A Lovely Harmless Monster – Blog

It's unfortunate that "blog" portmanteaus so nicely with "August", because in truth, any other month would probably be better for this kind of undertaking.

I started a couple lighthearted half-baked posts about stuff I'm not really qualified to talk about--I mean, even less so than usual--but I can't figure out how to hammer them into a shape that comes across as funny and not just me being dumb.

In January, an online music magazine called Loudwire published a list of what they think are the 25 best rock songs since the year 2000.

Yesterday on Ranking the NES, Jeff Gerstmann played the 8-bit Nintendo version of Hillsfar.

Fire alarms Someone wrote in regarding my fire alarm mishap and kindly informed me that my fire alarm probably has an optical sensor, which can be triggered by dust, and is less likely to happen if you give it a good periodic dusting.

I finished the Parker trilogy.

What was I up to 20 years ago?

Bagfoot I saw a car with a novelty fake license plate (on the front--I assume the back of the car had a real license plate) that read BIGFOOT, in a Bigfootesqe font.

Today's my spouse's and my anniversary, and I took the day off work.

I didn't recognize it as the fire alarm at first, because building maintenance had installed a new one recently.

Disrespect The two pointy front teeth of a cat are called "canine teeth", just like ours, but when it's a cat, I think it's disrespectful to call them that.

💡 This post is a work of fiction.

I've always had issues with tap water.

Oh god, I only have an hour before midnight.

You know those questions you have to answer when you get locked out of your account and need to reset your password, "what was your first-grade teacher's name", that kinda thing?

A sentiment I'm seeing a lot lately is "streaming sucks, I'm going back to physical media."

It's always nice to be at the office by myself, but only having one day off is taking its toll.

Friday In Mid-July update, I alluded to a possible future in which one of my co-workers, Squirrel, would have time to help with some of my Work Product Units.

Back in the old days of office phone systems, and maybe it's still like this in some places, if you want to dial an "outside line" (i.e., a normal phone number) you couldn't just pick up the handset and start dialing.

The original clickbait title was going to be "Is country music good?"

They're an American country music band who've been active since 1982.

Yesterday's post is showing up on the homepage as being posted on August 05.

Happy Blaugust 4th!

Jeff Gerstmann continues his quest to play and rank every 8-bit Nintendo game.

My default mental image of a "crime novel" would more accurately be described as a "cop novel": crime happens in the story, and sometimes very horrendous violent crimes are depicted, but it's always from the perspective of someone who thinks the crimes are

For most of the electric age, incandescent bulb flashlights were the only game in town.1 It's understandable that head-mounted lanterns were mostly associated with professions where this tool was especially useful, such as mining and spelunking, because u…

I'm on my lunch break and I've decided to go back to my old "distraction-free writing" setup: FreeDOS booting from a USB thumb drive1 on a thinkpad from 2006.

The trick to having a blog that you update consistently is to make it as easy to post to it as posting on social media.

I've been using imgur to host images basically since waffleimages died (I think like 2011?)

My new meds for sleep were repeatedly making me sleep for 10-12 hours, so I stopped taking them.

In the first few years of Calvin & Hobbes, Sunday strips would often have a throwaway gag at the beginning loosely connected to the rest of the strip.

Okay, I figured out what was causing the morass of RSS feed traffic in Robot Wars.

I don't usually enable visitor logs on my websites: I'm not chasing SEO and I have no need for in-depth analytics.

Since starting my career as an internet raccoon, I've used a number of different names to refer to myself.

Just a quick post to announce that I've added five more game badges to the collection, bringing the total number to 160:      Dizzy The Adventurer (2❤️/5) Formless Star (5❤️/5) Gold Brick Simulator (1❤️/5) Into The Deep Web (3❤️/5) Taiyaki Fabulous Museum…

Hat tip to Andrew T @ mathstodon for bringing this to my attention: Microsoft Edit.

I read Matthew Graybosch's post at starbreaker.org responding to David's post at Forking Mad entitled I want to comment on your blog post.

Tuesday1 was my quarterly doctor visit.

Click here for video A gray and white cat I've never seen before approached me outside the laundry room.

A personal codex I was watching a video by an ex-mormon about the mormon cookie craze, and at one point the host pulled out a copy of her personal LDS Bible.

Sick Little Monkeys by Thad Komorowski (❤️❤️❤️️️🖤🖤) I wrote about this book here.

I'm reading again, that's the important thing.

General desktop experience It's been over a month since I made the switch to Debian from Windows 7, so how's it going?

Occasionally my headphones will suddenly start repeating the last audio sample it received, machine-gun-like; this lasts about 10 seconds, then the headphones disconnect, then a few seconds later they reconnect.

The age of online diaries I started writing on the internet a few months before the term "blog" was invented.

Good news for Sunny fans!

I reached the portion of my No More Whoppers relisten where they discuss the 2013 book Slimed: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age.

The other day, my spouse was telling me about how one of her friends, who is Christian, didn't know what Lent is.

In the old days, Android phones all came with an app installed that was just called Browser.

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