Month: July 2007

Categories
Critters Gadgetology Home Base

Step up to the plate

It was a busy weekend this weekend, what with the baby shower and all, so I haven’t had much time for bloggage lately. I’ve also been preparing for the CGE trip, which is…this weekend! I can hardly wait. I’ve got a couple dozen blank tapes on order that should arrive any day now, and I’ve also procured a fisheye lens, which I’ve wanted for about, oh, 20 years, ever since my grandfather let me try out the one he was using. I just wanted to take that thing home then and there. 😆 But…there’s just one catch. I had to put a step-up ring on one of my cameras to try it out…and now the damned step-up ring is stuck. You cannot get that thing to budge at all. Apparently the threads misaligned or something, and now it’s on there. Which means I’ll have to put a step-down ring on it at some point to make it compatible with the other stuff I have (telephoto, wide-angle, etc.). As a result, that camera is also now incompatible with its own lens cover. Go figure. Worse yet, I have to get another step-up ring to use the fisheye on anything else. (The fisheye isn’t stuck, just the adapter ring.)

No problem, right? I’ll just call Bedford Camera & Video, literally the only thing in the local phone book for photography supplies, right? I mean, a step-up ring is just about the most common thing in the world, short of film or tape or batteries, that I could possibly be after……right?

Wrong. Fine upstanding pillars of the community they may be, they don’t have any step-up rings that are “that small”, and they don’t carry any cameras with filter threads that small. But they do carry a full line of Nikon™® accessories compatible with their full range of Nikon™® digital and film cameras, so would I be interested in one of those? “No,” I responded, “because I’m not using a Nikon.” Then it sunk in – they were trying to tack the sale of a multi-hundred dollar camera on to a customer’s call about a two-buck step-up ring. 🙄 I mean, I’m sure the person on the other end of the phone was just doing his job, but the conversation wound up revolving so much around their line of Nikon™® equipment that the whole point of me calling was lost. Pffffft. I ordered the step-up ring I needed from an online distributor with second-day shipping. Because there’s literally nowhere else to go in this area for anything more than the most basic photography/video supplies…and if you go there, you’d better be ready to talk about Nikon™®’s fine products.

Sheer desperation has set in at home as far as where to put boxes of stuff that are coming out of the baby room:
Pac-Boxes
That’s a bunch of boxes, stacked on the slanted back/top of the Kick machine, covered in a Pac-Man bedsheet. 😆 Well, hey, it kinda fits the game room decor…I thought I had found a new home for the machine itself, but that prospect appears to have evaporated as quickly as it appeared.

Here’s Xena through the fisheye lens:
Xena
Xena

I love the fisheye lens. I promise that I won’t shoot absolutely everything with it, but it’s really handy to have the option of getting that wide an angle, even if it makes my dog look a little weird.

Today’s entry has been brought to you by Nikon™® and your friendly local Nikon™® dealer. 😛… Read more

Categories
Critters

Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it?

Some time earlier this year, taking my morning bath became a strictly solitary activity. I’d gotten used to Othello and Olivia coming and sitting on the rim of the tub and watching me without incident. The magnificent klutz that we know as Oberon changed all that one morning when he pushed Olivia into my bathwater (while I was in it). I caught her so she didn’t get more than her paws wet, but apparently she didn’t forget. I was drawing a bath this morning, turned my back for a few moments, and then heard a colossal SPLOOSH! that sent water almost to the ceiling, and saw a furry streak running out of my bathroom.

And then I saw this:
Oberon drying off

Poor Oberon! Looks like he’s gone swimming. I helped him dry off.

Oberon drying off as Olivia flees the scene
Olivia fled the scene immediately and was unavailable for comment.

Looks like karma slaps cats on the ass too. 😆… Read more

Categories
Cooking With Code Home Base

Pinned and pained

Ouch. Between working on the farm and discovering that the only sunscreen Jan had at the pool yesterday contained something that’s basically poisonous to me, I didn’t just get sunburned this weekend. I fried in my own fat. I was thinking last night before I went to bed that I was just an embarrassing shade of red, but now it really kinda hurts. Add that to all the aches and pains that I picked up over the weekend, between farm work and spending one night sleeping on the floor (don’t ask), and I’m not exactly feeling great today. I’ll probably still be lobster boy by the time CGE rolls around. Ah well.

Interesting article here about Spam Blogs, and it really points up one of the reasons I’m so fond of WordPress…though by the same token, I wish there was a little more due dilligence when it comes to “sponsored” WordPress themes. (I think I’ve griped about that before – ah, here it is.)

I almost forgot to mention, in last week’s travelogue of the 1984 Arcade, that I got my first real bit of Wii time in before Brian and I left his (really really nice) new house. I love that thing. I must have one some day. Brian warned me away from playing the baseball game in Wii Sports, but let me tell you, that was the moment where it really hit me, because I like playing baseball a heck of a lot more than watching it. In fact, I barely can watch baseball – it’s like a televised death march. And this is as close as I’m likely to get to being up at bat since, oh, about fourth grade or so (long story). Bowling was okay – I do about as well with virtual bowling as I do with the real thing (i.e. I royally suck), tennis was a bit better, but baseball was where it really clicked for me. I never got even close to letting fly with the Wiimote, either. 😆 Santa, please take note: I really, really want a Wii this year. I haven’t been so enthusiastic about a modern gaming platform since discovering retro compilations on the original Playstation.

I’ve been skimming the list of available, playable games at Las Vegas’ Pinball Hall Of Fame Museum, a destination to/from which there’ll be free shuttles after hours at CGE this month. Anyone who knows me knows that my very tenuous grasp of physics (for example: walking in a straight line, catching objects which have been gently thrown precisely in my direction, breathing in and out) extends to pinball tables. I never had the interest in pinball as a kid that I did in video games, and certainly not the body mass – as a kid – that one needed to really “work” the table. But so many pinballs in one place? How can I resist? This is truly the kind of once-in-a-lifetime thing one runs into at Classic Gaming Expo that I continually tell people is worth much, much more than buying a CGE-exclusive homebrew and then going home to play it. Anyway, what’s emerged from my research is a few lists of games I need to play/film:

Stuff I Remember From My Childhood: Orbitor 1 (Stern, 1982), Haunted House (Gottlieb, 1980), Black Hole (Gottlieb, 1981), Black Knight (Williams, 1980)

Stuff I’ve Always Wanted To Play, But Never Saw A Machine In My Life: Superman (Atari, 1979), Q*bert’s Quest (Gottlieb, 1983), and the biggie: Doctor Who (Bally, 1992).

Stuff I’ve Never Seen Or Heard Of Before That Intrigues Me Greatly: Space Shuttle (Williams, 1984), Star Trek: The Next Generation (Williams, 1993), Star Wars Episode I (Williams, 1999), Stargate (Gottlieb, 1995), Super Mario Brothers Mushroom World (Gottlieb, 1992), Super Mario Brothers (Gottlieb, 1992)

You can see the details on each machine linked from the Museum’s list. But…no Xenon machine or the original Star Trek pinball? Are you guys serious!? Anyway, I’m not saying that there’s going to wind up being a pinball section on my site anywhere. In fact, I don’t know what the heck I’ll do with any video or photos that I shoot of these machines. But I do know that it’s an exceedingly rare opportunity – the flipside, if you will, of the 1984 Arcade in Springfield. To hit both places in one month? Awesome.… Read more

Categories
Gaming

Invade the Arcade!

On Wednesday, some of my friends and I swooped down on the 1984 Arcade in downtown Springfield, Missouri – a good 3 hour tour (a 3 hour tour) one way from my house – to check it out. To be honest, it was better than I imagined.

It’s a fairly unassuming location across from the YMCA. Springfield’s downtown area was much more active than I thought it would be, and at several points during the afternoon and evening the arcade had quite a crowd (and quite a young crowd at that).
1984 Arcade in Springfield, Missouri

Now you’re talkin’.
1984 Arcade in Springfield, Missouri … Read more

Categories
Cooking With Code Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Fun and/or games

This week marks the official launch of yet another WordPress-ified section of the site, this time an archive for the literally hundreds of videos accumulated for Phosphor Dot Fossils over the years. It’s not the most elegant solution for handling that material, I’ll admit, but it does help me to get away from coding every PDF article twice over and then doing dumbass things like forgetting to change the template code (which is why every Apple II game looked and sounded uncannily like Ghostbusters for the longest time 😆 ). You can do a search by title and look at video of, say, every port of Zaxxon for which we have video. It’s actually kinda neat – give it a try. In time I’ll also add back in stuff such as the maruqee artwork and other artwork elements that used to be part of the now-defunct Arcade Artwork Archive section. See? Even in the digital world I’m a pack rat who never throws anything away. I decided to go ahead and launch this monster this week because, plain and simple, it cuts down on extraneous coding and goofball Ghostbusters mistakes.

Speaking of old games…guess what? I’m goin’ to CGE! It’s official. But there’s a catch – you probably won’t see me much outside of the keynote speeches, which I’ll be taping for a project that the CGE organizers will let you know about Very Soon. (Well, okay, I’ll spill: I’m producing a DVD, possibly a multi-DVD set, of this year’s show. Keynotes, alumni dinner, auction action, show floor, you name it. The current plan is for the whole shebang to be available around Christmas. So hey, there’s my major post-production project to be working on after Evan gets here. Funny how that works out, eh?) So think of it as a working vacation. Still: it’s a trip to CGE that I literally didn’t have in the budget, so it’s nothing but a huge treat for me. Hanging at the Expo with an all-access pass, doing what I do best (aside from kicking your butts at Galaga), what could be better? And I’m still going to 1984 Arcade in a couple of days with Rob, Brian and the gang, so July really is kinda like my last hurrah before baby time hits me like a loaded diaper.… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Home Base ToyBox

Things are going just swimmingly

Swimmy time
A look at our super secret swimming hole. And us in it. (I’m the bald, non-pretty one who isn’t using any kind of flotation device and is therefore barely keeping his head above water in the deep end.)

Little Girl
This is the lifeguard, Little Girl. Sooooo much better than David Hasselhoff. For example: I could never see giving David Hasselhoff scritchies behind the ears. Hell, I couldn’t even see doing that to Pamela Anderson, for that matter. And I don’t think we’ll ever see video of Little Girl sloppily wolfing down cheeseburgers in a drunken stupor either.

Dipstick
This is Dipstick. He’s a much older cat and loves nothing more than to find shady spots…and stay there. He is wise beyond his considerable years.

Oberon and Olivia
Naturally, our own kitties are more than happy for us to come home from the pool.

I spent almost three hours today shooting some video for a Toybox article you’ll see in about a week; it was quite a bit of fun and took quite a bit of setup, but I think you’ll like it when you see it. It got me thinking quite a bit about my evolution from playing with toys as a kid to collecting them as an adult, and I realized that I was much closer to playing with them today than I’d been in a long time – I was just inspired in a kind of “I know that’s not what it looks like on the screen, but what the heck?” kind of way, and had a made-up rationale for why things would be the way I was setting them up instead, and before you know it, scenarios form in my head and I have to remind myself that I’m taking some pictures, not playing with my action figures. I had a long train of thought about the nature of imaginative play, about how much modern toys (especially those attached to TV and movie licenses) are geared more toward re-enactment of specific scenarios than they are to open-ended play, and the thought also occurred that I would need to be accessing my imagination in that same wide-open, no-boundaries space once again, probably sooner than I think, when interact with my son (and play with him) as he grows up. Anyway, not wanting to dump all of the cargo from that train of thought at your station, I arrived at the following summation:

  1. In some ways, I have indeed never grown up.
  2. I think I’m actually happier that way, and may function better that way.

So much of the business I’ve been in all of my adult life has revolved around finding ways to do things, finding ways to make things look a certain way. There are several schools of thought here:

  1. It can’t be done by us with this equipment.
  2. It can be done, but we don’t have the time to do it.
  3. It can be done, we just have to rethink the angle of attack and use what we know about the equipment we’re using to make it happen in a reasonable amount of time and/or money.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am so Mr. #3. And that comes from that spirit of imaginative play. Anyone who’s so locked into one way of thinking that they reflexively fall back on #1 or #2 as an answer without even trying #3 needs to get out of the pool and let someone more playful dive in and make some waves.

My toys are mostly digital now, but damned if I don’t still love my plastic ones too. And if I get to play with both at the same time, even better.

I’ve already gotten one call from the Entertainment Fort Smith print ad for GreenhouseFX.tv, but they wanted me to shoot a wedding…on the last Saturday in July. Eek. Stay tuned for the explanation of why exactly I had to turn them down…because it seems I’m booked.… Read more

Categories
Critters Gaming Home Base Television & Movies

Big Fun!

Found even more treasures during the Great Clean-Up Of The Baby’s Future Room Wednesday, including my long-lost tape of the original Fox promos for the 1996 Doctor Who movie. I’ve put those up on the site here, just click each of the “preview” buttons to see the various promos Fox ran in 1996. Damned if they didn’t make it look exciting, eh? (And hey, if you like Doctor Who trailers, you can’t miss this one – if ever you don’t dig a trailer from the new series, just come back to this one again. 😆 ) I also found a heap of PAL VHS tapes of such things as “I Was A Doctor Who Monster”, “K-9 Unleashed” and “Who On Earth Is Tom Baker”, all of which I promptly dubbed to a DVD for safe keeping. I’m fond of that now-nearly-extinct breed of fan film/documentary hybrids that Myth Makers excelled at.

The trip to Springfield’s 1984 Arcade is still on, and just a week away. I can’t wait for that. I may have some other Big News in the next few days as well, stay tuned!

Got some swim time in on Wednesday night, then we came home and I proceeded to whip up both dinner and the next day’s lunch for both of us all at the same time. Well, all three of us. That Evan is a hungry little bugger. As usual, I didn’t get near any fireworks – I fired up the fireworks graphic demo on the Christopher Tumber Vix / Tsunami Vectrex homebrew and let it run all day. When other people did start blowing stuff up, Xena was ready to come inside. (Smelling me cooking may also have had something to do with that.) I was getting pretty irritated with some kids who were shooting off fireworks insanely close to our overgrown pasture, when all of a sudden it stopped, and yet I kept seeing flashes of light outside – lo and behold, it was the nightly thunderstorm to the rescue. With all the rain we’ve had, it’s probably too damp for there to really be any legitimate concerns about someone burning down my land, but it’s just the principle of the thing.

I’m just elated with the news that Catherine Tate will be back as Donna for all of the fourth season of Doctor Who. That just about makes up for the hash that was made of Martha’s character development (to say nothing of that finale…oy vey! Sleep, Data, sleep! Am I the only person who thought that Eccleston’s Doctor would’ve wiped the floor with John Simm without a second thought?). But Catherine Tate? I can get behind that, and not just because she’s delicious. She’s not 20 years old, she’s not impossibly stick-figure thin, and she doesn’t have an unrequited love thing going on with the Doctor… yay, she might come across as a real person. I loved that character in The Runaway Bride, although I fully understand that I’m probably in the minority there. (That episode, and the first one with Martha, air this Friday night on Sci-Fi, so hey, you tell me.) I know that I’m just an American who hasn’t suffered overexposure to Catherine Tate via her comedy show, but I just thought she was really cute, and the character was a nice departure from anything we’ve seen in the show before, old or new. And as for Kylie…well…ask me again after Christmas.… Read more

Categories
Critters Home Base

Unearthing the past

Amazing what turns up when cleaning my old room.

Jump Cut City raw tapes

These are the Jump Cut City raw tapes, straight out of the camcorder, the original footage that we’d pile layers of sound effects, etc. onto later. When there was a big Burchuss scene, we’d dub Burchuss speech audio directly onto these tapes as well. What a find! If one had professional editing gear and time, one could probably do a Lucas number on these…oh…wait.

Jump Cut City raw tapes

I’m going to have to look at some of this stuff and see what’s on it, because several of these JCC adventures never ever got finished.

Boxed Kitten

We’ve been boxing stuff up to store it away and get it out of the baby room, though obviously we wind up with the wrong thing in the wrong container from time to time…

Boxed Kitten

(Don’t worry, that lid was closed for all of three seconds, and wasn’t locked down. On the flipside, Olivia’s not jumping into every box we’re unpacking or repacking now…)… Read more