Category: Reviews

A Fun Old (New) Stereo: The Looptone 9-in-1 Stereo

I own maybe fifty albums on vinyl and less than a dozen cassette tapes. I don’t buy new releases on vinyl — everything I have is either belonged to my parents, is from my own childhood, or was purchased to tickle some nostalgic sense. I don’t think I paid more than a dollar or two for any of them. Most of them pop, hiss and crackle and I like it that way. I’m less nostalgic about cassette tapes. I digitized all my childhood radio recordings years ago and only have a handful of tapes from local bands that never made… (read more)

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I Watched All 79 Episodes of Star Trek So You Don’t Have To… But You Should

Star Trek the Original Series with Captain Kirk, Dr. Bones McCoy, and Spock

Because I didn’t watch Star Trek as a child, a few months ago I decided to binge every episode of the show. Star Trek (today referred to as Star Trek: The Original Series or simply ST:TOS) originally aired on NBC from September 1966 through June 1969, and consisted of 79 episodes. When I say I didn’t watch the show, I don’t mean to imply I had never seen it. It was nearly impossible to grow up in the 70s/80s without at least some exposure to the show. Although I grew up a Star Wars kid, I definitely remember the McDonald’s… (read more)

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The Olde Orchard: Old Restaurant, New Location

Live in the same town long enough and you’ll eventually start referring to houses by who used to live there, and buildings by what they used to be. If I were giving directions to someone from out of town to The Olde Orchard, I’d tell them it’s located at 326 Elm Avenue in Yukon in the Old Mills Plaza, just off of Main Street. To anyone from around here, I’d just say it’s where the Miller Grill used to be — and to a real old timer, I might even call it the old Big Ed’s. Pulling into the parking… (read more)

RobOHara

Pixoo-64: A Pixel-Pushing Art Display for Retro Fanatics

Pixoo-64 displaying a Biker Scout from Star Wars

I’m a fan of old school digital artwork. For the past five years I’ve enjoyed viewing ANSI artwork (created in the 1990s for BBSes) in my office on a dedicated Raspberry Pi running PyAns. Another style of vintage art I really enjoy is pixel artwork. Pixel graphics are images drawn on a grid, one pixel at a time. These pictures can be very small, like characters from an old video game, or very large. The sprites that make up characters in most Commodore 64 games are only 24×21 pixels in size. Other pictures, like the backgrounds from those games or… (read more)

RobOHara

End of the Road: Kiss Farewell Tour

I have to admit, I was originally on the fence when Susan asked if I wanted to see Kiss perform on their “End of the Road” world tour stop in Oklahoma City. While there are plenty of Kiss songs I enjoy, I’d be hard pressed to refer to myself a member of the band’s “Kiss Army.” Like most of the band’s casual fans, I enjoy a lot of their songs from the late 70s and early 80s, a few from the mid 80s, and almost nothing from the past thirty years. Still, it’s hard to say no when a legendary… (read more)

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Meow Wolf: Origin Story (Review)

Meow Wolf

My family and I discovered Meow Wolf’s interactive art installation “The House of Eternal Return” purely by accident. In the summer of 2016, the four of us decided to rent an RV and drive west on I-40, eventually stopping in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was there, while looking for things to do, that Susan ran across a review of Meow Wolf, describing it as “part art installation, part interactive fun house.” On a whim, we decided to go check it out. The four of us spent roughly four hours wandering through The House of Eternal Return, taking pictures and… (read more)

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SLLEA RCA Video Adapter – You Get What You Pay For

The old saying “you get what you pay for” is usually true. Recently I had a brilliant idea. Instead of hooking up my old computers and video game consoles to a large television, wouldn’t it be nice if I could hook them up to a small flat screen monitor? I have a couple of 4:3 ratio flat screen monitors out in the garage that could work for just such a project. The only hurdle is that those monitors only have VGA inputs, and my old computers and video game consoles all have RCA (composite) outputs. If only someone made a… (read more)

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Beastie Boys Book (2018)

Adam “King Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Mike “Mike D” Diamond — two founding members of the legendary Beastie Boys — spend the first hundred or so pages of the new voluminous Beastie Boys Book describing New York City as it appeared in the early 1980s. It’s a bit wild, with lots of (unsupervised) teens hanging out at clubs, causing mischief, and discovering music both before and of their time. It was in that setting that Horovitz and Diamond met Adam “MCA” Yauch, discovered and dabbled in the hardcore punk music scene, and eventually went on to form one of the most… (read more)

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100 (Questionable) Movies for $15

I love shopping on Amazon, I love bargains, and I love bad movies — so when I recently stumbled across Mill Creek’s latest 100 Movie DVD packs, knowing well and good that they were probably terrible, I bought them anyway (so you wouldn’t have to). The three packs I purchased were 100 Greatest Cult Classics, 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Classics, and the one that originally hooked me, 100 Awesomely Cheesy Movies. Each pack sells for around $15 on Amazon, give or take a nickel. Even if you’re not familiar with Mill Creek, you may have seen some of their compilations before.… (read more)

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The Fantasy Fiction Formula (Book and Podcast)

When I tell my friends that my writing professor (Deborah Chester) wrote the book on writing genre fiction, I’m being quite literal. Okay, so maybe she didn’t write the book on writing genre fiction, but she wrote a book on the subject, and a darned good one too. It’s called The Fantasy Fiction Formula, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. In 264 pages, Chester walks you step-by-step through the process of writing a fiction novel. If you have stared at a blank computer screen wondering where to start, or started writing a novel only to hit a dead end… (read more)

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