Phil's Newsletter #44

Let your dim light shine

Previously on Phil’s Newsletter: I almost broke my wrist, we learned about Night GANllery.

You can pay for this newsletter to get some perks and directly support me. Phil’s Newsletter is brought to you by paid subscribers Jessica Nelson, Jeff Powers, Vikas Reddy, David Demchuk, Ian Scott, Adam Rodnitzky, and Kat Angus. You are each, individually, the best.

—

This week’s guest on OpenCV Weekly was Joseph Nelson (no relation), CEO of Roboflow. He dropped some knowledge with a presentation called “What is Active Learning, and Why Does It Work?”

—

This week’s issue is late again- I might make Friday the new publication date. It’s tough doing a live show AND getting a newsletter out on Thursdays.

Back when I had a salary job and lived with someone who (I thought, LOL) loved me, I used to look forward to Friday Night and Saturday. This was the farthest time between when I had to go to work again. There are TWO WHOLE SLEEPS where I don’t have to wake up and go to work. It felt extravagant. I was officially Off The Clock. These days it seems like the clock’s hand are gone, there is no writing on it. The clock is a flat circle.

Contracting and freelance work means you’re sort-of ALWAYS interviewing to keep your job. There’s no sense of stability (not that salary jobs are safe anymore either) and of course you don’t get benefits. Instead of having to worry what “your boss” thinks, you have to worry about what 10 different bosses think. It’s exhausting. Financial precarity is not new to me (I grew up on government cheese and food stamps) but there’s still something so… cruel about this whole goddamn arrangement. I have to work every day until I die, and if I don’t I will be forced into the street and likely starve? Someone oughta look into this. Seems sketchy.

Anyway I did something Pretty Expensive again because I have the Bad Brain…

The Roland SoundCanvas Fifty-Five Mark Two

I did another stupid financial thing, which is maybe why the intro is so morose here. It was for an awesome reason, though: I bought one of the most beloved MIDI devices of all time, the Roland SC-55mkII from my friend, former co-worker, and subscriber to this very newsletter Ian Scott. It was what a lot of game composers would have used to write the original music for games like DOOM and Chrono Trigger. It sounds precisely like 1992-or-so and I love it so much. Here are some MP3s I recorded of it playing some of my favorite tunes from the time period:

• Chrono Trigger, End of Time

• DOOM, E1M1

Sept 15th: OpenCV and Luxonis Return to Kickstarter

Coming soon to a Kickstarter near you: The companies that brought you OpenCV AI Kit are doing it again. Sign up to get exclusive rewards, win one of 74 giveaways, and follow the project on Kickstarter.

The Good Links

It’s getting harder and harder to scour the entire internet every single day but I do it for you.

• The STS Tecom, a 5.25” bar CRT from 1997. It fits into your ATX tower! Weird.

• A super rate Nintendo artifact sold for just $9100 — A never-before-seen-for-sale Game & Watch from 1982 honoring 20m games sold

• From the “No Duh” files: Feds Deliberately Targeted BLM Protesters To Disrupt The Movement

• More and more companies are “struggling” with this: Unity Workers Question Company Ethics As It Expands From Video Games to War — Protip, you can simply not help make war

• On The Future, a Hypercard stack from Cara Esten who you really should be following on Twitter

• “Jyushin Thunder Liger throws the first pitch at a baseball game and ends up getting into a fight with the team mascot!” Nuff said

• Lemmings is getting a documentary to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the series. Oh no!! *pop*

• Jason Scott recently updated the Flash emulation on the Internet Archive, go give it a look and see if some of your old faves work again!

That’s all for me this week, I have way too much to do. Scripts to write, videos to narrate, contracts to sign, joints to smoke, whisky to shoot, hearts to break.

— Phil Nelson

Wizard Tower Gamma, South of Market, San Francisco, California, United States of America, Earth

08.27.2021