Trying to decide what to do with the fact that I own a 3D printer and a frankly excessive number of spools of filament. (And no, I'm not going to 3D print a 3D printer. My roommate tried and failed, and he's an engineer.)

Turns out a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W can run LibreOffice just fine, but virtually all modern web browsers are just too resource-intensive for it to handle. There's a browser called Puffin that offloads a lot of the work onto their servers, but it doesn't work on the default RPi Linux distro.

Without consulting me, my body has apparently decided that 5am is a good time to wake up and 3am is a good time to start sweating like crazy.

New on ClockworkAvocado.com, an exploration of the over-reliance on focus groups and other pandering, often at the expense of originality. www.clockworkavocado.com/a-clockwork-...

In Clair Obscur's New Game Plus I gave all the characters I could the "Baguette" outfit, and Lune in particular makes cutscenes much harder to take seriously with her fashion sunglasses. Also they're called "baguette" outfits because the character has a baguette on their back, held in their sash.

I got my BYOK (byok.io) today, a nifty distraction-free writing thing, so I'm putting it through its paces working on Xeroverse stuff with my Lexicon. I found the emotional thrust of the weird prologue I'm writing for Book 2: Doug hates the idea of being forced to stand by while a tragedy unfolds.

There's a movie on Amazon Prime Video called The Fuzz about a living puppet cop who's trying to protect his puppet community, and the level of bigotry against puppets makes it hard to watch, though I know that and worse happens to people in real life.

In the finale of The Boys, they found time to show Homelander kill an Elon Musk stand-in by depositing him in space. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM6e...

I have a pair of glasses with built in Bluetooth headphones and I’m now hesitant to wear them in case someone mistakes them for like Meta’s dumb camera-equipped AI glasses.

Imagining Xero meeting the Deep and telling him that he has the potential to be this amazing bridge between humanity and ocean life, that he comes from a world where Atlantis and Lemuria are very real... but since the Deep is from the world of The Boys it definitely wouldn't end well.

I've written a blog, an expression of gratitude to the fans of this film. It's here for free on my Ko-fi page. ko-fi.com/larryblamire

I habitually watch stuff with audio description turned on when it's available. I don't really need it apart from maybe following the action better when I'm distracted, but I've gotten really used to it. And lately I feel like one out of every 10 words in AD scripts is "gaze."

I think Kingdom Come is brilliant overall, but it's funny that it critiques edgy 90s superheroes while prominently featuring the Spectre, who regularly doled out deadly yet surreal punishments that would've made Stardust the Super Wizard proud. outofthequicksand.blogspot.com/2012/01/top-...

I came up with a wonderfully dumb addition to the list of parallel universe versions of Xero: "31. Cmxiv, a photocopier given life and superpowers by the cosmic trickster Mr. Xyzzy just to mess with Xero." (CMXIV -> 914, as in the Xerox 914 photocopier.)

There are a few bits of the Xeroverse stories I'm writing in the present tense, and writing fiction in the past tense is a very difficult habit to break. (Also thinking of that one time I changed a short story from first- to third-person, and it was way more annoying than you might think.)

Think about my Slime Story TTRPG that I've been neglecting, which is basically about teenagers hunting MMO-style monsters for spending money, a mashup of Maple Story, Roadside Picnic, and teen dramedy. Now I'm thinking about having it be set in like 2006; the internet exists but isn't overwhelming.

I'm doing a little project that uses a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and it's still mind-blowing how a working computer with a 1GHz processor, Wi-Fi, and 512MB of RAM (and storage according to whatever size of micro SD card you're willing to buy) is that small.

Getting into a 3D printing project after not using my printer for a few weeks, and there's a lot of filament that got into the area around one of the Z-axis gears, which makes bed leveling fail. One of the few notable flaws of the Bambu X1C is how stuff accumulates around the rear Z screw area.

In the DC universe, Metropolis is in Delaware (and Gotham is across the bay in New Jersey). That implies that in DC, the state of Delaware is much more important than IRL, as it's home to Cleaner New York With Superman.

Working on a prologue thing for the Xeroverse where the Masked Ranger (basically the Lone Ranger) acts as a cosmic guide to an alternate Xero from the shitty 2004 movie (so basically imagine the protagonist of Hackers with superpowers). The Ranger is unflappable, but not for lack of trying by Doug.

Unless you open the cover and see "NO" in huge letters, this feels like a poor choice on the part of *checks notes* Skeptic Magazine.

He-Man's pet green tiger is named Cringer and seriously how is that not a meme?

Ecksbawks

I don't entirely know how the ending of my Xeroverse series is going to work out, but it's definitely gonna be weird, plus it'll have Killfile (my Deadpool parody) yelling about the weirdness.

New on ClockworkAvocaco.com, a look and how and why superhero movies (and to a lesser extent blockbusters in general) are so obsessed with origin stories. www.clockworkavocado.com/origins-fore...

I started New Game Plus in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and while it does have the joys of Big Numbers (and it ups the difficulty so you're not totally steamrolling enemies), the story has so many revelations that things take on new contexts the second time around.

Reading Kingdom Come led me to want to do something with the "High-concept superhero comic where a cosmic guide shows stuff to some guy" trope (which notably also appeared in Earth X) in my Xeroverse novels, which means I need to sit down and do a bunch of brainstorming.

Beware the Underbaby. bsky.app/profile/atru...

While in LA I went for a drive on Mulholland Drive, which had gorgeous views and an oddly narrow, claustrophobic road that winds through the hills. Back home I'm slogging through a day of work, wanting to go to bed the whole time.

I went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology again, and I highly recommend checking it out, though I'm at a loss for how to even explain what it's about. mjt.org

The motel where I stayed was across the street from a Trader Joe's that for whatever reason has torii gates in the parking lot. Also twice I saw people lining up to get in when they open at 8am.

New on ClockworkAvocado.com, a look at how and why superhero movies largely avoid certain types of content. www.clockworkavocado.com/content-warn...

The boy is indeed big.

Things I noticed about LA: * It's a lot greener than you'd think, with a heavy emphasis on palm trees. * The highways are laid out in such a way that you have to make lots of quick lane changes. My arms are getting sore from gripping the steering wheel.

It's definitely because of my friend Steven's influence that when I went to Medieval Times I found myself thinking, "The guys playing the knights at Medieval Times are pretty hot. Bet they get laid. Actually a show about what goes down behind the scenes at Medieval Times could be amazing."

happy Piccolo Day

This week's new post on ClockworkAvocado.com, a look at how superhero movies ignore victims, and how Twin Peaks was radical for how much care it put towards them. www.clockworkavocado.com/victimless-c...

This feels like it needs to be a reaction image.

I'm looking at what restaurants there are on the way to LA in anticipation of my road trip this weekend, and there's a Chinese restaurant called "China Red House," which seriously feels like a trap, like I'm going to walk in and find it's run entirely by white CIA agents.

Adding to the too-long list of Xeroverse ideas, I kinda want to do a novel where Xero runs afoul of a cosmic being called Crossover, who sends him to a series of other worlds to see what happens. Crossover's siblings include Cameo, Collector, Canceller, Reboot, and Spinoff.

Character names are ultimately something the audience has to hear over and over, which limits the appeal of funny names in actual narratives, which is a shame because real-life names can get utterly bonkers, as @actualnames.bsky.social demonstrates regularly.

I had the idea to describe contemporary superhero movies as "an origin story that never ends," and now I'm trying to expand that thought into an essay.

I'm doing a road trip to LA this weekend, but I'm getting increasingly tempted to go trade my Fusion in for like a Nissan Leaf or something after that. Gas is getting more insane and I don't normally drive all that far.

My superhero research has led me to watch the 1994 The Shadow movie with Alec Baldwin, and I do not know what to make of seeing him in quasi-Chinese clothes with long fingernails, being the master of the opium trade. It feels like a 30 Rock segment is breaking out. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErWm...

My doctor sent me a boilerplate mental health survey and then responded to the results by asking if I'd be interested in therapy, which is maybe not the best way to belatedly find out that therapy is available, but I'll take it.

There's a great local diner near me that has a sign by the register that says "A Mean Without Wine Is Called Breakfast," and by that metric I've had maybe 3 or 4 non-breakfast meals in my entire life.

The Law of Superheroes is a really interesting book that explores how various aspects of superhero stories might interact with real-life U.S. laws and regulations. lawandthemultiverse.com/the-book/

I tried imagining Xero winding up in the world of The Boys, which involved him copying Ashley's telepathy, leading to him copying several powers at once and (despite his aversion to killing) kills Homelander to save the world. Copying powers can be downright OP depending on the situation.

New on ClockworkAvocado.com, a look at how David Lynch tells the stories of victims, while superhero stories (and Silence of the Lambs) don't. www.clockworkavocado.com/victimless-c...

Dear Managers/Supervisors Everywhere: Do not schedule mystery meetings. Making employees anxious just because you couldn't be bothered to type a couple words into the calendar app is dumb and counterproductive for everyone concerned.