I’ve had the HL1 and HL2 soundtracks in my MP3 collection for ages, and the music really is quite good in places. Maybe because I’m a synth geek who tends to make spooky dark ambient music in a similar vein, but it absolutely is memorable and among my favorite video game music.

More so than the Portal music, which...…

Stranger Danger kind of blended into the Satanic Panic and the drug war. Because obviously, anyone who kidnaps little kids either wants to sacrifice them to Satan or give them free heroin.

I was born late in 1971, and don’t remember that stuff seriously scaring me as a kid. There was just the occasional sudden…

Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas all get associated with nostalgia. Halloween is kind of the season opener for the holidays, where one visits family (or wishes one can, or is glad one doesn’t have to), remembers/participates in family traditions and remembers one’s childhood. Also probably a large pile of manufact…

If the horns were a lot longer, it could help with social distancing. Fashionable and practical!

I saw a mudcrab the other day.  I steered well clear of it.

Probably by volume, most of the sake I’ve had has been Sho Chiku Bai junmai from hinoki masu cups at Japanese festivals. To quote a barbecue chain, “it’s the wood that makes it good.”

I prefer ginjo, but really, the only sake I’ve tried and didn’t like was nigori.

I’m not a legal scholar, but whenever the Senate and President are willing, the number of justices on the Supreme Court can be changed. Dems have been talking about raising it to 11 justices, and of course, they’d get to choose the new ones. There’s also the idea of raising it to 15, of which 5 are chosen by each…

I loved 720. My dad was a manager for an arcade at the time, and I went in with him most Sunday mornings while he did the collection, helped out a bit and mostly played games.

Being a synth geek, I also appreciate that it had the Yamaha TM2151 “OPM” FM synthesis chip (as found in the DX-100 and DX-21), along with two…

And here I thought a “phone tree” was just an annoying menu system.

I went through a fountain pen phase. Then I had a boss who absently picked up one of my pens and started tapping on the desk with it... surprisingly it didn’t cause a leak. And then he absent-mindedly (or intentionally, hard to tell with him) brought it back to his own desk. Later on I sneaked in and retrieved it, and…

I went through a fountain pen phase. Then I had a boss who absently picked up one of my pens and started tapping on…

Some shaving foam works on the mirror, some doesn’t.

I have been using a little bit of shampoo for the purpose instead — it works well for the duration of that one shower, less well the next time, and not at all the time after that.

For glasses, there’s a paste called Cat Crap that works pretty well, but the best…

Counterpoint: I played it for less than half an hour before I got annoyed, uninstalled it and asked for a Steam refund.

During that time I lost in Slime Climb (in the first round) four or five times. If there was a single-player practice mode maybe I could have finally gotten past the one piece of it that kept…

If you’re just listening to music or an audiobook, or take a Zoom call or something, 40ms of latency isn’t going to even be noticeable.

If you’re trying to produce music, then you probably don’t want to go anywhere near Bluetooth... aside from latency it’s a lossy codec.

If you’re just listening to music or an audiobook, or take a Zoom call or something, 40ms of latency isn’t going to…

I hope you kept it and didn’t sell it on eBay or something...

Now I feel even worse for playing 10 shows and failing in the first round of 8 of them...

Honestly, this is where my mind went first:

This would be a great idea if e-ink TVs were a thing.

Or maybe if you’re running on 100% solar and you’re off the grid completely.

Because they’re white and rich.

Now that’s what I call music.

(What? I like creepy drone ambient stuff.)

It’s not that white people don’t care about their friends. It’s that they don’t think about racism.