Superman. If you're a night owl, those are followed up by Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Tab Clearing...

• Mimetic v. Agentic: The weird new mutation of grind culture.


• Gulf allies frustrated by lack of warning.


• Microsoft files for a patent on an AI agent to play video games for you.

Tab Clearing...

• The room-size multiplayer arcade game...


• The original Pike car (and also the only one I haven't spotted in the wild.)


• Stop, Shop, and Scroll.

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Niche Market Segment

I really want a Malaise Era driving game.

1974 Gran Torino with a 2-barrel 351 Cleveland: ponderous acceleration, 105mph top speed, when the brakes aren’t locked they’re fading, body roll like a Lizzo backup dancer, and perpetually on the lookout for a guardrail into which it can understeer.

Midtown Madness with Chevrolet Vega GTs and Ford Maverick Grabbers? Sign me up!

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Tab Clearing...

• The Southernification of America.


• The life of a pro retro video game streamer.


• "Cheapfake" AI ragebait videos keep meemaw and pawpaw all riled up.

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Tab Clearing...

• Portugal likely to axe F-35 purchase. Buy stock in Airbus, Dassault, and Saab. Kraus-Maffei, too.


• Happy Pi Day!


• Super Nintendo hardware is running faster as it ages.

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Elsewhere...

• 1952 Bentley Mark VI


• Revisiting an old favorite strategy game...


• 2011 vs. 1911: Half again as much fun?

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Tab Clearing...

• Norway's closing its last coal mine in Svalbard, which could have unexpected geopolitical repercussions...


• The outgoing director of the BATFEIEIO has a sad.


• Coinage and currency in fantasy role-playing games.

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Player One was not, in fact, ready...

Just...wow.

Imagine being able to afford a limitless expanse of grass you could be touching and instead spending your Friday night getting dunked on for being embarrassingly online and not even good at it.

"Richest man in the world gets stuffed into a locker on a Fortnite livestream by a Zoomer playing a video game" is a thing I could not possibly explain to my 20-year-old self.

This is some straight up Bruce Sterling Neal Stephenson shit.

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Well, this is a lot of fun!

Someone has come up with a cool little website that allows you to add your own text to some legendary video game screens. It's a fun little time waster. I hope Wing Commander gets added.

Psst! Kid! Want a unique game console?

Further proof that if something has a CPU and a screen, someone's rigged it to play Doom...

The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom.

As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterfuck, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks.

In case you think I'm kidding, here's a dude playing Doom on an old Kodak point & shoot camera.

Scammer's Arrogance

So I'd gotten into playing a game called MLB 9 Innings on my iPad. I'd spend about thirty minutes or so after lunch fiddling with my team and playing the various game modes. It had become a part of my daily routine.

It's one of those "Free to Play" games where you'll need to occasionally spend money if you like winning and upgrading your team, and every other week or so, I'd buy a $4.99 or $9.99 pack of in-game currency or player upgrades.

Every once in a while Com2uS, the publisher, would double-charge my Apple Pay account. I checked on the subreddit for the game and other players had noted the same thing, but warned that if you asked for a refund, they'd give it to you but lock you out of your game account.

Then the other night I spent $4.99 on a pack of game bucks... and got charged for that and a $29.99 booster pack that I did not either ask for nor receive.

So I went and asked for my refund, which I got, and my account was locked, as I'd been told, and I now have that thirty minutes after lunch back as free time to do some reading or something instead of playing digital baseball, and an extra couple gigs of free storage on my iPad.

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Big Excitement

A sure sign that I'm well on my way to becoming an Old is that my big excitement this weekend has been solving the New York Times Sunday crossword in twenty-one minutes and fifty-seven seconds, which is a new personal best.

Go Team Me!

*blows noisemaker, throws confetti*

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Wordle Wobble

I used to use fairly random start words for Wordle, a different one every day. Eventually, though, I settled in on the one the WordleBot used for hard mode: "SLATE".

Well, they've juggled the dictionary and now WordleBot's favorite hard mode start word is "TROPE". I'm sticking with "SLATE". I don't care what the robot says, the letter P is not found in the sacred name of Etaoin Shrdlu.

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Terminal Roles

Here's a fascinating article on the Dungeons & Dragons players on Texas's death row.

It's definitely worth a read.

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Just Missed...

The NYT crossword gets more difficult from Monday through Saturday, and I just missed a personal best on the solution for the Monday puzzle today.

Off by eight seconds. So close!

(Yes, I've become the sort of person who does crossword puzzles for fun. I figure it's good for the brain, and since I work with words, it's probably useful.)

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