Tech: 2024 Tesla Model 3 Review, Part 2 - Adventures in Charging
One of the biggest questions a new EV owner has is, "How do I charge this thing?" It turns out there are a few options, all of which have pros and cons:
If you have any complaints which you'd like to make, I'd be more than happy to send you the appropriate forms.
One of the biggest questions a new EV owner has is, "How do I charge this thing?" It turns out there are a few options, all of which have pros and cons:
Halloween is coming, and this year Shangrila Towers is paying tribute to the gory, grotesque, and sometimes goofy world of 1980s horror fiction. Today's post will look at House of Illusions, a 1988 novel by Ruby Jean Jensen:
Killer clowns have been a staple of horror for decades, whether we're talking about Pennywise from Stephen King's It or Art from the Terrifier films. House of Illusions features a whole gang of them, who proceed to menace the inhabitants of a travelling carnival. Throw in a magician-who-might-be-a-demon, a mysterious house of mirrors, and a passel of picaresque carnie folk, and you have the prototypical '80s chiller, complete with an eye-catching all-hologram cover.
House of Illusions was published by Zebra Books, the paperback imprint of Kensington Publishing. Jensen was one of Zebra's most prolific writers, and she cranked out 20 books with the publisher, usually featuring evil children. In House of Illusions, the children aren't exactly evil, but they aren't safe, either; the story goes to some gonzo places that more mainstream horror novels would never touch. While the book is a bit light on plot and sags around the midway point, it does offer a few memorable images...blighted mirrors, shadows moving in the tents behind the midway, and clowns - so many clowns.
Halloween is coming, and this year Shangrila Towers is paying tribute to the gory, grotesque, and sometimes goofy world of 1980s horror fiction. Let's start with the book that inspired this series of blog posts - Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix with Will Errickson:
It's been over eight years since I first bought my 2013 BMW 328i, and over six years since my last review of the car, and I am finally saying farewell to the old girl. With over 168,000 miles on the road, my 3-series is positively elderly in German car years, and it's taken a lot of work (and a lot of money) to keep it in decent shape.
What kind of work? Well, aside from normal wear-and-tear items that any car would need (oil changes, new tires, brake pads, spark plugs, batteries, etc.), I've had to replace a couple of front control arms, the fuel tank value, the turbo intake air pipe, the starter motor, the valve cover and oil filter gaskets (multiple times), the coolant system, the driveshaft flex joints, the transmission line, the differential mounts, the horns, the hood struts, the door handles (multiple times), the rear passenger door trim, the cabin headliner, and even the center console cupholder.
Absurdly high maintenance costs aside, the car was fairly reliable (it only stranded me once, when I came out of a store and found the battery was dead), and it still drives like new. But I've grown tired of throwing money at it, so I am getting the lowest-maintenance vehicle I can think of:
Whatever your politics, you have to admit that this is a funny song by The Kiffness:
Swiss shoe company On is a relative newcomer in the world of running, but after famously receiving backing by tennis legend Roger Federer and getting endorsements from the likes of Zendaya, On has been able to take a sizable chunk of the U.S. market. I've been using On's Cloudrunner and Cloudrunner 2 training shoes for awhile now, so here are my thoughts after about 300 miles in each shoe.
Introduction
For my marathon training up to this point, I had been tracking my runs with my Apple Watch Series 8. It worked well overall (the GPS and heart rate monitor were really accurate), but it required constant charging, and the darn thing just broke after only 18 months of use.
So, I bit the bullet and ponied up for a Garmin Forerunner 965, a smartwatch that's almost twice as expensive as an Apple Watch Series 9. Is the Garmin worth the coin?
The Forerunner series is Garmin's line of running-focused watches, and the 965 is the most advanced model in the bunch. Its main selling point is a large 1.4" AMOLED display that makes the MIPS displays of older Garmin smartwatches look like middle school graphing calculators. The brightness, pixel density, and color range of the 965 trump every GPS watch out there, save for smartphone-style Apple and Samsung watches. The nicer display does mean a slight hit to battery life, but the Forerunner 965 still lasts me about 8 to 10 days between charges, including many hours of running with both the GPS and Bluetooth music playback on. It was nice to wear a watch that I didn't have to charge every single day just to use.
The big drawback to the 965 is that aside from tracking your runs, the watch really doesn't do all that much. It's not trying to be a smartphone on your wrist, so there's no apps for browsing the Internet, checking your bank account balance, or pulling up an airline ticket. And paradoxically, if you don't need some of the Garmin-specific bells and whistles the Forerunner provides (full featured navigation, Spotify integration, and contactless credit card payments), there are running watches like the Coros Pace 3 that do the same thing but cost several hundreds of dollars less.
All that said, I am happy with the Forerunner 965 so far, and would recommend it to any amateur athlete looking to quantify their fun.
The decades-old Alien franchise is receiving a new installment this weekend, Alien: Romulus, so I thought it would be fun to take a look back at all the movies in the series, excluding the iffy Alien vs Predator crossover movies, and ending with a review of the new film...