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And Beyond The Infinite Home Base Podcasting Serious Stuff

I just really like planets, okay? That’s the reason.

1 min read

Even the one that’s in Artemis 1’s rear view mirror up there, as much of a mess as it is – I even like that one. All my favorite people live there. And all my favorite cats. I’m particularly fond of the dogs, horses, and hippos there as well.

Speaking of either horses or water horses, I’m putting the cart before them and getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning. … Read more

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Home Base

Earl’s fruit salad recipe: addendum/improvement

1 min read

I have an addendum to the stupidly simple fruit salad recipe that has stood me in good stead for many years. This variant version of the recipe is… even tastier, but it depends on one thing being available that seems to be seasonal.

Prepare your taste buds and follow me. … Read more

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Critters Home Base

The Ballad of Oberon

1 min read

I’ve lost the sweetest cat I’ve ever known in my life.

Oberon literally showed up unannounced in my yard one on of the worst days in my life – a December day on which I saw my horse drown.  It was almost like he was someone cluelessly showing up at the worst possible time asking “Hey, I heard you have a vacancy?”  But there was something very different about this cat: not only was he immediately friendly, coming up to me awkwardly for pets and scritchies, but…my dog, Xena, hadn’t chased him away.  She normally chased away any cats that weren’t “hers” (at that time, my cat Othello still ruled the roost, and Olivia had just been adopted a few months earlier and was still a kitten.) … Read more

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Home Base Podcasting Serious Stuff

Voices from the machine

1 min read

I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m a podcast fan.  Being an every-day podcast listener is a big part of what led me to become an every-day podcaster.  I listen to lots of stuff, I find the gaps that no one seems to be covering in either subject matter or format, and off I go, so excited about starting on a new show that I momentarily forget that it’s been nearly 30 years since I worked in radio, and somewhere in the vicinity of 15 years since my last TV voice-over.  Still…I know how to Put Shows Together, either by myself or for someone else, so I get behind my battered microphone and keep trying.… Read more

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Home Base Toiling In The Pixel Mines

A chunk of 1995 on VHS

1 min read

It’s a slow, rainy weekend, so I’ve spent a bit of time today getting back to some VHS archiving/digitization, a project I paused due to the move a year ago. I had to watch quite a lot of this to figure out what it was, because there was a lot of disjointed B-roll, and then a looooong stretch of me (and this is back when I had some hair, man) doing what sounds like a video letter to someone describing my job. … Read more

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Home Base

The Packening III: The Packening Continues

2 min read

As is generally well known at this point, once my house was mine alone (and my kids), I started taking great strides – well, as many as I could afford on a tight budget – to make the place my own in a way it hadn’t been before. When I was married, there was a kind of clenched-teeth agreement (or at least it seemed that way to me) that, since I wasn’t going to suddenly become a different person and shed all of my interests and hobbies, those interests and hobbies were not to be visible beyond the confines of the room I was graciously granted as a sort of man cave. I never really worked out what was acceptable as decor in the rest of the house, because it quickly became a hoarder’s paradise. (And to be fair: we both contributed to that.) Once she was no longer in the house, I pretty much reversed that, not so much as an act of rebellion as an act of preserving my sanity in the early post-divorce days: once properly cleaned up, the house just seemed big and empty. A few lucky on-sale Hobby Lobby finds let me put my true colors on the walls.

Signs of the times

Signs of the Time Lords

When the Art Of Atari Poster Book came out, and I figured out Wal-Mart had frames all but ready-made for prints of that size for five bucks, well, things just kind of went from there.

Signs of Spacetime

Oh, and don’t forget the handful of arcade marquees that weren’t donated to Arkadia Retrocade.

Fantasy

How will all of this play out in Utah, where I’ll likely go from being a homeowner to a renter who’s forbidden to drive a nail into the wall? Believe it or not, there’s a solution in hand for this problem. I’ll cover that in a future post. Until then…all of my smaller wall hangings are ready to be hung on another wall.

Wall in a boxRead more

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Home Base

The Packening II: Also The Packening

1 min read

Some further late-night packening ensued last night, and just as quickly abated because I was kidless and had an opportunity to actually sleep. But let’s look, won’t you?

Reference books

Sci-Fi reference paperbacks (small): “If I see further,” Isaac Newton is often paraphrased as saying, “it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” What you see here is just a very small portion of a pretty healthy selection of non-fiction reference books concerning the making of fictional universes, along with critiques and so on. These have been, and continue to be, incredibly valuable resources that inform my own writings on these very shows and movies. And then there’s irascible-but-not-quite-lovable Harlan Ellison’s two groundbreaking volumes of television critique, both very well-worn. (In case you can’t tell, all of these books have been read and re-read to death.)

These are just the small-format paperbacks. There’s a lot more where these came from. A lot. A site like this doesn’t spring up, unbidden, out of nowhere – it has a heap of source material.

Hopefully you’re enjoying this trip through, if nothing else, my bookshelves.… Read more

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Home Base

The Packening

1 min read

Moving time. I hate it. I utterly hate it. I hate it with the white hot intensity of a collapsing supernova. It’s also an outstanding time to hit the pause button on your life and take stock of what you value, or have valued, or what you no longer value.

I’ll admit that I’ve been dragging my ass on this. I go to Utah in early-to-mid June to be with my kids and just kind of start over from scratch. I’m three days away from the end of March. I have April and May to get everything packed, sell the house, and get the hell out of dodge.

I wish I could be like Obi there. But I don’t have the luxury. … Read more