For two weeks, my section at work has organized and is currently running an “electronics recycling and disposal event”. Our team has done roughly a dozen of these events this year across the country, but this is the first one we’ve done here in Oklahoma City. It’s also the first one I’ve directly been involved with one and, holy cow. It’s hard work.

It can be challenging to dispose of government inventory. It’s a bit complicated, but we can’t just throw outdated equipment away. All equipment is barcoded and not all items are disposed of in the same way. There’s also a lot of paperwork involved, and sometimes it’s easier to just stick old or broken items in a closet rather than do through the process. Our event is kind of a “forgiveness/reset” event. Our team has placed large Gaylord boxes (48″ x 40″ x 36″) all around our campus and invited organizations and even individuals to place old equipment into these boxes. This can be anything from computers and laptops to cables, docking stations, software… you name it. These boxes are being collected and transported to a central location where they have to be sorted depending on the type of equipment.

I have been floating between multiple locations this week which has given me a unique perspective on the project. On our campus, a steady stream of boxes are being delivered and picked up. There are a lot of buildings and only so many movers, so this has taken a lot of planning and scheduling — and, when things change, replanning and rescheduling. At that point in the process, nothing is sorted; that happens over at our offsite depot a few miles away. I was hoping by 2024 we would have robots or something to do this part, but no. A group of hard working people pull everything out of those boxes and resort them into different boxes. Every single item has to be touched.

There’s no way to fully convey the scope of this effort, but I’ll try. On Wednesday we had 40 of those gigantic boxes arrive for processing. Forty boxes in one day. Again, the boxes contain electronic stew. One by one, they are emptied. Computers go in one pile, monitors go in another pile, laptops go in another pile, and so on. We are getting tons (literally) of what we call “peripherals” which includes cables, speakers, keyboards, mice, and lots of random items. I hate seeing brand new items come through the process, but I also hate seeing the really old stuff go through. Yesterday we found a cassette player from the 70s. While I was out, someone said four Apple II computers arrived in a box. What four Apple II computers were doing on our campus is, like a lot of these things, a mystery.

Four days into the event, we have processed more than 40,000 pounds of excess equipment. As a lifelong packrat, it breaks my soul to see all of these things go through the system. I have seen boxes and boxes of brand new keyboards come in; the keyboards have to be removed from their boxes to be tossed into bins. While the keyboards are a few years old, they’re the exact same model that’s on my desk. Nothing that’s barcoded can be saved from the process. It’s all government property and will continue on its way to be resold or recycled. Occasionally we’ll find something like an old Walkman or radio that isn’t barcoded meaning it was probably someone’s personal property and those items may or may not end up in a pile near me, but at the end of the day it all has to go back.

One of the things I’ve been tasked with is taking pictures of the event… which is ironic that I cannot share them since they are taken on government facility. The picture at the top of this post is a stock photo, but multiply it by about a hundred and you’ll get a rough idea what we’re dealing with.

There may not be enough Advil and back pills to get me through this project, but we’ll see. It has been a fun and eye opening change of pace.

I found this plastic severed hand at a garage sale a few months ago. I think I paid a quarter for it and even before we were back in the car I had already got my money’s worth. I tapped Susan on the shoulder with it multiple times, walked around with with it hanging out of my sleeve and tried shaking people’s hands, and approached several people while holding it and asked them if they needed a hand with anything. Twenty-five cents well spent.

The next day, I hid the hand underneath Susan’s pillow in an attempt to scare her. In turn, she hid the hand in my clean clothes pile. I hid the hand in her car. She hid it in the microwave. The hand has been hidden many places and every time one of us finds it, we laugh. A couple of weeks ago, I opened my CPAP travel bag, stuck my hand inside to pull out a power supply, and jumped when I felt a bunch of cold, plastic fingers in the bottom of the bag.

The closer we get to Halloween the more times I expect to find the hand. That’s not what scares me. What scares me is, I have no idea where the hand is in the moment, and am sure I’ll find it any moment…

Over the past few weeks I’ve binged the first season of two shows: Fallout, loosely based on the video game of the same name, and The Acolyte, the latest live action Star Wars series. The first season of Fallout, which aired on Amazon Prime, had an estimated budged of $150 million, while The Acolyte had a budget of roughly $180 million. Fallout currently has a 90% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes while The Acolyte has an abysmal 31% approval rating. What did Fallout do so right that The Acolyte failed out? A lot, actually.

In science fiction stories authors create fantastic worlds that can have any rules they dream up, but one of the most important things is that once those rules are established, they are consistent. It’s perfectly acceptable for an author to establishes a world where aliens can breathe underwater… but if one of those aliens later drowns it has to be explained to readers or viewers why. These types of stories have to stick to the rules they’ve created, otherwise the audience may feel confused, cheated, or frustrated when the rules change.

Fallout does a great job of this. Its post-apocalyptic setting is established early on. Groups of people known as “vault dwellers” avoided the effects of a nuclear war by living in underground bunkers, while the land above (the “wasteland”) has become a dangerous place full of fiends and ghouls who suffer from radiation (and worse). The season’s overarching plot involves a vault dweller named Lucy who must emerge from her vault and face adversity to rescue her kidnapped father. In the first episode we are introduced to two more major characters, Maximus (a squire serving in the militaristic Brotherhood) and “The Ghoul,” an undead gunslinger who crosses paths with both Lucy and Maximus and is after the same thing (which just so happens to be, quite literally, someone else’s head). Throughout the season the show uses flashbacks to flesh out the backstories of these characters. By the end of the season a lot of what viewers thought they knew was wrong, but everything fits together nicely.

The Acolyte tries to do many of these same things and, ironically, fails at most of them. The Acolyte tells the story of Force-sensitive identical twins, Osha and Mae, who were being raised by a coven of witches. A group of four Jedi arrive on the planet, stumble across the twins, and ultimately are involved in a deadly conflict with the witches. As a result of the conflict the witches are killed and the twins are separated, leaving each one to believe they were the sole survivor. One of the twins, Osha, leaves with the Jedi and attempts to become one herself only to fail. The other twin, Mae, spends the next fifteen years training under a Sith Lord with the intent of murdering the four Jedi who visited her planet as a child. So far, so good.

One of the biggest problems with The Acolyte is that it takes place in a world that has already been established. The rules of the Star Wars universe were firmly established back in 1977 although, god love ’em, they’ve been fiddling with them ever since. In the original trilogy it was established what Jedi could (and couldn’t) do through the means of the Force, but new Jedi powers keep appearing. In this series, the Sith Lord referred to as “The Stranger” is able to perform a “mind wipe,” in which he is able to make characters permanently forget about the existence of other characters, and even wipe decades of memories from their minds. That’s new! The Shadow also wears a helmet made of “cortosis,” a metal that shorts out lightsabers when they come in contact with it and repels the Force from penetrating it. Neat. But where was this metal in every other Star Wars film? Why doesn’t The Stranger wear an entire suit of armor made from the stuff? Or wrap his fortress in it? Why can’t the Force penetrate the helmet through the eye slits we’re shown?

Another thing both series have in common is the use of flashbacks. In Fallout, flashbacks are used to give backstories to the characters and explain to viewers how we got to where we are. In the main timeline we know there’s been a nuclear incent of some kind, but later, through flashbacks, we learn who was behind it. We learn each of the characters’ backstories, and ultimately, their motivations.

Again, The Acolyte does this completely wrong. The next to last episode of the season is a flashback to events that has already been explained and in many cases shown to views. One of the biggest complaints about 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story was that it retold events that viewers already knew about. In 1977’s Star Wars, Han Solo bragged about making the Kessel Run in “less than 12 parsecs.” In Solo… we watch Han make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. But, like, great — we already knew he could, because he already did. We also see him win the Millennium Falcon from Lando, a fact that was established in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. If you told viewers it happened, you don’t need to go back and show us it happened, too. The Acolyte revisits entire scenes for the sake of showing us that Jedi was hiding behind a tree the entire time. It feels a bit like Back to the Future Part II when one time-traveling Marty McFly goes back and revisits the first time-traveling Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, except in this case there’s very little to be gained from it.

Finally, we have the characters themselves. While characters in a story should not be one-dimensional, they should have clearly established traits and morals and stick to them; and, if they don’t, those decisions should be justified. Fallout’s Lucy is a vault dweller who’s been raised on the Golden Rule. When forced to shoot, she’ll shoot, but she complains about being kidnapped and tortured by saying “that’s not nice!” The Ghoul, on the other hand, is on a mission. He’s unwavering from it and merciless, almost like The Terminator. When we find out why, it all makes sense. Maximus is a military grunt who dreams of earning a coveted position as a squire so that someday he might earn an even more coveted position as a knight. He was rescued by a knight as a child and wants to become one — end of story. That doesn’t meant that the character has to be simple, but it means his motivations are. Maximus’s story arc is about become a knight. Period.

In The Acolyte we have four Jedi who have been covering up an event and lying to the Jedi Council about it for 15 years. It was a death that, at best was a Jedi defending himself and maaaybe swinging his saber a fraction of a second too early, and at worse was an accident. I mean, this is Star Wars. Luke destroyed the Death Star which, according to the book, had nearly two million people on board. Two million! Obi-Wan killed a guy in a cantina and cut off another guy’s arm. Where was that mind wipe stuff then? Star Wars was a rough universe that often put characters in kill-or-be-killed situations. Worse than all of that, the show makes the Jedi look like a bunch of bumbling doofs. They can’t solve a murder, half of them are getting murdered by an angsty teen, another Jedi — who had nothing to do with the original witch attack, he just happened to be there — feels so guilty about the whole affair that he’s talked into killing himself rather easily. It just goes on and on. These aren’t the rantings of an old man saying “the Jedi aren’t acting the way I want them to” — these are the rantings of an old man saying, “the Jedi aren’t acting like they do in every other movie.” Somebody, Force mind wipe me!

Throughout its first season, Fallout told a complete story. We got a beginning, a middle, and an end of a story arc with lots of little stories throughout the season. At the end of the season, our characters are off on their next adventure. If the next season comes to fruition I’ll watch it and if it doesn’t, I feel satisfied with how the story ended. In the same amount of episodes, The Acolyte left viewers with more questions than answers. By the end of the season, one of the good guys has turned bad, one of the bad guys has amnesia, the ultimate bad guy has escaped, we learn there’s an even badder bad guy, and the events of this episode are covered up just like the previous events were, for reasons unknown. Bah.

Amazon has announced that Fallout has been renewed for a second season. I look forward to watching it. There has been no word as to whether there will be a second season of The Acolyte or not. These new Star Wars shows are being created for people younger than me BY people younger than me, and if they do end up making another season of that show, I’ll try and let them enjoy it while I go watch something else.

They say death comes in threes, which means this past weekend we either got one extra, or there are two more to come. This past weekend we lost four great celebrities.

Shannon Doherty passed away at the age of 53 on July 13 from breast cancer. Doherty rose to fame as Brenda on the hit show 90210, and found a second home as Prue on the television series Charmed. For Gen Xers, Doherty will be remembered either as Rene, Brody’s girlfriend from Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, or as Heather Duke, one of the many Heathers from the 1988 film, Heathers.

Shelley Duvall passed away at the age of 75 from complications of diabetes. Duvall first broke through with her performance in 1977’s Annie Hall, but it was her rolls in The Shining and Popeye, both released in 1980, that made her a superstar. Duvall’s Fairy Tale Theater was a big hit as well. Duvall was instantly recognizable and will be missed.

Richard Simmons, famous workout guru, passed away at the age of 76. In the 1980s, Simmons had seemingly the entire country “sweatin’ to the oldies,” but he was more than just a workout legend — her was a personality. Simmons’ appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, among other talk shows, made him a star. Simmons was known for his generosity and his empathy, often cold calling people to support them in their weight loss journey. In later years Simmons became a recluse, leading to speculation about his health and living situation (check out the excellent podcast Missing Rickard Simmons). Over the past year Simmons squabbled with comedian Pauly Shore, who was been pitching a biopic based on Simmons’ life which will surely now get greenlit.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the world’s most famous sex therapist, passed away at the age of 96. Westheimer lived an interesting life. At the age of 10 she was sent from Germany to Switzerland to attend school. Her Jewish parents remained in Germany, and were both killed in concentration camps. At the age of 17 Westheimer joined the military and served as a sniper, only to be discharged at the age of 20 after being injured by an exploding shell while defending Israel in the Palestine War. All of this happened 30 years before Westheimer began her call in radio talk show, Sexually Speaking, in 1980. That show led to multiple television shows and becoming a part of pop culture. Westheimer went on to author 45 books, with another waiting to be published at the time of her death.

Each of these four people contributed to pop culture in their own unique way and will be missed.

In the middle of Boatfest — a gathering in West Virginia that has everything to do with retrocomputing and nothing at all to do with boats — I heard some commotion coming from the rear of the room. When I arrived there I found John “BoatOfCar” Shawler and Amigo Aaron, hosts of the popular Amigos Podcast, playing football. They were playing on an original Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home video game console released back in 1972. The game is so primitive that it requires a third person to serve as the referee, and the field itself is depicted by an overlay that has to be stuck to the front of the television. If that sounds remotely entertaining to interesting to you… welcome to Boatfest.

For the third year in a row, I made the 1,000 mile drive from Oklahoma City to Hurricane, West Virginia. This trip marked the first major voyage of Big Rob’s Van, which did surprisingly well. Sure, a few parts fell off along the way, the radio doesn’t work reliably and we had to stop at a Home Depot in Kentucky to buy a 2×4 to perform an on-the-road repair to the bed, but it did get us to West Virginia and back, so we’ll call that a success. On our first night on the road we stopped for the night at Big Springs National Park, where I slept in the van and Susan camped in a tent. On the following day once we arrived in West Virginia, Susan headed off to a cabin for the weekend while I remained in Hurricane for the event, spending my days at the event and my nights inside the van (in a friend’s driveway, not down by the river).

Boatfest is a throwback to the computer club meetings of the 1980s. There are scheduled events, but the majority of the show is all about looking at the things people brought. The computers you will see at Boatfest range from old machines that you might remember seeing (or maybe even owned) back in the 70s, 80s, or 90s, all the way to obscure machines that only the nerdiest of the nerds have heard of. Sitting on the table next to me was a nearly pristine 386/16 computer running Windows 3.1 that everyone recognized. Two tables away was an Apple 1 motherboard kit sitting next to a PiDP-11, a miniature version of the PDP-11 minicomputer released in 1970. A couple of tables past that, a couple of young teens were battling one another in in a car game on the Dreamcast. One of the best things about Boatfest is that nobody brings the same things to share two years in a row, which means the show is completely different every single year.

Another great thing about Boatfest is that new people are always discovering it. Among this year’s new attendees were Marshall and Lee, locals who found out about the show. Marshall bought a Altair kit and was showing some simple games it could play with its LED lights and how to load software into it. On the other side of the table, Lee had three vintage portable computers including a TRS-80 Model IV portable that I hadn’t seen in many years and another “luggable” system running Lode Runner. Trust me, you have not played Lode Runner until you have played it using keyboard controls while staring at a tiny amber monitor. Heaven!

Petzel may have one-uppoed his Amiga Toaster demonstration from last year by showing off his NABU system from the 1980s. I’ll probably get this wrong, but the NABU was a computer from the 1980s that connected to your home cable connection and was able to download software that way. The updated system Petzel was demoing had a Raspberry Pi simulating the original back end, allowing new software and games to be downloaded and played. It was yet another example of a computer system I had never heard of, and yet somehow there were three of them in the room.

There are a few events that have become regular staples at Boatfest. Frank, Jason, and L. Curtis Boyle were holding court at the front of the room, doing repairs for RetroRewind. Anyone with broken gear is welcome to bring it to the show and the guys will do their best to repair it on the spot for free (minus the cost of parts of course). Several podcasts associated with the show including the Amigos, ARG Presents, and my own Sprite Castle took turns doing live shows. Finally on Saturday night was the auction. Anyone attending the show is invited to bring items from their personal collection and put them up for auction. Many people throw in an item or two and donate the proceeds towards either the show or the charity the show is associated with.

I didn’t have as much time or space to pack for the show as I had hoped and so for this year’s auction I only brought (and sold) some boxed DOS games from my personal collection. I really had no expectations when it came to pricing and was more interested in them finding new good homes than the amount they sold for; that being said, I made enough to cover a few tanks of gas in the van for the trip home. I am constantly surprised at the amounts some of the items in the auction seem to command. It seems like computers that mostly work but still need a few repairs sell for for than completely working systems! I have a few non-working Apple II computers and a few other items that I am already planning to bring to next year’s show.

Another Saturday night tradition that has developed is the bringing, sharing, and consumption of adult beverages. There were multiple spirits available to imbibe, including yet another jar of West Virginia moonshine that was smooth enough to be dangerous. At the far other end of classy, I found a bottle of Dill Pickle Flavored Vodka at the local liquor store, which I picked up and challenged people to drink. It was as tasty as you might imagine dill pickle flavored vodka to be.

Those who hadn’t already started their trips home gathered on Sunday for a picnic thrown by the Amigos crew. There were hamburgers, hot dogs, brats, and plenty of sides for everyone. As Susan (who had returned from the cabin and joined us for lunch) and I were sitting at a picnic table enjoying a hot dog, on the other side of the gazebo we could hear a loud conversation about the evils of Adobe’s licensing. Only at a Boatfest picnic!

I had a great time looking at and playing with all the old computers, but the highlight of the show for me is reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. Thanks to everyone who brought things to demonstrate at Boatfest or just stopped by the show to check things out. Every year on the drive home from Boatfest I begin brainstorming about new things to bring to next year’s show and I’ve already come up with a good one. It seemed to me everybody in attendance had a good time, and assuming there’s another show in 2025, I will definitely be there!

What do our Visio television, a set of DJI wireless microphones, and a GE washer/dryer combo have in common? Over the past couple of months, all of them have broken.

Back in the day I used to think that brand names were really important, and still do to a certain extent. When you spend a little more on name brand items, along with that name comes better quality. The JVC VCR I use to capture VHS tapes is fifteen years old and still working great. I can’t imagine a, you know, Daewoo unit lasting as long.

But the problem with appliances and devices today is that the companies selling them don’t make the components. I’ve always had good luck with Samsung televisions, but less than half of all Samsung televisions use Samsung displays. That’s not all that surprising. Apple makes 0% of the components that go into an iPhone.

So when you’re comparing brands and trying to decide between JVC and Daewoo, it’s likely that each of them have purchased third-party components (maybe even from the same supplier) to build devices. Now, part of what you’re paying for is quality control — we hope (or would at least like to think) that someone like JVC uses better parts and does more testing than an inexpensive brand. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. But recently, I’ve discovered that there’s something more important to me than the names on the box, and that is:

How easy is it to get repaired and/or get replaced if it breaks?

In all of the instances above, things went great. The $400/55″ Visio television Susan bought for the condo in DC and brought back home with her developed a problem with the display after only 13 months. Armed with only a model number and a prayer, I contacted their tech support and after a couple of hours of troubleshooting they told me to keep the TV and mailed me a check for the price of the television. My DJI wireless microphones stopped working and after contacting their company they cross-shipped me a new pair, no (a few) questions asked. Last week, our six-month-old GE washer/dryer combo unit stopped working. It’s under warranty and they’ll be fixing it next week free of charge, which is pretty generous considering the problem appears to be related to the handfuls of cat hair the repairman pulled out of the filter box…

My other “insurance card” comes from Amazon. I’ve ordered so many questionable items from Amazon, from a solar-rechargeable power band (fine print said it would take a week in the sun to recharge) to a large, off-brand power station (stopped working within the first month). As long as you’re willing to haul it up to Kohl’s or one of their other shipping partners, you can send almost anything back to Amazon within their return window.

Name brands have always been important to me, but being able to easily return things has become just as important, if not more.