The Dog Days of Summer may be slowly fading, but the Bullets of Summer are still sticking around... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Yesterland! This video of Disneyland in 1956 is wild. Everybody dressed up for a day out at Disneyland... from dress shirts with long pants and full on suits... to sundresses or Capri pants... nobody was in jeans and a T-shirt (and where were short pants for the guys?)...

I remember for my first visit 20 years later it was the same. My brother and I were dressed up in matching green suits that my grandmother made. And the reason I remember them so clearly? Because the threads in my suit glowed when we were riding It's a Small World. I remember the suits right down to how the buttons looked (but don't ask me what I had for dinner last night). And, wow, were the attractions very different at the beginning! No E-ticket rides in 1956 because they didn't come until three years later. And of course this were back in the days where not much was politically correct. Something I didn't know is that Disneyland was never segregated. Walt Disney wanted everybody with the means to pay to visit the Happiest Place on Earth. That being said, there are precious few non-white people in this film (except for the "Indian Village" entertainment, of course). Interestingly enough, the boat skippers on The Jungle Cruise fired AT the hippos instead of in the air to "scare" them back in the day. Vicious.

   
• I've Been Framed! Every payday I've been buying picture frames to hang up prints and art and maps and bits and pieces I've been collecting over the past 50 years. Last time, I bought some frames that arrived in a totally a different color than I ordered, so they refunded me 50% of the cost and I just spray-painted them. Score! Today they finally stopped smelling, so I hung them up. They're prints by Bill Mudron as a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli films (based on prints by Kawase Hasui). I love them. There were actually five I wanted, but two of them were sold out, so I got the these three, which are incredible. They're in the hall as I walk in the front door...

Dang. I wish I could afford glare-free museum glass (to get a closeup glare-free look at them, you can visit the artist's website here). What I really love is that the characters from the films are almost hard to spot in these prints because they're very small. In mine for Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, you have to look a minute...

I really wanted the prints for Kiki's Delivery Service and Ponyo as well...

You can buy reproductions on Mudron's website, but you can't get them at the size of the original prints, dangit. I may buy a few smaller reproductions to hang somewhere else in my home, because they're so frickin' amazing.

   
• The Plot Thickens! If you've never seen Robots Draw, you're missing out. I knew about the account, but I didn't know that the guy behind it did a TedTalk...

Before I could afford a dot matrix printer, I had an Atari 1020 4-color pen plotter, which I'm reminded of every time I see a Robots Draw reel...

The printer was mostly for fun because the paper was only 4.5-inches wide, but it was better than nothing. Even if it took forever to print text because the letters had to be drawn one by one. Wikipedia has a short article on the unit here (which is where I got the photo).

   
• Gooey! I honesty don’t know how in the hell got to be THIS BAD at Apple after Steve Jobs’s died. Granted, I am using a public beta of the latest iOS, and this might be fixed... but... what the fuck does this last button do in Apple Music?

The first is shuffle. The second is repeat. The third is infinity auto-play. But that fourth button provides no feedback as to actually doing anything, so I have no idea. This odd set of buttons could very well be the worst GUI design I’ve ever seen. Coming from a company that used to care about GUI! Fortunately, long-time blogging friend LeSombre managed to remember an article about this very topic and was able to tell me it means "AutoMix" and Apple describes it as "Songs transition at the perfect moment, based on analysis of the key and tempo of the music." So I immediately turned it off, because I wondered why in the hell the end of a song was either sped up or slowed down in weird fucking ways as it faded to the next song via CarPlay. No thank you. And, on that note... APPLE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PROVIDE SOME FEEDBACK FOR YOUR FUCKING BUTTONS SO PEOPLE KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY ACTUALLY DO!

   
• Only Connect! If you've ever been frustrated by The New York Times puzzle "Connections," you should know that it was inspired (or stolen) from a UK quiz show Only Connect. These puzzles always feel incredibly difficult, and I can't fathom having to solve them within a time limit. It usually takes me forever when I have forever!

In other news... "Father's Day" was invented at a YMCA in Washington State?!??

   
• Atmosphere! Alaska Airlines has rebranded their loyalty program as "Atmos" now that they've merged with Hawaiian Airlines. Which is fine, I guess, if not for the fact that Dolby Atmos home theater sound standard already exists. I'm guessing that there was no trademark danger since they are wildly different industries, but I still wonder why they'd go with this?

"Atmos" isn't a real word. At best it's an abbreviation for "atmosphere" (which is where Dolby got it, I'm sure, because they're creating an atmosphere of sound). Not sure where Alaska's head is at here, but I can't help but think they could have come up with something better.

   
• Winds of Waiting! I am clinging to the idea that the person asking this horrific question has challenges gauging social situations and perhaps didn't know that what they were asking is awful. Anything else just beats down my faith in humanity to new lows. I don't care how impatient you are for the next book, this is inhuman. And I have zero doubt that this question already haunts George RR Martin himself. So... why?

That. Being. Said. While undeserving of... whatever this was... Martin has kinda brought fan frustration on himself. He has been stringing everybody along for thirteen YEARS. All the promises and all the assurances of Winds of Winter being a "priority" falling by the wayside while he finds another TV show or movie or game or book or convention or talk show or whatever to do. Anything but actually getting the work done. Add to that the HBO adaption utterly destroying the ending of the A Game of Thrones adaptation and making fans even more anxious to know how everything "really" ends... and, well, it takes things to new levels. — No, he did not deserve this terrible question. But I have to wonder if George RR Martin wasn't constantly making promises he couldn't keep, would we have an environment where people feel entitled to ask a question like this in the first place? Something to ponder. Also something to ponder? BRANDON SANDERSON COMPLETING A SONG OF FIRE AND ICE?!? Good Lord. I'd rather have no ending than that. These authors in no conceivable way complement each other. Like... at all.

   
Now it's time to go pick tomatoes for my dinner.