
This year’s RetroStrange Halloween track is now available on Bandcamp. It’s called “Forest Quest” and it was created by Nicky Flowers, thanks to the support of my Patrons.
You can download it free, right now!
This year’s RetroStrange Halloween track is now available on Bandcamp. It’s called “Forest Quest” and it was created by Nicky Flowers, thanks to the support of my Patrons.
You can download it free, right now!
Softly and quietly launched this week: Set Side B. A new gaming blog from John Harris, one of my favorite games writers, and a small-but-growing cast of characters.
The name Set Side B has been kicking around in my head for awhile, being the huge Famicom Disk System nerd that I am. It’s a reference to a common message that appears on screen instructing the player to eject and flip the disk.
As usual I’m Kermit The Frog / Ed Wood-ing this one, and the infrastructure is shared with RetroStrange and Extra Future. Set Side B is ad and tracker free.
Visit the site at https://setsideb.com/
… is now available on Substack. Read about my new guitar, the latest OpenCV Weekly Webinar guests, what video games I’m streaming, and a reminder that Divergent League Baseball 1999 is coming soon!
My grandmother died last week. I wrote about it in my newsletter. It is reprinted here for posterity when Substack goes dark eventually.
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She was my grandmother, but of course she was more than that. She was a human being with thoughts and wants and needs and she was not shy about telling you what they were. She and her late husband (who preceded her in death), our Nanny and Gramps, were the bedrock of our extended family. If one of their kids, grandkids, or great-grandkids needed help out of a bad spot, they were there every time. COVID-19 took Gramps from us last year. He died thinking it was a hoax thanks to Fox News. Nanny died gasping for air, too.
Nanny and Gramps would give their last dollar to a family member who asked for it and they would forgive nearly any transgression. Many of their kids and grandkids took great advantage of this and stole from them, lied to them, begged them to co-sign bad loans or buy cars with a promise to pay and just never did. My grandparents had come up with nothing, and knew how that felt and their family was everything to them. They both died with nothing much to their names except their social security checks and a reverse mortgage on the home they built together. Despite this, I know in my heart if you could ask them they would do it again. They would give again, and again.
My favorite memories with her are of waking up and making coffee for us (she liked it strong) when I lived with Nanny and Gramps, and arguing with her about whatever news was on the TV. She was smart and funny and enjoyed that kind of banter. When I first moved out, I’d still call and talk with her frequently, and she’d lament that “nobody here will argue with me.”
Christine Sherman née Perkins had a tenacious mind, and it made seeing her struggle with dementia and senility the last several years all the worse, for Nanny’s own quality of life foremost but not least of which for my mother who has been her tireless (and often sleepless) live-in caretaker. Still, everyone she knew was happy to see her and talk with her every time we could until the very end.
She believed in us, and proved it time and again, and boy did we need it. Without her help I don’t believe any of us, from her children to her great-grandchildren, would’ve had much of a chance at decent lives. Even with their help all of her kids spent time on food-stamps and government assistance, even the conservative family members reading this who like to pretend they never got any help.
I myself owe them so much- for helping my parents get a home when I was a baby, for letting my mother and brothers and me stay with them when that marriage dissolved, for buying us school shoes, for being at our meets and games, for always… being there for us. I could spend days telling you how much they did for us.
But Nanny and Gramps are no more. That bedrock, like so many things and people we used to lean on, is soon to undertake that final change into the inevitable dust and ash. Goodbye, Nanny. You gave us everything you had and more, and we loved you more than words could say. Still, I count myself lucky that I was able to say it, and hug you, one last time.
This weekend I did some work on RetroStrange infrastructure and scheduling.
RetroStrange TV (our 24/7 streaming TV channel) which is now fully autonomous and publishes notifications to Twitter when each show or movie begins with the #RSTV hashtag. You can find my TV station code on GitHub. The current setup of two Linode 4GB servers this should provide us with enough space and power to run it basically forever at $40/month. Support via Patreon appreciated.
The next RetroStrange Movie Night is November 23rd and we’re showing film noir classic D.O.A. (1949) see the Facebook Event.
The other big RetroStrange feature is the StrangeLine. I’ve set up a phone number you can call for various RetroStrange stuff. Right now you can call to get info on the next Movie Night, or listen to the Skulking Permit by Robert Sheckley as heard on LOFI SCIFI. We’ll add and change up the content regularly, so go ahead and give (814) 787-2643 (that’s 814-STRANGE) a call.
… is now available in your inbox or on Substack. Learn about the latest episode of Sticks & Fists, get the latest RetroStrange theme tune, and some Good Links.
We talked indie web infrastructure, Troma, Ted Lasso, and the hows and whys of our public domain media empire on RetroStrange. Give the episode a listen on their website, or in your podcast app of choice.
Like last year’s campaign, I created the video for this amazing spatial AI device. Now available on Kickstarter.
Over on the Substack you can find issue 42 of Phil’s Newsletter, wherein we discuss generative adversarial networks, release a new Monster Association video, and my sister-in-law Jessica critiques my favorite Beatles songs.
Today (August 13, 2021) is also the first episode of All Elite Wrestling’s new show, Rampage. We’ll be doing a live watch-along with my Patrons in my Discord channel starting 6:30pm Pacific.
Magnetic Interference is an album of music produced here in the Wizard Tower, using my KORG Volca Beats, Monotron Delay, and Monotron Duo. They’re meant to be used in your own projects, royalty free. My Patrons get it for $0, but even if you aren’t a member of my Patreon you can listen to it on Bandcamp or buy a copy for $3.
It’s been fun using this little drum machine to make chilly, relaxing beats to put on while I work on client stuff. Expect more.
This week’s edition of Phil’s Newsletter is out– in it you’ll find me repairing an old Phil Collins cassette tape, 3D printing some cute stackable boxes, beating River City Ransom, and generally Trying My Best.
This weekend is the Season Finale of RetroStrange Movie Night, and we’re going out with a bang: By honoring the patron saint of Movie Night, the great Dick Miller. We’ll be starting this episode early to accommodate showing the feature we missed out on last week due to biological difficulties.
Issue #28 of my weekly newsletter is now available on the usual place. You can subscribe for free, or kick me a few bucks if you like it and want me to keep doing it.
In other news, John and I beat Streets of Rage on episode 2 of Sticks and Fists. Episode 3, this coming Wednesday to my Twitch channel, will feature Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie: The Game.
Please see the attached image for my new streaming schedule on twitch.tv/extrafuture. My newsletter for last week is available via the usual channels.
Today we pass the half-year mark on Phil’s Newsletter with issue Number Twenty-Six. 26 weeks of me talking too much about myself. This week we cover The Bacon Grease Jar, RetroStrange TV content drop, my weekly webinar series, and next week’s Movie Night movies.
Thanks for reading and subscribing.
I’ve found things are easier when I post these periodic reminders of where I am doing stuff online these days, and how people can get at me or support me or both. Not many changes from our previous edition in December 2020. Bold items are new. As of right now you can find me at the following online haunts:
… is now available on the Substack. In it we discuss: My deteriorating mental state, this weekend’s RetroStrange Movie Night episode, and the return of 1993 Divergent League.
Thanks for reading.
This week on Phil’s Newsletter, it is Wrestlemania, but then again, every day is Wrestlemania.
Our Discord sever is now a community server, which means I want all of ya’ll in there. This is a year for making new friends. Join today and watch some wrestling, or play some video games, or just lurk: https://discord.gg/uNahVCDU
The introduction video I wrote for OpenCV.ai is now live! It’s a tight 2 minutes of no bullshit pitching.
This week’s newsletter is a little bit light, and I was in a real weird mood while writing it. Movie Night is this weekend!
So, like, we have a TV channel now. RetroStrange TV to be precise. It plays movies we have featured on Movie Nights past, including some short features and other odds and ends. We are broadcasting Divergent League Baseball there, now, too.
There’s something coming from me about the indieweb, sometime, because I’ve remembered that I need it. I am a person who still feels like they do not really belong anywhere, or even, feels like they specifically do not belong wherever they are. I think over the last few years I forgot not how important independent media and news is societally, but how important it is to me personally. The answer is: Very much, a lot, etc. Where else would I go?
As announced on retrostrange.com tonight we’ll be streaming a couple of good ‘ol fashioned rubber suit monster movies with Gamera .vs. Barugon and Majin The Monster of Terror, both released in 1966.
My newsletter went out last Thursday like it usually has. I spun up a Patron/Subscriber only Valheim server. I like Valheim.
You can grab yourself a heapin’ helpin’ of Phil’s Newsletter at the usual place. It’s still free. You can still pay me anyway. Just sayin’
This week I launched a big project and talked a bit about the little things.