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September is Library Card Sign-up Month!

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

I already made a post like this on my birthday but it’s Library Card Sign-up Month! If you haven’t already, here’s another reminder to sign up for a library card if you don’t have one. They aren’t just for books! Mine offers movies, cds, comics, board games, video games, and more. Plus it’s a space where you can study and do work and have meetups.

Your local library may also have free digital services you can get through your card. Mine has Kanopy, Hoopla, and Libby (and probably others). Kanopy is a great streaming service for movie and tv that offers things to watch similar to what you would see on the Criterion Channel. Hoopla offers movies, ebooks, and audiobooks. Libby is focused purely on ebooks and audio books. Anyway, libraries are great. They’re a third place that would never be allowed to be created today.

I Am Never Doing This Again

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

Well, that’s Blaugust all wrapped up and my take from this has been that while it was a lot of fun as a reader to get a lot more posts in my RSS feed. I’m not going to do the daily posts again. It’s just too much work, which is not what having this site should be for me. I know there’s a lot of effort put forth by the Blaugust organizers that you do not need to do this so I don’t blame them, but that’s the initial goal I saw and what I ended up sticking with. Anyway, glad I tried it but I’m not sure if I’ll officially participate next year.

Internet Mysteries: CompUSA Corporate and Borders Books and Music’s YouTube Channel

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Because I have no life, I am thinking about two internet mysteries I do not have the answer to.

Mystery 1: How is the CompUSA Corporate page still up? The company went under like 15 years ago and yeah, the name has been passed around a few times by companies trying to bring it back, but it never stuck. Someone has to be paying for this though. Who? I’m currently seeing very small gambling ads at the top but that’s a new addition. Does that mean it was kept alive by someone else and then sold to a gambling company, who is assuming that people are looking up the corporate site for a long dead company and will click on the ads?

Mystery 2: Who is uploading new videos to the Borders Books and Music YouTube account long after that company has closed down? Is there an employee that still has the login and uploads videos when they stumble across them on an old hard drive? The most recently upload is an interview with Jimmy Carter where the first comment is “I thought both of you died how did this get posted?”

Some Summer Reads I Enjoyed

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

Recently I came across this article about how reading for fun has dropped a ton in the US over the last 20 years. I don’t actually know if this is accurate or the way they studied this, but it did prompt me to post about some books I enjoyed reading on Bluesky so I may as well post an expanded list here. The trick to reading a lot over the summer is simple. Just develop an extreme love with your library’s summer reading program. Anyway, here’s some things I’ve read with each title linking to the Bookshop.org page, but I read a lot of these through my local library. Many of them have audiobooks too.

Some recent Sci-Fi/Fantasy reads include:
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey
A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert
Sir Callie and the Champions of Helston by Esme Symes-Smith

Comics also count as reading and here’s some I read:
Dungeon Club: Roll Call by Molly Knox Ostertag/Xanthe Bouma
Girl Town by Casey Nowak
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Eerie Tales from the School of Screams by Graham Annable

The non-fiction I’ve read this year is sorta all over the place, but some of the things I liked were:
Collected Game Writing Articles by Steve Ince
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything by Colette Shade
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games by Mike Drucker
How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

I’ve also read a billion The Baby-sitters Club and Baby-sitters Little Sister books because that’s what my two girls love and know a lot of the lore AND can recommend the graphic novel adaptations

Forums Are Still Great

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Once in a while I’ll see a post on social media lamenting that the Internet isn’t as good as it used to be and pine for certain things like forums, personal sites, IRC, etc but you can still do old internet stuff! There’s still plenty of active forums, and you probably already know this if you’re reading this site, but you can still make websites and webrings. IRC chat rooms are still going too. It’s still fun! Go do it if you miss it that much.

I really like papercult.club for tabletop rpg discussion. It’s a nice smaller community and it feels like there’s very little drama in the indie ttrpg scene when people can actually discuss stuff in smaller communities. This applies to the various ttrpg discords I’m in too.

DOS Game Club is another favorite of mine. It’s a DOS game discussion group where each month they pick a different DOS game to play and discuss. There is an IRC channel built into the web page too if you prefer real time chat and I think it’s a nice place to hang out.

Sometimes I poke my head into the IntFiction.org forums to see what is happening with the interactive fiction community too.

I’m sure I’ve talked on here about making personal sites. Personal sites are fun too and you can get one going pretty quickly with bearblog.dev or neocities.org. Both support RSS feeds as well, which is still neat and very useful.

Anyway, this stuff all still exists and it’s fun!

RetroAchievements

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After seeing this post about it, I’m hooked! I’m probably the last person to know about it but RetroAchievements is basically a service that hooks into a specific set of emulators to let you get little achivements for retro games. Achievements are kinda goofy and maybe a net negative for games, but I like doing this with old games I’ve played a bunch of times before. It’s just fun and goofy to get them for something like Super Mario Bros. My only real complaint is that it’s basically only for console games, when this would be much more exciting to me if it supported DOS and the Amiga. It apparently supports the Apple II but I haven’t been able to get it to work. Which is a shame, because the idea of earning achievements in something like Gabriel Knight 2 is very funny to me and I wish I could do that.

My Favorite Radio Stations

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Even though this Strong Bad email is very accurate, I love public and college radio. I think the curation it offers beats streaming and it’s how I discover new music these days.

Anyway, here are my favorite radio stations. All of these can be streamed and it is probably not a huge surprise that I own t-shirts for all of them. If you have a community radio station you like, consider supporting them if you can fit it in your budget. Funding is being cut for everything good right now and they need support.

WDET – Detroit’s NPR station. I think it has a lot of good music shows that play at night and as a local, the news programming is relevant to me as well.

WCBN-FM – The University of Michigan’s radio station. It’s pretty chaotic and they play a wide range of stuff and a lot of obscure things too.

WPRB – A community radio station in Princeton, New Jersey. I really like Jon Solomon’s show on Wednesdays and he hosts a 25 hour long Christmas music marathon every year where he stays up those entire 25 hours and plays really weird christmas music including a 40 minute version of Little Drummer Boy

KEXP – A legend in Seattle. They have helped so many bands from the area, including the whole grunge scene, and I like all the alternative rock they play

Proposals A and B Passed in Ann Arbor!

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

Local library posting again but it’s wonderful to wake up and see that proposals A and B passed in Ann Arbor. This means that a parking lot that has been sitting next to the library for over a decade will be transferred to the library where they can build a new, larger library that will also include affordable housing. My limited understanding is that it had a vote in 2017 to make it a park, which it was never suitable for nor did the city or the citizens group that pushed for that vote ever do anything with it. As relatable as I can find “no really, I’ll get right to doing this task any minute,” I’m glad that it will belong to the library. The amount of misinformation being spent and put out by this group saying that the vote was to destroy parks was intense and I was worried it wouldn’t pass. It turns out it wasn’t even close though.

“We’ve replaced a parking lot with a library and affordable housing” is my dream scenario for any city and a great thing to wake up to.

I was hoping the proposal for Livonia to build a lot of new buildings for the city would pass but didn’t expect it to and it didn’t. It’s Livonia, which is a lot more conservative, and I knew that a monthly increase of $10-15 per month in taxes would be a tough sell.

But I’ll take the new downtown library in Ann Arbor. Congrats to the city!