belsaas

[belsaas]

I hate that I will never make anything as funny as the official LGBTQ+ Employee Group at KFC.

[belsaas]

I really hope riding boots come back into style soon

I love wearing skinny jeans and riding boots so much, and transitioned just in time for them to fall out of style. I need my 2015 preppy autumn girl look back in vogue.

[belsaas]

i don't know guys i kinda like this one

[belsaas]

dropout tv is like . what if there was an animal shelter but it was for 30 yr olds with BAs in Theater

[belsaas]

An ode to the iRiver iHP-120

For whatever reason, I've found myself deeply nostalgic for high school as of late. And for me, that is intractable from nostalgia for what is perhaps the peak mp3 player ever made:

The iRiver iHP-120 was released in 2003, my sophomore year of high school, and it changed my life. This thing held an astounding 10GB of music—for comparison, most mp3 players at the time were flash based, and held 128 or 256 MB of music. The only big competitor at the time was the 1st generation iPod, a mac-exclusive device that transferred data over firewire and had to be synced using the fledgling iTunes. Juxtapose that to iRiver, who took what I like to call the "we don't give a fuck" approach:

When you plugged in the iHP-120 with USB 2.0, it just showed up as an external hard drive—you could throw whatever you wanted on there. Naturally, it could read mp3 files, but this thing introduced me to the world of audio codecs and processing in a way nothing could have prepared me. WMA files worked fine (a big deal at the time because of DRM issues, during the heyday of KaZaA and Limewire). You want to play uncompressed .WAV files? No problem, put them on there. FLAC files? Absolutely, let your audiophile freak flag fly. Fucking OGG Vorbis files played on this thing. Hell, you could put text files on here and read them.

(The firmware for these was also basically open-source, and people did even crazier stuff with them. By the time I retired my player, it could do gapless playback, crossfading, 10-band equalizing, normalization and more. I think I also changed the boot screen to a picture of Sailor Moon.)

But the magic didn't end at uploading music to the iHP-120—controlling this thing was more intuitive than any other device around at the time. All of your music was displayed on the player in whatever folder structure you loaded onto the device—navigating the music was as simple as using Windows Explorer. You had your standard play/pause, skip forward/back and volume controls on the front joystick, but what are the other buttons for?

Yeah. This thing was also a portable recorder. At anytime you could just hold down the Rec button and start recording with the onboard mic, or using an external input (more on that later). On the right side, an A-B Interval control. You ever wanted to just listen to one part of a song on repeat to learn the lyrics? Just hold down the button. Lastly a hold switch to disable control inputs while it was in your pocket—no accidentally pausing the music.

Okay, back to the external input mentioned before. The top of the iHP-120 is wild.

The top I/O panel of the iRiver iHP-120, with 4 jacks.

From right to left, you have a 3.5mm headphone jack (naturally), a 2.5mm microphone jack, the remote control port (more on this in a bit), and in white you have Line In/Out jacks which you could use to record as well as just plug in a second pair of headphones for a friend—jacks which support both 3.5mm analog input, as well as 3.5mm TOSLINK optical cables.

The TOSLINK 3.5mm male plug. A plug I only ever encountered on this device and the Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium, a sound card I wrote a review of in 2009 which seems to still be up at PC Gamer and reading it now I don't know how any of my writing was ever published, let alone in print.

Chances are good you've never encountered this, it's phenomenally uncommon, and TOSLINK as a whole largely died with the emergence of HDMI—but this fucking mp3 player could both record and transmit fiber optic audio in uncompressed stereo or lossy 7.1 surround sound. In high school, I would plug the iHP-120 into our home theatre and listened to Porcupine Tree's Stupid Dream on repeat (side tangent, I'm pretty sad 5.1 album recording never really caught on, but the Dolby Atmos music format is better in every way, and I'm grateful Apple is bringing it into the mainstream).

"Okay, so we have an music player/text reader/voice recorder with optical audio, and basically every codec under the sun, what else could you go on about Erika?"

-you, the person reading this

THE REMOTE

Let me take you back to 2003. I was a depressed theatre kid teenager who would listen to Rooney on repeat on my Koss UR40s while crying over a girl who wanted nothing to do with me.

The Koss UR40 Headphones I wore like a fashion accessory everyday.

The other thing I wore everyday besides those headphones? Baggy cargo pants (it was acceptable at the time, I swear). Inside the right cargo pocket was my iRiver iHP-120, and clipped to the velcro flap of that cargo pocket was the iHP-115R remote control.

The iHP-120 remote unit

Every function of the iHP-120 could be controlled from this little fucker. Play/pause and stop buttons. Volume, skip track and recording are all here on rocker switches. You could even change the fucking bitrate of playback on this little thing, all without taking the actual mp3 player out of your pocket because the LCD screen on the remote has all the same info you'd get on the main unit.

The remote itself connected to the iRiver with that big plug you can see in the picture above (shamelessly stolen from Nathan Edwards who I worked with at PC Gamer in the late 2000s and only while writing this post discovered has already written a much more professional ode to the beauty of the iHP-120 this year).

You would plug your headphones into the remote, (or in my case you could also plug in your 1988 Chevrolet 2500 suburban's tape deck adaptor and have controls at your fingertips. No more distracted driving).

An image of a 1988 Chevorlet 2500 diesel Suburban. Not super relevant but god I miss my high school suburban. We would take the rear and middle benches out and put a queen-size mattress in the back, which 9 of my friends would ride on as we went to Little Caesar's for lunch. Also, cars just looked way fucking better back then.

I think I'm about done waxing nostalgic, but I really do miss the days of discrete devices—I kind of find myself fighting back against my smartphone. I have a camera I carry around, a pen and paper planner and writing notebook, and a kindle for reading. There's something appealing about not having my phone be my access to music either—rather, having a device that I just threw my music on and it plays it really well was rad. The iHP-120 was really fucking rad.

[belsaas]

what kind of fucked up and evil dish can i make without buying too many ingredients?

what kind of fucked up and evil dish can i make without buying too many ingredients?

->

this day and minute? go put kiwi in the microwave and see a gunky kind of bitch unfold

[belsaas]

Bring back Blinx the Time Sweeper you cowards

[belsaas]

i love cutthroat kitchen but bingewatching makes it really stand out how often alton brown refers to himself as ‘daddy’ and makes contestants wear spreader bars

[belsaas]

a little comic(?) about holding back & being trans online

[belsaas]

Obsessed with this utterly terrifying wedding dress exhibit at the MFA.

[belsaas]

New name, new platform!

Hey everyone! This is Kat (@zaftikat) here to make an intro post for our new Tumblr! Welcome to Danger Square Productions (formerly known as Soses Media)

We are a trans run podcast cooperative making comedy and actual play podcasts. The Danger Square team consists of me, @firtee-the-kobold, @belsaas, our non-tumblr user partner Emma (who goes by NocturnalMusings elsewhere), and @sapphire-mess! Our current lineup consists of two shows, Chicks with Dice, and Unsound Theories. On Chicks with Dice, we just finished our first campaign, and are currently releasing our Monster of the Week actual play, Disaster Lesbians' Guide to the Apocalypse! On DLG, we explore what it means to be a monster in the pre-apocalyptic world of 2024. It's a story made for people who love monsters and hate fascists. Since we're just getting started, now's the perfect time to listen in.

On Unsound Theories, join hosts Kat and Kira as we watch movies with no sound and no subtitles. Whether we figure out what the hell is going on is always up in the air (spoilers: we don't). In the style of movie podcasts that cause the hosts mental anguish, you too can participate in our pain by listening to us try to decipher the visual storytelling in movies of varying quality! Both shows release on alternating weeks in their respective feeds, and can be found wherever you get podcasts!

[belsaas]

"grackle" really is a perfect name for a bird. knocked it out of the park w/ that one

[belsaas]

[belsaas]

Trans girls will ask if you want to see a picture of their dog, and like 50% of the time it's an actual dog. 49.5% of the time it's another trans girl. But for that rare 0.5% chance that it's a Blue-tongued Skink, you have got to risk it and look at the pic.

[belsaas]

Yeah, I practice ENM

(Ethical Non-Mahogany)

((Mahogany isn’t native to my region of the US))

[belsaas]

[belsaas]

Handbinding Project: My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie

This really started over a year ago, with a project started in the Renegade Bindery server: people would format different chapters of My Immortal, without knowing what anyone else was doing, and we would put them together into one file. It was agreed upon that everybody would disregard both good design and good taste. 

(If you click on each image, the caption lists who designed the page in question. I couldn’t include them all here, but every page is basically a work of art. Horrible, typographically hellish art.)

After raiding a Joann’s of materials I thought belonged in Hot Topic circa 2005 (before it just became Think Geek II: We Don’t Light Our Store,) I almost immediately tested positive for covid. So I made most of this over the last four days, and with varying levels of coherent thought and common sense. The process is documented in a thread here