Sorry, shoppers, this was a one-and-done exclusive. I’m all sold out!
Of all the adjectives ever used to describe me, “toyetic” has never been among them. Here I am anyway!
I’m a Funko Pop!
Category Archives: Misc. Media
Best CDs of 2024 According to an Old Guy Who Bought 11
The nominees, alphabetically.
Hi, I’m Fat Casey Kasem and welcome to another music listicle, but not a Top Ten because I bought one too many!
As part of my annual series of year-in-review entries, I remain one of six people nationwide who still prefers compact discs to digital downloads. My hangups about vinyl would require a separate essay unto themselves. My new-album splurges are rare because: (a) it’s increasingly tougher for new music to catch my ear as I grow older and more finicky; and (b) my favorite yesteryear acts died, stopped recording, or swiveled in directions away from me. That usually means missing out on what majorities loves, thus further dropping me down the bottomless wishing well into total irrelevance as chronicled on this very website, thirteen years and counting.
In 2024 I bought brand new studio albums from eleven acts, omitting any pre-2024 finds or gifts, and not counting non-studio releases we’ll cover at the end. It can be fun to walk past the cool-collectors’ vinyl bins to the way-back by the T-shirt rack and pick through what passes for in-person CD sections today, though I’m seeing diminishing returns as those get smaller and dustier, sometimes not even alphabetized.
Indiana State Fair 2025 Photos, Part 7 of 7: Outtakes and More!
Mandatory state fair jazz hands!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…
…and it all comes down to this: me finally wrapping this up two months late. For starters, enjoy a few pics that didn’t slot perfectly into the categories of the first six chapters.
Indiana State Fair 2025 Photos, Part 5 of 7: The Year in Art
Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles performing their big hit, “A Hard Day’s Knit”!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…
Yep, I realize the fair ended over a month ago and no one cares anymore. Between Fan Expo Chicago, Dragon Con, movies, offline life and other hobbies, I’ve been sidetracked by higher priorities. Nevertheless, I’ve committed to finishing this miniseries of galleries for posterity and for myself. If a few images strike your fancy as well as mine, then hey, cool.
Anne and I are at that age when we’re more interested in visiting the exhibit halls than in rattling our bones on the Midway rides. We enjoy seeing what new works of paint, photography, building blocks, and science have been offered up for the various competitions. The State Fair holds its massive celebrations on behalf of our farmers, but Indiana has no shortage of artists, either. Whether adults or kids, the illustrators, sculptors, dollmakers and other artisans come from all demographics, work in multiple media, and bring ideas from pop culture as well as from their own influences and home lives. They each contribute in their own ways to the Hoosier State creative legacy.
Dragon Con 2025 Photos, Part 5: The Cosplay Parade, Video Game Division
Fallout fans welcome you to pre-Wasteland Atlanta!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
In 2019 my wife Anne and I attended our very first Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the longest-running science fiction conventions in America. We once again made the eight-hour drive from Indianapolis and returned for our fourth nonconsecutive Labor Day weekend at that amazing colossal southern spectacle. We can’t conscientiously afford to do D*C every year, but we’ll see how long we can keep up an every-other year schedule before we’re too old or overwhelmed to handle it…
Our belated coverage of Atlanta’s annual Dragon Con Cosplay Parade continues! We amateur enthusiasts took way too many photos that took me too long to sort in between juggling other life aspects (such as a family reunion this weekend). If you or someone you know was in the parade and you’d love to see them, pretty-please let us know! We’ll be happy to search our files and show ’em if we caught ’em. No guarantees, but we’ll oblige if we can. Also, please let me know if any characters have been misidentified. As we get older the number of pop-culture universes keeps multiplying and we can only contain so many of ’em in active memory at once.
Next batch up: lots of video game characters, just because. Enjoy!
Indiana State Fair 2025 Photos, Part 2: The Soundtrack of Summer
’90s alt-rock welcomes you to the Indiana State Fair!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…
This year’s State Fair theme was “The Soundtrack of Summer”, by which they mean “The Year of Music”. Summer is a time to listen to music while on vacation and/or while frolicking in the sun! Music is often written about summer! If music and summer were a couple, their celebrity name would be “Mummer”! I’m not sure if that should rhyme with either “bummer” or “boomer”!
The most noticeable expression of this theme was the fairground P.A. system, which they turned into an ’80s radio station (alas, no DJ) that was a pleasant addition to our surroundings whenever it wasn’t drowned out by the growls of the shuttle tractors riding their circular routes. Also supporting this theme, the Harvest Pavilion was devoted to one large exhibition called “Vinyl Revival: The Art of Music Experience”, filled with tributes to the art of album covers curated in partnership with Indy CD & Vinyl, that stalwart record shop in Broad Ripple that I’ve visited maybe once ever, because I’m only in their neighborhood once every five years or so.
I understand album covers used to be one of the perks of buying 12-inch records back in the late 20th century. Those covers aren’t quite the same objet d’art at the size of a cassette, CD, iPod menu, or music-app thumbnail. They mean even less in a culture where the music-consuming majority seems to have swung their support more toward individual singles they can toss into a 5,000-file digital folder than to full-length albums containing eight to twenty songs by the same artist and taking up shelves and crates in their home. I hate vinyl and vinyl hates me (long story), but I can recall times spent in my youth rifling through the bins at the major department stores that used to carry them, and just staring at the art that could sometimes be cooler than the tunes inside. I appreciated the chance to dive into the joy of physical media and its package design, which had to serve the dual purpose of buyer aesthetics and product advertising, as one placard acknowledged in a conscious effort to “keep it real”, as we used to say, though sometimes we Gen-X-ers were just being ironic.
Here We Go Crazy: Alt-Rock Hero Bob Mould Returns to Indianapolis
Hi-Fi Indy in our city’s Fountain Square district.
Dateline Saturday, May 10, 2025 — Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife Anne and I share a lot of important commonalities, but one of our smaller Venn diagrams is “musical preferences”. Nearly everyone I know with similar tastes lives in other states, and even that is a Post-It list. Therefore I can either attend concerts alone, attend only when Anne wants to (which has happened exactly once in twenty years of marriage), make new friends to attend concerts with [sigh], or never experience live music again. Once every several years, I let option A win and commit to a one-man night on the town.
My last concert over six years ago was fun and mentally invigorating, yet physically debilitating and emotionally isolating whenever the bands weren’t playing and I could dwell on my loner-in-a-crowd status. For years I thought it might be My Very Last Concert, especially during the COVID era. Six years later, here I go again for a new episode of “Is This My Very Last Concert?” Our star attraction is one of my all-time favorite musicians: indie rock legend Bob Mould — singer/guitarist with the influential Minneapolis hardcore/punk trio Hüsker Dü and leader of the short-lived power-pop follow-up act Sugar. He’s now touring to promote his fifteenth solo album Here We Go Crazy, which was released this past March and has been in heavy rotation in my car’s CD player on and off ever since. (It’s still so new, as of this writing Wikipedia has yet to bother covering it.)
Best CDs of 2023 According to an Old Guy Who Bought 7
Alphabetically arranged by artist, the nominees were…
Hi, I’m Fat Casey Kasem and welcome to another Top Less-Than-Ten list! And no, that isn’t a coaster that got sorted into the middle row by accident.
As part of my annual series of year-in-review entries, some of which I procrastinate much longer than others, I remain one of six people nationwide who still prefers compact discs to digital downloads. My hangups about vinyl would require a separate essay unto themselves. My new-album splurges are rare because: (a) it’s increasingly tougher for new music to catch my ear as I grow older and more finicky; and (b) my favorite yesteryear acts died, stopped recording, or swiveled in directions away from me. That usually means missing out on what majorities loves, thus further dropping me down the bottomless wishing well into total irrelevance as chronicled on this very website a couple times per week.
Best CDs of 2022 According to an Old Guy Who Bought Ten
Hi, this is Fat Casey Kasem again, and welcome to MCC’s Top Ten!
As part of my annual series of year-in-review entries — which I’m well aware should be posted nearer the beginning of a calendar year as opposed to the end of the subsequent — I remain one of six people nationwide who still prefers compact discs to digital downloads. My weird hangups about vinyl would require a separate essay unto themselves. I don’t splurge too much because it’s increasingly tougher for new music to catch my ear as I grow older and more finicky, and as my favorite acts of yesteryear die, stop recording, or turn toward musical directions that take them beyond my zones of interest. That usually means missing out on what the majority loves, thus further dragging me down the long plummet into total irrelevance as chronicled on this very website a couple times per week.
With the specter of COVID in our rear-view mirrors, or at least lurking in an off-road blind spot and plotting its next sinister mutation, 2022 ended up my biggest CD-shopping year since the 1990s. Of the ten acts represented here, two are bands with passionate voices I only recently discovered for myself by paying closer attention to Pitchfork over the past couple years. (In my defense, one of them is a debut album from a new act. As for the other one: I’ve simply been missing out.) The other eight are established pros preexisting in my collection, many of whom emerged from pandemic hibernation to reveal how they spent all that quarantined free time. Of those same eight, three average 40-plus in age like me. But I don’t like them just because they’re old. I’ve given up on plenty of now-elderly acts who, like, used to be cool.
Our 2022 Road Trip #4: Warhol & Friends
Come lie on Warhol’s couch and fail to embody him!
As a pop art fan, I’ve braked for Andy Warhol works at our past visits to institutions in Chicago and Columbus, OH. It was great at long last to see the much vaster treasure trove at the Andy Warhol Museum, opened in his hometown of Pittsburgh in 1994. A full five stories are devoted to the artist/filmmaker, plus a couple more stories for bonus content. They’re open late on Fridays, which worked out perfectly for our travel itinerary as well as the schedules of several other visitors, including an entire tour group that we had to weave around as we lollygagged from floor to floor.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 