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.
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.
You know, around the time a gentleman in the Ars Technica comments section compared me to a white supremacist because I did not like Batman v Superman, I got to thinking, you know what? I really should start blogging again.
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.
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.
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:
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've just released my first eBook. It's a short story called Old Tom and the Old Tome. Here's a plot synopsis:
Old Tom is a mercenary. In his youth, he fought for Mordred in the war against King Arthur.
But, as his name implies, Old Tom is not as young as he used to be. These days he prefers simple, low-risk jobs.
When a witch asks him to find an old book in the ruins of a school of magic, Old Tom thinks it will be exactly the kind of simple, low-risk job he’s looking for.
He is wrong.
I've released the book under a Creative Commons license; you can download it for free right here on good old corporate-sellout.com in the following formats:
If you like the book, you can send me a donation:
It's also available through these sellers (with more to come; I'll update the post when it's available elsewhere):
This was an interesting project, and I hope it will be the first of many. In the coming days I expect to share some of the Making-Of information -- what tools I used to make it, the learning curve, etc.
Hope you enjoy it!