In the late evening, just an hour before midnight on January 31st, 1958, the United States launched it’s first satellite – Explorer 1. Explorer 1 was our answer to Sputnik 1 and 2. At least, it was our successful answer – our previous attempt, Vanguard TV3, ended in a very famous disastrous failure barely leaving […]
Ah, simulation software. Flight simulators, driving simulators, space simulators… you think of it, someone has probably coded a simulator for it. Hell, there’s even a joke name for a genre of game today called “walking simulator” where most of what you do is simply, well, walk. Computer simulations hold an interest to gamers in that […]
The computers of the 80’s are somewhat well known for the unique sounds they produced. While CD quality audio and digital sound samples are the order of the day now, and have been for several decades, in the early days of computers sounds, and thus, music, were produced via internal hardware that directly generated tones […]
What’s that? It’s January 31st? Well, looks like I’ve survived another trip around the Solar System, as some would say. Awesome. I did have some crazy long post I wanted to make regarding this, but I couldn’t word it correctly. Something about it all just didn’t feel right as a way to celebrate. What I […]
In a bit of rocketry news that I’m long overdue for writing about, back on January 21st, 2018, the New Zealand company Rocket Lab had the first successful launch of their Electron rocket – a booster designed to launch very small payloads into Earth orbit. Not only does this mark New Zealand’s entry into orbital […]
I mentioned early last November that Spin Street, a well known local music and video store here in Memphis, was closing. That event finally happened on the 25th of January – right at the end of the financial year. On that day, Spin Street closed its doors after 2 months of some quite intense liquidation […]
I really can’t believe this is still having to be addressed, but here we go, again. A post is making the rounds on Facebook saying “Pluto has been reclassified as a planet!” This is, of course, an outright lie, and the article cited as a source for it is absolutely idiotic when actually read. Here […]
Today marks 32 years since the Challenger Disaster. On January 28th, 1986, The Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds into it’s 10th mission due to one of its solid rocket boosters having a failed o-ring in a joint between 2 sections of the tubing, causing a burn thorough which over a minute of flight […]
January 27th, 1968 marked one year since the fire at Launch Complex 34 that killed the crew of Apollo 1: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. One year without a manned American space flight. One year of major change to our space program. One year of relative uncertainty. 1968 would, as fate would have […]
Microsoft just put out the February 2018 Xbox Live Games With Gold list and, as always, it’s got some good, and some bad to it. Let’s take a look. Opening up on Xbox One, we have Shadow Warrior and Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India. Shadow Warrior… Another first person shooter? Well, this one has swords and […]
Okay, I’ve spent a good bit of time tearing down the YouTube Partner Program changes. I’m not going to lie, I was rather upset by them initially myself – I still think the principle of creating these kinds of limits to people earning any money via Adsense, SuperChat, or any other built into YouTube feature […]
Here we have, as always, the launch highlights from last weeks Atlas V SBIRS launch. It was an early evening launch with spectacular views, as is usually the case for an Atlas V launch. This particular clip is interesting to me in that this being Launch Complex 41, it’s the same one that Cassini, and […]
Time for another episode in the same style as Spider-Man or the 2006 Halloween episodes – this one is another one split between gameplay footage and a review, and some live action storytelling with James and his friend Mike Matei. In this case, the game being covered is “Bugs Bunny’s Birthday Blowout,” a game released […]
On January 22nd, 1968 a Saturn 1B rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 37B carrying the first Apollo Lunar Module into orbit for its first in-space test flight. While Apollo 4 had tested the massive Saturn V, itself, of course, a critical machine in physically getting to the Moon, Apollo 5 […]
As the YouTuber Partner Program madness kicked in this past week, one extremely common point I saw being brought up by large YouTuber Content Creators time and time again was that most of the channels being affected by this were making under $100 a year. Noting that the payout threshold for Google Adsense is $100, […]