The Illustrated Man

He took his shirt off and wadded it in his hands. He was covered with Illustrations from the blue tattooed ring about his neck to his belt line.

“It keeps right on going,” he said, guessing my thought. “All of me is Illustrated. Look.” He opened his hand. On his palm was a rose, freshly cut, with drops of crystal water among the soft pink petals. I put my hand out to touch it, but it was only an Illustration.

As for the rest of him, I cannot say how I sat and stared, for he was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body. When his flesh twitched, the tiny mouths flickered, the tiny green-and-gold eyes winked, the tiny pink hands gestured. there were yellow meadows and blue rivers and mountains and stars and suns and planets spread in a Milky Way across his chest. The people themselves were in twenty or more odd groups upon his arms, shoulder, back, sides and wrists, as well as on the flat of his stomach. You found them in forests of hair, lurking among a constellation of freckles, or peering from armpit caverns, diamond eyes aglitter. Each seemed intent upon his own activity, each was a separate gallery portrait.

—Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

 

He’s Dead, Jim

Sony D-ES52CK

I knew what I was getting into when I bought it. Seller noted it as non-functional with a “no disc” error, but it was cheap and I thought why not give repairing it a shot? I’ve seen enough YouTube videos to know that the fix for the “no disc” error was simple – just some basic cleaning and a bit of tweaking of the laser’s potentiometer. Hell, one video I watched even had this exact model and the numbers on the multimeter I needed to match to get it working.

Unfortunately, even after attaching a meter and mirroring what was shown in the video (and afterward a whole lot of playing around with other values), it still stubbornly refuses to read discs. The laser and the transport mechanism is verified as working (it moves normally and attempts to focus), but so far I’ve had no luck resuscitating it.

I did note that someone else had already been into it. The screws that hold the top plate of the bottom half of the unit in place all but fell out when I went to remove them, so who knows what’s been fucked around with? (Says the guy who’s fucking around with it.)

I’m half-tempted to seek out a working unit and just throw this one in the donate pile. I do rather like the styling of this lil’ nugget.