Slumberland

Photo by Waffle Whiffer.

While browsing Flickr this weekend, I stumbled on an amazing photostream with lots of great pop culture stuff, particularly packaging and advertising characters from the 1960s-1980s. If you grew up in that era as I did, you’ll see a lot of familiar stuff in Waffle Whiffer’s great photostream. Look and reminisce. The photo here is just one example of the fun stuff found there: a late 70s Kool-Aid package with the classic Kool-Aid design, before the envelopes got busy and over-designed. I didn’t even like Kool-Aid that much as a kid, and yet the envelope always made it look so good! Heyyyyyy Kool-Aid!

Becca used my Detlef-13 felted laptop sleeve pattern to make a laptop sleeve with Zelda hearts. Very cool idea. I love how the last heart is half-empty; I guess that had to be done, otherwise they’d just look like normal hearts. Lots of old game graphics lend themselves quite well to the pixelly quality of multicolor knitting. Perhaps I’ll create some game-related charts that I can include with the Detlef-13 pattern.

I just stumbled on Pee-Wee Herman and the Alien Invasion, a very short super-8 film shot by an 8 year old (back in the 80s, I assume). Pretty well done, considering. The claymation part works nicely. It’s not all that exciting, I guess, but it made me smile anyway.

You can compare it to Pee Wee’s Brain, which was an actual clip from Pee Wee’s Playhouse, also with claymation.

Today marks the 17th birthday of Slumberland BBS, the bulletin board system I started in 1991.

Slumberland is a Citadel board; that is, it runs one of the many kinds of Citadel BBS software. There was a time when the Seattle area had tons of Citadels. Mine is probably the last one standing. Up until only a few years ago, you could still dial in to it, using a modem and a voice line, but now it’s telnet only (if necessary, though, you can get there from a java applet on a web page.

When the BBS went up in March 1991, it was running MacCitadel software on a MacPlus. MacCitadel was OK, but it had some quirks (the kind of quirks that could eat your whole message base), and it could not network with the other Seattle Citadels. Which was important at the time, since most of us had no Internet access, so we used Citadel networking to send our messages across long distances. (As far as Texas and New York, which was pretty impressive at the time.) So I picked up a used 286 from my employer and started running TwitCit in July 1991. Later I switched to GremCit and eventually Citadel+, which is what the board runs today.

Slumberland, like most Cits, is a “message board”; it didn’t exist for games or file downloads, but for conversation. (Though we did have the odd file here and there.) We still post messages in the various “message rooms” (topic areas), and the software now also has live chat support, so many of us just hang out at Slumberland all day long, chatting when we can.

I wonder what I would have thought if, in March 1991, someone told me that Slumberland would be up and running 17 years later, and it would be the last survivor of the old Seattle Citadel network.

Continuing to browse after watching that Otis Redding video, I found the whole darned show: Pt.1, Pt.2, Pt.3, Pt.4.

It’s all freaking great. Otis does “Satisfaction,” “Respect”, and more, and Eric Burdon does a killer version of “Hold On, I’m Coming”. And that’s not all.

Enjoy!

While randomly browsing YouTube I came across this video of a blistering-hot performance by Otis Redding on Ready, Steady, Go! in 1966.

If this doesn’t make you want to dance around you might possibly be a zombie.

One of the original Seattle bloggers, Anita Rowland, lost her battle with cancer yesterday. She was the host of the Seattle Weblog Meetups, and one of those people that it seemed everyone knew, either through blogging or through her activities in SF fandom. On Metatalk, Dylan said “She was a connector. Were it not for her, I wouldn’t know at least a dozen people here in Seattle. She was the ‘den mother’ of us Seattle bloggers.” And that is the truth.

Photo by l0ckergn0me.

Last night KOMO-TV hosted a local blogger get-together at Fisher Plaza. I was a little suspicious — after all, they promised us food, alcohol, and swag, and why would KOMO want to do that for a bunch of misfit bloggers? But it sounded interesting, and despite last minute misgivings (I am a major introvert), I attended. To my surprise, I had a pretty good time! I did not see some of the folks I expected to see there, but did run into some other familiar names. I also met a lot of really neat people I didn’t know of before, so now I’ll be adding a lot of blogs to the reading list.

The photo here is the group photo taken in the Northwest Afternoon studio. I have other photos in my Flickr stream.

Thanks to Chris Pirillo for organizing the event!

Someone on Metafilter mentioned this a few days ago, with a comment something like “what is up with this video?” But until I got around to watching it, I could not have imagined how weird the video really is. Someone on YouTube put it best: “I’m not sure if I just watched a music video or a prom clip of a transvestite hooker with her klingon date. A great song has just been ruined. But I might watch this video 500 more times, just to be sure.”

I bring you: Hall and Oates, “She’s Gone”:

While browsing Shorpy, I saw a link to Box of Apples — a site devoted to fruit crate label art. They sell giclée prints of them, but even if you’re not in the market, the gallery is a fun browse. They mention in their blog that “…one reason these labels are so pretty is that instead of the usual four-color printing (where cyan, magenta, yellow and black are combined to produce the desired hue), they used eight- and twelve- color printing.” Close-up examples are provided to illustrate this. They are all great, but I think I like this one the best.

I am a big dork. Threadless has been around for ages, but it wasn’t until last year that they finally broke down my resistance and convinced me to buy a shirt. I bought a few more after that. I like them a lot. I keep watching their website for cool new shirts, and buying one occasionally. But then this week they had a sale, and… I couldn’t help it. I bought 5 shirts. (Gulp!)

These are the ones I bought (click on the thumbnails to see them larger):

It is addictive, because they are all limited edition, so you have that “must buy it now or it will be GONE! FOREVER!” thing going.

Anyway, I guess I have enough t-shirts for now. Between t-shirts and salwar kameez outfits I guess I have been buying more clothes than usual lately.

(Bigger pics below the jump)
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While browsing YouTube tonight I found this set of charming covers of songs by Michael Penn, Erasure, A-Ha, and others. The videos aren’t much to speak of, and the performances are unpolished, but the singer, ExUSAF, has a good voice and does a fine job with songs like Penn’s “Try” and “Long Way Down”. And he hits the high note in “Take On Me” much better than I do. If you are the type of 80’s music cover geek that I am, the little piano break in “Take On Me” will totally win you over.

Oh, what the heck. Here are a few of the songs I liked best, after the cut — enjoy!
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Well, I don’t post often enough in the best of times, but dealing with 3 weeks of bronchitis made me a lot less motivated to post. You know how it is — you do the minimum you have to do, and then your brain just shuts down for a while. And now that I am well, I keep feeling as if nothing I want to post about is important enough to post after such a long posting drought.

So, I decided I’d just post about some random stuff to get back into the posting mode.
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While I was going through photo albums looking for photos to upload to Flickr, I found a group of photos that I took on April 10, 1994, at the Seattle Center memorial vigil for Kurt Cobain. These are the photos.

I looked online for articles about that day, and surprisingly, found very little. Here’s something I wrote about it myself on Metafilter, a few years ago.

It’s hard to believe that 13 years have already gone by.

I’m going through old scrapbooks and albums to find photos to put onto Flickr. Lots of my photos are in terrible shape and I don’t want to lose them completely. This one is scanned from a contact sheet that is not in good condition — I don’t have a good full-size print of it any more and I’m not sure if I still have the negative, though it might be in a notebook in one of my boxes o’ junk.

Anyway, I was prowling downtown Olympia on a dark cloudy day in 1985, looking for something I could photograph for Bob Haft’s Experimental Photography class at Evergreen. The due date was the next day and I had procrastinated as usual. I turned a corner into an alley and found this graffiti. When I developed the photo, it didn’t look like Olympia; it seemed like something from a war zone in the 1940s.

I made a hand-colored print (which has since been destroyed), and turned that in for my assignment. This is one of my favorite photographs (though it’s not very cheery, is it?), so I hope I can find the negative and get some real prints made again sometime. Because this is scanned from the contact sheet, it looks even more vintage and unreal than the print did; it’s got a touch of blurriness and noise.

I’ve got some other old photos up at Flickr now and I might post more of them here on the blog soon.