A Christmas Story about the Atari 2600

Posted on December 20, 2024 by Reverend

MBS and I continue to make the doughnuts on the Family Pictures Podcast, episode 5 discussing the 1983 classic A Christmas Story is in the can. I’m really proud we’ve been able to keep the momentum up these last couple of months, and while we’ll be taking a break for a couple of weeks over the holidays, we’ll be back in early January with one of my favorite criminal family films: At Close Range (1986).

A 1981 ad for the Atari VCS (soon to be known as the Atari 2600)

Now on to my Atari 2600 Christmas story, which I also narrate in the podcast episode. A Christmas Story centers around nine year old Ralphie’s intense longing for the Red Ryder BB Gun, which maps almost one-to-one with my own obsession with the Atari 2600 as a ten year old in 1981. There was nothing more in the world that I wanted for Christmas than an Atari Video Computer System,* I was obsessed. I kept the Atari Catalog under my pillow for nighttime reading; its pages filled with wizards, aliens, astronauts, asteroids, Pelé, and end-of-the-world nuclear annihilation….I was all in!

Cover of the Atari Video Computer System Catalog from 1981

My mom was given to splurge at Christmas (maybe too much so from an accounting perspective), so I had a good idea this was going to happen. In fact, with seven kids to shop for all by herself, she would get quickly overwhelmed and the walk-in closet in her room became a dumping ground of assorted bags filled with random presents. Being a not very patient child, I would sneak into her closet and rummage through the booty to find my loot. Lo and behold I found not only the Atari VCS, but also the three hottest cartridges of 1981: Asteroids, Missile Command, and the old gold Space Invaders. But rather than being content with knowing, I had to take it a step further and bring the presents to my friend’s house, unbox them, set the system up, and play the Atari for a full week before packing it all back up and returning it to the closet. What a little shit I was.

Description of Space Invaders from 1981 Atari VCS Catalog

I did my best to act surprised come Christmas morning, but my mom knew what I’d done. She made a point of not ruining the moment, but would later confront me with the last words you ever want to hear from the person you admire the most in this world: “I’m not upset, just deeply disappointed.” That Christmas story still haunts me, and my siblings love to remind me (and my kids) of my boyhood transgressions when we share our holiday memories. Christmas was a wonder-filled time for me as a kid, and for that I’m lucky and still owe a great debt to my mom. Some of my most treasured memories of her are wrapped up in the mania of the holidays, and even then I had an inkling how big a psychic toll Christmas took on a single-mom with 7 kids. A Christmas Story captures not only the fantasy and longing of the holiday for a young child, but also a sense of how dysfunctional insanity and joyful excitement can co-exist in a moment that will one day become one of the many stories we cherish and share.

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*Still the greatest present I have ever received.

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Blog OR DIE!

Posted on December 19, 2024 by Reverend

Mark Corbett Wilson put together the above minute-long clip taken from the inaugural Reclaim Rewind 2024 event earlier this month. It features Maren Deepwell prompting me to discuss our company montra over the last several months, namely “Blog OR DIE!” What follows is a bit of a rant about how I continue to blog circles around pretty much the entire internet; just because I’m annoying doesn’t mean I’m wrong! In fact, Maren is one of the few who has thus far out-blogged me in 2024 with a whopping 65 posts, but the year is young yet for the bava! As of right now I have 60 posts in the can, and at least 6 more to go because Blog OR DIE! is not only a way of life, but it’s also an open license to freely talk shit on all those who do not Blog or DIE! as hard as me!! And there are many….all those little Instagrammers and Facebookers have no idea what it means to be free, they lead lives of quiet desperation, but they brought it upon themselves. I have no pity and will show no mercy! Blog OR DIE!

This can be filed under the category “Maren is nice.” Other info: Hat tip by @visualthinkery is licensed under CC-by-sa. Remix by Maren Deepwell.

I’m thinking this new montra might very well catch-on, I mean even the other “last of the bloghicans,” Alan Levine, is calling for this post—-and who am I to let the blogfather down? In fact, I’m making a commitment over the next 12 months to publish first and foremost to my blog, and only after that to sundry places around the web. I’ve been pretty good about keeping the blog central to my online life, but I could even do better. I’ve been known to push out a quick photo or link without taking the time to contextualize it here and ensure it remains part of this ongoing narrative. There’s another reason though, last week (December 13th to be exact) wrapped up the 19th year of consistent blogging on the bava. I haven’t done anything else this regularly over the course of my life, and the blog has been berry, berry good to me! As of now I have 3863 published posts and more than 16,600 comments on this blog. It’s my goal by December 13th, 2025 to have 4000 posts, which means an average of 11 posts each month for the next 12 months. If I’m able to pull that off it will be an average of 200 posts a year for 20 years: 4000 posts! If blogging where baseball it would make me something of a cross between Pete Rose (RIP!) and Cal Ripken Jr.: an iron blogger with hustle!

So this post is where I throw down the gaunlet and say Blog OR DIE! Not just as some blustery slogan (although that too!), but as an ongoing commitment to a way of life. A way of closing in strong on twenty years of blogging on this outpost of sense making in the wilds of the world wide web. 4life!

Posted in bavatuesdays, blogging | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Bavastudio One Year Later

Posted on December 18, 2024 by Reverend

bava storefront

I just realized that one year ago yesterday I moved into bava.studio, beginning an odyssey of fits and starts over the last 12 months. As might be expected, I have blogged the process pretty thoroughly. It’s hard to express how restorative and generative the journey has been thus far, and thankfully I’m still working out a few kinks and finishing the arcade part of the space before I fully “open.” Although something tells me it will always be a bit of a work-in-progress. This much I can say for sure a year on, it’s alive with the machinations of the bava!

https://flickr.com/photos/jimgroom/54213148005/in/photostream/

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Retropie Overscan Settings for 27″ CRT

Posted on December 18, 2024 by Reverend

I currently have two Retropie setups: one on a Raspberry Pi 3b and the other on a Raspberry Pi 4b. I did this to work through some issues I was having getting the OS updated from the Raspbian Stretch to Buster. Now that I have two working units, I brought one to the bavastudio to try and see how it looks attached to a 27″ CRT TV. Using a handy HDMI to RCA convertor I can take the signal from the Retropie and convert it to an AV signal that plugs right into an old school CRT TV’s RCA inputs. So, that’s easy enough.

HDMI to AV converter

After that, I needed to adjust the overscanning option on the Retropie to make sure it scales appropriately to the TV. To do this you take the SD card out of the Retropie and plug it into your computer and edit the config.txt file on that boot disk. The existing settings for overscanning were the following for me:

# uncomment this if your display has a black border of unused pixels visible
# and your display can output without overscan
#disable_overscan=1

# uncomment the following to adjust overscan. Use positive numbers if console
# goes off screen, and negative if there is too much border
overscan_left=16
overscan_right=16
overscan_top=32
overscan_bottom=64

I uncommented the disable_overscan option and set it to 0 and then commented out the rest:

# uncomment this if your display has a black border of unused pixels visible
# and your display can output without overscan
disable_overscan=0

# uncomment the following to adjust overscan. Use positive numbers if console
# goes off screen, and negative if there is too much border
#overscan_left=16
#overscan_right=16
#overscan_top=32
#overscan_bottom=64

I also tried to change some settings in the Retroarch config via the Retropie interface, but I’m not certain those changes made a difference. The above does get me consistently 4:3 Atari games on a 27″ TV with very little black space around the margins. It maps almost 1:1 against the actual Atari 2600 and 5200 consoles I have running on that TV—so I have a control to test with.

Asteroids full screen

Next step will be trying this out on the Retropie 4b, but I do like that at least one of the Retropies is using a CRT rather than a 4K monitor—the latter just seems wrong for all kinds of reasons.

Posted in retrocomputing, TV, video games | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Atari 2600 on the 3DS

Posted on December 17, 2024 by Reverend

Stella Atari 2600 Emulator for the DS

Atari 2600 emultaion running on a 3DS

About 7 or 8 years ago I figured out how to bypass region-lock on the Nintendo 3DS so my kids could play the games we bought in Italy. With the release of the Switch soon after, they haven’t even looked at their 3DS in years…..but I have! While researching how to get demo roms of the gorgeous Atari 2600 cartridges created by Champ Games running on Retropie, I came across an emulation project that promised to get them working on a 3DS.* I quickly abandoned the Retropie route and went all-in on getting StellaDS (the Atari 2600 emulator for the DS) running on one of my kids’ discarded handhelds.†

Screenshot of 3S Hacks Guide website (click to be brought there)

Screenshot of 3S Hacks Guide

In order to get StellaDS running you first need to hack your 3DS and get homebrew installed. The site 3DS Hacks Guide has an absolutely brilliant walk-through for getting homebrew up and running on your DS. I have an older US region 3DS that’s on the latest firmware, so I was pushed to the MSET9 hack. I followed the straight-forward directions (it looks far worse than it really is) and was able to get the DS hacked and homebrew installed in no time.

Universal Updater

StellaDS app in the Universal-Update after installing homebrew

Once installed you have access to the Universal-Updater, a homebrew app store where you can download and run the StellaDS emulator, although before doing that I recommend  downloading and installing the Twilight Menu++, a nice interface for your 3DS to access applications you get from the Universal-Updater. Additionally, the homebrew app store has other emulators for Atari 5200 and 7800 games, as well as a really nice ColecoVision emulator—all quite impressive. They’re freely available for non-commercial use from the Universal-Updater app store, but you do need to add the ColecoVision, Atari5200, and Atari7800 bios files to the root of your 3DS SD card to get those emulators to work.‡ I have to give a huge shout-out to wavemotion-dave (or Dave Bernazzani) for his amazing work on helping to develop and continuing to maintain these emulators. Niche communities like this are often small and relatively fragile, and the work of one person can carry the lion’s share of the load—so major kudos and huge thanks for all you do, Dave.

Atari 2600 on 3DS

The Atari 2600 Haunted House on the 3DS

I now have Atari 2600 games running on an old 3DS cleanly, and the experience is impressive. I love the lower touchscreen that allows you to reset/restart games with a simple touch. You can also press the cartridge space to change which game you want to play, it really makes the experience.

Wizard of Wor for 3dS

Champ Games version of Wizard of Wor

Coming full circle, the Champ Games play perfectly on this emulator which allowed me to finally scratch that itch. Those games are so good. They’re essentially hand-picked updates of Atari 2600 games like Elevator Action, Galaga, Super Cobra, Scramble, Wizard of Wor, etc. The quality of the game design is truly extraordinary, arguably some of the best games I’ve ever played for the Atari 2600. Galagon is essentially an identical copy of the arcade version of Galaga running seamlessly on an Atari 2600, which is insane for 11 year old me. The same can be said for Elevator Agent and Wizard of Wor, but this discussion might be worth a separate post given there is much to say about the awesomeness of these games.

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*The issue with my Retropie is it’s running lr-stella14, a very stable version of the Atari 2600 emulator, but it’s unable to handle the more sophisticated demands of the Champ Games. When I tried to update to the latest version of lr-stella I was running into all sorts of issues, so I jumped ship from the Retropie given I really just wanted to demo the Champ Games to see which physical versions I would buy, but more on that in another post.

†We have two DS consoles in the house, but I could only find the older, smaller 3DS. I know there’s a 3DS XL lying around somewhere, but no luck locating it thus far.

‡I have included all the ROMS/BIOS files for Atari 5200, Atari 7800, and ColecoVision in the following zip file. Just unzip and add all files to the root of the 3DS SD card and all three emulators should work: 3ds_bios_roms_a52_a78_coleco

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Night of the Comet: Sisterhood in the Apocalypse

Posted on December 16, 2024 by Reverend

Can’t stop, won’t stop! MBS and I are back for yet another episode of the Family Pictures Podcast—mark it 4, dude! This time we’re exploring the theme of sisterhood at the edge of forever in the 1984 b-movie cult classic Night of the Comet. A box office hit made by the same producers as the surprise sensation Valley Girl (1983) released the previous year. Night of the Comet was made for $700,000 and raked in over $14,000,000. Beyond it’s financial success in theatres, the film has continued to build a cult following over the past 40 years in large part because the aforementioned sisters are bonafide badasses. It’s a pretty easy case to make for this being a family picture—not to mention a holiday movie!—but more than that is the way it continually subverts expectations. The film’s goofy characters deliver ridiculous lines with dead-pan sincerity which normalizes the absurdity of their plight. The subtlety of the sisters’ camp, if that’s even possible, makes for a tongue-in-cheek satire right up their with Repo Man (1984). It’s not camp to them!

Badass Sisters at the end of the world prefer Uzis

Beyond the details of the film which we take you through over the course of the episode—replete with fits of laughter—are the personal memories linked to this film for me. This was one of my very first date films. What I mean by that is that as an eighth grader I asked a girl out on a date to see this film with me. Her parents dropped her off at the single-house theatre on Sunrise Highway in Rockville Center (and would likewise pick her up promptly when it was over). I like to imagine I gallantly offered some Twizzlers or Dots, but then think that I probably secretly resented every one I had to part with. Anyway, so I’m seeing this teenage comet zombie film as a 13 year old—one of the oldest recordable date movies I have on file—with a girl of interest and Sam (Kelli Maroney) starts in on her heartfelt monologue about how she’ll never have the opportunity to date her high school love interest. I could literally feel the pathos as I was greedily chomping my Twizzlers.

See the monologue where Sam talks about the boy at school she’ll never date

A month later I would go on another date film with a different teenager of interest, this time to see the lowly Runaway that brought in a fraction of Night of the Comet with 10x the budget. What does Tom Selleck have on Kelly Maroney besides a moustache?

Another story I told during this podcast that’s a favorite of mine has to do with a similar young love, end-of-the-world apocalypse film, namely Miracle Mile (1988). Towards the end of the podcast I was talking about the beautiful art deco El Rey Theatre where Night of the Comet begins, and noted it’s quite close to where I once lived on Cloverdale and 6th Street in the Miracle Mile district of LA. I saw the movie Miracle Mile while in high school, and I was a huge fan. I loved the way it started off a bit goofy, like Night of the Comet, but unlike it’s apocalyptic cousin it turns into one of Dante’s darkest visions of hell.

Chaos in Miracle Mile

It’s total whiplash in terms of the film’s tone, and unlike Night of the Comet which ends with the attempt to re-create an updated vision of the 1950s nuclear family, Miracle Mile ends with the two protagonists trapped in a helicopter sinking into the La Brea Tar Pits trying to find re-assurance that they’ll one day be transformed into diamonds. It’s as dark as dark can be when it comes to nuclear annihilation films, and the claustrophobic shot of them gasping for breath and making sense of their untimely demise is enough to haunt someone smarter than I was at 17.

But that’s not the story, that’s just prologue, here’s the story. So in 1990 I move out to Long Beach, California to stay with my brother after my dad breaks the news to me that there’s no more money for college. I had finished one year at George Mason University, but truth be told I was not too sad to move on. What’s more, I always wanted to visit California, it was the fabled land of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) —what’s not to love? Anyway, I got a job, began the residency process for low tuition at Long Beach City College, and generally started my acculturation process to the inimitable Southern California—a most wonderful part of the world for an 18 year old.

I also was running jogging a lot at this point, and while in Ralph’s Supermarket one evening, a bag boy must have deciphered by my pasta-filled diet and broken down sneakers that I run (maybe my once svelt frame also was a clue?). He asked as much, to which I replied in the affirmative (in fact I was training for the San Diego marathon), and then he quite nicely asked if I’d like to go out for a run with him and a few friends. I was thrilled given I had zero friends in Long Beach, so gladly accepted. I went on my first run with them overly confident and they absolutely destroyed me given I was just doing it as a hobbyist (story of my life), while they were actually on the track team at Cal State Long Beach.

Nonetheless, I was invited back a second time, and for the third get together they invited me to their apartment (they were roommates) to watch a film. “What film?” I asked. To which they emphatically responded “Miracle Mile!” I was like “Fuck yeah!” Not only were they excellent runners, but they also liked cool, independent films like Miracle Mile—I was starting to think we had a future. I showed up promptly and they wasted no time. They immediately dropped the VHS tape into the VCR; they were all business. I had seen the movie several times before, and was commenting excitedly throughout, but they just offered a stray smile and then returned to staring straight ahead at the screen, all business. Odd.

By the time we get to the final scene where the couple is imagining their future as diamonds in the La Brea Tarpit the entire group of runners loudly exclaimed “THANK GOD I’M SAVED!” I was ambushed by a bunch of fleet footed bible thumpers, and it occurred to me just how differently we read that film 🙂 The cultish vibes were on full display after that, and they even busted out the fire and brimstone literature and invited me to their store front church, but I was too Catholic to fall for their penny ante cult. Anyway, end-of-world films have all kinds of uses I guess, but Night of the Comet is definitely not in danger of pushing anyone to join a religious cult—to its defense.

Posted in Family Pictures Podcast | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Celebrate the Holidays with Reclaim

Posted on December 16, 2024 by Reverend

As we enter the final stretch before the holidays, I wanted to share a couple of festive events on tap this week as part of Reclaim Rewind 2024.

First up is the Community Chat on Wednesday, December 18th at 12 Noon ET. We’ve invited ALL our special guests over the course of the year to come together in one super session. You can hear from various folks about their exciting work, as well as share your own highs and lows of 2024. This is our opportunity to come together and say thank you to all those who have been generous with their time and energy in 2024.

Beyond the Community Chat, on Friday, December 20th from 10 AM to Noon ET we’ll be hosting a Request Radio Holiday Special on the mighty ds106radio. You can jump on our Discord channel or message @[email protected] on Mastodon and we’ll be sure to get your request on the air. So call-in you teenage comet zombies, and celebrate the end of world year in Reclaim style. This is our version of an open holiday party, and we really hope you can join in the fun.

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Working through Home with Mr. Mom

Posted on December 5, 2024 by Reverend

MBS and I are on a serious roll with the Family Pictures Podcast as we drop episode 3: “The Roles We Play – Mr. Mom.” What I’m finding as we continue to focus on movies from 1983 is how the process is bringing up some memories and stories from my childhood as a kid in the 70s and 80s. Stories are gold and more than a few are starting to percolate that are really fun to relate, like family free-for-alls in the supermarket or early mishaps as a paperboy.

Another story I forgot to tell was around my own mom’s return to work, much like Teri Garr’s character in Mr. Mom. The economic crunch of the early 80s was real, add to that a divorce with seven kids and my mom had no choice but to suit back up. More than that though, she liked going back to work, she was good at what she did and it gave her reprieve from nearly 20 years of constant child rearing—almost entirely alone. The other side of having seven kids—if you can last long enough—is the older kids eventually take care of the younger. In many ways my oldest sister Kissy (she was maybe 16 or 17) was a surrogate mother to me and my younger sister. That said, your mom is your mom and it wasn’t easy for Cathy, the youngest, who was maybe six or seven at the time. She committed my mom’s work phone to memory* and spent much of the day calling her at work—making up all kinds of crazy emergency scenarios to ensure the operator and/or her colleagues would put her on the phone. She called so many times a day (an hour?) that the hospital ultimately had to block our home number (I wanna think at my mom’s request). My mom would check in at regular times, but we couldn’t call her. There’s a whole bit about how central the home phone was to a household in the 80s, but maybe we’ll do that in a different episode.

Anyway, I’m loving how this podcast provides the excuse to reflect back on my own childhood and family while thinking through my role as dad 40 years later. I always enjoy Alan Levine’s reflections on his family and using his blog to pay tribute, but I always had a hard time imagining a post like that head-on. The podcast allows me a way to do it slant while talking about my favorite entertainment in the world: movies.

Speaking of which, episode 4 will have us leaving the comfortable confines of 1983 and venturing up a year to discuss the cult classic Night of the Comet as a family film—“a bit of a stretch?” you ask. We don’t think so, but you are just gonna have to listen to find out about this early date film for a 13 year old bava.

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*In fact, I might put too much of this on my younger sister, we all called my mom a lot—although Cathy was the worst offender for sure. In fact, I still remember the hospital phone number: 379-0007.

Posted in Family Pictures Podcast, film, films, movies | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

A WordPress Multiregion Recap

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Reverend

I started writing about running (or trying to run) a WordPress Multiregion (WPMR) instance of this blog in November of 2021. So over 3 years ago now.

WordPress Multi-Region on Reclaim Cloud

Since then I’ve written eleven posts tagged wpmr that focus on various elements of setting up and running two constantly syncing instances of WordPress across different geographical locations on Reclaim Cloud to ensure 99.999999999999% uptime. If and when one region has down time (it’s really a matter of when not if), the instance will instantaneously failover to a different region that will be both readable and writable. In other words, zero downtime. When the offline version comes back online, any changes will be instantly synced so there’s no missing data between instances of WordPress. As already noted in one of my several posts on WPMR, bavatuesdays doesn’t need an always on failover setup like this—it’s a bit of overkill. That said, it’s nice 🙂

Bava Multi-Region Cluster Cause I Can!

While I do want to pretend my blog is indispensable every hour of every day 365 days a year, the real value is for a top-level .EDU,  large instances of WordPress Multisite (WPMS), and/or other high-profile WordPress sites that just can’t go down.

Second Time Around with WordPress Multi-Region

WordPress Multi-Region: Is the Third Time a Charm?

Multiregion: a Year-Long Odyssey

A good part of 2022 was spent working with the Reclaim team to lock-in the WPMR offering, eventually getting it running for both Macalester College’s main .EDU, and soon after Trinity College—which was pretty awesome. As is always the case, this blog was used as a bit of a laboratory. It was a year-long odyssey in which I tried and re-tried to get all the pieces of WPMR working as expected, but the third time was truly a charm.

Flattening the DNS Curve with Cloudflare

Traditionally to run a WPMR for a top-level .EDU site, you need to control the DNS for the main domain. For most schools it would be impossible to provide a third-party like Reclaim that access given how much runs off that main domain, there’s no way they could point their nameservers to Reclaim Hosting. One way around this is to point just a part of their DNS, namely the www subdomain, using CNAME flattening in Cloudflare. This allows us to manage only the www.yourschool.edu subdomain, while leaving the rest of the DNS to function apart from the instances we run at Reclaim. What’s more, once the DNS is pointed at Cloudflare we’re able to manage load balancing, caching, DDoS protection and more.

After we got Reclaim Hosting’s www.reclaimhosting.com running on a multiregion setup, Lauren, Chris, and I did a Reclaim Today episode wherein we discussed the process as we were preparing to go live with Macalester College’s main site just a month later. This was a pretty intense and deeply rewarding few months at Reclaim.

Reclaim Hosting: the Site on the Edgeport of Forever Uptime

Soon after Macalester, we got Trinity College up and running on our multiregion setup, and both have been rock solid since (knock on the proverbial wood). It was also the inspiration to officially roll-out our ReclaimEDU services for schools that use WordPress and want to ensure their website doesn’t go down.

ReclaimEDU

In the spirit of experimentation, we continued to explore other DNS flattening services like EdgePort. While I loved that EdgePort could flatten any subdomain (or sub-subdomain) at a fraction of the cost of Cloudflare,* not to mention the built-in application delivery networks that ensured uptime even if both servers were down, in the end Cloudflare proved a much more stable option.

That brings us pretty much up to date. Looking back most of the WPMR development work was figured out in 2022. Two years later we’re currently going through a new round of WPMR for WPMS setups that offload media to S3 and are built on-top of sub-subdomain wildcard instances—introducing some complexity. The solution for wildcard sub-subdomains Chris worked out is pretty slick—but he’ll talk more about that on the blogosphere anon. I also have another post coming about a recent move of bavatuesdays’s WPMR back to Reclaim Cloud. I transferred it into a brand new multiregion using the Reclaim Cloud marketplace, and it was quite simple and included some new features. I’ll document how to get your own WPMR up and running in Reclaim Cloud shortly, as well as breaking down the specifics for setting up DNS and load balancing in Cloudflare. WPMR is the infrastructure blog gift that keeps on giving.

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*Cloudflare makes you go enterprise at the tune of several thousand dollars a month when you want to flatten a sub-subdomain: something like blogs.baruch.cuny.edu or commons.gc.cuny.edu.  We were trying to find workable options for our 2024 multi-region projects of CUNY Academic Commons and Blogs @ Baruch –we love you CUNY!

Posted in bavatuesdays, reclaim, Reclaim Cloud, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Peter Sellers Does Michael Caine

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Reverend

A few days ago I came across this video of Peter Sellers doing a brilliant Michael Caine impression on a 70s TV show. It’s simply too good not to share. It led me down a Sellers rabbit hole, and like the friend I shared it with already, it will ultimately end in a Sellers marathon over the holidays. When you read up on Sellers you quickly learn his personal life was a bit of a mess, to put it lightly. Whether or not those demons are part and parcel of his comic genius is beyond me, but I do know that now I need me some Quilty!

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