Knuckledragger

RIP Cleto Escobedo III, of "Cleto and the Cletones" fame.

Wake up babe, the GabeCube just dropped.

Y'all remember Plants vs. Zombies (2009). One of the most beloved video games ...ever. It had a couple sequels that were nothing like it, and at least one "F2P" online version IIRC. Well, apparently EA shat out a "remaster" last month called Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted and it's a half baked, buggy AI-upscaled mess. Now that's a damn shame.

We are so thoroughly doomed as a species.

Dick Cheney croaked. Remember when he was the most evil man in America?

For the bargain hunters out there.

Brief update on this issue: To securely wipe an HDD, it's necessary to do one pass with Disk Utility first, then make use of the Terminal command. This is because Terminal itself can't unmount a disk. Also, in possibly related news I have a stack of six HDDs to donate to the local second hand shop.

I've been "following" the FB page of Finnish electronic trio Koneveljet for like 15 years and the updates have been ...sparse. Their last album was 2005. It was a staple in my record back in the 00s. Unlike many of their peers from the frozen north who make either brooding techno or chilly ambience, Koneveljet got for a mouse upbeat and cheerful sound. They do so while being exceedingly odd about it. "Welkom" is a bouncy, almost goofy dance track with the strangest tourist guide imaginable: I dropped it in a tiny but very ritzy club in the second half of the 00s and got asked by several of the patrons "What is this stuff?" "Kompa" is similarly energetic with a guy with a (presumably) Finnish accent repeating the names of famous people. To this day, I'm not sure of the name after Winston Churchill. I love how they use Ringo Starr as poignant punctuation. The whole thing is so genuinely odd yet completely effective. Solid Finland/10. Since then they reformed briefly to do a live gig in 2017 (in Finland of course). Most of their updates are in Finnish (even machine learning struggles to translate it correctly.) Some things don't really require translation, like this photo: I woke up this morning and was greeted with the announcement of a new Koneveljet album, the first in over 20 years(!) Downside: the cover art is AI slop. 🤮 I hope the music is better.

RIP David Ball, one half of Soft Cell and The Grid. Everyone knows "Tainted Love" (for good reason) but in my world The Grid was the absolute sweet spot for UK rave culture with pop sensibility.

RIP Susan Stamberg. I'm not sure I aligned with per politically or otherwise, by I can say my formative years had her and the other NPR ladies on in the background. I'd say her name wrong ("Stanberg" "Samberg") much to the amusement to the adults.

RIP Ace Frehley. I was never particularly a fan of Kiss, but his showmanship was something else.

Something I just learned that others might already know: Apple removed the secure erase function from Disk Utility because users where "damaging their SSDs." Something, you know, a warning popup might have solved. Now one has to go through Terminal to accomplish the same thing. I mention this now because I'm finally decommissioning some external HDDs from the early 2010s.

Some damn, dirty hippie with entirely too many guitar amps. Taken in St. Petersburg, FL in 1973 by Joel Bernstein.