Hi, I’m Phil Nelson, a writer, developer, and audio-visual maker of stuff. I have been making stuff online for over 25 years. I run RetroStrange and Set Side B. Good to see you.
Blog Archives
Over on Github some awesome person has released
“A Remake / Celebration of the original ‘Super Mario Bros.’ games. Features new levels, custom modes, new characters, alongside a full level editor / custom level system!”
It looks like a lot of fun and I’m planning to play with it this weekend.
A webpage that you type a question into and it responds with a Simpsons clip.
A RetroStrange TV community member known as limebar is building something big, indie, and cool as hell for music creators and fans: a 24/7 streaming music video channel with your stuff on it. Read the announcement blog post and follow the channel.
Threw this chubby little grip by Thingiverse user wilkesvaughn onto my Ender 3 Pro the day before a multi-leg trip thru the American Middle-West and so far it’s been nice. One thing that I’ll need to mod in: My travel earbuds have a 90-degree bend in the TRRS connector, which means I can’t use headphones with this on. It looks nice in pink on my black Pocket, with some light sanding right before hopping in a cab to the airport. I’ll clean the bottom a bit better when we get back. Take a look:
Thief snagged $10-$20k before escaping into the water. Been awhile since we had a good heist.
Booked a few days of R&R time this week, to fly out to Iowa and attend the wedding of a friend (as much as one can befriend an Iowan). This week’s newsletter is named after an episode of the Twilight Zone and a They Might Be Giants song.
Speaking of Giants, somehow the San Francisco Baseball Giants are 1.5 games out of the Wild Card after what has been a… difficult season. Didn’t expect that. Let’s go Giants. Hopefully I’ll be able to waste some money at Oracle Park on the postseason again.
The continued enshittification of Google Search, once one of the most severely useful things ever invented by people, is really depressing. You can’t get correct answers anymore, and you can’t even get webpages made by people to show up on it without doing a bunch of weird tricks. You know this already.
Recently I am trying out Kagi again. It’s a search engine that actually shows you links to webpages containing the items you are searching for. An absolutely wild prospect, I know. One thing that sucks is that they too are all the way up Artificial Intelligence’s ass, but at least with Kagi you can kinda turn that shit off.
This is not a paid advertisement. I just hate what they’ve done to search.
Recent purchases include: A pair of decent Sony wired earbuds for when I am out and want to listen to things that sound good ($35). Next year’s notebook: A 2026 Hobonichi Techo Weeks w/ Mother 2 characters on the front. A whole bunch of Tijuana Toros baseball gear for the folks back home. The headphone link gets me a kickback if you buy one.
I’ve posted about this elsewhere, but RetroStrange has a little bespoke webpage that lets you see what items we have in the Catalog, meaning these are the videos that play randomly on RetroStrange TV. It’s pretty wild to look back at where we started and where we are. I just wanted to make an automated streamer for Old Time Radio episodes and had some spare time. Now we have that, a second radio channel with public domain music, and a 24/7 streaming TV channel.
The current RetroStrange TV Catalog stats:
Grand total: 657 files accounting for 441 hours 47 minutes 37 seconds. Yes, Curator Prime watched all of these at least once to clear them for inclusion. That’s a lotta watching. Join our Patreon so we can do more.
Over on OpenCV Live!, my weekly show about Computer Vision and AI, we’re off this week. That’s because I’m flying all over the damn place. We’re gonna be in Iowa for a wedding, in Illinois for friendship, and Michigan to visit the Nelson family over the next week. October in Michigan is not something to miss out on. I’m looking forward to it. We’re gonna eat some hot dogs and drink some beer and go for some walks and check out On Base Productions Studio B. If we have time, world domination. If we have time.
You can follow just my links with a feed, or on the website.
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
See you down the road,
Phil Nelson
2025.09.15 +8UTC
Follow me around the innernette:
This doesn’t sound good but probably could have been worse. We may not know the details for a little over a month.
The actual vape-powered site is being slammed by Hacker News, so you’ll have to check it out later, but the writeup is good. Vapes are way overpowered these days, especially the disposable kind.
AKI.guide is a website dedicated to sharing knowledge about the pro wrestling video games made by AKI Corporation between 1996 – 2007 such as Virtual Pro Wrestling, WCW/NWO World Tour, and No Mercy. These games have a huge online following, and mods are still being actively developed that add entire new gameplay modes and total conversions. The site even has an online patcher so you can try out mods without needing to download any tools.
