#Kevin Barr

[jayday-art]

I’m cooked, they got me. I’ll be back in this corner of the internet for a little bit

[nomi-womi]

I finally finished this after 3 months of procrastination. c: I hope to draw more this year and next. Added the 2020 and 2018 versions plus my reference sheet and I’m happy to look back on how my art has progressed.

[devooshawrites]

The Prom

Fandom: Ed, Edd, and Eddy

Pairing: KevEdd

Rating: Explicit

Summary: Kevin and Edd attend prom...and the after party...with their friends.

[callmebennett]

Just some rev kevedd!

[laf-outloud]

notthisproductions Happy trails.

The final episode of Walker airs tonight. Figured it was time to post some old pictures of my time on the show. It was a fun one. I met some great folks, from the writers room to the cast and crew. Anna Fricke offered me a job that led to a helluva ride, allowed me to create one of my favorite characters and kept the lights on during some hard times - I’m forever grateful. A tip of the hat to everyone involved.

Totally worth it to see Gen dancing and Jared cracking up!

[nofatclips]

Super Moon Machine by Rachael Dadd from the album FLUX

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Vertex, Volume 1/Number 5, Mankind Pub. Co., December 1973

[positivexcellence]

hilarieburton: Photo dump! All of this is just happiness.  People I love.  People I miss.  People I can’t wait to work with again. 

I spent 6 years on OTH.  I’ve spent 14 years celebrating what comes AFTER with these people.  They’ve heard me. Healed me. Humored me. I’m just really really grateful that we get these magical little moments to be together. Thank you @fwbcharityevents !

And thank you @bauble_magpie for helping me with my sister @sophiabush ‘s ring! We finally got to put our intaglios together to activate our wonder twin powers!!! ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Gertz at MMFA:

Tucker Carlson has devoted much of his post-Fox News career to solidifying his influence over the GOP.  He used his sway with former President Donald Trump to secure the vice presidential slot for his near-duplicate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, helped to line up anti-vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump, and addressed the Republican National Convention. But Carlson isn’t just advising the Republican presidential nominee and serving as a GOP kingmaker. He is also hard at work shaping the future of the party by bringing the most deranged, racist, and disreputable people in American politics into the Republican tent. Carlson is building power on the fringes. He is turning a coterie of far-right, conspiracy-minded politicians and commentators — many elevated by Trump himself — into a coherent faction that could further displace the current party establishment and reify the blood-and-soil nationalism and reactionary politics of Carlson and Vance.

[...]

Jones is part of Carlson’s network of crackpots, bigots, and kooks

Carlson is at the center of an anti-Fox, anti-establishment faction of the right-wing media and Republican Party.  Carlson’s tour booked some of the more traditional players in the alliance, including GOP politicians like Vance and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), MAGA strategists like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Kevin Roberts, and former Fox personalities like Dan Bongino, Glenn Beck, and Megyn Kelly.  But it also incorporates figures like Jones and Kennedy Jr. who were previously consigned to the fringes of American politics. MAGA keyboard warriors, hardcore bigots, and deranged loons are welcomed on Carlson’s show for cozy interviews that allow them to reach and influence his large online audience. Carlson’s effort to bring extremists into the mainstream right dates back to his time at Fox, when he worked to sanitize fringe figures and launder their views to his audience. But after being forced off the air and hanging out his own shingle, anything even resembling guardrails is off, as a review of his guest list shows.

Former FNC host Tucker Carlson’s far-right tent of influence spans from Alex Jones to J.D. Vance to RFK Jr.

[comicarthistory]

Page from The Outsiders Annual #1. 1986. Art by Kevin Nowlan.

[dalekofchaos]

Dark Side of the Ring season 6 ideas

Season 5 is over, so here are my ideas for season 6 of Dark side of the Ring

The Ringboy Scandal

Bill DeMott

The Knight Family

Wrestlers Court

Ashley Massaro

Daffney

Rikidozan

Buck Zumhofe

Hardbody Harrison

Heroes Of Wrestling

Adrian Street

The Kliq

Perry Saturn

IWA Mid-South

Rick Rude

Mr Perfect

Juana Barraza

Raven

Art Barr

Larry Sweeney

Ludvig Borga

Jerry and Brian Christopher Lawler

Buddy Landel

Test Martin

Tom Zenk

Demolition

The Shiek

Muhammad Hassan

[paceypeternathanslawyer]

More pictures from the recent One Tree Hill cast reunion!!! (Nov 2023) 😍💕

[nomi-womi]

Miraculous Edd-bug

[wordacrosstime]

Programming Embedded Systems (with C and GNU Development Tools)

[Programming Embedded Systems (with C and GNU Development Tools). By Michael Barr & Anthony J Massa. 2nd Edition, 1 October 2006. Publisher: O'Reilly Media. Paperback: 301 pages, Dimensions: ‎ 17.78 x 1.98 x 23.34 cm. ISBN: 978-0-596-00983-0]

In the past 15 months or so I elected to expand my personal and professional skill set to include working with small computing systems, sometimes referred to as microcontrollers.  These devices have become virtually omnipresent, in everything from automobiles and bar-code scanners to toasters and doorbells.  If you operate a late-model vehicle, for instance, you may have as many as 70 (!) of these devices in the car controlling everything from the fuel mixture to emissions to anti-lock brakes and collision avoidance sensing.

I was interested in moving into this arena as part of my career, as there were many openings for people with a strong understanding of the imperatives attendant on both the software and hardware of embedded systems.  I knew a bit about the electronics side of things and I have done software development of one sort or another most of my 40+ years as a professional, but this arena poses unique challenges and opportunities.  I knew I needed to do some specialized self-teaching, and this book seemed like a great place to start.

To start with, what exactly is an embedded system?

As the name implies, it is a system - in this case a miniature computing device - that is a component of a larger framework.  This larger framework can take on myriad forms.  Some of the largest such frameworks are satellite networks.  The embedded system comprises hardware - a central processing unit, or CPU, along with some (minimal) on-board memory and one or more electrical interfaces (e.g. a USB or RJ45 jack) through which it can communicate with the outside world. 

Unlike the computers most of us are familiar with, such as Windows or MacOS-based laptops or Linux servers, these devices often do not have an operating system (WIndows, MacOS and Linux are all operating systems) that performs many of the low-level functions needed to keep the device running and useful. 

This keeps the device flexible in terms of how it can be used, but at the expense of more detailed and subtle development and maintenance requirements.  Thus, the "software" on an embedded system may be a very small bit of computer code that simply turns on the interfaces electrically and then waits for something to happen.

Programming software for these systems is intriguing but fraught with issues that an ordinary computer user never sees.

For example, given that the memory and interface resources on these devices tend to be rather modest, it's necessary for the programmer to take care of any bookkeeping that is necessary to keep the basic functions from colliding.  If one of the interfaces is used to provide a scanned barcode to a waiting receiver, it must pass that information through some on-board memory first.

The embedded software designer needs to be sure that this information can't be corrupted, or "clobbered", by a competing task that might be, for instance, putting the scanning laser into sleep mode to save power.  Moreover, there are cases where the same locations in memory need to be shared by tasks as a part of getting work done.

But what happens if one task is trying to write data to a specific memory location while another task is trying to read from it?  Is there always a specific order in which this happens?  What happens if either operation is incomplete for some reason?  Will the device recover and continue to operate, or will it lock up?  The aforementioned are but a tiny set of examples that the developer must bear in mind.

Messrs Barr and Massa have many decades of experience between the two of them in just these kinds of environments. I was delighted to see just how easy this book is to read and how thoroughly they cover all of the issues that accompany such a software development enterprise.  They are careful to create and explain examples that use commonly-available development kits (I use an STM32 ARM Cortex-M Development Board myself; there is a photo of one such system below) and free or nearly-free software tools to break down the barriers to entry in this field.

This book is really as much about operating system design as it is about microcontroller software development; if one is interested in what nearly every operating system must do, this volume talks all about it. 

Above and beyond this, it is a wealth of anecdotes, sample code, and general wisdom that will really ease the novice into this exciting world of programming and small-device control.

I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get down on the bare metal with computers.  It is necessary to be at least familiar with the C programming language (almost all of the examples are coded in C) and it would be very helpful to have worked with at least one Assembly language as well.  Beyond that, the only requirement for getting the most out of the book is a willingness to experiment and be delighted.

Image Credits (from above down; with thanks to copyright owners): (1) STM32 ARM Cortex-M Development Board © Copyright Owner, date unknown (2) Book Cover © O'Reilly Media 11 October 2006 (3) Michael Barr © Barr Group 2012-2025. (Anthony J Massa, no photograph found)

Kevin Gillette

Words Across Time

4 February 2025

wordsacrosstime

[laf-outloud]

@larryteng

Ouch... just... ouch. You can tell Larry really loved the show. We all did. I'm so sorry to see it go.

[greensparty]

2024 Northeast Comic Con Fall Edition Wrap-Up

For many years now I’ve been lucky enough to cover the Northeast Comic Con (read my coverage here), a fun cool convention for lovers of comics, pop culture, and collectibles. Most recently I attended the Spring NECC in March.

Here are some of the highlights of some of the guests I got to speak with at this season’s NECC:

Actress Anne Dudek has appeared in a great deal of film, TV and theater in the last 20+ years. A Newton, MA native, she has had recurring roles on House and Big Love. But I asked her about her role as Francine Hanson, Betty Draper's friend and neighbor on AMC's Mad Men (I worked at AMC Networks when Mad Men was capturing the zeitgeist) and the experience of working on that show? She says "It was an incredible experience. Matthew Weiner, the creator, is a genius and I loved every second of it. I was in every season except for one. I loved the writing. I loved the directors."

Speaking of AMC, the channel's unscripted Comic Book Men was a sleeper hit when it aired from 2012-2018. Built around Kevin Smith and his comic savvy friends at his comic book store, the show brought comic book culture to mainstream TV. One of those friends on the show was Ming Chen, who was the webmaster for View Askew and is also a SModcast podcaster. I asked about his experience of being on the show? "Listen, I'm just a nerd who grew up loving Star Wars and G.I. Joe and James Cameron movies. It used to be such a solitary thing being a geek. There weren't many out there or if you were, you didn't tell anybody about it. I'm glad I stuck to my fandom. Some people tell you not to read comic books. I'm glad I did not listen to them. But it was just cool to be on a show that celebrated all the stuff that I love and I was able to bring it to other people. It awakened a lot of people's inner-nerdom. The other thing I loved about it is that a lot of the show was just me and my friends asking a lot of 'What If?' questions. I didn't realize people would relate to it as much as they did. Then I realized in every dead end job there's all kinds of people sitting around having those same conversations." The series had a great run of 7 seasons / 96 episodes!

Oh and speaking of Kevin Smith and the View Askew-niverse, one of Smith's most frequent collaborators is actor Brian O'Halloran. After playing Dante Hicks in Clerks, he returned for the sequels and numerous other Smith films as Dante or another Hicks. I have met O’Halloran many times over the years beginning at the 1998 Vulgarthon in Red Bank, NJ. Since then I’ve run into him and talked at many conventions. In 2022 I interviewed him and Clerks III co-star Jeff Anderson via zoom. When I spoke with him then, I asked if he had any plans to direct sometime soon. He said "I’ve been working on a script for a while so I will hopefully at some point be like “alright, that’s it I’m making this movie”. I followed up to see if there was any news? He said "No news, but I have a script I've been working on for a couple years now that I'm pretty particular about. It's a comedy and comedy is something that I think is a lot of work to write for, it's not as simple as people think. But I've been working on that for a while, which would be the thing that I'd want to direct. I helped assistant direct other peoples' projects over the years. So the world is not new to me for that. Obviously working with Kevin [Smith], M. Night Shyamalan, and James L. Brooks watching really great directors work is a lesson and a treat that no film school can teach you. When you get out there and work with these people it's the best experience. I hope to in the next few years - when this absolutely pretty face is no longer pretty enough to look at, I'll jump behind the camera." I also asked if he was able to say anything about the sequel to Mallrats. He says it "had to be put on the shelf after the passing of Shannen Doherty. She had a big part in that film and the loss of her puts a hold on that project. Kevin is pivoting to his two favorite characters Jay and Silent Bob. Next up is Jay and Silent Bob: Store Wars. Hopefully that begins shooting next year."

Speaking of NECC guests who I've had the pleasure of meeting in the past, I got to meet actress Kelli Maroney at the 2018 Rock and Shock. I got to talk to her about Night of the Comet, which just recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. I asked about one of my all-time favorite movies Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which she played Cindy the cheerleader in. "Well, I had auditioned for Stacy, but I don't know if they had already cast Jennifer Jason Leigh at the time. I know there was at least one day where me, Phoebe Cates and Brian Backer auditioned all day long and read the whole script over and over again for the producer, Amy Heckerling and Cameron Crowe. Then they called me up and asked me to play the cheerleader. You don't really know how other people see you. Up until then I had played a juvenile delinquent and an awful human being and to myself I thought 'where are they getting this cheerleader thing?' [laughs] Cause we don't see ourselves as other people see us. It took me ten or twenty years to finally see why they saw me as the cheerleader. But it was phenomenal. I didn't drive so for my first time out to California, my choices were the teamsters could pick me up at the crack of dawn or I could get myself there somehow. But I got to watch Universal City come to life. It's just like that commercial on Turner Classic Movies only better. It exceeded my expectations!" And then after we chatted for a minute, Kelli came out from behind her booth and gave me a big hug. This has to be one of the rare occasions where a celebrity guest was truly that gracious and appreciative. Thank you Kelli!

I didn't get the chance to speak with musician / actor /podcaster Michael Des Barres, but I briefly caught some of his panel. I talked with him last year at the NECC's 2023 MusicCon. Just a few weeks ago I actually talked to his ex-wife Pamela Des Barres as well. I had hoped to chat with him about Power Station, Seinfeld, or MacGyver. Maybe next time!

The big theme this NECC was The Monkees. They had Zilch!, a Monkees tribute band performing. They had appearances by Coco Dolenz, the sister and musical collaborator of Mickey, and also Bill Chadwick, a songwriter and musical collaborator of The Monkees. I asked him if he had a favorite Monkees song? "Well I'd have to say something like 'Zor and Zam' because I wrote it." Alright, how about his favorite Monkee song he didn't write that's his favorite? "I'd say 'Won't Be the Same Without Her'." I also stopped by and talked with the good folks at Monkee Mania Radio, where I recorded a station ID, which will be airing sometime next weekend!

...And the big star of this NECC was Micky Dolenz of The Monkees. After the passings of Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith, he is now the last Monkee standing. Over the years I've seen him around at other cons, but never got the chance to talk to him because the lines were too long, including last year's MusicCon. Unfortunately Mr. Dolenz was not doing press so I couldn't ask him a question for my coverage, but I did purchase an autograph and he signed my vinyl record of More of The Monkees and shook my hand. He is a gentleman and a scholar!

Big thanks to Gary Sohmers and the NECC team for another fun-filled con!

For info on Northeast Comic Con and their other events: https://necomiccons.com/