Phil's Newsletter Issue Twenty-One

Wabi-sabi lifestyle blog??

Previously, on Phil’s Newsletter: I did nothing and panicked. We previewed the 1993 Divergent League Postseason, I talked about buying R.E.M. albums 18 years ago.

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First things first, I been kinda sick the last few days. It started Tuesday, and I felt like total hell yesterday. It took several National Lampoons Vacation movies (and WOW there are some really messed up jokes in Vacation and European Vacation) and half a bottle of pepto but once again I lived bitch. I only spent 2-3 hours of it feverishly tapping out messages I will never send.

Today I feel like a slightly lesser hell, and will write all day long to “make up” for being ill. I ain’t dead yet, but we’ve got deadlines.

Welcome To Wizard Tower Studio A

I posted a teaser on Instagram earlier, but last night despite being sick I still couldn’t sleep, but I was too foggy to write, and so I took some meds and re-arranged my entire living room so I can use it as a persistent video studio. My beloved gigantic television is now an anchor desk / kitchen prep area. Behold:

This is part of me trying to short-circuit my various co-morbidities, by leaving Phil Toys around the place so I can’t get too stuck in the psychological mud. I need the friction between Thinking About Doing Something and Doing Something to be almost 0 right now. “Oh! A Guitar. I guess I’ll play that instead of sitting here Having Feelings.”

We Have A Valheim Server Now

Paid subscribers to my Patreon and this newsletter get access to a brand new dedicated Valheim sever. If you haven’t seen it, Valheim is like a sort of Norse mythology Minecraft, but way prettier and more deliberate. I’ve sent paid subscribers the login info already. We should probably be Steam buddies: Hit up my profile.

Giant Monsters Return to Movie Night This Saturday

This Saturday at 7pm PDT it’s Tokusatsu action on RetroStrange Movie Night! We’ll be taking in a duo of 1960s Japanese cinema, with Gamera .vs. Barugon and Majin the Monster of Terror. It’ll be a massacre of models and rubber suits. Here is last week’s intro w/ preview trailers in case you missed it:

We hope you’ll join us on twitch.tv/extrafuture for tiny explosions and big performances. As usual, we’ll be playing a selection from the RetroStrange Safety Squad archives before the show starts. Don’t forget to follow RetroStrange on YouTube, where we post full length movies and our curated pre-roll content starring me(!), and Twitter where we don’t do much yet.

The 1993 Divergent League Postseason Is Underway

Congratulations to the Toronto Blue Jays and Montreal Expos, who have won the AL and NL Wild Card games. The full playoff picture is now Orioles .vs. Astros and White Sox .vs. Blue Jays in the ALDS, with Giants .vs. Cardinals and Expos .vs. Braves in the NLDS. In “real life” the Jays and White Sox faced off for the NLCS, while the Braves and Phillies battled in the ALCS, leading to a Toronto / Philadelphia World Series. Ours is already a little different.

Games will be broadcast every Tuesday and Friday night, and will include the first game in each series, and all elimination games.

The Good Links

Rain or shine or sleet or snow &c

• “If you add digital, on top of a thing that is broken, you will have a broken digital thing.”

• I love these “nature photos” - photographic manipulations that replace the feathers and scales of animals with flower petals. Outlandishly beautiful.

• Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Gates are $360 billon dollars richer, and my father and grandfather are dead. Billionaires: Who needs ‘em? Literally nobody.

• Inventor of the cassette tape Lou Ottens has passed away at 94 years old.

• Fascinated this week by The Tree That Owns Itself, “[…] a white oak tree that, according to legend, has legal ownership of itself and of all land within eight feet (2.4 m) of its base.” h/t Josh Sawyer

• This week in Zombie Tech: “Turntable.fm is back from the dead — and now there are two”

• It was inevitable: "Zoom Escaper is a tool to help you escape Zoom meetings and other videoconferencing scenarios.”

• The Texas AG spent 22,000 hours (on the taxpayer dime) to find 16 total cases of incorrect addresses on voting forms. That’s fewer than 1 in a million. Great work, Ken. You fuckin’ goon

• You can pay someone $16 to re-route basically any text message. Do not use SMS for 2 factor auth, folks!

• Stay away from my wobbly-wheeled robot son

• NFTs are possibly the most stupid wasteful thing to come out of tech in this century and that’s some stiff competition

• A Raspberry Pi Zero built into a cassette tape being used to emulate the ZX Spectrum

• Like it says on the tin: A simulation of a giant banana orbiting the earth at the distance of the ISS

• Clearview AI is arguing in court that NOT being able to steal and sell your face for surveillance purposes is a violation of their first amendment rights. JFC.

• Pictures of things that can store exactly one Tweet

This week has been a fucking rough one, friends. Work is going pretty good but my body and mind have been ground into a thin paste. I need to eat better and drink more water. Tune in next week for when I talk about how I need to eat better and drink more water.

— Phil