Welcome to my notes toots bleets section. What's a bleet? Well, it's a complex series of grunts, gargles and mumbles. Its my microblog, a place where I can blast out a quick post, something that wouldn't necessarily need a larger blog entry. A brief thought, a dumb comment, a joke, meme, animated gif or the like, all very much fair game here.
I've also archived my twitter account, since that website is dead. I've deployed that archive to the web as a way to cross reference some of my game reviews and writing.
Communion
Author: Whitley Strieber
Year Published: 1987
Genre: biography/memoir
Rating: |
When looking for interesting non-fiction books to read in an effort to improve my own journaling, I was excited to find Communion, a UFO book. It’s a combination of the author’s first hand events and transcriptions of hypnotherapy sessions, hoping to unearth more memories of those same events. It’s all over the place and unfortunately the described events aren’t actually that interesting. What is interesting to me is an established sci-fi and horror author (The Day After Tomorrow, The Wolfen) decided to risk his reputation and career to write this book, presenting his anal probing by alien lifeforms as fact! If this was Joe Nobody I could assume it was a ghost writer, but this guy is on the scene in NY in the 1980s! He’s known! He’s established! and he’s telling everyone some old lady alien jerked him off in front of dozens of little goblin janitors while they gently probed his anus. It’s kind of impressive! Beyond this, the meat of the book boils down to describing a lot of unexplained lights and shadows that move in and out of the confines of our reality. With the way the author talks about events as facts, they don’t really ask a lot of questions about why any of this happening. At one point I felt this was just an allegory for his marital problems and an excuse to get him and his wife into therapy.
As the book wraps up, he begins to try to link meaning of all of this to superstitions and ideologies of every religion to have ever been documented. But these connections are so quick and rapid fire that it feels more like a stream of consciousness. I’m mostly disappointed this did not turn out to be a thing that makes me feel magic of the world, once more. As we grow older we begin to lose our enchantment for the unexplained, well I did anyway. I KNOW magic isn’t real, I KNOW the odds of foreign life finding this planet are so infinitesimally small that it will not happen before the sun gives up and dies. But I still hope that I’ll see a ghost out of the corner of my eye, I hope that I will witness a miracle and I hoped that this book would make the hairs stand up on the back of neck while showing me that something bigger than ourselves exists.
Another day in 2025, another 35mm film camera has been released. Today we’re talking about the Kodak Snapic A1! It sports a 3-element 25mm glass lens, 1/100s fixed shutter speed, f9.5 aperture, multiple exposures and a built in flash. Interestingly, what separates this from the other recent Kodak cameras, is the auto-advance and powered rewind. At 99$ I think there’s a lot to like about this camera. If it was more than that I think I would find it lacking but for cool hundo it seems like an okay deal. I still think I would rather put the money into the MC-A but also, I would be less worried about this getting knocked around. The fixed aperture and shutter speed is a weird choice - I’m sure it had a lot to do with production costs - it seems pretty limiting. I’m very glad they didn’t slap a terrible LED flash on this thing; they knew they needed the exposure because once the sun starts setting you’ll have to use the flash. And that could be great! I like flash-on-camera style portraiture and think this could work well for some fun bar-shots and nightime portraits. I’ll wait to see more hands-on reviews and impressions but look - any new film cameras coming out in 2025 is a good thing. If this keeps up it’s a sign that the ecosystem is sustaining itself. Film photography cannot exist in a vacuum, you need a lot of resources to keep the hobby alive and if companies are pouring R&D money into, that means it’s got enough juice to keep going. And that’s a good sign to me.
I read this morning that Lomography has announced a new 35mm film camera that has a rather exciting feature set. It’s a small, compact, full frame camera - it feels funny to have to qualify that in 2025 but there have been like three new half-frame cameras sent to market recently, four if you include that insane fuji x-half, which yes is digital but still - zone AND auto-focus and shutter speed controls from bulb up to 1/500. There are a lot of things about this camera that I like, at least on paper; it includes some features of legendary cameras of the past like the Klasse, Contax and Mju. I am going to wait for a few un-sanctioned reviews before I get too excited, I know lomo dances around the build quality line making it a gamble whether or not their products are built to last. With something like this coming off the production line, though, I think it’ll help people find a quality feature-set on an affordable camera without resorting to extraordinary prices for what essentially amounts to a ticking time-bomb. This could replace my Olympus XA or XA-2 as my daily driver, but not unless I know it can stand up to a little bit of abuse first.
I’ve worked out the storage on my home network recently and I’m going to do a writeup on it in the future. The macmini that was sitting on my downstairs desk not really doing anything has become a little server. I’ve attached some USB-C drive enclosures to it and have moved everything off of my failing WD MyCloud NAS. I’ve got calibre, jellyfin and transmission setup as well as a web server. I need to build a smal quick website that will remind me of all the different places on my home network these services reside. like to access jellyfin its ip.address:8096 and I have to look it up each time.
The other thing I have been poking around at is Tailscale. I would like to have access to some of this stuff when I’m not at the house and this seems like one of the best ways to do it. Again, I’m doing a much bigger writeup on this stuff but I wanted to get something up before I forget about everything I’ve done.
Immediately after the 4th of July weekend this year my business cranked up to a pace that I’ve not seen in a few years. Suddenly everyone needed their photoshoots done, all right on top of one another. It’s been a fairly furious pace that has completely consumed all of my attention but as I type this I can see the end of the busy season coming near and I’ll be able to properly divide my attention amongst the hobbies and other responsibilities of my life.
I’ve been working my way through Communion, but it’s been kind of a slog! I’ve had it since the beginning of June and have only gotten through around half of it. I need to hunker down and just finish it! It’s hard to balance all of your hobbies! Especially when you have a few too many.
It’s been a minute since I’ve given a lot of attention to the website. Sometimes, when something is just purring along in the background you need to let it be, and that’s how I’ve felt about the site recently. I just finished Ys Books 1 & 2 for the TurboGrafx CD and made my final update about it. Mostly, Catrena and I have been busting our asses at cleaning, downsizing and organizing the house. We’ve been in this space for 9 years and since our primary source of income is finding, buying or making everyday-to-weird stuff for other people, we can accumulate a lot of crap we don’t know what to do with and feel bad about disposing of. Part of this has also included a massive reorganization of the garage which I will probably make a post about in the future. That’s all to say I didn’t lose any fingers over this past holiday weekend, though we don’t really have a lot to celebrate these days. I did go to a pool party that had a hot dog roller machine, which was maybe the highlight of my month? It affected me deeply and now I think every party should include one of these. More posts eventually, hopefully you are reading this through RSS or, better yet, visiting this site after getting notified via RSS and reading it here. Like a cool person who can cook 12 hot dogs at a time. Until then!
Okay now with Oath of Felghana finished I’m ravenous for more Ys so I think I’m going to watch through the 1989 anime of the same name, Ys! I put this on the plex server a few years ago but I never got very far into it, I think I was working on something. I also am ready to play through the first 2 games in their original form, possibly the TurboGrafx-CD versions, though I did boot up the HP Thin Client and installed the first game’s DOS port. The sound is very bad on that version, though, it’s nostalgic for sure, but its just PC speaker beeps. Ys has such a rich history of music starting with the PC98 FM Sound that it almost feels like a disservice. Hmm… no matter which version I play, I’m going to get some bump combat!
Oh no, I’m thinking about playing an Ys game! I haven’t played one since Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana. I didn’t play Monstrum Nox on Switch because apparently it ran terribly but I’m hearing rumblings that’s its running much better on Switch 2. That’d be a good background game to have going for a while. I could also play Oath in Felghana, that’s also on Switch. Or maybe fuck it and I’ll finally play Daemon x Machina. HMMMMM.
It’s official, I know too much about Law & Order. I’m on season 18 after starting at 1. I haven’t watched the made-for-tv movie, yet, that was made during the Chris Noth years. I should have been reviewing each year but I didn’t start this thinking I was going to get sucked into it as much as I have been. Maybe I’ll do a ranking of seasons and characters when I’m all done. Whatever I end up doing, I’m enjoying S18 more than I expected, but its still a more sterile than the earlier seasons.
Happy Switch 2 Release day for all who celebrate. I’m currently waiting on my delivery from UPS and hope that it gets here so I have something to connect this Pro Controller to. Whitefish salad unrelated.
June 5, 2025 | 12:04 pm
UPS DELIVER MY SWITCH 2 CHALLENGE, ANY % (IMPOSSIBLE)
June 5, 2025 | 1:02 pm
June 5, 2025 | 1:06 pm
The year is 212X, the 43000 screenshots on my Switch 1 system have finally finished transferring over. My bionic brain banks receive an alert from the switch 2 transfer tool and my infrared eye clusters begin to glow. A dusty hand reaches for a cobweb covered joycon and presses A.
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
Author: Tom Robbins
Year Published: 1976
Genre: fiction
Rating: |
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues is a book that I’ve had on my shelf since picking it up from a thrift store around 15 years ago. I saw the movie years ago, and I only remembered two things: Uma Thurman and big thumbs. I’m happy I finally made time to read this - alongside of me Catrena listened to the audio book - and when we finished, we watched the movie. I’ve never read a book that broke the fourth wall quite in the same way as Cowgirls, author Robbins really knows how to walk around a point, bringing in any possible topic as circumstance, but he does it with such wonderfully flowery run-on sentences that it almost doesn’t matter what he’s talking about. As a writer, his confidence to ramble on about a topic is legendary, and his long-form metaphors unrivaled. This book has some dated language and talks about whooping cranes too much, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. To spend anytime with the legendary hitchhiker Sissy Hankshaw is worth any toll the road has to offer. Having finished this book, its apparent before we took up together she slowly extended her big beautiful digits at us and we did what anyone would do, we slowed down and hitched her a ride.
I started a list in apple notes today, 2025 Things Read and I felt silly because I could be doing this on the website. I’m not looking to write long-form book reviews, but I could use a section to put some thoughts out here and there. For instance I finished Even Cowgirls Get The Blues today then Catrena and I watched the movie (which I loved). I could use a space to pen out a few quick thoughts. Maybe that’s what this is for, my bleets.
I could throw them up and say “Book!” and make them part of a series and then they would look special in the feed, and get collected into a series. Hmm…
Stickers came in from slapco! I’m excited to be able to hand these out to other photographers or video game nerds or people who hate the corporate internet.
I started to tweak the css for the image gallery plug-ins I made and i’m starting to realize why people use pre-written libraries for this. There is a seemingly infinite amount of scenarios you need to take into account. I’m following the “you can’t please everyone” philosophy and trying to keep things tidy without going crazy. I haven’t poked at this since I got up and running and in that time (what 2 months, maybe?) I feel I’ve learned enough that going back to this CSS and can quickly see the mistakes that were made.
I wanted to make some stickers or something for the website and I think I just made the best thing ever.
So I wrote that blog post the other day all about the next steps for the site, a to-do list for my next steps and I go ahead and do something completely different. Say hello to the updated /galleries. Something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, but hadn’t gotten around to, I’ve changed the way the gallery list looks, making it more about the photography, and giving it a unique look. Check it out!
Some site updates coming out today. RSS feed is live! Give it a shot, all you weary netizens, subscribe to me. I’ve added a statement on AI usage, a temporary blog-roll page which I’m going to tinker with, all while I’m still chugging away at Yakuza, planning a wedding and watching the world burn.
Hi Gracie, thanks for giving me the kick in the pants to get my RSS feed up and running. It’s a top priority soon.
