Supposedly, this is a non-photoshopped picture of something nothing more remarkable than an Austrialian possum with a very rare abnormality affecting its coloration.

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?

Angst and illness and two children who won’t do what they’re told. So instead of a normal post, here is a picture of an official 2016-version Fortress Maximus, with a cheap bootleg Fortress Maximus standing on its shoulder.

A Thing Happened and I need some time off.

Did you know that they’ve released a new version of Teddy Ruxpin? This one retains the original’s animatronic mouth, but swaps cassettes for bluetooth and soulless robot eyes for LCD screens showing the souls of the forsaken children that were harvested to make him.

Also, he goes through batteries really fast. Here is what happens when the NiMH rechargeables you put in him can’t provide enough power to make him work, but are still charged enough for him to power up:

Obviously, there’s going to be a lot of filler during the holiday season, but I’m almost done with the next Deep Ice article. It will almost certainly go up next week.

This Thanksgiving season, many of us will be spending time with our families. I’m personally lucky that we’re not going to be sharing a table with the cliche racist uncle (Most of my uncles have passed on), but this is the time of year when you’re probably seeing a lot of respectable thinkpieces advising us, as we sit around poultry, that we should try to All Just Get Along and not let politics divide us, and if your uncle decides it would be a good time to remind us that “All lives matter” or that Antifa are the “real fascists”, you should just smile and pass the gravy and not ruin anyone’s dinner by being all uppity about it.

You know what you’ll never see in one of those thinkpieces? A byline belonging to someone who isn’t white and straight and male. It’s always, “Come on, liberals, let grandpa have a couple of free N-bombs on Turkey Day for the sake of family unity.” It’s never, “Come on, Uncle Rick. Maybe just let it go when her boyfriend tells a joke about Trump wanting to bone his daughter.”

So here’s my unpopular take about civility and the holidays: Fuck that noise. Maybe the reason we’re so divided isn’t because of our inability to be civil and put politics aside. Maybe it’s exactly the opposite. Maybe the problem is actually that the dominant culture — straight, white, cis, hetero, Christian, male culture — overwhelmingly wants to treat politics like sports. To frame it as, “Oh, you’ve got your team and I’ve got my team, and we both get passionate about it, but in the end, we both know that it’s just a game, after all. We can just talk about something else.”

Because it’s not sports. Okay, sure, maybe if you’re in a time and place where politics is mostly about tax codes and land use regulations, we should all live and let live and have civil differences of opinion. But in the time and place where we actually live? If you start talking about poor people fleeing from Honduras to protect your children from gang violence as though they were vermin? I should not be expected to respond civilly to that. If you start defending the systematic murder of black children because they spooked white cops? I should not be expected to respond civilly to that. If you try to tell me that my trans friends should be presumed to be sexual predators? I should not be expected to respond civilly to that.

The problem isn’t that we’ve got too little civility. It’s that we’ve got too much. It’s that you can advocate the most vile, hateful, despicable things, but as long as you use the approved “polite” phrasings, you’re allowed to treat the civil rights, the health, the happiness, the very lives of actual people like a sport, and it’s the height of rudeness for you to face any sort of social penalty for advocating it.

So this Thanksgiving, as you gather around pie and poultry and watch football and inflatable cartoon characters, I call on you to be civil, not to your family, but to the victims. To the trans folk who stand to lose their jobs, their homes, the ability to use a restroom. To the immigrants who walked halfway across a continent for a chance of a better life. To the sick who can’t afford healthcare. To people of color who would just like to walk down a public street without having the cops called on them. To the women who are mocked and doubted and threatened for being the victims of sexual violence. Treat them with the respect and sympathy that a hundred thinkpieces by straight white men want you to show your racist uncle. Do not treat those people so cruelly, so disposably, as to let someone enjoy your hospitality while attacking them. Do not choose a peaceful meal over the rights of the oppressed.

If a dinner guest at my house called my mother a whore, I’d tell him to get the fuck out. Why, then, should I be “civil” if he calls for my black friends to be shot by police, or my trans friends to be murdered by hateful mobs, or my Jewish friends to be shot by white supremacists?

Be the jerk, this thanksgiving. If your racist uncle mentions Making America White Great Again, tell him to shut up or leave. Not under my roof. If you happen to be under his roof, leave. No one’s sweet potato casserole is worth being the sort of person who turns a blind eye to hate.

Happy Thanksgiving. Death to fascism.

I was planning to have the final Eternity Comics article ready for today, but it’s been a pretty long week, and then my daughter got pink eye, and it’s hard to write with an angry toddler climbing on you and demanding you provide Elmo, Mickey Mouse, and pictures of pandas to soothe her “yucky” eye.

So instead, here’s two variations on one of the acquaintances our friend Avi is going to make. Not sure which one I like best.

I say “acquaintance” and not “friend” because these dudes will totally eat him if they get a chance.

If this message appears, it means one of three things:

1. The election results were so bad I didn’t have the strength to come back and change it.
2. The election results were so good that I was too busy celebrating to change it.
3. The election results didn’t come in before I went to bed so I didn’t know what to change it to.
4. The kids distracted me so much I forgot all about changing it.
5. Basically things went as predicted, leaving me with mixed and confused feelings along the lines of “I know that I should be happy with this outcome but the despair is still overwhelming and I still don’t believe things will ever get better.”

So, um, good luck everyone.

In either case, Remember Avi? Here’s a little montage of his various fashion options.

That family health thing resolved in the way it was probably going to rather than in the way we all hoped it was going to. So next week probably.

In the mean time, here is some small things. To start, something I found at the local Giant:

And here is a charming Evie anecdote:

Evie: My belly hurts.
Daddy: Do you want some medicine?
Evie: No.
…
Evie: My belly hurts. I want medicine for my belly.
Daddy: Okay. (gets oral syringe of gas drops)
Evie: I do it. (wrests syringe from daddy)
(lifts up shirt)
(sticks syringe into her navel)

 

No post this week due to a family health issue. Deep Ice will return when things have stabilized.

Instead, enjoy this cute little dude:

This is a GE 7-4680A clock radio. There’s nothing much that’s special about it. They pop up on eBay a few times a year for prices in the $25-$45 range. I have no idea when it dates to; its date markings are in some kind of code. I know they were produced at least as early as 1982, probably much earlier. It has an AM-FM radio and TV audio tuner that’s backlit with a small incandescent bulb. Its single monaural speaker has a nice warm tone. I don’t know what it is about old speakers. They don’t sound perfect, but they tend to always sound fine. Modern speakers either sound great or sound like shit, with nothing in-between. Setting the time is limited to two buttons, one of which advances the clock slowly, the other advances it quickly. If you miss, you have to go all the way around 24 hours to try again. It has no battery backup, and has to be reset after even the briefest of power outages.

One very much like this one sat on my mom’s nightstand as far back as I can remember, up until some time in the early ’90s, when she got a new one, then it sat on my headboard for the rest of the ’90s and then it went off with me when I moved out. It had what I’d always assumed was a little fresnel in the clear front panel over the dot that lit up to indicate PM. Turns out that was actually a cigarette burn.

By 2016, a couple of the LEDs were dimming and the front panel was loose. There was a short in the time-setting buttons so that if you pushed them, there was a chance it would just instantly jump ahead 78 minutes. So I started looking for a replacement on eBay, and ended up buying two. Some time in 2017, I dropped the water tank from my CPAP machine on it and the alarm started buzzing and never stopped. That’s why the one in the picture there is not the one I grew up with.

I have an unreasoning nostalgia for this model of clock, though it’s certainly not anything useful or modern. So since I had both a fully functional replacement clock and also a spare, I decided to build a thing.

You’ll recall that a few months ago, I gave Dylan a small network-connected music player I’d built. And part of that project was coming up with a quasi-standardized way to put together a Raspberry Pi Zero W-based network connected music player. So I reckoned, why not take that, and make a clock.

So that’s what I did. I had a go at using the original display panel, since it was a much better fit. But it’s weird ’70s LED technology with a 20v forward voltage drop. Where the hell was I going to get 20 volts to drive that? And then I burned one of the lights out trying to figure out the pinouts. The driver chip for the LED had a number on it that led me nowhere, so I was shooting in the dark for how to make it work; the display itself had a 20-pin ribbon cable that had become stiff and fragile with age. There were more lights on the panel than the clock actually used, including a colon for separating hour and minutes. None of the pins seemed to work it.

So instead, I got four 7-segment modules and hot glued them into a frame made of styrofoam, cut to size. The displays had a little decimal dot in the corners, so by turning the first one upside down, I got the AM/PM dot for free.

Continue reading I Made a Thing! Clock Radio Project