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Confirmed, per a suggestion by Peter Kirn, that you can, indeed, run Timbaland’s Beaterator game, originally developed for the PlayStation Portable, on a modern portable “retro” game console like the Anbernic SP, shown here. Shortly after its PSP debut, in 2009, the game also appeared on the iPhone.
I was fiddling with my old Nintendo DS, and apparently I was so addicted to Timbaland’s production that I stored some instrumentals, including Xzibit’s “Hey Now (Mean Muggin),” on there at some point in the distant past.
And in case it’s not familiar, here is the track. It is fantastic:
And then Peter Kirn reminded me about Timbaland’s PSP (PlayStation Portable) release, Beaterator, which I now need to reacquaint myself with.
I’ve finished reading 12 novels so far this year. Two a month seems like a good pace, leaving room for other reading. Below are the titles in the order I read them. The ones with the + signs I recommend in particular. I put Middlemarch on pause after I was about a quarter of the way in, and I’ve picked it back up, though I really need to read a good essay or two about what I’m due to appreciate about it (recommendations welcome), as it’s precisely the sort of compendium of courtship micro-interactions that I could never get engaged by. I’m also currently reading Blood Meridian, Moby Dick (which I’ve started several times in the past, and this is the first time when I’ve felt like I will actually not just finish it but enjoy it), and The Hummingbird.
1: C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
2: + Jakob Kerr: Dead Money
3: + Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon (reread)
4: Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier (reread)
5: + Cory Doctorow: Walkaway
6: + Ali Smith: Autumn
7: + Joan Didion: Play It as It Lays
8: + Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time
9: Michael Connelly: The Black Echo (Bosch Vol. 1)
10: Stephen King: The Long Walk
11: Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley
12: Michael Connelly: The Black Ice (Bosch, Vol. 2)
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Fortunately, my brain was long ago trained to interpret the ongoing nearby construction as abstract minimal techno
▰ Overheard at restaurant this week: “Human connection is going to be outdated in five years.” Someone in the group also said, “Human connection is overrated.”
▰ I have a choice between the drummer near the office and construction near home
▰ Nice: my (successful) attempt to have Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) run on a modern portable gaming console made it to Jason Kottke’s blog and Austin Kleon’s newsletter.
▰ I finished reading two books, both novels, this week: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and the second in Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, The Black Ice. That brings me to the average I’m going for, two novels a month, a dozen so far this year — and with a few days in June to spare. I’ve paused Middlemarch at about a quarter of the way through, and I am currently reading Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, and a few others.
▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: John Kelly shared, on Threads, some Justin Green comic drafts from the 1990s, some of which I edited for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. ▰ John Kannenberg, whose Museum of Portable Sound has an admirably broad scope, reminded his followers of a 1981 assassination attempt involving a tape recorder. ▰ A post on Instagram from Music Thing Modular introduced me to the Shortwave Collective, “An international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.”
Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), his feature film debut, is having a moment. It was mentioned in “One Last Job” (a recent episode of Poker Face that focused on an aspiring filmmaker) and a track from the movie’s score, by Tangerine Dream, was featured prominently in the opening episode (“Groundhogs”) of the latest season of The Bear. The latter makes particular sense, since both the movie and the show are based in Chicago. The Bear team knows what it’s doing, in that the track used in the episode, “Diamond Diary,” is buried under a lot of dialogue, which is true to how Mann’s movie, even when a scene was free of actors speaking, generally mixed the music with a lot of diegetic sound.
