The Girl With the Dragon Gifts On A Train.

So we have a movie where the lead is a black girl. This is a big freakin' deal. Sure, we've got a hard-ass British Army sergeant. But the army isn't made up of soldiers who are just insanely evil, like 28 Days Later. They're maybe not quite as realistic as Dog Soldiers but their incompetence is only minor.
Other than that we comfortably have a lot of women in speaking parts. And we have the lead played by a black girl.

The Girl With All The Gifts is a simply terrible name for a movie.
Would you think it is 
1. a delightful Christmas story 
2. a post-apocalyptic zombie movie 
3. a creepy Scandinavian murder mystery?

Exactly. And something more like this should have been the key art.

 We haveta haveta haveta start casting black women and Asian men as leads. And Native American and African and South Asian and... steer away from the brown-haired white boys the way we do.
Hey, sure, maybe not all at once. Let's cut 'em down to 50%. Try that for a while. Eventually we'll be at a nice 20% brown-haired white boys. That seems reasonable.

Diggs it

Groove to my neice's husband's Kickstarter for a dog crate.

Yeah.

Or, you know, CG

 If we do a CG version of the police cruiser, it'll just look something like this? Maybe?

Ringu

I did this tutorial. Note that Shapeways adds a step specific to rings that isn't needed as one can change the size of the material in Fusion 360's sheet metal environment.

I'm getting this ring (ID 14.5mm) made at Shapeways. For such a simple design you might be surprised to learn it took me days to do.

Microphone tests with acoustic guitar

I test an Aurycle kit microphone (a u47 clone, all stock), the Austin ribbon kit (with Cinemag transformer), a Rode NT1-A, and an AKG C12-A.

Left to right: AKG C12-A (with the "Utopia" logo), Rode NT-1A, Austin Ribbon kit (Cinemag transformer), Aurycle U-47 multipattern clone kit.

They all go through the preamps on a Focusrite 18i20. I lined them up with a bit of distance from the guitar just so they shouldn't sound terribly different from one another just due to the positioning.
It's virtually impossible to do a real blind A/B comparison, so I generally don't even try. But there are some clear differences betwixt each of these mics.

Art Rock

I've had the very pretentious idea of "art song on the top, rock song on the bottom" for, well, since I was a teenager.
I've never quite been able to pull it off.

A baritone guitar would probably help.

The idea being to have a groove underneath, but to continue to vary the melody and harmony on top like classical Western music.

I dunno. Maybe I can pull it off eventually. I'll start with a concerto for electric guitar. That sounds appropriately pretentious. No?