Welcome to the Villa Straylight.

Logon please

.. or maybe you'd like some content?

Websites:

PCBurn: PCBurn's back online. And it now has a complementing Youtube Channel.

Frost Photography: Photography and family indoor portrait studio nestled in a walk up conveniently located in downtown Middletown Connecticut. It's also minutes away from many lovely outdoor locations for a photo shoot.

Trak Systems: Home of the Record Trak point of sale system; tailored for media stores (record, CD, video), suitable for tracking general merchandise (through the entire ordering/sales cycle). Complex systems design and business solutions consulting are also available.

Hackaday: Hackaday.com publishes news about people making things. Or failing to make things. Or ruminating about how things are made. It's interesting.

Literary Persuits:

CheapTruth: The 80's future of Sci-Fi. Thank you, Mr. Sterling.

The Model 66 Scenario: At the Dawn of Time there was UseNet. And there was collaborative cyberpunk fiction on UseNet in alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo. Both have largely been forgotten, but here's 867k of fiction in a text file to attest to their existence. It's certainly interesting.

Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown: Back in the bygone days of analog phone systems there were groups like the Legion of Doom and the Chaos Computer Club (although the latter is still around, still interesting). When the proverbial shit hit the fan during the dawn of the 90's Sterling turned it into this novel, ranging from the hacker underground to exposés on the feds and police involved. A great look back at hacker and law culture at the beginning of the age of ubiquitous computing.

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: Go back to the 22nd century of 2003 where an egalitarian utopia has replaced your miserable struggle for survival. Or something. With the .com boom behind us I think everyone's put paid to the /. government model.

NESIT:

NESIT main site: NESIT, against all odds, is shaping up to be a solid community center in Connecticut and a representative Hackerspace. If you're in the area of Meriden, CT come on down and check it out.

Podcasts:

Super Fan Giovanni: Giovanni has lovingly restored classic episodes of Lovelines to as good a quality as he can get from old tapes of one sort or another. Splicing in different sources he's archiving the episodes from 1995 to 2005. Throw him a few bucks if you're interested in the restoration and archival project.

And some WebComics:

EDITOR'S NOTE: it's been a good ten years since I read any of these. They're still around, though!

Daily Comics:
Something Positive
Questionable Content

Monday, Wednesday, Friday Comics:
XKCD
Girl Genius
Penny Arcade

Tuesday, Thursday Comics:

Completed Series:
Freak Angels As of 2020 the original website is gone. Whomever was paying for it probably simply stopped. You can still read it over at this web.archive.org mirror.

Internet Curios:

April 1st RFCs: It's come to my attention that some of you haven't read the April 1st RFCs from the IETF. Every year someone submits a frivolous RFC on April first on topics ranging from the Coffee Pot over IP protocol to the Evil Bit. Wikipedia then collates them a bit after the fact.

Principia Discordia: Apparently still alive after all these years.

-- Inhibit, August 24th 2022