Hi, I’m Phil Nelson, a writer, developer, and audio-visual maker of stuff. I have been making stuff online for over 25 years. I run RetroStrange and Set Side B. Good to see you.
Good news, everyone! It’s January 1st, and among other things, that means it’s Public Domain Day here in the United States of America. A bunch of great works from the past are now no longer under copyright, far fewer than should be if not for the interference in our legal system by massive copyright rent-seekers like Disney, but it’s still something. Here are some of the newly-free works that I think are worth your time, along with links to some more collected lists.
The works of P.G. Wodehouse, one of the funniest and sharpest writers I’ve ever read. His Jeeves series is just tremendous. Yes, this is where calling all butlers “Jeeves” comes from in popular culture.
The works of jazz composer, saxophonist, and bandleader Charlie Parker.
The work of Hannah Arendt, an incredibly important writer on history and philosophy. Her most known work is probably The Origins of Totalitarianism which is still as vital today as it was when she wrote it post-World War II. Perhaps moreso.
As always, the absolutely essential Internet Archive is the best place to find copies of all these things in various formats for streaming, reading, downloading, etc.
My friends at The Indie Beat, home to awesome fediverse-based music streaming channels, have launched their newest endeavor: The Indie Beat TV! It’s something like classic MTV, but independent, and therefore better by one thousand percent. I dropped into the chat yesterday for their big launch and it was a good group of folks cracking wise and enjoying some really great music and art. More coverage on NHAM
Last night we did a screening of The Lost Boys, and it was epic. Amongst all of our Cyberdeliae, this was the one with the rowdiest audience: lots of screaming and singing along. Excellent costume contest entries, too.
For this one I did something a little different from the others: instead of DJ music over abstract visuals, I filled the pre-roll and intermission with music videos featuring VAMPIRES. I only needed 30 and 20 minutes respectively, but I immediately had way more than that, in fact, more than enough for a mixtape.
A RetroStrange TV community member known as limebar is building something big, indie, and cool as hell for music creators and fans: a 24/7 streaming music video channel with your stuff on it. Read the announcement blog post and follow the channel.
McGruff’s® Smart Kids includes the viral hit “Cocaine & Crack,” along with cult classic favorites “Inhalants” & “Alcohol.” Music by Mike Hawes; Lyrics by Robin Nelson and Tim Sloan. The Deluxe 2xLP also includes extra songs “Take A Bite Out Of Crime,” “Shoplifting,” “Hitchhiking,” and more!
I think last time we talked I was gearing up for the busy conference time, and we’ve finally splatted out on the other side of that after stopping in Nashville and San Jose, but somehow it’s still the busy season over here in my Wizard Tower floating high above fragrant SoMA in San Francisco.
One of my guitars, Vincent, getting some work done on the bench.
I write these newsletters sometimes just so I remember what even happened. This is one of those. Let’s see what has been cooking over here.
Infrastructure Week(s)
Had a hell of a good time decommissioning several of the servers that run RetroStrange, Set Side B, Extra Future, etc, with Linode (our longtime website host) and consolidating them into one bigger, better, server. Now everything is faster, running newer software, and our hosting bill is about half what it was. We’ve got all the above websites, RetroStrange Radio 1, Radio 2, and my newsletter, on one 4gb Linode virtual server, with another 4gb server broadcasting RetroStrange TV. All running Debian and Ubuntu.
We also took down the RetroStrange Halloween Channel, which we launched last year as a way to keep the Hween spirit going all year. Nobody really watched it, so we had to take it down to save money. We’re still going to turn the RSTV main feed into all spooky stuff for Halloween, don’t you worry.
I also took the opportunity to swap out the old RetroStrange TV uplink server, a little mini PC that lives in my apartment and sends the RSTV video feed up to the broadcast server, to a Beelink Mini S12 Pro. It runs Ubuntu, and we use OBS to send the 24/7 feed. We’re now Open Source Software from top to bottom over here, and the stream looks and sounds better than ever at the same bitrate. Go watch, you’ll see what I mean. I spent a couple more bucks on a new 8-port ethernet switch to keep everything here locally running smoothly.
A little more Inside Baseball before I stop rambling about our indie web infra: RetroStrange TV now averages 5-15 viewers at a time, which is pretty great to see. It costs about $40/mo to run the servers.
We could really use your support on Patreon. It’s a buck a month, and it keeps the lights on.
I’m trying to book more script writing and voiceover gigs.Holler at ya boy. I’m working on a couple of short 30s-1m spots with some other customers right now which I’ll update you on next time. You can see some of my past & present work in video production on my site.
My day job, running all of the public-facing and much of the back office stuff for OpenCV, the world’s largest computer vision library, is still happening. It is happening so much.
Our YouTube channel now has over 120,000 subscribers which is kinda wild. Our Thursday morning live stream, OpenCV Live!, attracts somewhere between 150-200 peak live viewers every week. We’re finally popular enough that people are swiping whole episodes and uploading them to their own channels. Talk about a milestone. Over on LinkedIn I’ve built us up to 325,000 followers. Our newsletter subscriber count just passed 370,000. Things are happening, and yet…
Overall, it’s been a tough year for Non-Profit Organizations like OpenCV especially in tech. With the Trump Tariffs and the seemingly-random removal of tons of National Science Foundation grants, we are in a more precarious position than ever. If your company uses Computer Vision, consider donating to OpenCV or even better, becoming a supporting member organization. Sharing the link helps us a lot, too.
Moosick
I released Pandemic of the Various, the music album of short electronic weirdness I made in 2021, under a Creative Commons license and put it up for free download on my website. Go check it out. Yes, you can use it for stuff without asking.
The Good Links
Enough of my bullshit for now. Here are some Good Links.
Joe Rogan and his cult of hangers-on suck ass and aren’t funny, and we all know it, but Elephant Graveyard on YouTube just dropped an absolute nuke of a video about them, I mean god damn. This is just some extremely well-crafted shit right here. Watch immediately.
Ed Zitron, one of the sharpest writers on AI, has a podcast called Better Offline which looks critically at the AI business and has remained very good since its launch earlier this year.
That’s all for now. In the next month I’m headed to Tijuana, Iowa (congrats Joseph and Katie), Chicago and good ‘ol Niles. See you on the road.
Phil Nelson Wizard Tower, SoMA, Earth 2025.08.25 +8UTC
I just uploaded the short album of electronic music I made in 2021, Pandemic of the Various, to this website for free download under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can use it on your stuff!
We now have an official page here for the album of weird drum and synth noises I made in the early 2020s, hosted here on exfu for your indieweb listening pleasure. I’ve also added MP3 downloads of the tracks for free.
