Knuckledragger

Last night I had to do something I hadn't done in decades: extract a multi volume ARJ file. Back in the floppy disk era it was commn to break up archives into 1.4MB chunks. ARJ did this by making file.arj file.a01 file.02 etc. I had four such files (dated May 12, 1993) containing an install of Dune II, the first RTS game. It took me several hours to get them open. The ARJ utility's website is still online, but many of the links are broken. None of their binaries run correctly on W10. I dug up several modern unarchivers for OS X that purported to work with ARJ files, but none worked correctly. I eventually got 7Zip working on my W10 box. It took some futzing, but it cheerfully extracted the split archive. I now have some savegames going back to Jan, 1993. Dune II runs ...decently in DOSBox, but in the course of my adventure I discovered Dune Legacy, which is a FLOSSy remake of Dune II that runs on modern OSes. It requires assets from the original game (which I had in the ARJ archive) but it doesn't look like it loads old savegames. I might pine for a lot of aspects of the 90s, but I don't miss the computer technology.

(OC) I remember when it happened. 36 years ago today Cliff Burton died in a tragic bus accident. His passing was the final nail in the coffin of Metallica's legacy as an artistically significant metal act. In addition to being the eccentric iconoclast of the band, he was also the counterweight to James and Lars and their near infinite supply of bad ideas. Kirk, bless his little mealy mouthed heart, never had the spine to stand up to the other two. Jason Newsted never had a chance. The truth is, Metallica's merit has already been plummeting for several years when Cliff died.. While he was the keystone of the band, musically and diplomatically, Cliff was not the only source of brilliance. When Dave Mustaine was in the band, he wrote more or less all the of great Metallica riffs (either used in his original songs, or recycled later.) While Dave is an unrepentant, irredeemable cretinous asshat of mind boggling proportions, he is one of if not the best riff writers in all of metal. When, in 1984, Metallica was more or less the best metal band on the planet, their success was the result of Mustaine and Burton's brilliance.

I watched this nearly 2 hour documentary on Putin;s "Dacha" today: It is a lengthy watch, but morbidly fascinating. Also it's available in Russian if one speaks the language.

Got reports that the Showreel from last night's show has issues. I could not replicate them. Also, Mixlr (bless their hears) is rolling out a new "Channels" feature. I have to sign up for it to continue. So far the UI looks awful. In any case, last night's show is up on Mixcloud:

Test Tone @ Home live right now: https://mixlr.com/illuminator/

The "funny" thing is that the number of Putin underling who have ran afoul of gravity recently is sufficiently high that I had to double chekc which one you were talking about.

Friday's show is up:

Test Tone @ Home live right now: https://mixlr.com/illuminator/

Let's talk about zoomers and mid 90s "intelligent" drum n bass (a term reviled even at the time). I saw this recently in a TF2 thread: I said "you wot m8?" and asked for an explanation. Peshay was "LTJ Bukem, Jr." throughout the 90s. I was never a huge fan of his mixes (too heavy on the female vocals) but he definitely had his moments. Mid 90s DNB is among my favorite bits of electronic music, ever. The answer I got was that a YT video with that title blew up because of a viral meme (and many meme iterations) using the 1996 DNB track "Only You" by Intense. The original meme: TF2 version 1: TF2 version 2: The full Peshay mix from 1996, uploaded in 2018: 2M views, most of which were in the last few months. The Information Age is one weird roller coaster ride. Also this phenomenon ties into my personal belief that humanity peaked in 1996. The fact that I was young, permanently stoned and utterly immersed in drum n bass, trip hop, German hard trance and early goa trance has nothing to do with it. I swear.

Thread necro again. The second, slightly less smol Windows box I bought from MyEmployeesDontsGetBathroomBreaks.com arrived today. It's the newest model so of course it's running Windows 11. UGH. The good news: ShutUp10 beats many of the worst aspects of the OS into submission. The bad news: every other irritation about that that ShutUp10 can't fix. I've had W10 for about 4 months now. I don't rely on it for much except for gaming and the tasks that require Windows. With that said, I've grown to mostly get along with the OS. Windows 11 is like a drunken knight from chess. Three steps backwards and two steps wait where are you going? I repeat what I said in my previous post. I could write a book about Tim Apple's Infinite Bad Decisions, but one evening wih the new Redmond OS and I'm again vewing the Mac Tax as the price of salvation. At least the 8 core 5900HX CPU is quite peppy. Everything is so responsive as it does ...something I don't like.

Last night's show is up:

Test Tone @ Home live right now: https://mixlr.com/illuminator/

2K's 'quality of life' change for BioShock is that Linux users can't play it anymore. That includes the Steam Deck. Prior to this update, Bioshock Infinite was very playable on the SD. This British fella sums the situation up quite well:

Queen under medical supervision at Balmoral. It's looking pretty clearly like this is the end for Queen Elizabeth. The rest of the royal family is traveling to Scotland to see her. The UK press appears to be more or less saying she's gone without saying it. Operation London Bridge in full effect.

Russia buying millions of rockets and shells from North Korea, US intelligence says. 🤡

Ugh. No thanks, Native Instruments. SaaS is cancer.

Last night's show is up:

20 years ago an obscure and legendary Detroit electro producer died, weeks before his 33 birthday: James Stinson was one half of the electro duo Drexciya. At the time of his passing, he was a mysterious figure. For the dozen or so years that he made music, he recorded under innumerable aliases. For the last few decades I've observed endless slap fights on sites like Discogs over how he should be credited on specific releases. Techno fans can be, ahem, a bit narrow minded. Detroit techno fans are the most singular focused of the lot. Detroit electro fans make ...every other electronic music snob look easy going by comparison. The artists themselves often (usually) gave incomplete or flat out misleading information about themselves. The trope of the "faceless techno producer" was a fairly common occurrence in the 90s. I've been fascinated by the genre since I first heard it on college radio in the mid 1980s (and had no idea what it was.) I first heard about Drexciya in a UK music magazine upon the release of their anthology The Quest. I was lucky enough to find a copy locally. It was some of the strangest music I'd ever heard. By 2002 I had a number of their 12"s, none of which were easy to come by. I joined SoulSeek early that year after the demise of AudioGalaxy. The day Stinson died, there was much talk about his passing in the slsk Electro room. I actually didn't have a Discogs account at that point. Unintentionally, I ended up making one on Stinson's birthday. In the two decades since James Stinson died, most of the mystery surrounding him has been lifted. A large amount of his previous unreleased catalog is available on limited vinyl runs and FLAC downloads. I've listened to a lot of it and it's quite a mixed bag. James was a very uncontrained artist and that meant he went deep into experimental territory. Often that resulted in noodling wank. Sometimes he struck absolute gold. There really as not been another artist at all like him.

Test Tone @ Home live right now: https://mixlr.com/illuminator/

Last night's show is up:

Test Tone @ Home live right now: https://mixlr.com/illuminator/

The following is going to be nothing more than a bunch of YT embeds. There's a newish member of the Mic Snobs TF2 community who is experienced as the Spy class and posted a short "frag video" to our Discord. You don't need to know what any of that means. The music he chose was so actively painful I commented how it made me want to die. He said it was a classic from "when [he] was 15 years old." That was 2007, apparently. I did the proper old person thing and went on a rampage in the music channel of our Discord, posting a bunch of songs from when I was ~7 years old. I'm not sure it will embed, but the frag clip with the "song" is here: https://streamable.com/37w5zo

NSFW. This guy shoots Leica and is a spectacular example of why Leica glass just obliterates everything this side of large format. His images are so sharp it's stupid.

Is this thread indexed by google? I forget. I had a dualski colonoscopy and endoscopy yesterday. The prep work was gruelling in extremis. The good news is that I don't have any obvious symptoms. The bad news is that there's no explanation as to why I'm sick so severely and so often. Today I am operating at like 1/10 power. Unsure if I'm doing my radio show tomorrow or not.