I hate to be one of *those* people, but I've been on a bit of an analogue kick lately.

I take day to day snaps using a 40 year old film camera for sheer shits and giggles. I mean, objectively any modern digital camera will do a better job of making a picture, but at the same time there's still a charm in the simplicity and robustness of the process. Light goes in, magical chemical shit happens, more magical chemical shit happens at the developer, then pictures happen. It's mostly automatic - save for the focus - but thanks to modern batteries the light meter doesn't quite measure correctly anymore since it was calibrated for mercury batteries and because the whole lot's based on voltages and signals, the timing of the shutter and/or aperture can cause things to be a bit overexposed

I bought a record player yesterday. More importantly, I bought something of a crap record player. It's not a high-end turntable system. It's a cheap, portable Steepletone that has a DC power input, Tone and Volume, 2 detacheable speakers that also form the lid. It has a sub-woofer output, line-in, a speed adjustment and that's it. But it makes OK sound, even using a 29 year old copy of Master of Puppets, and manages to sound much clearer than an iPod ever did. It's a fairly simple creature, with no fancy bells and whistles.

It doesn't quite have full bass, but there is something just fascinating about the way it revolves. The process of creation is visible under a microscope.... a needle tracing along a groove moving coils in the head. I mean, it's a physical process, rather than something ephemeral like data which is subject to the whims of battery and electricity. It's just wires and coils that could theoretically (And probably is, tbh) be made in a shed, rather than a process requiring hyper-pure megafactories cutting silicon wafers and moulding OLED screens. It's a piece of technology for the apocalypse that'll run quite happily off a 12V car battery when all the iPods have been cooked by radiation and EMP.

It has no real features whatsoever beyond reveling in it's own deliberate failings. It's a bit crap, but it's not trying to convince you that it's better than it actually is.... so transcends its inherent crappiness to become something just a little bit interesting.

I suppose, the joy of analogue tech is the way it fails. Instead of chirping or blocking, it just sort of degrades gracefully in an intriguing, fascinating and organic way (Okay, so maybe not VHS...). It's not about an absolutely faithful reproduction.... it's about just a little extra creation from nature.

Or am I just being Fedora?
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Hey, uh, would the creation of handwavium, uh, 'handwaved' some of the interesting series that came out after the start of this shared universe away? (Danelaw coming down on series that start to get disturbingly popular so as to prevent another faction of fen from developing, for instance.) I've sort of got an idea for a group of characters and an eventual idea for a plot for them, but I'm just trying to see if the events of the setting might prevent that through the prevention of the series or a shutdown of the series as said above.

This is late news. But it sort of slipped under my radar. 
Trimpe is notable for a lot of work in the 70s on the Hulk and is the first guy to draw Wolverine (in the same book). 

Quote:Trimpe is best known to fans for his work on The Incredible Hulk, a series he drew from 1968 to 1975. It was during that run that he drew the first appearance of Wolverine (in Hulk #180), who would later go on to become one of the company's cornerstone characters thanks to his appearances in the successful X-Menfamily of titles.
In a statement, Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso said, "To me, no artist is as synonymous with the Incredible Hulk as Herb Trimpe, who gave the Jade Giant a sense of pathos and scale that set the bar for every artist that followed him. Like a Hulk-punch, Trimpe's art truly exploded off the page. Comics lost a giant."
Trimpe went on to work on a number of different titles for Marvel, including the first issue of its licensed G.I. Joe, the majority of the company's Godzilla and Shogun Warriors series. He also had runs on Iron Man, Ant-Manand Captain Britain, for which he co-created the character of Elizabeth Braddock, who'll be played by Olivia Munn in next year's X-Men: Apocalypse.

Quote:Trimpe was fired by Marvel in the 1990s, something he wrote about for The New York Times... He returned to higher education, gaining a BA in art and eventually moving on to teaching at a local school in New York state, but he kept a foot in the comic book business, working on covers for a number of publishers, and even returning to Marvel for a 2008 Hulk story.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... s-security
The passwords and other descriptions below applies if it's a AVS WinVote machine.
I personally wouldn't be surprised if these passwords were also used by any other voting  machine with built in WIFI.
From roughly 2002 to 2014 if you didn't like your vote and/or didn't think you would like how the other people were voting then to change them, all you needed was a WIFI capable laptop able to connect to the WEP WIFI of the voting machine.
The password for the administration account on all of these machines is "admin" or "ADMIN" and the WEP password is either "abcde" or "ABCDE".
OH! if that's not enough access, the machine also uses a version of Windows that hasn't been patched since somewhere around 2004.
It looks like the States that use these so called voting machines were informed of all these major problems at least by 2008, but continued using them through 2014.
My personal initial reaction upon seeing that these voting machine specifications included WIFI was "WIFI ON A VOTING MACHINE!"
They  have been decertified, but if I'm not mistaken that is only in 1 state "Virginia I think." and it only took 7 years. So if you don't like your vote or don't think your going to like how your neighbors are voting just take your laptop along on voting day and remember the above passwords you can set all the votes on the voting machines any way you like. Did I mention there is no auto logging of changes?
What I can't understand is why in the last 7 years since the reports started coming out about WIFI enabled voting machines is why some group of college students haven't gotten together and drove from district to district changing all the votes recorded on these machines to votes for "Darth Vader", "Garfield" or maybe their university mascot.
So just remember your electronic voting machine vote counts...  Maybe... You just can't be sure what it will be or how many times it will change after you have voted.   
God Bless 
edited to add link to an article about AVS machines in Virginia.

Check out http://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/th ... +Planet%29]this article from AmusingPlanet.com -- a village in England which has a model of itself as a tourist attraction.  And within that model is a model of the model.  And within the model of the model is a model of the model of the model...  Article includes photos so you can actually see all the levels.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Yeah. We're home.

As another April 15th starts to fade away it is time to remember how the tax software companies like Intuit have helped us. They have seen the suffering of American tax payers and has spent millions of dollars to ensure that that suffering does not end. Wait, did I say help us, I meant we should remember how they have helped themselves by screwing us.
Imagine if the DMV operated the way our income tax system works:
"Well yes, we do know what numbers ought to go in those blanks but we're going to ask you to look up your car's VIN, then look up the details on these tables, oh, and if you make a mistake on any of the math and it doesn't agree with our calculations we'll make you pay a penalty."
"Wait, you already have the numbers? You've already calculated what I owe? How about you just tell me that number?"
"Sorry, the Auto Registration Software companies will have their pet legislator kill my job if we do that. How else will they sell AutoTax or DMV At Home if we just tell you what we think you owe?"
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Will the transhumanist future have catgirls? Does Japan still exist? Well, there is your answer.

It's a piece of techno music, and thusly is unlikely to affect Doug in any way, but "We Have the Energy" by Evil Nine has a refrain in it that has a certain resonance with Doug's personality. I swear it's a sample from someone, and my brain claims it's Abbie Hoffman, but I can't say for certain and the Internet fails to identify it.
"No more slogans. No more excuses. No more blinding our eyes and baring our asses to the world. We have the power. We have the resources. We have the energy. Let's get together and WRECK SHIT!"
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com

"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."

http://time.com/3821342/percy-sledge-singer-dies/
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012