Mission Statement: Herculodge: The Essential Guide to Saving Your Manhood in an Era of Shriveling Masculinity.
I can be e-mailed at herculodge@frontier.com
Championing oversized Invicta watches for many years, it appears Michael Davis broke his ties with that company and did so in a publish fashion, posting his discontent with his job on his facebook page as posted on Miss Moss the Home Shoppingista.
I guess all things come to end. I was an Invicta addict from 2008 to 2013 though I have since sold all of my Invicta models.
In related news the Watch Geeks site dedicated to Invicta fanboys was hacked out of existence.
It seems like a changing tide for Invicta who, whether you like the brand or not, has been a style influence in the watch world.
About ten years ago, my short story "The Curse of Tatiana Minero," a fable about a man whose memories of a teenage girl ruin his life, was published in Void magazine. I did a Google search of the story today to see "how it is doing" and I discovered that Void has re-published it this year.
I agree with Friedman that you should never try to write comedy but rather tell the truth and either your work will be funny or it won't, but that's not the point. The truth is.
If you like big monster teeth on your watches and a big 48mm bezel with double-coated sapphire and professional grade lume, you might be tempted by the Benarus Megalodon. I'd like to see real photos first. However, 4 of the 8 models have already been reserved, so apparently a lot of Benarus fans didn't need to wait.
On a related note, I almost sold my Benarus Moray Dart. Why? Because I wasn't wearing it enough. I put it on yesterday and realized I have a very amazing watch, both distinctive and classy, unlike anything in my collection. Those lume markers make it a keeper. An argument could be made that it's the most compelling watch in my collection.
Last night already weary of having gained about 8 pounds over the last 8 weeks, my family, another family, and I gathered at a pizzeria where I promised myself I’d limit myself to two pizza slices. However, that’s not how it played out. Six slices more like it. Maybe seven. At 600 calories a slice plus an avocado cream cheese spring roll appetizer and a tall glass of chilled porter, I ingested about 4,000 calories and have no doubt I gained another 2 pounds, not to mention the self-loathing, self-disgust, and bloat that has afflicted me for over 12 hours, compelling to swallow handfuls of psyllium husks.
Lesson Number One: Because pizza is for me a trigger food akin to crack, I am not allowing myself to eat it anymore. Certain foods have that power like linguini or angel hair pasta covered with clams, garlic, and olive oil. I can eat plate after plate of that stuff with warm garlic bread.
Lesson Number Two (related to Lesson Number Two): For lunch (after a guilt-fueled kettlebell workout) I had an amazing 600-calorie spinach salad with tuna, feta, kalamata olives, toubili, and Italian dressing and the salient flavors satisfied me as much as the Mediterranean pizza I had last night. Next time, no pizza. The salad will be fine.
As much as I can't stand badly compressed mp3 files, I think the bigger problem today that continues to get worse each year is not bitrate compression, but rather audio compression (ie, the loudness war). So many songs today are slammed into a brick wall in the digital master, sucking all the dynamics and life out of them. I'd rather listen to a dynamic, low bitrate mp3 than a squashed, no dynamic recording, no matter how good the "quality."
Doug adds:
I completely agree with Brandon's comments about the diminishing quality of releases due to the effect of the "loudness war." I'm not a fan of compressed MP3, and I still buy most of my music on CD (or even SACD or Bluray Audio) and current mastering techniques clearly make music sound like crap. As an example, compare the 1986, 2004, and 2012 (so-called "25th anniversary") CD editions of Paul Simon's "Graceland." The sound quality has increasingly gotten worse on them. You can easily confirm this looking up the album on this website:
1. They complain we have sacrificed music quality for convenience. This ignores the fact that we have music available to us anywhere and everywhere, and consume far more of it than we once did, strictly because of that very convenience. If it weren't for the convenience we wouldn't be listening to music in most situations at all.
2. They describe the analog era as some kind of "nirvana, no the group." But vinyl records only sounded great the first few times you played them. They were vulnerable to dust and wear. Furthermore, the dominant music format in the vinyl era was AM radio to begin with, then FM later, neither of which is as clear as a moderately good MP3 can be.
I completely agree with Brandon's comments about the diminishing quality of releases due to the effect of the "loudness war." I'm not a fan of compressed MP3, and I still buy most of my music on CD (or even SACD or Bluray Audio) and current mastering techniques clearly make music sound like crap. As an example, compare the 1986, 2004, and 2012 (so-called "25th anniversary") CD editions of Paul Simon's "Graceland." The sound quality has increasingly gotten worse on them. You can easily confirm this looking up the album on this website:
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=paul+simon&album=graceland
Badly compressed MP3 is often a problem, by the elimination of dynamic range is a much greater problem.