Crowdfunding caveats

In receiving review offers for The Gadgeteer, one type of item that comes up almost every week (or more) are truly wireless stereo earbuds. Everyone’s got their own little spin on the same tune. And sometimes, they’re not even out of prototyping, like these Reecho earbuds that I got to test, and rip into in my review.

You can see from the picture that the initial product image compared to what was actually shipped (after months of delays) is grossly different. It’s something that really makes me thing twice about backing anything on Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

Of course…

Aaaaand Epstein offs himself. After being removed from suicide watch just days ago. After previous self harm before that. Can’t we just get one win? Just one?! Lot of rich pedos breathing a big ol’ sigh of relief right about now.

Unless. You know. He’s a billionaire. And all he had to do was punch himself in the face a few times, “suicide” a week later, get shipped to the hospital in a private ambulance and get wheeled out of the morgue to a secret new life in South Asia or some shit.

I don’t know. I’m not the tin-hat type but this is amazingly convenient.

Money can do a lot. Never see that guy again and everyone gets away with everything.

D&D Beyond

I’ve been using D&D Beyond to track my 5th edition characters for the last several sessions, rather than the old school paper and pencil character sheets, and it’s thoroughly good.

In fact, I’ve used that website for character creation for the last two randomly rolled characters… my late human druid and my current tiefling cleric, Velza. It keeps track of everything and saves a lot of time in looking up spell details, rolling bonuses and if it’s one or two d8’s needed for Sacred Flame at 5th level. There’s a shot of my current character sheet below.

Yes, I currently have 1HP. Got absolutely flattened by a froghemoth and was stabilized by a party member.

We just need to play more often! It’s been a couple months, now, and I’m really itching to sit down to a small role playing marathon.

Tool … now streaming!

Ahhh, just saw the news that Tool is putting their entire catalog on Apple Music. That’s awesome. I haven’t listened to them in ages because my CDs are who knows where, up in the attic or something, and up until now they haven’t made their way onto any streaming platform. This is great.

I used to listen to Tool in the middle of the night, staying up late to work on art projects in college. That takes me back, man.

Pocket Operator

Here we go, current WANT of the moment … one of these badass little Pocket Operators from the audio wizards at teenage engineering. You can see below what these little sequencers are capable of. I really dig the PO-20 arcade. It’s got those fun 8-bit bleeps and bloops and features a chord progression engine. Check out CUCKOO’s video and see how easy it is to slam out some beats in mere moments.

Just sick. And it’s like $60! I want one.