Geeky Posts

Dollhouse City Streets

The latest video from Dollhouse City.

Dollhouse City Streets

This is the new Richardson brothers project, a Youtube channel devoted to the dollhouse city we built with our lifelong toy collection. The channel is just getting started but we’ve already got a ton of Dollhouse City content on Allen’s Instagram @blackobelisk. Here is how we describe it on Youtube:

The Nerd Habit of Collecting Signatures

As I mentioned in a previous post, at MarsCon in Bloomington last weekend the son of a nerd who had died was selling his father’s collection of media, books, games and ephemera.

I picked up the Doctor Who cookbook from the previous century, some trading cards, all for pennies on the dollar. Perhaps the best find, or at least the one I can’t ever imagine finding again, was the single by the actor who played the third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, “Who is the Doctor?”

Signatures for a Nerd

At MarsCon in Bloomington last weekend, the son of a recently passed nerd was selling his father’s collection of media, books, games and ephemera. I picked up the Doctor Who cookbook from the previous century, some trading cards, all for pennies on the dollar.

Highlights from “The Guys Who Never Stop Fighting”

My comic strip “The Guys Who Never Stop Fighting” originally appeared a few times in the Ripsaw News in my “Crackbrained Comix” series. I revived the GWNSF for the Transistor where it ran for several years. Both publications are now defunct. Here is a gallery of ten highlights.

Duluth retailer on Twin Cities TV

Ryan Fleming of Rogue Robot Comics and Games was on KSTP-TV’s Minnesota Live with a nearly statewide audience, showing off hot holiday gift items and/or “a little bit of everything in geekdom.”

Index of the Duluth Superhero Community (the Richardsonverse)

800 entries, 250 illustrations, 50 footnotes

Co-written with Allen Richardson. Illustrations by the Richardson brothers using craiyon.com, stablediffusionweb.com, and DALL-E 2

Contents
1. Preface: I Destroyed the Universe
2. Introduction: Superhero Exegesis
3. Index of the Duluth Superhero Community
4. Footnotes

Preface: I Destroyed the Universe

From the Journal of the Morphogenetic Field Technician: I am trapped far beneath the UMD campus in the Novelty Sphere as the global catastrophe intensifies. My team’s experiments in this underground lab are directly responsible for the apocalypse overtaking the planet. The quakes grow steadily. Portions of the lab visible through the Sphere’s cyclopean porthole have caved in. Soon the roof will collapse releasing tons of basaltic bedrock. If the Sphere’s integrity holds, I will have limited air. One thing I have an unlimited supply of: claustrophobia. It is as if I am in an untethered bathysphere sinking into the mounting pressures of the deep. The Sphere’s instrumentation confirms my worst suspicions: this is no mere global extinction. We destabilized probability itself, and the vertical line on the catastrophe graph indicates structural failure of the universal constants. Like a landslide, the cosmos races toward physical destruction. Gravity will be the first to fail, centered on the Sphere. The well of the Earth is popping like an old spring.

Sky-Diver and Cold Turkey

Geeks will help out in the comments, but it appears what we have here is a QSL card — a postcard mailed to confirm receipt of a ham or citizens-band radio transmission. The CM 76 presumably means it was a calling card of Duluth ham radio operator Charles F. Makowski circa 1976.

Bob Dylan on Hibbing from 1966 Playboy interview

Dude reads highlights from the 1966 Playboy interview. Dylan on Hibbing: @6:40-8:53.

Some of My Indie Rock Guitar Goddess She-roes

My favorite musicians are women. Who’s the coolest member of the Pixies? Kim Deal! You don’t even have to think about it for a second. And my favorite genre is indie rock. Indie is not major label, and not pop enough to score strings of giant hits. The term is frequently applied to punk-lineage garage-y guitar bands, but not exclusively.

The past few years I’ve discovered many indie chick rockers and all-female bands. Here are some highlights. This (not comprehensive!) list showcases indie women who play guitar or bass, either solo or in bands, who have been active in the past five years. Therefore many of my classic faves have been excluded — for instance a suite of 1980s and ’90s rockers. I will write about them one day, but here the focus is on contemporary artists.

My descriptions are fleshed out with links to music videos, interviews, rig rundowns, and live performances. This part one of two, and I plan to give Duluthians their own essay in part three. Here goes — some of my indie rock guitar goddess she-roes:

Empire Lanes: Who knows the stories behind this story?

I found this comic in a fifty-cent bin. The online summaries are engaging.

My Favorite Writers/Biggest Influences: Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem was born in 1921 in Lwow, Poland which is now Lviv, Ukraine. He died in 2006 in Krakow, Poland.

He was a Jew who survived the Holocaust, which in Poland was bracketed by two Soviet invasions. He went on to become one of the greatest science fiction writers in the world. His best-known work (in America) is the novella “Solaris,” which became a 2002 film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney. Lem sold more than 40 million books worldwide.

My Favorite Writers/Biggest Influences: Jorge Luis Borges

I read, and re-read, the same few authors. I find them impossible to put down. Here are my favorites,  the biggest influences on my own writing — and why.

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Argentina in 1899.

W9MMS Duluth

Nerds will explain this in the comments.

LibraryCon at LSC

I was all-out nerd at Lake Superior College today, where the Erickson Library hosted LibraryCon.