Here's my incomplete collection of Zoom, a Laser Video Magazine. Pioneer produced at least eight volumes of these 8" LDs as educational material for retailer partners. Volume 7 includes the introduction of the LaserActive, a combination laserdisc and video game console! archive.org/details/zoom...

Budget-ass Kevin Bacon and James Dean in this movie.

Bought a vintage pachinko machine on the walk home from brunch.

A moment of media serendipity, in two parts. Part 1

Got the Apple IIGS working and set up in the living room. Wound up replacing the ROM, clock battery and the Ensoniq sound chip (turns out those can die!). It’s using a CFFA3000 for the HD and a FloppyEmu for disks. Using a Retrotink 4K to scale the output because this monitor’s VGA scaler is bad.

You ever hear a song you’re certain is some AI bullshit and then find out it’s just Nickelback?

Pricemaster tribute for the 25th anniversary yesterday

My trainer made a typo for the last set, I gave her shit about it, and so she actually made me do it.

Oh my god GET A JOB

I can't stop thinking about this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi...

New Session Issue 4: Upheaval now live on telnet: issue4.anewsession.com featuring work by: @asterolsen.bsky.social @mbbischoff.com @ultraviolet.gay @jana-aych-ess.bsky.social ...and more! web release coming on Saturday so STAY TUNED!

Been messing with this ancient Data I/O Unisite unit for a while now, specifically trying to understand how to get device data back off it over the second serial port. Finally making progress using arcane TTY magic stolen from Stack Overflow.

Got a mystery meat laserdisc in the mail. This is a RLV, a recordable LD; you can tell by the red bottom. As I understand it, these were expensive to produce, requiring huge specialized recording equipment, so I guess this disc is a one off, or close to it. I’ve never actually seen an RLV in person.

Audio on the Apple IIGS was mostly missing or extremely garbled, and caused some games to immediately crash with “unhandled sound interrupt” errors. On a hunch I tracked down a replacement Ensoniq sound chip for the motherboard, and that, for better or worse, fixed everything.

From a trip to SF with an old buddy, sometime around 2005. My buddy's friend ran a skate shop there and hooked us up with boards and took us on an all-day skate tour. I'm the one not ollieing a toilet in this photo.

Today's archive upload is a pretty fucked up tape entitled "Teen Files Flipped - Racism." They are not joking about this warning! But also it has Coolio in it. archive.org/details/teen...

Found this incredible production logo for Maryland Instructional Television on a laserdisc.

A great long form article! Despite some frustrating combat mechanics, I still love the original Mirror’s Edge. Such a gorgeous game! If I had my way, every game would look like Mirror’s Edge or Jet Set Radio. www.designroom.site/mirrors-edge...

Shooting this must’ve been a pain: all those unsync’d CRTs would have shown up with rolling black bars in the film camera without specialized hardware. Maybe the PAL format helped here? Film is 1/24fps, which is almost a clean multiple of PAL’s 1/50fps. Were European arcade cabinets PAL or NTSC?

Apple IIGS boot screens rule

The Retrotink 4K can handle the Apple IIGS’s funky 15kHz RGB sync signal when it’s piped through BMoW’s Mac Sync-inator to get all the signals on the right pins.

Werewolf lookin ass moon in the backyard this morning

Got jury duty today. The view of Hood from the 17th floor of the courthouse is nuts, at least.

Found the PAX 2007 DVDs at the thrift store today. This was the year the Mega64 guys drew a really mean picture of my friend @lazerketten.bsky.social. Here's her and I (in the hat holding the SLR camera) almost 20 years ago, getting made fun of at the giant nerd convention, memorialized on DVD.

Explain Steven Seagal then

Read one the funniest things @1900hotdog.bsky.social published this year, for free: Dogfight Wild Tournament part 1 and 2. 1900hotdog.com/2025/01/punc... 1900hotdog.com/2025/01/punc...

Has anybody seen our cat Meatloaf? Where’d that guy go?

The Vinegar Syndrome motherlode has arrived.

Been trying to rip CAV laserdiscs that encode “picture stop” frames to automatically pause the disc (to display a menu or still images or whatever). It’s annoying because some of the weirder discs I’d like to preserve pause a lot, which makes them awkward to record straight through.

My newest @archive.org upload: the first of about 20 LDs of early 90s supermarket in-store promotional material. It's mostly slow panning hero shots of paper towels and deli meats. I love it? There's only one disc ripped right now but I'll add to the collection over time. archive.org/details/in-s...

There are only two films I respect: the movie Rad, about a 80s hometown BMX hero, and the movie Thrashin’, about an 80s hometown skateboarding hero.

Today's IA upload is the laserdisc version of Muscle Motion! Let this bevy of hunks floor hump you into total physical fitness with a series of exercises that, frankly, won't do much of anything. I think you're just supposed to masturbate to this. archive.org/details/musc...

Remembered a funny story about driving to the Oregon coast from Portland with my friend Diana back in 2007, maybe? One way to get to the coast from Portland is to take the 26 west, which gets really windy and hilly once you get past Hillsboro.

Something to think about the next time you’re buying toilet paper and bananas

Seems like this Apple IIGS I got was actually used at Apple. Also has definitely been dropped at least once.

My wife @ladykaka.bsky.social and I, from the instrument.com 20th anniversary party

Another VHS upload to the archive: The World of Jump Roping, brought to you by the beefiest man to ever twirl a rope, Mark "Roth" Rothstein. Nobody has ever loved anything as much as Roth loves jump roping. archive.org/details/worl...

The only other thing I'll say about our current technological state of affairs is that we already invented the perfect catch-all solution to everything 40 years ago

Respectfully disagree. I think it makes people under-think what they’re doing, and have attended several incident reviews at work lately where the underlying cause was accepting LLM suggestions. You can show me all the toy software you want but so far this stuff is still a hinderance at scale.

Today's archive upload jumps the queue by singular request: Exposing the Satanic Web. Brought to you by Dave Roever, the phosphorus grenade that hit Dave in the face back in Vietnam, and the satanic panic of the late 80s. archive.org/details/expo...

The thing about preordering Analogue gear is that when it finally shows up, it feels like a gift from the person you were several years ago.

The answer is always and unequivocally: yes, absolutely

Love to do a little light tourism through the world of the insanely paranoid.

“This system will grind you up and spit you out and if the only thing you’ve got to wedge into the gears is a thick, beautiful pecker, then you’d be a fool to let social convention hold you back.”

fuck it. only good decisions from here on out

Today's upload is a rip of the second Atari E.R.I.C. point of purchase laserdisc. This disc ran inside an in-store kiosk and was driven by pressing keys on an Atari (likely 800?) computer, which then jumped to various time codes via a serial connection to the LD player. archive.org/details/atar...

Kate Bush: the maaaan with the chiiild in his eyes The Child In His Eyes: please help, he’s a wizard and trapped me here with magicks