As we near the 10th birthday (holy shit) of one of the most prized pieces of equipment I own (my Nikon D7200), I think I’ve come to a decision regarding its future:
I’m retiring it.
Okay, no, not really.
What I really mean here is that at least when it comes to public events where there are gatherings of people, I’m going to opt to just use my phone, or bring something smaller like my RX100M2. The D7200 will still see some use…for landscapes and things.
Why? For a simple reason: whenever I carry the D7200 around it really does feel like people see you in a different light, and not necessarily a good way. People stare at you like you’re holding a loaded gun. Staff at some establishments get uneasy and even ask you to leave. (This happened to me at a place that proudly proclaimed they wanted you to take pictures with your phone and share them on instagram!)
It’s hard to not notice this when you’re sitting down to process photos and all you see are people staring daggers at you. But the photos taken with my phone? Oh no one cares, it’s a big whatever.
Like, dude, I’m just a hobbyist. I’m not here for anyone else other than myself. The only thing I’m doing with these photos is putting them on Flickr. I’ve got zero professional interest here. But there’s no way for me to communicate that in the moment.
So yeah. I think given that the best option is to just not bring the big camera out to events, or to places where other people may get in the shot.
Further if there was ever an impetus to move over to a smaller, mirrorless camera, this would most definitely be it.
So yeah. Ocarina of Time remake is real. I’ve heard some people groaning about it. And on one hand I get it because a lot of people consider it to be the greatest game of all time.
But me? I’m willing to give it a chance. Grezzo is probably behind this, and they also worked on the Link’s Awakening remake. A game whose original I hold very close to my heart as I played it through a very rough patch of my childhood and it kept me somewhat sane and distracted from The Horrors That Be.
If Grezzo had screwed up the remake I would never forgive them for it.
But they didn’t. Further, I think they paid good homage to it, even. Example: the 6th dungeon (the Face Shrine) is when you learn The Twist of the game, and the dungeon themes take a really dark turn befitting of said twist. The original music for the Face Shrine is my favorite track in the entire game, partially because of this.
So, what does Grezzo do, here? They give the theme a massive glow up and even incorporate *the original theme* into it. It’s so good. It reminds me of what Game Freak did with the Gen 3 remakes in Pokemon, and I loved it just as much there, too.
(There are other things Grezzo did awesomely. Manbo’s Mambo is another standout example.)
I could write more here, but I think my point is clear: given the excellent job Grezzo has done with Link’s Awakening (and the 3D remasters on 3DS, too), I’m willing to give them a chance to do right by OoT.
I've had some people say in my tirades against AI that I am against technological advancements of any kind and I would have been against things like the computer itself when they were invented.
I really think AI is an entirely different ballgame compared to anything like that.
To use one of my hobbies as an example, computers and digitizing photography were of huge benefit to everyone in that field. Sure you had people sneering (and still do) saying that film is better, but for the rest of us, it was a huge democratization of the field.
You no longer needed a darkroom to mess with your photos. You no longer had to worry about wasting money with each biffed shot, the only "cost" was the room it took on your camera (and when you're shooting on a Mavica set to full quality on a floppy disk, yeah, this cost was significant).
Someone with a computer and camera could now do what you previously needed a darkroom for, which was a not significant investment if you didn't already have one you could use (at say, a college or somewhere else).
The move to a computer for this stuff didn't take away any of the creative process, either. It just made it less messy. You still need to adjust brightness/contrast/color balance/etc and make considerations along the way. You, the human, are still intimately involved in the creation process of a digital photo.
Yes, you could batch edit things, too. But at the end of the day, you were still involved in making the decisions in the process.
AI completely removes the human from the equation, here. No decisions are made. You are completely surrendering the creative process to a machine who makes decisions for you. And the machine kinda sucks at its job.
The most charitable equivalent to this is that you don't want to deal with the creative process of developing a digital photo so you're handing it off to a seasoned photographer to do it for you.
Or if even that's too much for you and you asked AI to generate a photo of something you would have took? Then you weren't involved with the process in any way, shape or form. You just had someone else go and do it for you, and that someone else is a machine.
This isn't progress, this is just allowing some chuckleheads who don't care about the process and don't want to invest any time whatsoever in trying to be good at something. They want instant gratification. They don't want to actually learn anything, to develop skills. Because why do that when I could just ask some machine to serve me some slop instead?
Worse, these people don't understand they're not doing the art form they claim to appreciate any favors. They're just participating in its destruction. You're not democratizing anything with AI. You're actively killing it.
So this trashed Voodoo1/Diamond Monster 3D came across my bench (not mine, belongs to someone on Discord) and while I don’t know jack about Voodoo cards, this looked pretty cut and dry. Bent pins on the FBI and TMU, and damaged/missing capacitors (that looked like someone skipped this poor card across some pavement).
Replacement caps arrived yesterday (thankfully someone on Vogons knew the values of the ones on the back of the card), got them installed, and...weird, TMU is only reporting 1MB of RAM when there should be 2. Pulled card back out, inspected the pins, realized I missed one when reflowing...and there we go, the full 4MB on this card is now being recognized!
Now, I haven't seriously tested the card yet, waiting on an extension cable from Amazon to test it as I forgot to ask for the passthrough cable when I agreed to take this on. But Mojo at least reports everything is in its proper place so I'm hopeful the card Just Works when that cable arrives.
The pins on the TMU are still kinda bent but one of the pads is starting to lift (one that passes under the TMU) and after reflowing them none of them are shorting (after checking with a multimeter) so...cosmetically it looks eh, but it should be fine from a functional standpoint and I know full well perfect is the enemy of good so I don't want to break this card trying to make it look good.
As someone who's been a fan of theirs since 2012, I...really don't know how to feel right now. It almost feels like you're watching someone or something you really care about slowly lose its soul and become something it isn't, and that hurts in some sort of way.
This is a band that absolutely broke my taste in music, from their first EPs, to their first full-fledged album, to Cry (which completely dodged the sophomore slump, IMO), all of which remained on repeat for a good number of years post release.
Then it felt like things started going downhill. They finally "released" Bubblegum, which would have been a great song...if the live version that already existed as a bootleg wasn't much, MUCH better. But then! They released a new single! Tejano Blue! And all was right with the world again! (Same with Dark Vacay.)
...then X's landed and to me, it's a 8/10 album which is good in a vacuum but when compared to their previous work, it's hard to not feel some level of disappointed. Where previous albums had songs that could all stand on their own, X's was an album that felt like it had to crutch itself on the big hit songs (Tejano, Dark Vacay, and Dreams From Bunker Hill being the only non-single that I thought stood out).
Then there's this...one two punch. Greg Gonzalez did a collab with Karol G and holy fucking shit it's so good. Like if CAS had brought her in as a dedicated singer and let Greg do all the guitar work, hell yeah I'd say this has all the makings of a mind-blowing CAS song. I listened to it on repeat for a solid week.
Then...this. This, this, this. I'm not sure I can even say the same thing I said for X's, that this is really a good song in a vacuum but it's the fact that CAS has done such amazing work in the past that makes it feel worse than it is. This just feels outright phoned in. The vast majority of the lyrics are
"I loved the way you made me feel"
It's almost like a CAS-flavored take on the hit song "There She Goes".
Compare and contrast to the lyrics on damn near any of their prior work and it just feels empty. Hollow. Devoid of soul.
Moving past the lyrics even, it just lacks that dreamy feel that CAS was so well known for. For a good lot of their previous songs you could put on some good headphones, sit in a dark room, and just feel the music wash over you. It was really, really good at that. This...feels like it's trying to straddle the line between Romans 13:9-era CAS, and current era CAS, and failing at both.
It just...hurts me to write these words, it really does. This, again, is a band that absolutely destroyed my music tastes from 2017 onward because their music was on a whole other plane of fucking amazing and now it feels like I'm coming down hard off that high and everything sucks.
You ever have that thing happen? You know. When you upgrade to a certain piece of hardware, only for it to immediately be replaced by something better that just...fell into your lap? This has happened to me numerous times. (It's also how I was an iPhone 7 owner for like, a week before the 8 came out.)
This kinda happened with the ultimate 98 build: I had plans to move it to an Athlon XP 3200+ system after VCF West last year, but due to a very last minute acquisition the whole works got upended and instead it transitioned over to a P4 Northwood-based system right before West was due to happen.
And now we're here: The Windows XP Shuttle. The one that started it all, actually. It was my first Shuttle machine, acquired from Zhinu after he decided he was done trying to figure out what was wrong with it. It was a weird amalgamation of parts, an older chassis paired with the motherboard from an SS30G2. I managed to get it somewhat working, but alas, the gremlins would come back and take this machine out for good.
Later in 2025, I figured out that the XP Shuttle was suffering from board flex damage, as it would no longer reliably power up if the board was fully mounted to the chassis. If I unscrewed the CPU heatsink, it would power up fine. Screwed down? Nothing but power cycling. I did rule out any sort of shorting (by covering the whole interior in kapton tape). The board was just...toast. Given this looked like it had been a Fry's return at some point, I could only guess.
As a temporary measure, I snatched the (dead due to needing a recap) board out of my newly-acquired Tricaster Pro 2 (which is itself based on the Shuttle SG31G2) and made use of it as the "temporary" XP Shuttle. This board could thankfully make use of much newer CPUs (Penryn-based Core 2 Duos and Quads) so I was finally able to break out of the CPU bottleneck the SS30 was seemingly stuck in.
Fortunes change fast...
It was around this time that I mentioned needing to find another Shuttle board so that I could return the Tricaster's board to it and get that machine fully up and running. As if on cue, an awesome fellow (RevisionY2K) hopped on ebay, and found an era appropriate Shuttle board for around $40. He offered to buy it and just let me get him back for it, which was much appreciated.
This was a departure of a board: It was one out of an SA76G2, which was the AMD equivalent to the SG31, and could take anything from later Athlon 64s up to earlier quad core Phenom IIs. However, there was a small problem: The CPU was in a completely different location, which meant none of the coolers I had for these Shuttles would work. Shuttle at some point shifted the CPU location more toward the front of the machine.
Unfortunately, this meant I would need a subtly different XPC frame (one with the forward position CPU cooler mount holes) in addition to the aforementioned cooler. Luck was fortunately on my side here, as I did in fact have a frame that would work with this board! The one originally belonging to the Tricaster.
As for the cooler, I kept my ears to the ground on eBay, and...after enough time, one for an intel model popped up, but the screws looked like they were in the right position...
It was cheap enough, so I rolled the dice, and...it fit! Awesome. We can get this show on the road. After a bunch of wrenching (and a second rolling-of-the-dice on eBay to get a Phenom II X4 945 from China), I had it: My perfect Windows XP Shuttle build.
As such, it was given a fun name. Quadraxis. Because quad core, ha, get it? Also Metroid Prime 2 is cool.
Little did I know, a fateful trip to ewaste and then eBay would upend this whole thing.
I went to ewaste to sell some things and meet up with people and maybe poke around. I didn't find much, but I decided to make one final tour around the place and saw something familiar: A Shuttle frame sitting at the bottom of a pile of Dell towers, with a motherboard in it. I wasted no time, dug it out, and grabbed it. Thinking that maybe with some extra parts, I could build this into something.
Unfortunately, this frame and board were from the "modern" line of Shuttle XPCs: A wee bit bigger and taller, enough to make them completely incompatible with previous XPC chassis parts. Feck.
I didn't want to put this to waste, so...I hopped on eBay, as one does.
This was a mistake. Because in sorting low to high to try and find people selling only the chassis components, there sat one very low priced complete system: An SH61R4, and it was only $40.
"For parts or repair only", because as the description said, this came from a shop, and the guy didn't know how to wipe the drive. Photos of it powered on and sitting at a login prompt.
I pop a quick look at Shuttle's site. Oh, this is new. At least relative to the usual fare around here. This is Sandy Bridge-based (with Ivy Bridge compatibility bolted on in a BIOS update). But most importantly: It had Windows XP drivers. FECK.
Yeah, screw it. This project is going to plaid. We're building an XP machine to challenge god. Paired up with a GTX 750Ti that I also got at ewaste (that needed repairs and bodges from physical damage, which I'm pleased to report were successful), this is really pushing the limits of what's acceptable for Windows XP.
However given I've done the very same thing for my 98 builds (which are both late Northwood P4s with video cards that are more appropriate for an XP build), it isn't exactly out of character.
This piece has gone on for long enough (I didn't think it'd get this long!) but I am pleased to report the seller packed the SH61R4 just fine, it got here safely (though they didn't put the case cover back on correctly) and is sitting next to me, happily running XP.
Given I have too much stuff as it is, the previous XP build is probably going to end up at VCF West's consignment this year if I don't find an interested party to buy it for effectively what I've put into it money wise. It's still a great system! But redundant with this new development.
If you went to VCF West or VCF SoCal recently (in the last year) you might have spotted these keytags I've had out. I didn't expect them to become so popular (I ran out before day one was over both VCFs) so I'm hoping to have a ton more printed out this time around (and I'm thankful to compgeke for both giving me the original files and giving me permission to make 3D printed versions of this).
Except I need to make some tweaks because unfortunately the 0.2mm nozzle of my Bambu P2S struggles with the thin font used for "Computer Shit". With the original fonts/design files it can be tweaked, and I'm prototyping ones that'll hopefully print better + are a bit smaller to save on filament.
I did (as I mention before) also get a P2S. Would love to get that printing out keytags as well but it lacks the 0.2mm nozzle (which are thankfully easy to acquire and install) and an AMS for color switching. I hope to be able to swing one before VCF West this year because yeah, each batch of these keytags is a 10h print. Ouch. And I anticipate these are going to fly off the table. AND I've gotta print BlueSCSI tags too for someone else.
alright since I’ve got more opinions, I’m gonna need to sit down the sysadmin friendos and tell them that hey, listen: people have varied use cases for their computers and not everyone is using them in a mission critical corporate environment like you’re used to.
“But it’s a good thing for driver updates to include BIOS updates, it keeps everyone secure!” Not when your grandparents have not a clue what this scary BIOS update screen is so they rely on their instincts and yoink the power, bricking the machine.
“Forcing features like Bitlocker keeps everyone secure!” Tell that to the user who just lost everything because this stuff was turned on without their consent and they didn’t know they needed to back up their keys and now it’s too late.
“Windows forcing updates at setup is a good thing, it should be required!” And what about people like my parents who live out in the boonies, who rely on a heavily capped satellite connection that is barely faster than dial-up? Good job, she’s locked out of her new computer until it can download a big round of updates. That could take days with that connection speed.
I could go on, but point is, if you’re a sysadmin who just treats everything (outside of your job) like it’s deployed and managed on a corporate network with all that entails, please broaden your thinking just a touch and realize this is vast overkill for most end users (and is liable to cause even more problems because they’re not trained for this stuff like you/your coworkers are!)
Something I've just noticed because its happened to me multiple times in the last month, and that's the AI boosters and sympathizers seemingly repeating this talking point that well, AI is already here, and it's not going away, so you might as well surrender your mind to the slop machine or you're gonna miss out!
It gave me some deja vu because it really felt like the exact same shit cryptobros would throw at you when you told them NFTs were stupid and no one cared. "Well, it's here, you better get in or you're NGMI!"
Like. Bruh. I don't care. I used to be a bit more sympathetic toward some AI uses, like people who used LLMs to automate tedious crap rather than using it to pretend they're something they're not. But due to recent occurrences (specifically computing and gaming becoming a luxury + prices for components I use in projects skyrocketing due to AI bullshit) I swapped over to "all big LLMs are bad and if you're using them you need to sit with the fact that you're feeding this black hole that is consuming our hobbies and it will not be stopped until it runs out of money".
I actually got called out for this opinion switch (along with being told, of course, that AI isn't going away/it's already here, so stop resisting) and I just can't...stop being irritated about it because like, come on, dudes. Can you not see what this industry is doing to everything it touches? And yet, I'm supposed to be all happy about this and totally cool with things I used to be able to afford becoming unaffordable and unobtainable because some shitass AI company walked into thanksgiving, ate all the mashed potatoes, and then sodomized the turkey and left? And the rest of us are holding our forks with nothing left on the table? Not even so much as scraps?
jesus fuck
Like, if y'all were trying to convince me to be softer on AI stuff, all this is doing is making me that much more vindicated in my hatred of it.
hot take: starfield is the greatest game ever
not because the game itself is any good, oh no, a couple hours in I just realized this is Fallout In Space but worse and bounced off
but because the honeymoon period with it convinced me it was a good idea to move some stuff around financially in 2023 and pick up a used 3070ti for a good price (and it turned out to be a fresh return from RMA, so damn near brand new)
and given how 2026 is going for tech stuff, I may have felt foolish for spending money stupidly in 2022/2023, but I am thankful for that stupid spending because it's gonna carry me through this utterly shit period that we're in
Welp, the lab is getting a panic upgrade, I guess.
An anti-gun lobbying group (whose mission I usually support!) is pushing on politicians to regulate "3D printed ghost guns" (air quotes because, well, it really feels like people who don't know how 3D printing works are pushing this narrative that consumer 3D printers that you can buy right now can actually print a lethal firearm when, if we're honest, the only thing FDM printing is going to get you is a plastic shrapnel grenade shaped like a gun that's going to blow your hand off) by getting them to introduce bills that would either ban 3D printers, or heavily regulate them (by backdooring them, effectively).
This is...a foolish endeavor, if only because this narrative is being pushed as if a vast majority of ghost guns are made entirely from 3D printing, which is definitely not the case. Ghost guns--far as I'm aware--can be something like a legit firearm with the serial number sanded off. The term covers a wide gamut of weapons, but yet it feels like there's this push to blame 3D printers for it.
I wouldn't even be surprised if some corporations are helping push this narrative too because 3D printing is a means for normal people to have some means of production, but I digress.
Point is, one such bill has come to the state I live in: California AB 2047.
Now, I do plan to write my representative an email about this, but given California's legislature slipped by the absolute turd that is OS-level age verification (admittedly, it isn't the most draconian, but still) and no one seemingly found out about it before it was too late, I have my worries that AB 2047 is going to pass in much the same way.
Thankfully, there is some implication that this bill only affects existing printers if they are sold or transferred to someone else. It would seem so long as you have the printer already in your possession, there ain't a thing they can do about it.
That in mind, I decided to sell off some things (including my old Bambu A1) and pulled the trigger on a P2S. I had been lusting after one for a while, and essentially my plan is to get one now and just...be cautious upgrading the firmware on it.
Though looking at the bill as written, I get the feeling this is just going to result in companies refusing to serve California and thus result in a soft ban of 3D printers, here.
It's a bill written by people who seemingly have no idea how 3D printers work. It's just a convenient boogeyman they can go after to say they did something against gun violence without actually doing anything against gun violence.
If you're in California, consider writing your representatives about this, please.
I really do need to eat some crow on the Pentium 4.
Specifically, the later Northwood Pentium 4s.
I bought into the reverse hype that All P4s Are Bad and only have one place, and that's the bin. When I was building the Ultimate 98 Machine, I believed it, which is why I settled on a 1.23GHz Pentium III-S (and made plans to shift to an Athlon XP 3200+ after VCF West 2025).
I had heard of people using P4s for 98. I never wanted to follow them down that hole. I knew from everyone telling me that path was full of pain and suffering.
Until, well, fate happened. A month before VCF West 2025, a friend encountered a mid-00s Alienware machine at ewaste and couldn't get it at the time, but I just so happened to be there the week after and spotted it. He wanted me to grab it on his behalf, and offered to split the cost of it down the middle because all he wanted was the case, not the parts inside.
I accepted that offer, and we both paid $40 each for it. The person running ewaste said he was mostly charging for the components inside, and after getting it to my friend's house, I found out why: It had a 3.2GHz Northwood P4 in it (second fastest of the Northwood P4s if you don't count the P4 Extreme Edition), an Intel D875PBZ motherboard, and the star of the show, a Nvidia GeForce FX5950 Ultra. Those cards are NOT cheap, not at all, even though they're beaten and/or matched by midrange cards a generation newer.
A month out from VCF, I suddenly had a big decision to make. Do I stick with the Tualatin P3 system I've got, or transition to this new board and CPU? I already planned to move the FX5950 over, and figured if I was going to do that, I might as well go all in...
...and I'm glad I did. Even though the venerable Tualatin P3 served me quite well for the time I had it, this new system did NOT play around. It felt quite a bit faster. But more than that? It felt significantly more stable. Crashes were just a fact of life on the Tualatin build. But here? Few and far between. Even on 98.
While I was waffling on this whole thing, I did look through a ton of archived articles from Anandtech about the Northwood P4s and how they compared to the Athlon XPs, and while yeah, Netburst wasn't the greatest, it also didn't seem like it was entirely outmoded by the competition of the time, either. It was still keeping up with AMD's offerings and both camps were leapfrogging eachother.
At least it felt like AMD only got significantly ahead when the Athlon 64 was released, and Intel responded with the maligned Prescott P4 (which, at least going on my 3GHz Prescott that I used for a bit, I do agree with the "PressHot" name).
The Northwoods? Yeah, again, Netburst was definitely inefficient, no getting around that. But it felt like the Northwood cores were actually some form of okay. Willamette sucked (and was matched by lower-speed AMD chips), Prescott sucked (and ultimately resulted in Intel going back to the drawing board with the Pentium M), but Northwood?
Actually Kinda Okay, I guess?
It really does feel like the Northwood P4 caught some strays from being sandwiched between two mediocre core revisions. And when people say that All P4s Are Irredeemably Bad, they're usually thinking of the Prescotts. Or--shudder--the Cedar Mill Celerons.
Maybe I'm entirely wrong. I haven't given that Athlon XP system a run, nor have I experienced an Athlon 64 system (yet, though I have a board for one! Just need a CPU). But at least insofar as my retrocomputing uses? The Northwood P4s have been pretty decent.
(This post was kinda inspired by someone in Discord reacting in absolute disgust when I went through a bunch of effort to save a 3.2GHz Northwood from death, and said "hey, these aren't terrible in my experience".)
So I'm rolling the dice a little bit here with my Overkill XP Shuttle project. RevisionY2K scored a Shuttle FA76 motherboard for me, without a heatsink, and I've been on a quest for one ever since. A buddy in the UK managed to find some locally but that's currently held up.
They're a nice insurance policy though, because they're specifically for my board.
Anyway, this popped up on eBay US, and it was cheap enough that I decided to roll the dice:
It's the same shape, with similar hole pattern for the FA76...but the SH67H3 is, as the name kind of implies, equipped with an H67 chipset, which is 2nd and 3rd gen Intel Core.
Knowing how Shuttle operates (the XPC chassis was pretty standard, within Shuttle's own product line, anyway), I can't see that they would have a separate heat sink SKU for AMD boards this late. My hypothesis is that sometime in the late 00s they began transitioning toward having the CPU sit more towards the front of the board, rather than toward the rear, and they did this for both AMD and Intel models (and made the coolers the very same, for the most part).
Case in point, I have a Tricaster Pro 2 which was built off a Core 2 Duo-based Shuttle from the late 00s. The frame has provisions for both the old heat sink mount toward the rear, and another set of screw holes toward the front in a rectangular pattern.
(None of this is present in the XPC frames I have from the early-mid 00s. They only have screw holes for the rear mount.)
I hope this works. Because as Tech Tangents discovered in his video about building two miniature retro computers, Shuttle's parts are hard to find even though they were seemingly quite popular back in the day. Knowing these parts are effectively "standard" would open doors for all five of us who love these 'lil machines.
This has nothing to do with tech, but considering this DOES have something to do with my VCF tables (at West for the last two years, and SoCal this year)...yeah I'll talk about it here.
Probably like a handful of people may wonder what the story is behind the sea slug stuffies that usually sit on my table. Usually the star of the show is Rootie (the purple-ish one with the cowboy hat) but the one who started it all? Chicken Sandwich.
It's 2024. We just got done dealing with some of the worst housing-related fun stuff we'd ever dealt with, just got done upending our pad and effectively moving out and back in again. As part of this we decided hey, let's wander around places like Five Below and look for fun decor since, well, the place is looking kinda bare, now.
The girlfriend spotted this sea slug stuffie sitting on one of those stuffie carousels that you see sometime in stores, and made a note to come back and grab it when she got paid again. The time came, thankfully it was still there (along with several friends) and she grabbed it and brought it out to the car.
In the car, we're both looking at it, remarking at how cute it is, and she's like: "We need a name for it."
I look it over. Noticing its oblong shape and the little sparkly yellow ruffle that surrounds its body. It reminded me of cheese. I then say, completely out of pocket:
"It reminds me of a BK chicken sandwich. You know, the oblong-shaped one?"
We both looked at eachother like something just clicked and yep, that would be the name. Chicken Sandwich. It probably didn't help that we had just watched one of those TikToks that went over silly cat names and couldn't stop laughing at the one that was named "Meet A Real Costco Hot Dog".
Chicken Sandwich was the one that started the sea slug arc. Everything else just kind of followed in short order. Googling for information on this lil' slug, I found out that hey, there's actually a purple variant, and they're on clearance for $2 a pop.
...so I bought the other one. And we decided well, maybe we should keep the sandwich thing going, so it was named, aptly, Ube Sandwich.
Oh, but we're not finished yet. The orange sea slugs had been put on clearance too, suggesting that Five Below was clearing inventory. We waffled on picking up another one because cheap, decided against, and almost as if on cue, my phone begins going off warning of an earthquake to the north of us (yay, California).
Yeah we turned around and bought that sea slug. We don't fuck with omens. This one, continuing the trend, was named appropriately: Spicy Chicken Sandwich.
You'd think that's enough, right? Nah. Because here comes the star of the show. The girlfriend wanted a beanie off Five Below's website, and I just so happened to pop a look...the purple sea slug was still on clearance, and there were two left. Aw, screw it. In the cart they go.
Now, we were at a loss for names, here. The first one was named Mochi (and she wears a little ribbon around one of her antennas to set her apart). The last one, we struggled for a bit. But again, as if by divine intervention...
I'm a longtime Patron of The Macintosh Librarian. She's pretty damn cool (and I had the honor of meeting her in person at VCF West 2023!) and occasionally she'll send me special edition Maccy prints as thanks for being the first Patron. Trust me, this is relevant, not trying to brag here, promise.
In 2024, not long after VCF West, she sent me a few things, one of which was a large 3D-printed Maccy that also came with a cowboy hat. The hat had become separated from the big Maccy, but...as the hat sat on the couch next to the still-unnamed purple sea slug, I got an idea...and put the cowboy hat on the sea slug.
I didn't know it yet, but it was at that moment that Rootie Tootie was born. (Not named after the pancakes, but the association is enjoyed nonetheless.)
Initially my name for her at that point was Yeehaw Sandwich (because once again, sticking with the sandwich names) but the girlfriend had the better idea of calling her Rootie Tootie, and that's what eventually stuck. And she very quickly became the sea slug. Because there's just something about a smiling sea slug wearing a cowboy hat.
(And yes, eventually, we did take her to IHOP just to order a Rooty Tooty Fresh 'n Fruity because why not. Also she has a pink horse we picked up at a western wear store that's been appropriately named Fruity.)
So yeah. That's really the answer if you wondered what the significance of the sea slugs is, either on my social feeds or at a VCFed event. I've usually brought stuffies to VCF events just because why not and it makes my table easier to find for friends, but from 2024 onwards...yeah, it's sea slugs.
Ending note: I have nowhere else to really put this, but if you read this and think "hey, that looks familiar, I think I got a polaroid-like thing with that sea slug on it, what gives?" Well, it's because of a fun thing I've been doing since 2025 called "slugbombing" where I'll take Rootie to what looks like an unattended exhibit and take a photo of her sitting on the exhibit with an Instax Mini 9. I then tuck the photo somewhere kind of out of sight, for the exhibitor to find later. My hope is that it puts a smile on their face.
I have also just straight up asked people if they wanted to be slugbombed, and thankfully most people are good sports about it and enjoy it. Like Action Retro, here.
