I grew up gaining a lot of music through CDs primarily and I've long since relied on rips of those old albums for continuing to listen to that music. One downside of that is I've missed out on certain "bonus" tracks until I go back and find digital versions of these albums for one reason or another. Just this past weekend I stumbled on the bonus track "No Roads Left" for Linkin Park's "Minutes to Midnight" album (2007). I've never heard this track even though I've heard this album hundreds of times before. The track is a wonder, especially the crescendo at 50s. If you haven't listened to this album before (or in a while) then I recommend a full listen through with this at the end.

Happy Juneteenth! Since today is a day off for most of you in the states, here's some perfectly useless but lovely insight for you. The folks at Time Extension dug into some research to track down who (possibly, not definitively) the designer was of the famous "bacon strips" logo which Konami used as their primary logo. If you're a fan of old arcade games or even hits like Metal Gear Solid, you'll recognize the logo.

One thing I have only recently discovered is a delightful mode of play inside some Call of Duty games called "Prop Hunt". Why is it so delightful? One team plays as "hunters" with weapons (as usual) and the other team plays as... inanimate props from the level they're playing in. Props, as they're called, can move, jump, deploy decoys of themselves, and change to new (randomized) props all while being hunted. Hunters have to keep a keen eye out for things seemingly out of place and take out the props before time runs out. It's one of those games that feels wholesome and utterly my style.

If you'd like to see what this looks like, then there are a few YouTubers/streamers like OldTime101 who play and post examples regularly.

I try to post more obscure items from the web, but this one is too good not to share. LEGO is releasing it's first Legend of Zelda kit which contains not one, but two iterations of the Great Deku Tree. One from Ocarina of Time and one from Breath of the Wild. Pre-orders ship in November so no one is building these anytime soon, but it's very exciting to get two legit Link minifigs as well.

If you're more of a Mario fan (or just like retro game console stuff) there's also this Super Mario/NES/CRT TV kit with slightly more pieces for slightly fewer dollars.

Tito of Macho Nacho Productions on YouTube is one of the reasons I fell in love with modding Game Boy Advances (Game Boys Advance?) earlier this year and I've been learning more about how to make my retro video games last longer since discs and disc drives are liable to fail at some point.

This particular video on using a Raspberry Pi for loading games is fun, but the buried lede here is that it uses Open PS2 Loader (OPL) to load disk ISOs over a samba/SMB share folder. This is such an awesome feature of OPL for people like me, who host a NAS at home, because it means loading a ton of games is easy and disc free.