Posts published in “Life”

Girls Music Playlist

January 8, 2026 |

The two older children are in a funny place right now. They absolutely do not want to listen to any music with a male singer. And I get it! They’re little girls and trying to figure out what being a little girl means, what it means about them, and how they fit into the world as little girls. They couldn’t tell you all that because they are just on the edge of turning five, but their actions, what they talk about, and what they ask me and mom reveal this sort of childhood quest for understanding of self.

It will get more complicated, I’m sure. Right now, though, we’re stuck on disliking music where men sing.

In response to this preference, I have compiled a playlist of songs featuring female singers. With a catch.

I do not want to just fill it with contemporary pop junk. That can be some of it, no doubt. Just not all of it. Instead, I want to be sure they are listening to a broad spectrum of things so they can develop a more nuanced taste in music. I am under no illusion that they will grow up listening to the same things Sarah and I like. I don’t want that! What I want is for them to listen to music that interests them in expanding their musical horizons when they are old enough to search out music for themselves.

I don’t want them to get stuck and complacent listening to the next generation of corporate, generic, totally interchangeable pop music garbage. I’d like them to find something that really resonates with their lives, even if it’s weird or niche or maligned by their peers. And the most important way to help them down that road is to lay the groundwork now.

So this is all cool and heady and aspirational and whatever, but what does the playlist actually look like? Good question! You can check it out for yourself.

Sorry for the Qobuz link. I know it’s not the most popular option, but I prefer it. I ditched Spotify after something like 15 years because of the insane amount of evil they are doing to both the community of musical artists that feeds them and to the world in general. Spotify can get bent. Try Qobuz! They pay their artists fairly! (This is not an ad).

Listen to the playlist and let me know what I am missing. It’s got a huge variety. Sure, we’ve got K-pop Demon Hunters and Celine Dion, but we’ve also got Lambrini Girls and Unleash the Archers. Linda Ronstadt! Röyksopp! Whitney fucking Houston!

I’m open to suggestions. What else should we be listening to?

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Happy Holidays from me, The Black Laser

Happy Holidays from me, The Black Laser

December 25, 2025 |

Life

This is your annual reminder to have a happy, safe, and fulfilling holiday season, no matter what you celebrate or if you celebrate. Everyone deserves to have some time to fill their cups at the end of the year.

You’ll notice, however, that the customary Happy Merry card isn’t here this year. That’s because it just dang got away from us this year. Between a late Thanksgiving, three polar vortices, crazy work responsibilities, and a bunch of boogery illnesses, we were unable to make time in time to get cards out. So, a great many apologies, friends! I promise we still love you.

If you typically get a card from us, don’t fret. We have something planned for after the new year. Save us a space on your fridge. If you’re not on my snail mailing list and you’re my friend and you’d like to be, just shoot me a note! If you’d rather not, you can be assured I’ll be sharing the image here as well. All the bases are covered.

All that aside, happy holidays. I hope you are surrounded by love.

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What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 17, 2025

What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 17, 2025

November 23, 2025 |

Life and Thoughts

I lost a couple days this week to a child home sick with an ear infection, so my output hasn’t been so great. But I still managed to do something!

Posted twice — Now you all know about my desire to have my face in the local diners and the hallowed tradition of Sandwich Day.

Recorded more voice data set scripts — Another 5 or 6 of these this week. The interface I record into isn’t the normal DAW method, but through a web page. It’s a little wonky and the interface isn’t the easiest to use. I wish they’d let me resize the text box the line sits in. I wish I could record pick ups. Some of the lines are two or three hundred words long and have foreign language words. They are very difficult to get through in one pass.

I’ve figured out a clever (to me) way to soften this difficulty, though. We’ll see how well this works out in the future.

Recorded an audition — This one was to be the voice of a service call voice robot.

Added another TBLR episode to Youtube — This time it’s The Damned Thing.

Overall, not too bad for a week that was two days shorter than normal. Next week will also be limited with Thanksgiving and Sandwich Day.

I don’t really share videos as exclusive post topics anymore, so I’ll share this song I found last week and really enjoyed here instead. Have fun.

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Sandwich Day and the Celebration of Leftovers

Sandwich Day and the Celebration of Leftovers

November 22, 2025 |

Life

Years ago—I can’t remember if it was while we lived in California or if we’d already moved to Delaware—Sarah had the idea to celebrate the day after Thanksgiving with sandwiches. We always prepare a Thanksgiving meal at our house, so we always have a ton of leftovers. Just sort of the nature of the game. But using all those leftovers before they go bad is invariably a struggle. Traditionally, you prepare to-go packages for guests and that helps shift some of the food. But when it is just the two of us and maybe a single guest? What do you do with the rest of it all?

The answer? Sandwich Day.

I hate food waste. It drives me nuts, especially with meat. As touchy-feely as it sounds, I believe that if an animal died so you can eat, you have a responsibility to make use of that sacrifice as thoroughly as possible. I am not against eating meat, but I am against treating it with disrespect. And waste is disrespectful.

With a meal as big as Thanksgiving, ensuring that all the food is eaten and nothing is wasted is difficult. But if you invite a bunch of people over to eat it all remade as sandwiches, you go a long way toward mitigating waste.

So, Sandwich Day. Sandwich Day started as the day following Thanksgiving and remained that way for a few years. That meant that our leftovers were still plentiful and fresh; they hadn’t been subjected to days in the fridge and picky fingers going into and out of containers. It was a good system.

Later, after the pandemic and lockdown, life changed with children and jobs and expanding social networks. Sarah typically works the Friday after Thanksgiving because God forbid people don’t have a chance to go have a lobster roll immediately following a turkey feast. Sandwich Day Friday became impossible, so we moved it to Sunday, the day the restaurant is closed during the off-season. Then she started inviting people from work over and it became a bit of a party.

More people also means that we require more leftovers; more leftovers than we generally have. It’s also kind of whack to invite people over to your house to feed them four-day-old food. Now I cook a second turkey the day before Sandwich Day Sunday, prepare more cranberry sauce, and make more gravy. Kind of like a 0.5x Thanksgiving dinner prep. The stuffing is still fine by Sunday.

The day is fun, though, and worth the extra kitchen effort. And we always run through everything, so waste is avoided. What meat isn’t used ends up in a turkey pot pie the next day, anyway, so it’s all good. The sheer amount of stock I end up getting from two turkey carcasses is also wild.

Don’t think this just people coming over and eating cold turkey sandwiches and drinking wine. No, we go for it. We’ve gone for it from the jump. The idea was that we’d each make a different sandwich and there’d be a third classic Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich available. Traditionally I make a Kentucky Hot Brown and Sarah finds a new sandwich somewhere online to try. This year we’re going to simplify to just the Kentucky Hot Brown and Leftovers sandwiches.

A Kentucky Hot Brown is an open-faced “sandwich” served hot from the broiler. It’s turkey meat, roasted tomato, mornay sauce, bacon, and toast thrown into the oven to get hot as heck. Dress it with a little parsley at the end for freshness and eat it with a fork and knife. It’s insanely delicious. I omit the tomato because November isn’t exactly tomato season here in the Northern Hemisphere, but I don’t change anything else.

Originally created at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, KY in the 1920s, the sandwich itself has grown past its Kentucky roots. You’ll find a lot of recipes online and they’re all riffs on the same idea. If you want the original from the restaurant that created it, you can find it here. I don’t recall where I found the recipe back all those years ago, but it’s likely it was this one from Serious Eats. The date of publishing checks out and that photo of the bubbling grease is tickling the memory holes in my brain. However you decide to make it, the important factors are turkey, mornay, bacon, toast, and heat. Everything else is just dressing.

I encourage you to incorporate Sandwich Day into your Thanksgiving weekend, especially if you aren’t traveling. Christmas gets at least two days of celebration, so why not give the superior Thanksgiving the same recognition? It’s a great way to spend more structured time with your loved ones, reduce waste, and try something new. Give it a try.

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Putting Your Face on a Mug

Putting Your Face on a Mug

November 17, 2025 |

Life and Thoughts

There are two diners here in Milford, Delaware: Westside Restaurant (which is on the south end of town) and Milford Diner. They’re both pretty good, but I prefer Westside. It’s the one of the two that meets my exacting standards. Milford Diner doesn’t have feta cheese, for some reason. Too bad, because their coffee is better than Westside.

Both diners serve coffee in a variety of mugs collected from many sources. You get your Legoland mug, your white porcelain food service mug, your Best Mom Ever mug. You get it. The sort of mug variety you’d see on the shelf at a Home Goods or Marshalls or thrift store. Don’t Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Coffee!

At a recent breakfast visit, we were blessed to drink out of this mug.

Bob Viscount, the insurance guy of central Delaware.

This raised a few questions, of course.

Does he pronounce his surname to rhyme with “discount” or the like the British nobility?
If it’s like “discount”, why isn’t he using that in his materials?
Is this an effective marketing strategy for him? I’d say that the median age of people who eat at these places is like 60, so maybe this old school approach is the right one.
Where is this guy? I can find no listing for him online. These mugs can’t possibly be that old, can they? Addendum: the name “Bob Viscount” is much more common than I would have assumed. Even a search for “Bob Viscount Delaware” yields many incorrect hits.
Is he “Bob” to his friends and “Robert” to everyone else?
How do we get mugs with our faces in the restaurants?

That last question is obviously the most important one. Over our eggs and toast, we started looking, thinking that it should be relatively easy and inexpensive to make this joke real. Bob here has mugs with his face in at least two restaurants in town, after all.

We were wrong. Vistaprint has custom mugs starting at $10.49, as of the writing of this post. That’s fine for a single mug. No problem. But if you really wanted to do this correctly—and I mean, like, really do it correctly—you’d need to saturate the environment with mugs. Milford is a small town and there are only two restaurants I know about with the Bob mugs, but they both serve a ton of coffee. You’d need a lot of mugs. What, like, 50? 100? You’re looking at $449.62 for the 50 pack and $899.25 for the 100 pack. Fortunately the shipping is free.

That feels like too much for an, admittedly, really funny joke. Stick that one in the bin of hilarious ideas to do when we win the lottery. Which we never play. There are some cheaper options out there, but not cheaper enough.

I am not even sure what the mug would look like. It would definitely feature our faces, but it would have to be a new photograph tailored specifically for coffee mug format. None of this half-assed-reusing-existing-assets stuff. If we’re going to spend $900 on a set of 100 custom mugs to spread throughout town for no other reason than because we think it’s funny, we’re going create a new image. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.

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What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 10, 2025

November 16, 2025 |

Life, Thoughts and Work

What did I do this week?!

Recorded a voice project – There’s quite a bit of low impact work recording a variety of speech to help train virtual assistants’ abilities to recognize speech. They give you a little phrase and a mood and you record it. This project had 256 prompts and took about four hours over as many sittings. Not great money, but not hard work either.

A voice audition — I can’t say for whom. I was NDA’ed. To be perfectly honest, even after recording the audition, I don’t know who it was for.

Started learning Fairlight — I’ve been using Studio One for ages to do my audio work. It’s very good and works for me, but there’s no harm in learning other options. I recently tried Reaper but it’s like trying to learn how to build a house by staring at an ugly concrete wall. Maybe I’ll return to it one day, but for now I bounced right off. So now I’ve set my sights on Blackmagic’s Fairlight which lives inside DaVinci Resolve. That last sentence probably means nothing to most of you. I’ll follow up on this at some point.

Recorded and posted about my kids — What else would I write about?

Wrote and recorded a post for next week — You’ll see it on Monday. Planning! So cool!

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“Hold You”

“Hold You”

November 12, 2025 |

Life and Thoughts

When Penny and Bea were very small—walking but not really expressing themselves well with words yet—they would walk over and ask to be held by reaching their arms up and squeaking. Or grunting. Whimpering? I don’t know. Whatever you’d call that sound that little kids make when they want something. Listen to the narration to hear it.

When they did this, I would ask “you want me to hold you?” and then pick them up and give them the comfort they were looking for. Sarah must have said something similar, too, and we must have been pretty consistent in the phrasing, because eventually they would come up to us, reach their arms out, and say “hold you!” meaning “please, pick me up and hold me.” It was one of the earliest, clearest phrases they both used.

There some variations, of course. “Huggah” was common, especially before they started using more than one word at a time. When Penny was learning to walk, she would say “Wah wah wah wah wah” to get you to hold her hand and walk around with her. But “hold you” was the Homo sapiens to the other phrases’ Homo neanderthalensis.

Imagine these two little goblins coming up and asking to be held.

I tried to find a video where they actually said “hold you” but couldn’t so use your imagination.

Even now, as grown, adult women approaching their fifth birthday, they still say “hold you” to indicate that they need to be picked up and held. If they want a hug, it’s “huggies” which is a totally different request than “hold you”. Feeling sad after some altercation with their sister? Hold you. Don’t want to walk up the stairs for bath? Hold you. Just need a damn bit of human comfort for pretty much any reason? Hold you.

Even as they were struggling with diction, “hold you” was always clear and well pronounced. Always understandable. They really needed to be held. When the request was critical, it became an emphatic “Hold you hold you hold you hold you!” There’s no denying that.

Mina, at the ripe old age of two and a half, has spent her whole life hearing her older sisters—who she adores and strives to model in everything—say “hold you”. But because main exposure wasn’t the primary source of the phrase, me and Sarah, her interpretation of the words, of the sounds of the words, is a little bit corrupted. A bad VHS copy of something you rented at Hollywood Video.

So, instead of “hold you” she says “hohnyoo” or “holnyoo”. It means exactly the same thing and is used in exactly the same way, but it’s a funny interpretation of what Penny and Bea say. A strong need isn’t “hold you hold you hold you,” it’s “hohnyoo hohnyoo hohnyoo.” Again, if you want to hear it, listen to the narration at the top of this post.

One day, she’ll be old enough to understand that they’re saying two words: hold and you. Then she’ll probably stop saying “hohnyoo” and start saying “hold you”. One day, they’ll all stop saying it completely which will be a sad day we won’t recognize until much later. For now, whether it’s a “hold you” or a “hohnyoo”, I pick the child up.

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What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 3, 2025

November 9, 2025 |

Life and Thoughts

In an effort to stay true to my statement of intent in Tuesday’s blog post, let’s have a weekly check in with what I am making or doing during the week. Doesn’t have to be fancy. Think of it as a way to keep me honest.

Ok let’s go!

Published three blog posts — Feels nice to write here again.

Wrote another post for next week — Loading up the post schedule.

Recorded narration for three blog posts — This adds quite a bit of time to the postings, but it’s also fun and good practice for me for longform narration, especially in a more contemporary style. I was going to skip the Tiny Chef post, but then I thought ehhhhhh just do it.

Posted current TBLRs to The Black Laser Youtube page — Now, if you want to listen to me read you stories on Youtube, you can. You can only see five of them so far, but they’re all queued up. Of course, if you want to listen to all of them or old post narrations, you can get them all at The Black Laser Bandcamp.

Got my video camera all set up — For some special projects! Also putting to use the AT815b I’ve owned since the 1900s. I also spilled a little coffee on the camera.

Finished cleaning up some photos from this summer I’ve been sitting on — The distinct disadvantage of shooting on a camera is that you need to touch everything afterward. I get nicer photos, but it takes more time. You’ll see the photos on Monday.

That’s pretty much it. Not at all a bad effort, especially while the entire house is muddling through colds. See you next Sunday for another round up!

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