I Used To Have A Shit Ton Of These. Well, Maybe Not A Shit Ton, But You Get The Idea
One of the things I loved—and still do love—about MiniDiscs is the whimsy they bring to my life. And this whimsy is no better illustrated than with TDK's "BitClub" line of MD media. I had a couple dozen of these back in the day and they were always my favorite.
Nowadays, if you're lucky enough to find any for sale, they are crazy expensive—which is why I don't currently own any. That top photo was from an eBay sale; $68US for the lot. That's $11/disc—half what you normally see them for—and still a price I can't justify when "regular" disks typically go between two and four dollars.
So unless I fall into a wad of cash, I'll just have to admire the whimsy from afar…
Always Worth Reposting
Current Mood
I Apologize In Advance
365 Days Of UNF: May 1st
WTF?! It Was Just January…
Senator Chris Murphy asks us to post this statement to the public. Report from the Senate Floor: "Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is.
So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans' plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted. In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps. Last night, they took the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that.
Now, we knew that Republicans would largely unanimously oppose them, but we had two objectives here. One, Republicans were forced to put their opinion on record — many for the first time — on the most corrupt parts of Trump and Musk's agenda. Two, as I've been saying, I am going to make every process and procedure as slow and painful as possible for as long as my colleagues choose to ignore the constitutional crisis happening before our eyes.
So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans' personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it. Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires. The corruption and theft is happening in the open here.
The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It's a fundamental injustice.
Thanks to your pressure and support, many of my Democratic colleagues have joined my effort to do everything we can to make sure they cannot destroy democracy and steal your money in the dark of the night. We are being loud about what is happening. I'm going to continue to grind the gears of Congress down as much as possible to make it that much harder and slower to get away with this corruption. That's why the votes lasted until nearly 5 AM.
This is a five-alarm fire. I don't think we have two years to plan and fight back. I think we have months. It's still in our power to stop the destruction of our democracy with mass mobilization and effective opposition from elected officials. So we can't miss any opportunity to take advantage of opportunities to put Republicans on the record and shine a light on what is happening.
And you have a role to play in this as well. I need you to amplify what's happening, support the leaders who are fighting for you to make sure they can continue speaking truth to power against Musk and Trump's billionaire cronies, and show up at rallies and town halls. Use every tool at your disposal to send a message loud and clear about how you expect my colleagues to lead and fight in this moment.
Every best wish,
US Senator Chris Murphy
A Reminder…
The More You Know…
If It's Like That…
…I think I have undiagnosed ADHD. Seriously.
Doing My Part
Aww…
Vomiting It All Up, Wednesday Edition
Drag Is Art
We Did Not Heed It
I've Had Dreams Like This
We Need These Girls More Than Ever
Takedown Update
I was able to get the cached copy of the image removed from the interwebs, so hopefully this will satisfy the demand. I haven't heard anything from my host, but for now it looks like I'm good…
365 Days Of UNF: April 30th
Got A Takedown Notice Today
Obviously the guy did not see the "Notice" aka Don't Be a Dick section on the right. The notice came through my hosting company and I supposedly have 48 hours to remove the offending material for I'll be shut down. I found the offending post and photo and deleted it. No big deal, right? Well, one link the attorney (yes, a fucking attorney) provided was to the i0.wp.com domain that I have no control over. It was created when I was using the Jetpack add-in back in 2021.
Based on similar requests i0.wp.com I found online, I've reached out to wordpress.org and their forums requesting that the image be deleted from their caches. If it isn't removed, VoenixRising may go poof on Friday until it's resolved—and possibly permanently.
If it's shut down, you can follow me on tumblr while this gets sorted out. If I have to end up shutting down VoenixRising with this host, I'll move to a different one and start fresh. I'll keep the blogosphere updated updated via Tumblr.
TBH, this doesn't come as a complete surprise. I've been flying under the radar as far as the whole NSFW content is concerned with my current host, and I haven't moved to a more NSFW friendly host simply because of the trouble involved. But I may be forced to.
He. Does. Not. Care.
🤣 🤣 🤣
Mark Your Calendars
I Hate This Timeline
365 Days Of UNF: April 29th
Freshly Returned From Service
If you recall, I won this orange nugget from my first-ever foray into Japanese auctions a little more than a month ago. It had some battery issues when it arrived, but I'd seen enough YouTube videos on how to clean the battery contacts on these things I thought I'd try doing it myself. I mean, how difficult could it be?
It turns out cleaning the contacts on the battery door are easy as fuck. It's the internal ones that are a little more challenging. I took the rear cover off, and with a combination of cotton swabs, vinegar, isopropyl alcohol and most importantly nerves of steel, I cleaned off most—but not all (because it would require a degree of disassembly that I most definitely was not comfortable with)—of the extensive green corrosion that had been caked on the internal contacts.
After reassembling, I slipped in a new gumstick battery and was genuinely amazed that it actually worked and that I hadn't destroyed anything in the process. As weeks passed however, I knew I wasn't getting as much running time between charges that I should have been getting, and when charged, the battery was never charged fully.
While all this was going on, my baby blue 910 started screeching when recording. I did the basic clean and lube (again, something I learned from YouTube), but it didn't alleviate the problem. Once again, it looked like it was something that was going to require a level of disassembly that I wasn't comfortable with. So I took a chance and reached out to one of the YouTube guys who effortlessly works on these antiques to see if he took on outside work and what it would cost.
To my surprise, he wrote back within minutes of me sending the email, quoted a very reasonable price, and I sent the unit off to him the next day. A week later he returned it, cleaned, lubed, and now the mechanism made only a normal amount of noise. No more screeching! I wrote back to him and asked how much he'd charge for battery contact cleaning in addition to the standard clean and lube. Again, he quoted much less than I was expecting and the orange 910 was sent off.
I got the nugget back today. The mechanism is silent and the battery has now lasted me nearly 8 hours of continuous use and shows no sign of giving out any time soon; only the end-most battery indicator has gone out, indicating it's still comfortably at 80% capacity. Thanks, Shawn!
The blue 707 is still my favorite, but the 910s (either this orange one or the baby blue) are the ones I take with me when I'm out and about.
Guts
I've loved this stuff since I was a teenager and first got into HiFi. Those shiny manufacturer brochures touting the advantages of their design over the competition, resplendent with cutaway diagrams and photos of the inside of the gear they were selling were an endless source of fascination. When my buddy who got me into this initially would return from the Chicago CES each year, laden with shopping bags full of brochures, we'd sit in his room and pour over all of it for hours, daydreaming that one day we'd own some of it.
I was kind of surprised that a cursory internet search for photos of the inside of my new Tascam deck were nowhere to be found. Fuck it, I thought. I'll make my own. So I disconnected everything, popped the cover, and snapped a photo worthy of a product brochure.
Even though I already knew (from having the Service Manual) that there was no audiophile-grade CD mechanism in this deck, but instead just a standard Teac (parent company of Tascam) IDE CDROM drive like you'd find in a desktop or tower computer of the era, it was still kind of surprising to actually see it. And the 2015 date stamp on the drive was another surprise, confirming that I'd gotten one of the units from the last year they were in production.
BRING IT!
Vomiting It All Up…And It's Only Monday 😫
Trump: 'I run the country and the world'
President Trump shared his thoughts on how his two terms as president have differed, saying in a new interview with The Atlantic that this time around he's leading "the country and the world."
"The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys," Trump said in the interview published Monday. "And the second time, I run the country and the world."