A Nueva York Cari and I spent the 4th of July weekend in New York at her sister’s house. My mother-in-law has been staying with us since early March (she came down for Dominic and Elvira’s wedding), and it was finally time for her Florida vacation to come to an end. She won’t fly, doesn’t drive, and is getting up there in years, so a solo train ride isn’t happening either. So, driving is the only real option. Here’s a run-down of the trip: Wednesday, July 1: Dominic and Elvira picked me up around 5:00pm and dropped me off at the rental car company, which has a branch in the Brandon mall. I got a black Mazda CX50, which is a crossover SUV. For a road trip with three people and a bunch of luggage, it’s decent. After driving it back to the house, we all packed and prepared to...
Category: Comics
Flopping and Thrusting
I'm going to try to do a weekly round-up. Try to establish consistency and all that... Retro Computing As part of trying to do my small part in preserving Atari ST history, I figured that it doesn't take too much time or energy to find batches of floppies out there in the world and see if there is interesting source code or software that needs to be preserved. I recently won an online auction for very cheap that had 200+ disks. The shipment arrived this week. It looks like the majority of the disks are ST-related, with some being Windows/PC-related. I hooked up my external floppy drive/Greaseweazle enclosure and imaged the disks to my hard drive. I still need to go through each disk to see their actual contents, and from there, will determine if there's anything that needs to be archived online. The Adventures of Johnny Thrust I've begun...
Comics Overload and a Splash of Retro
I finally got my main Atari 1040STE ("Jules") set up with STiNG 1.26 (TCPIP stack) and CAB 2.8e (Crystal Atari Browser). Browsing the web on a computer that was created 10 years before the web was is a pretty rough experience. I expect the real endgame will be to realy get a decent two-way transfer system set up like FTP (SMB is not an option without considering MultiTOS or something like that). I've been slowly assembling a nice collection of popular and useful utilities, applications, and even a few games. The main focus, however, will be to use Jules to archive the large stack of in-box games I got last year. I also ended up jailbreaking my Sony PS Vita 1000 handheld console and have been enjoying playing some games on it here and there. Moving away from retro computers and on to retro comics (back issues), I've been on...
The Consistency Challenge
For some time now, I've been aware that I have a problem staying consistent. This affects several areas of my life and, although not causing me and my family any real degree of pain, it is making the days that go by feel less and less fulfilling. What am I lacking? What do I feel I could be doing better? Where is my time not being optimized? All of these questions (plus others) plague me from time to time. In the context of consistency, I've realized that I'm "floating" through a lot of things in my life. Again, this isn't necessarily a negative thing, but it's also not helping me obtain some goals. And, yeah, I know, this is a retrospective of the year gone by, compiled during the last few days before a new year is upon us. Cliche, but the holidays are one of my most nostalgic times...
Prepping for the 4th
I've been spending the weekend getting some minor projects around the house completed along with buying the groceries for our little July 4th party. There will only be eight of us for the day, but it should be a lot of fun. Along with food, we'll likely play some board games, possibly watch a movie and play some video games. I'd guess there'll be a lot of sitting around and talking too. More DeLorean parts came in as well. I received Issues 156, 157, and 158 (which is the final issue). And there was also a surprise in the box: a movie poster for the documentary OUTATIME: Saving the DeLorean Time Machine. Items Added to the Library Movies: A Fistful of Dollars (1964) Dog Day Afternoon (1975) Moonfall (2022) Stillwater (2021) Tesla (2020) Comics: Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent Vol. 1 #4 The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 6 #27 (Legacy Vol....
Rebuilding
A good friend of mine, Dale Lewis, has been going through a tough spell medically, so me and some friends are trying to raise some money to get him a mobility scooter through GoFundMe. Please take a moment to read Dale’s story and donate if you can. If you can’t donate, please help us spread the word. Thank you! Over the past several months, I’ve gotten back into buying and reading comic books. One of the roadblocks that I had before was time. And that was two-fold as it takes time every week to get in the car, drive over to the local comic book store and pick up your subscriptions, then haul it all back home. As much as I want to support local businesses, I found that Midtown Comics in New York was able to ship out subscriptions monthly. So, I started getting my books through them and...
Quick Cap Recap
Sunday we went and saw Captain America: Civil War at the AMC West Shore. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone and go into details, but I loved it and would like to see it again in the theater. It was a long movie, but flew by. Yesterday was a big day - I resigned from my day job. I have something lined up. More to come. I'm now going to spend time organizing all of the comics we bought on Saturday.
Full of Renders, Comics, and BBQ
I was able to get the final render for SCS047 off to Carl this morning. I found that supporting an alpha channel in the animation required QuickTime using the Animation codec with a depth Millions+ of colors. Today was Free Comic Book Day. The whole family participated as we visited Emerald City Comics in Pinellas Park and The Comics Club in Brandon. We got a ton of stuff that I'm too tired to list here, but all-in-all, got some fantastic deals and bunch of fun reading material (and games!). We grabbed some food at a BBQ kiosk outside Emerald City and some Mexican at Vallarta's in Brandon later in the day. After all of that, since Melissa was back in town for the last day or two, we took her by the new house. Nothing's changed since the photo's I posted yesterday, but neither of the girls has been to...
May Begins
I picked up the weekly comics this past weekend and was pleasantly surprised to find that World War III was in the stack. For the uninformed, WW3 is a DC book that chronicles the crazy shit Black Adam is doing to the planet while he’s on his insane killing spree thanks to the events in 52. It was a four-issue mini-series and I enjoyed it immensely. I think this is also the very last week of 52, and I’m going to be very happy to jump into Countdown after. I also got the latest issue of Fantastic Four. All I can say is I’m so happy to see the Surfer back in action. I know Marvel is really bringing him to the forefront because of the FF movie this summer, and I’m as happy as a pig in shit. The fact that Michael Turner did the cover this month helps...
