Category: Announcements

25 Years, Give or Take

2024-12-13, 6:34 pm
Categories: Announcements, Stream of Consciousness

The first post on this site is dated December 9, 1999. That means it passed its 25th anniversary a few days ago.

I meant to post something on the anniversary, but, well, my dog died and it's been a pretty rough few days! (Maybe I'll post some more about her coming up. I've got a lot of stories and some of them have photos.)

So yeah, I may have missed the actual date by a few days, but here we are now. Twenty-five fuckin' years, huh? Ain't that somethin'. Lord knows this blog's had wildly variable levels of activity over those years, but still. I've had this blog for twenty-five years. How many people can say that?

It's not my first website — I had websites on Prodigy, GeoCities, and Dragonfire back in the '90s — but it's the one I eventually started calling a blog, once people started calling them that.

They used to say "The Internet is forever." Now we know that's bullshit. Maybe if you're famous. Or if you say something career-endingly stupid. But for most of us normies? The Internet is ephemeral as fuck.

Prodigy's gone. GeoCities is gone. My old favorite messageboard is gone. Flash is deprecated. Some of that stuff's still archived in the Wayback Machine, but the record and publishing industries are currently doing their very best to put a stop to that. Users have moved from silo to silo to silo — AOL, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter — and the websites that were really useful 20 years ago have gone to shit.

And here sits my blog. Sure, the layout and the domain have changed a few times, and a bunch of the links and videos don't work anymore. But all the shit from 1999 (and some I've added from even earlier) is still there. A record of the last 25 years of my life. Not a complete one, by any means, but kinda like one of those movies that goes through the main character's life, occasionally makes a time jump, with some periods getting filled in a lot more than others.

High school. (I made a silly little Flash animation when I graduated, but of course it doesn't work anymore.) Moving away to college. Buying a PS2. Motherfucking 9/11. My first breakup. Graduating and leaving Flagstaff. My first car, my first apartment (you know, I really didn't have my own place for very long), my shitty job in north Phoenix followed by my years as a temp. My first trip to Hawaii. That time I watched a bunch of Dracula movies. I got married and we got a puppy and we spent eleven wonderful years with her. My grandma died and I became a father. I had a lot of opinions on subjects like Jack Kirby, Ken Penders, and Final Fantasy, and for awhile there I posted a hell of a lot about Frank Zappa. I'm leaving some stuff out.

When I started this site I was a 17-year-old kid. I look back on some of my old posts with embarrassment, most with some amount of affection. I'm not that kid anymore, thank Christ, but you know what, he had his moments.

Here's to 25 more? Sure, why the fuck not. It's nice to have the occasional constant in life.

So Some Stuff Happened

2024-06-25, 6:09 pm
Categories: Announcements

So, to use a phrase that's appeared more than once over the course of the...Jesus Christ, 25 years? I've been writing this blog: I've been meaning to blog more.

It's been a wild couple of years. In 2022, my grandma Alice died; in 2023, I became a father. Maybe I'll talk about those things more, and maybe I'll just talk about Ninja Turtles comics and old Nintendo games. I haven't decided yet.

Plus ça Change

2023-01-01, 12:52 pm
Categories: Announcements, Stream of Consciousness, Work

Expanded from a post on brontoforum.us, 2022-11-30.

This website moved to a new hosting provider last week; the old one shut down.

I've been feeling kinda weirdly melancholy about that, actually.

I'd been at that last hosting provider since 2007. And that hosting provider was my first Real Job -- the one where I moved out of my grandparents' house and got my own place.

It was a lousy job and the pay was shit -- I'm making more than three times as much now for a job that's nowhere near as stressful -- but my brain still associates it with a pivotal moment in my life.

And I was kinda off in the middle of North Bumfuck and didn't know anybody on that side of town, and it was lonely sometimes, but I had friends around the valley who'd come visit. So I also associate it with old friends. Including an old girlfriend.

It had its moments, y'know? It was my first real taste of adulting.

It's kinda funny, looking through my old posts and thinking about how I've changed. I used to variously refer to Halloween and New Year's Eve as "my favorite holiday". Now they just kind of go by without me paying too much attention to them.

I'm forty, I don't go to parties anymore, most of the friends I used to go to parties with moved out of town. I've mostly stayed within a few miles of where I was born. When I stay up late I get a headache, and my opinion of fireworks has changed significantly since I got a dog. And all that was before the once-in-a-century pandemic. Except for the being forty part; that's new.

It's not that I don't like nostalgia or looking back. Hell's bells, moving my website to a new server makes me nostalgic for a shitty job I quit 15 years ago. It doesn't take much. I don't need New Year's Eve to wax nostalgic, and what good is a three-day weekend if I spend a day of it with a headache from staying up too late?

Anyway, the website's been migrated to a new host. Hit up the contact page if you find anything that's not working. Unless it's the mobile sidebar; I already know about that. You know what I'm nostalgic for? WordPress 4.

Mr. Bubble

2018-08-02, 7:24 am
Categories: Announcements, Stream of Consciousness

Aside from changing my photo at the top of the homepage, I've also changed the site's tagline.

The previous tagline, "Now works on phones!" was a double entendre (of the non-sexy kind): at the time I wrote it, I had not only just converted the site over to mobile-friendly design, but I was also (briefly) working a temp job where I was setting up a new phone system. Now works on phones, geddit?

The new tagline is Uncle Thad's Propaganda Bubble.

See, the other week, some guy in the Techdirt comments said this to me:

BTW: keep pushing your web-site because proves that you make your own propaganda bubble and only read what agree with

Now, I never would have seen the post at all, thanks to my Hide Techdirt Comments script. But another poster responded to that post and quoted it. So, quick side note: please don't quote the trolls; I've blocked them for a reason, and that reason is that I do not want to see what they are saying.

That aside, though, I kind of loved the "propaganda bubble" comment -- not least because, at the time the troll accused me of using my website as a propaganda bubble, I had written a total of four posts in all of 2018, and all four of them were lengthy, digressive posts about how much I like "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Mandatory Fun album cover
Does this look like propaganda to you?

Now, the troll actually did accidentally stumble onto something resembling a point: I am posting to this blog more these days, and, as I noted last week, that's specifically because I want to spend less time dealing with assholes.

Assholes being the keyword, of course. Not people who disagree with me. I've got no problem engaging with people who disagree with me; I do it all the time. But, much as trolls like to bleat "You're only calling me a troll because I disagree with you!", there is, of course, a difference.

The Old Crew

2018-08-01, 7:01 am
Categories: Announcements, Stream of Consciousness

As part of my policy of updating the photo at the top of the homepage at least once a decade, I've updated the photo at the top of the homepage. It's cropped from this one:

Thad, Jim, David

That's me on the left. I grew a beard again. So for those of you who read this site for the Shaving tag and have spent the past nine months awaiting my next shaving post with bated breath, I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you.

I don't usually dress that fancily. I am dressed fancily because I am at a wedding in that photograph. Specifically, Jim's wedding. Jim is the guy in the middle, and David (right) and I went to his wedding a few weeks back.

The three of us went to NAU together. I see David a few times a year, but hadn't seen Jim in years; it was nice to have a chance to catch up. Nice wedding, nice vacation, and his new wife Liz is a lovely person as well.

If you want some idea of the kind of wild party animals the three of us were in college, I leave you with this: when David and I introduced ourselves to Jim's mom, her response was, "Oh. Mystery Science Theater 3000."

Home with the Sniffles

2017-12-11, 4:24 pm
Categories: Announcements

I caught some kind of head cold, or maybe the flu that's going around, and stayed home from work today.

Reports indicate that this year's flu vaccine may only have a 10% efficacy. But if you haven't been vaccinated, do it; 10% efficacy's better than nothing. I got mine -- and if I hadn't, I might be feeling even worse right now.

Employment

2017-11-27, 7:58 am
Categories: Announcements, Stream of Consciousness, Work

Last night I finally got around to changing my site intro. I removed the bit that said "I'm a thirtysometing computer scientist who's spent the last few years bouncing from one temp IT job to another."

I got a full-time job on April 1, 2016. It's been good. Good company, good pay, good benefits, good coworkers.

Back in 2013, shortly after starting a new temp job, I introduced myself to one of the other guys and cracked a joke about "jumping from temp job to temp job, hoping each time that my next leap would be the leap home." After eight temp jobs in seven years, it looks like I've finally made that leap.

I'm getting used to it. That constant fear that you learn as a temp, that the axe could fall at any time? I'm working on unlearning it. It's not as bad as it used to be.

I wrote a post once called Tempin' Ain't Easy. I'd still like to expand it to book length, one of these days. Years of unemployment and underemployment certainly affect your outlook. I'm not about to forget those years. I feel lucky that that's not what I'm dealing with anymore.

Now I need to think of a new tagline. "Now Works on Phones" is a two-year-old joke; it's a reference to a then-recent responsive redesign of the website and a brief (about three days) contract I took installing phones in an office. Now Works on Phones.

No more jobs working on phones. I hope.

What's Next?

2017-11-20, 7:28 am
Categories: Announcements, Status Updates

So what's on tap this week? I don't know. I might sit Thanksgiving Week out, unless I get inspired.

I've got a third Kurtzman piece in mind, but haven't had the time to do the image gathering/editing portion of it. (Lost another damn Sunday to a migraine.) And I've got two Weird Al posts already written (with an idea for a third), but since I'm timing my Weird Al nostalgia to Nathan Rabin's series, I'm waiting until he gets near the end of Bad Hair Day, for reasons that will become apparent.

There are plenty of other topics I've got some thoughts about -- Linux gaming! The Internet's lack of robustness against very simple brute-force attacks! Steve Ditko! The ongoing disputes among the Zappa family! The difficulty of keeping an inventory of a large comic book collection! -- so maybe I'll get inspired and crank out some more material this week. But in case I don't, happy Thanksgiving.

Who has two thumbs and ow, my thumb!

2017-07-13, 6:53 am
Categories: Announcements

I've got some kind of carpal tunnel or arthritis or something going on, and my right thumb's been bothering me for days. I'm going to try and spend less time typing until it gets better.