Month: December 2008

Categories
ToyBox

Little Cybermen, yay!

Due out after the first of the year:

Cybermen figures

I’ll take half a dozen of each, thanks very much. Left to right: Tenth Planet Cyberman (1966), Moonbase/Tomb Cyberman (1967), Tomb Cybercontroller (1967 – this one is a build-a-figure whose pieces will come with the other characters in this wave), Invasion Cyberman (1969), The Next Doctor Cyberleader (2008).

I don’t know if this is the entirety of the second classic wave, or if previously announced characters like the third, seventh and eighth Doctors are still on the way. Obviously, with the Cybermen being all over this year’s Christmas special, these figures are being announced now.… Read more

Categories
Home Base

Will the real Kevin Moon please stand up

no, I'M SPARTACUSSo today, I had to go to Wal-Mart and have one of my wife’s tires patched. I gave them my phone number, found out it was probably going to take close to two hours, and then set out to Braum’s on foot for lunch (about half an hour away). I had just left the farm before this, so I wasn’t exactly dressed nice…which is probably for the best since part of that walk practically takes you through a ditch. Anyway, I took my time eating lunch and then waddled back down the road and across Highway 64, which is about 6 lanes at that point with absolutely no crosswalk whatsoever. Helpful. Anyway, I got back to Wal-Mart, picked up some baby stuff, and took my loot to the automotive section where I hoped I wouldn’t be waiting too long. I fired up my minidisc player and listened to the end of a Doctor Who audio that I had started earlier that day (Masters Of War, about which I shall wax rhapsodic at a later date). Having finished that, I sat and waited.

Finally, the barely-helpful lady from behind the counter looked straight at me and said “Kevin Moon?” It just didn’t register with me that she was addressing me, because (A) that’s not my name, and (2) I was really tired by that point. I had to come out of my haze a bit to really comprehend that she was calling me by one of my friends’ names. Then I kinda perked up. What? Kevin’s here? I asked the lady if she had said Kevin Moon, and she said “That’s you, isn’t it?”

Flash back to about two or three years ago, when Kevin made one of his road trips through the area; he had a flat tire and I’d had to lead him to Wal-Mart so he could get his tire patched. As he didn’t have his cell phone with him on that occasion, I gave them my number, and his name. That’s how they had me in the system: Kevin Moon. Never mind this whole Earl Green business that I’d told them about when I checked in and gave them the keys.

Having gotten all that sorted out, I was able to get on with my day. Really, it’s too bad Kevin wasn’t there – he could’ve saved me that whole hike-through-the-ditch thing. I’m sure, given how I looked from working outside and walking through a little bit of mud (the ditch wasn’t really that bad), everyone at Braum’s assumed I was living under a bridge and finally saved up enough for a down payment on a bacon cheeseburger! 😆 … Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff Television & Movies

Behold, a stop-motion child is born!

It's a WTF? Christmas!Maybe it’s just because I’ve been sick as a dog and still wearing myself out running around chasing the boy, but somehow Christmas just hasn’t settled into my mental landscape as a reality this year. I know it’s only about a dozen days out, but for some reason this year it’s just not “real” for me. This isn’t a “bah humbug” thing, but more of an “oh well” thing. It’s there, I’m aware of it, but that’s about it.

If there’s one thing that has gotten me almost in the Christmas mood this year, it’s been ABC Family’s relentless showing of every Rankin/Bass stop-motion Christmas special…ever. They’re showing stuff that I’ve never even heard of, and here I thought I was a consummate fan of that particular sub-genre of Christmas special. Some of the stuff is just about Krofft Saturday Supershow trippy, shoehorning Christmas imagery into bizarre quasi-pagan-new-age storylines. I’ve seen no fewer than three completely different “origin stories” for Santa produced by Rankin/Bass. Heck, there was even one I’d never heard of before that jammed Leprechaun legends into a Christmas story – one begins to sense the faint sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped. But it’s all good fun.

I’m not sure what to think of this new special airing tonight that’s supposedly produced in Rankin/Bass style; I’ll have to wait and see. If they pull it off without even a CGI assist, then I say bravo – they will have single-handedly resuscitated a style of filmmaking that, if it wasn’t already dead, was at least on life support. If it’s just CGI animated to look like stop-motion, then…bleh. At any rate, they’d be hard pressed to match this loving tribute to the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials that aired way back in the first season of MadTV in the mid-1990s – you know, the season when it was good.

I remember this being a big hit when I was working at the Fox station at the time; around Christmas time, Marty Houston and I would sing the “we’ll get even” song incessantly around the building, and didn’t give a crap who was listening in. Good times.… Read more

Categories
Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

On the verisimilitude of bleeps and bloops

So today I dragged out a few of the old Odyssey x00/x000 dedicated consoles from the early 70s. For those not in the know, these were relatively-low-price-point machines which usually played a Pong-like game and maybe one or two other variations on that theme dressed up as hockey or soccer, released between the original Magnavox Odyssey (1972, the first home video game) and the Odyssey2 (1978, still my favorite). Magnavox, in trying desperately the make the things seem futuristic to you, the consumer, called these games by names such as “Odyssey 100” and “Odyssey 4000” (really, if you think about it, they almost made the Odyssey2 sound like a step back in retrospect). I’m singling out three of these intermediate Odyssey consoles as historically important in PDF Level 2, and therefore I needed video…so therefore I needed to hook them up.

Menu from the DVD-R of Odyssey Pong variants.Not so fast, though! Just hooking them up and recording their video wasn’t enough. Each of these machines generated its own internal sound – bleeps and bloops came from a little piezo speaker inside the plastic casing. Not only did I record the video straight to a DVD-R (through my infamous RF-to-digital rig, which was responsible for a heap of the first DVD), I also shut off everything else in the room – even the ceiling fan – and did sound recordings of each machine. I discovered that the Odyssey 100 and 500 had an identical bleep-and-bloop generator (that’s a highly technical term there), so I captured “the perfect beep” from one recording and manually synced it up with the video. The Odyssey 4000 produces a variety of bleeps and bloops, so it’ll be a slightly more complicated process, but the point of all this is that I want the resulting video on the DVD to present the true experience – both sound and picture – of what you’d see and hear while playing these games.

This is important because the Odyssey x00/x000 consoles – with only a couple of models excepted – all have analog components, and therefore can’t be emulated, strictly speaking: there’s no chip to emulate, just a rat’s nest of discrete logic wiring. This point was made to me very thoroughly when I plugged in the Odyssey 500: the analog circuit that generates the vertical lines that form the boundaries of the screen (and the center “net” line for the tennis/pong game) has gone way screwy on me. The vertical lines have groovy waves going through them, which also distort everything else on the screen – any video I gathered would’ve been useless. Fortunately, the early Odyssey x00 consoles had a knob that could be used to literally yank the center line off the screen completely. So that’s what I did – without that line on the screen to warp everything, the game appeared perfectly normal. I’ll reproduce the missing center line with the Avid’s graphics tools and it’ll look like it’s supposed to. That experience reminded me of why it’s really important to get this stuff right – because these machines won’t always be working. Compared to the video games you play on your Xbox 360 or Wii today, of course, these old Pong variants are cave drawings. But you know how excited real archaeologists get about cave drawings, don’t you? It’s history. In its own way, so is this.

I’m hoping to have the 1970s done by the first of the year, but I keep finding so much neat stuff to add – old Odyssey consoles, Studio II and Astrocade and Channel F games, commercials for stuff like Blip and Merlin – that it’s dangerously tempting to just make this one “Phosphor Dot Fossils: The ’70s.”… Read more

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

Ah great

Once again, Obi’s decided to run out the door full tilt and inspect the property. It upsets me when he does this, on behalf of Evan – he’s supposed to be my little boy’s cat, and ya know, it’s gotta do a real number on your self-esteem when your bestest furry buddy routinely runs away from you.

It’s just as well then that Evan’s spending tomorrow with other members of the family, mainly because his daddy’s sicker than a dog. I’ve taken so much Benadryl in the past 24 hours that I feel like I’ve been smothered with a blanket. Several times. I’m switching to a less ….debilitating antihistamine tonight, to deal with the chills, the fever, the aches and pains, and the fact that the hills are alive with the sound of mucus. And yeah, I know, I’m a real pansy if Benadryl knocks me out. Hey, I’m a square. I don’t drink or do drugs recreationally. It doesn’t take much. I didn’t go to the farm today – which is okay by me. I’m not sure I can handle a farm routine that Hannah isn’t a part of. I’d prefer feeling better to feeling like crap with a crapital crap, but I was relieved to not be at the farm today, as much as it might’ve inconvenienced everyone.

I did make the mistake today of watching some Sarah Jane Adventures; don’t get me wrong, it’s a great little show, and almost more like classic Doctor Who than the current Doctor Who is. It’s gotten a big boost this season from getting to cherry-pick from Who mythology as background info, as well as developing its own ongoing stories. But the two-parter I watched today was a slightly more convoluted take on the Doctor Who episode Father’s Day, with a nearly identical paradox. Benadryl-addled brain + temporal paradox = not my friend. But I kid SJA – it’s a great show, and so amazingly unlike anything that’d be rolled out for the early teen age group over here. In some respects it’s almost Buffy-esque in how it deals with “real life problems.” I’m glad it’s back for a full season in ’09, because with “light duty” for both Doctor Who and Torchwood, it’s gonna be a painful year.

Finally, a big shout-out to Jess Ragan for selling me a shiny new Mobilepro – well, okay, not new, and he keeps trying to warn me that it’s not especially shiny – but it’ll be a huge help to be able to stay connected while on the move. Evan’s entering the “stick everything in his mouth” stage, and as much as I’ve tried to keep hazardous objects out of reach, it stuns me what the little guy comes up with – he finds hazards that I didn’t know were there – and as such, sitting at the computer and merely listening isn’t an option. I either need to be close at hand, actively engaging him, or at least close at hand keeping an eye on him. Not having the means to walk around and do the wi-fi thing has been aggravating for the past month; I look forward to being “on the air” again.

Hopefully there’ll be an Obi cat at my feet while I’m doing it, too.… Read more

Categories
Home Base

Wretched hives of scum and villainy

down with the sicknessThis time last night, I was having a major, major, major allergic reaction to…something. I don’t even know what. I was broken out in hives (all of which felt like they were full of bees) from head to toe, and even my fingers, throat, tongue and eyes were swelling. I wolfed down some Benadryl when I noticed that the problem was going from “slightly annoying” to “this is kinda scaring the bejeezus out of me”, but what really scares me is that I don’t know what it was an allergic reaction to. I didn’t handle any hay last night at the farm while we were dealing with Hannah’s situation, I didn’t eat anything yesterday that I hadn’t eaten a zillion times before, and I don’t recall coming into contact with anything foreign enough to make me say “yep, that’s it – that’s what I was allergic to.” It was more than a little bit scary. I felt better this morning, but at the same time still felt like chicken fried crap because of the Benadryl – that stuff leaves me in a fog for days, from a single dose. I was also worried about whether or not it was a contact thing that I might pass on to Evan during a diaper change or other routine contact; fortunately, this seems not to have been the case.

Fortunately this happened at night when I’m not the only person around to take care of Evan; if that had happened while I was here alone with him, I think the situation would’ve been ten times scarier. As for right now, I’m still a little itchy and my hands/fingers are still a bit swollen, but really my main problem is still trying to come out from under the Benadryl. One Benadryl. It’s kind of embarrassing to realize how easy it is to put me under like that.… Read more

Categories
Critters

R.I.P. Hannah, 2001-2008

HannahOkay, this one hurts like hell. Tonight we had to put our seven year old Arabian mare Hannah down. She somehow managed to break her left front leg badly enough that there was bone portruding through the skin; the bone itself was shattered. We got there, with Evan in tow, just before the vet arrived to send Hannah on her way as humanely as possible, and she was still standing up as best she could, still trying to graze, like nothing happened. Evan patted her on the nose, and she gave a contented snort, even though she had to be in a fantastic amount of pain.

My wife hand-picked a stallion to breed Shel Hannah (Hannah’s mom) to in 2000, and Hannah herself arrived in 2001. From the moment her hooves hit the ground, Hannah was the sweetest, calmest horse who ever lived on the family farm. She had a brief bout with a respiratory problem when she was only a week or two old, which nearly killed her. In the week leading up to her birth, and for the week or so that she was sick, my wife was practically living in the barn with Hannah and Shel. It’s no lie to say that we invested everything in that breeding (as well as a Sultry breeding that wasn’t carried to term), but Hannah’s sweet disposition made spending all that time with her easy. (Here’s some video of Hannah and Shel showing off in June 2001.) When Hannah herself was expecting a foal in 2006, my wife camped out in the barn then too; the little guy who emerged was every bit as sweet as Hannah was, but he had cracked a rib just trying to come into the world and died a week later. (I camped out for the week that he was with us, caring for him almost around the clock.)

We hadn’t bred Hannah again, and her bloodline was fairly unique; we always planned to, but the money just wasn’t there, and obviously when Evan came along, priorities changed. I’m ashamed to admit that I can’t even find a photo of her that’s more recent than 2006. I’ve seen her every weekend that I’ve gone up to feed horses (read that as simply “every weekend”), but just haven’t taken any recent pictures.

For anyone who knows anything about horses, and especially Arabians, Hannah was just about perfect. Her carriage was just off-the-scale perfect, and it came naturally to her – she wasn’t showing off, she actually ran like that. We never put her in a show, and I wish now that we had. We came close to selling her a few times, but it never quite panned out, but I never once imagined that we’d have her for so short a time, or that she’d live her entire life on this farm. I never thought it would end like this and I’m having some trouble with that. Deja vu – I’m really getting to hate December: Iago, Sultry, and now Hannah.

Hannah was our own little miracle. She wasn’t a horse that we bought from someone else; she was custom-made just for us. And I doubt I’ll ever meet a horse as gentle as her again. Good night, sweet girl…you’ll always be our little Hannah.

Some pictures follow for anyone who wants to see ’em. … Read more

Categories
Home Base Toiling In The Pixel Mines

My assistant editor

BRRRRRRFFFFFFSo I had to rebuild some of PDF Level 2 tonight when I discovered that Evan had apparently done some…ah…work on it. Note to son of mine: if you’re angling for an “assistant editor” credit, you actually have to leave intact some of what was originally there. :shocked: No sweat, though, because this one’s almost a breeze to put together compared to the first one, at least where compositing and other things come in. Part of the whole reason to have an Avid at home, whether I’m still “in the biz” or not, is to keep discovering new tricks and, yes, new workarounds. Knowing how/why the machine does some of the things it does helps me find ways of tricking it into doing certain things for me, perhaps more efficiently than I’d done them before, and occasionally allowing me to do stuff that I simply hadn’t worked out how to do before now. It keeps me in the loop. Or it keeps me loopy. Not sure which, really. Suffice to say, even Evan deleting a couple of layers of effects/text/compositing wasn’t a disaster – it was a head-scratch and 15 minutes of rebuilding what had been there before. No sweat. I really wish I’d known some of these tricks when I was working at the station, but hey, no biggie. I still like what I’m doing now better.

CGE DVD news: pre-orders begin very soon. There have been just a few last-minute course-corrections on the homestretch, mainly of the “how are we gonna do this?” variety, but be looking very soon for a pre-order page with packaging shots, maybe a video preview or two, and other assorted goodness. The delivery date has slipped to right after the new year, but I think the results are worth the wait.

If all goes well, I’m hoping to record all of my intros and voice bits for the year-end podcast thingie tomorrow morning; I’ve got all the stuff written, now I just hope my sinuses clear up and my voice doesn’t sound like chicken fried crap. Or doesn’t sound more like it than usual. I’ve had a nasty bug since Sunday morning, but it’s been a stomach bug that’s had me stranded in the bathroom a lot (which is, I’m sure, more than you ever wanted to know); now I’m trying hard not to catch what Evan and his mom are in the process of getting over.

Under 24 hours to go on the Torchwood figure auctions; links if you wanna see ’em: Captain Jack, Weevil, Cyberwoman.

Also, if you’re aquainted with the apparently-un-chase-away-able phenomenon known as RugalSizzler on Digital Press and other forums, you need Sizz-wear. Trust me on this one. (If you have no idea what it’s about…stay away! You need your brain cells intact.)… Read more

Categories
Music Television & Movies

The Electric Light Jedi Orchestra

Lumpy!Every once in a while I run across something that really makes me believe in synchronicity – that there are simply no coincidences whatsoever. This interview with David Acomba, who was initially slated to direct the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, really keeps me thinking that way too. An excerpt discussing the original intentions for the legendarily lousy show’s musical direction:

FAX: It’s interesting imagining “The Star Wars Holiday Special” as a rock musical.

ACOMBA: It definitely would have had more rock ‘n’ roll in the same way that Robin Phillips is more rock ‘n’ roll, it’s just crazier. It needn’t have been loud, grungy stuff, but it would have been much more contemporary and much simpler. I like really simple music tracks. I think it would have turned out to be much better.

FAX: Who might you have used?

ACOMBA: Let’s see, who was available at the time? The new version of Jefferson Starship had some big hits at the time and that was okay for me. The Electric Light Orchestra, not my favorite group but, on the other hand, it does have some relevance because they were very big at the time.

It just goes to show that I’ve been right all these years: as hairy as he is, Jeff Lynne is a Wookiee. As many sci-fi references and concepts as he managed to sneak into ELO’s lyrics over the years, one can only imagine that old Jeff would’ve jumped at the chance. On the flipside, I’m glad that things didn’t happen that way – it took long enough for me to get my hands on “Beatles Forever.” Considering that Jefferson Starship’s song from the Holiday Special was never an album track (and so far as I know, hasn’t even shown up on any career retrospectives), the last thing I would’ve needed would be another impossible-to-find ELO song.

But given that I’m a huge fan of both ELO and Star Wars, I’m sure I would’ve figured something out. 😉… Read more