so, here is a copy/paste from the 2004 version of the post, now with archive links… btw, i would now add that, if you just want to get the story without reading every post, scan through the first thread, watching for the posts by user “blueseed” as they contain all the updates… on the second and third thread, the posts by “z167704″ are, of course, the most relevant… ctrl+F on most browsers will let you search the page… of course, all the posts are meaningful, so, i recommend at least scanning… anyway, here’s that copy/paste:

in the Dreamcast Technical Pages message board archives (now known as the AlwaysGame.com SEGA Forum), i found this thread about a regular of their board, Thomas Vazquez, aka “z167704″, with whom they had shared many hours playing PSO, Quake, and other Dreamcast online games, turning up missing right after the september 11th attacks… in fact, they had played Daytona USA with him the night before…

it all makes for a rather long read, but, this is some heart-wrenching, unbelievable stuff and there is not exactly a happy ending here…

i think the whole ordeal is relevant to everyone…

it all starts with this thread

and then, on september 25th

october 12th, aftermath and more of what the future may be like

and you could have a look at this

and this all has to do with a subject i yell about quite a bit…
the people who say that we should all “get off the internet and go out and meet some REAL people” or that you do not have “real” relationships on the internet…

tell THESE people about “real” and how these are not really “real people” they know and how they don’t really have “real relationships” between each other…

i also wanted to add something new that i find quite gripping…

in 2006, a couple released their own home video of the attacks from a breathtaking, but, of course, horrifying perspective… i don’t live in new york, so i don’t know where “41 River Terrace, the tallest building in Battery Park City North, about 500 yards northwest of ground zero” is (the location they give on their site where the video is hosted), but, it is a perfect view to see the entire nightmare unfold – this is unlike any video i have ever seen and odds are you have never seen it, either… most people have not, for some reason…

“What We Saw” By “Bob & Bri”

be sure to check out the FAQ on that page, as well…
(btw, i have a fairly high-quality conversion of this video i made for my psp and it should work on most small media devices – if you are interested in a copy, contact me using the info at the top of the right sidebar of this page…)

Related posts:

1. my annual 9/11 post that i think EVERYONE should read
2. My LJ Feeds Link
3. search terms that bring people here

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

here is the original word document for those who want it…

“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.” — NASB95

Theopneustos is the Greek word translated “inspired by God” — literally “God-breathed“. And this sets the Bible apart from any other document. Indeed, an ‘extra-terrestrial message’ sent to us from outside time and space, written by the One who created time and space and all that is in it. Everything else this passage says is because of those first few words; that Scripture is God-breathed. The same breath that He blew into the nostrils of Adam to cause him to have life causes the word of God to be alive (Hebrews 4:12).
However, there are many Scriptures that refer to God’s breath in terms of judgment. In Nave’s Topical Bible alone, I find several passages to this effect. Like 2 Samuel 22:16 (quoted in Psalm 18:15) where David seems to equate the breath of God as “the rebuke of the Lord”. In Job, Eliphaz speaks in 4:9 and 15:30 of people perishing by the breath of God, yet interestingly, in 32:8, Elihu speaks of the breath of God giving man understanding.
So, with the facets of God’s breath I have referred to so far, it is no surprise that we are told that His word is profitable for teaching, reproof and correction. And Elihu was obviously onto something, as in 2 Timothy 3:15, we are told that these sacred writings are able to give “the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus“. As has been well said, we must first know “the bad news” of man’s guilt and the penalty of sin if “the good news” of the Gospel is to mean anything to us.

Now, since the Bible is from The Creator of All Things, it is most certainly the only truly accurate manual for the human condition and the Christian walk. As the summary of divine revelation, it contains everything we need to know to for “training in righteousness” and to be “equipped for every good work” that God will call us to do. As Matthew Henry put it, “whatever duty we have to do, whatever service is required of us, we find enough in the Scriptures to furnish us for it“.

All of this being the case, we as Christians, ought to fill our minds with the Word. Through prayerful reading, devotions, study, and memorization, we “renew our minds” (Romans 12:2) and conform it to His will that we may be “doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:22). Ephesians 6:17 speaks of the word of God as the sword of the spirit, the only offensive weapon in the Christian armory, and we need to practice our swordsmanship so that we may battle the enemy the way christ did with “it is written” until the devil flees (Matthew 4:1-11, et. al.).
Since the Bible is how we learn the will of God and equip ourselves for spiritual battle, the Scriptures need to be our obsession, our hobby, spending the rest of our lives searching them, learning them, studying them. There is no pastime more worthy of our attention. As one of my favorite passages on the subject says “…commit yourselves completely to these words of mine. Tie them to your hands as a reminder, and wear them on your forehead. Teach them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are away on a journey, when you are lying down and when you are getting up again. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deuteronomy 11:18-20). If we spent every moment of the rest of our lives in the Scriptures, we still would not know all there is to know, so, we should fill as much time as we can with our minds on the Scriptures, “making the most of your time, because the days are evil“, endeavoring to “understand what the will of the Lord is” (excerpted from Ephesians 5:16-17).

Related posts:

1. an english lesson for the internet age
2. how do i make time with god my highest priority?
3. for luke and asbel

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

in my links on the sidebar, i have a special section just for random links… click on them to visit a random weblog, a random homepage, a random webcam, even a random page on wikipedia… i love random links and don’t come across them too often, but, now i have a new addition to the list…

do you know FutureMe?
it is a site that lets you send an email to the future… the link at the top of this post and soon to be on my randoms list allows you to see emails people have sent (they have been anonymized), with the date they wrote it and the date it will be sent…
i hit it a few times and there is some fascinating stuff… a parent’s email to their daughter for her 18th birthday, a guy entering medical school sending himself a message to be received after he graduates, someone on their first day quitting smoking, a wife on her 5-year wedding anniversary sending a message to her hubby for their 10-year anniversary, and of course, mundane things like reminders for a doctor’s appointment, and many many many that are not easily described…

they are small pieces of stories of dreams and wishes, hope after regret, breaking of cycles, escapes from the past, beginnings and endings and new beginnings… and you can’t help but imagine these people and their situations, and the more vague the message, the more interesting it is…

so, go check it out, and btw, this is the best kind of random link, the url itself has the command to randomize, so, you can go there and just keep hitting reload…

Related posts:

1. links – Dreamcast
2. cleaning up my “Looking At” list #1 – coffee/espresso
3. finally got change detection again

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

or “20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles” and wow, this guy nails it, even if he spends a lot of time being comical…

(warning, language that some may find offensive…)

Related posts:

1. the whole “Ebert on games” thing
2. Lifestream for June 22nd, 2011
3. people don’t get PlayStation Home

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

in many ways, i miss the bus… we used to take it all the time in cali… sometimes i would just get my walkman, catch a bus, take it to the end of the route and then take it back home… “two dollar therapy” we called it (a buck each way)…
anyway, i think this article nails it and there are some poignant comments, as well…

.
.
[i should start blogging links more often... i always just add any interesting link to the "looking at" section over there on the right, qute a ways down, but, no one ever sees those... and a link can go over there for a wide variety of reasons... anyway, i just grabbed the "Press It" bookmarklet and this is my first use of it...]

Related posts:

1. cleaning up my “Looking At” list #1 – coffee/espresso
2. wow, i think my inner child is wounded
3. Fw: Rio Rancho reaches agreement on wireless contract

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

for the record, at that time, i was in the early stages of my techie journey with a TI-99/4A (with the 128k (?) memory expansion, disk drive, voice synthesizer, 300 baud modem, printer – ah, what i wouldn’t do for a pic of my old desk), i remember reading computer magazines back then and hand-typing basic programs they had in there (they did NOT come with disks, though, you could order cassette tapes with that month’s programs on them, as i recall)… some progs were so big, they would publish them in parts, so, you had a month to type in all that stuff and then wait for the next issue… i guess i was eleven years old when dad bought me a book called something like “Beginning BASIC For Kids”, which taught me about strings, variables, boolean – i still remember some of the little visual aides and such from that book… after that book, my fate was sealed… for years to come, my notebook full of programs and notes was my best friend… i remember many junior high lunches spent with a mile-long print out of some program i had written, scrutinizing every line, command, subroutine, trying to debug the thing, comparing my original notes, looking for typos, looking for incorrect goto line numbers, any clue as to why it isn’t working…

a misspent youth, to be sure…

i spent most of my non-programming time playing scott adams text adventure games, but, i did my bbs time, as well… on one local bss – i wish i could remember the name – i had been caught cheating at tradewars… selling secrets back and forth – had three accounts, one for each opposing faction and one to collect my hush money payments :) neither team ever figured out who their rat was, but, the sysop did… somehow it all worked out that he gave me co-sysop access and i eventually worked for him at the computer shop he ran… dick scheffler was his name…

on a bbs called “the twilight zone”, there was this little game where you could win more access time (you see, folks, you connected to a bbs using a phone line, so, they limited access to users, usually starting at a few minutes a day for new accounts, and there were things you could do to earn access minutes), this was a “guess the number” game… so, i had, say, 30 mins access time per day… so, i would log on and go straight to that game and try to win more time… but, in 30 mins, i could only guess so many numbers and may guess the same one more than once (it was a three digit number), writing down each number i tried ate up even more of my precious time… sooooooo, i wrote a little prog that could try out numbers WAY faster than i, a mere human, could punch them in, read the results, try again, etc., and would never repeat the number it had tried since i started it…
as i recall, i got busted using that, too…

and, you know, bbs’es live on, both dial-up and via telnet… when i got my psion 3c here just 3 or 4 years ago, i didn’t have any internet software for it, but, i did have a modem and a comms program, so, i got some bbs phone numbers, dialled them up, searched their files sections, and, after trying several bbs’es, eventually found an ftp client that i downloaded, then used it to get the rest of what i needed from the ‘net…

annnyway, fun article… the “oh, let’s make fun of 80s tech” joke gets a bit tired, but, this one is not too offensive…

btw, my brother got a “petster” for christmas one year, more like ’87…

oh, and, before i go, it would be a crime to bring up bbs’es and not mention textfiles.com and the bbs documentary… which bbs documentary? well, THE bbs documentary, of course :P

Related posts:

1. Fw: The Phone
2. oh. my. god.
3. abq gas prices, our abq trib, and…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The true cost of free iPods – Engadget

Boing Boing: Lucas put malicious Xbox trojan on Star Wars DVD
Star Wars DVD Grosses $115M

Google Search: star wars holiday special
[not only do i remember the fam rushing home so my brother and i could watch this over 25 years ago, i have always rather vividly remembered a couple moments from it (like the stormtroopers searching the wookie kid's room), and the images at these sites were so familiar i found myself saying "oh yeah, i forgot about that part"... yet i have trouble remembering my own phone number...]

ICQ Chat Request

A visual history of spam (and virus) email
The Spam Weblog

Boing Boing: Fave music site: Oddio Overplay

Play the PlayStation Portable — in Japan – Engadget
[um, yeah, i'd probably like to play with that... btw, best pics of the PSP i've seen yet...]

Guardian Unlimited Film | Features | Ruined by R ratings
[something of a history of not-safe-for-network-tv language in movies being dubbed for broadcast...]

NetRatings: Broadband users a majority in U.S.
[i somehow missed this news until now...]

The Making of a THX LaserDisc

Cities Collection [via RefDesk's SotD]
This NASA site offers outstanding astronaut photography of cities taken during space-flight.

craigslist – Gorgeous 2br Penthouse on Las Vegas Strip [sigh]

Related posts:

1. links – The Holy Trilogy on dvd, two more 9/11 links, and a few various
2. star wars dvd notes
3. hell has frozen over?

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

it is a role-playing-required game, though, and i have not done that sort of thing since i was a teenager, and am not sure i am in any hurry to again, it can get goofy… (you should see some of the rp weirdos on pso… they talk to their mags and everything…)

anyway, so, i have been just sitting in the newbie channel a bit the last few days, watching how things work, and today someone was talking about their internet connection lagging, so, someone says “excuse me, but, it seems you need to read HELP INSANITY”…

so, i had a look and it is kinda’ clever…
btw, i can’t help but hear peter jones reading this…

15.6.1 Insanity

(see HELP ROLEPLAYING)

Adventurers are a special group of people. Sarapis has given to adventurers both strengths and weaknesses that denizens do not have. One of the weaknesses to which an Adventurer may fall prey is insanity.

The first sign of insanity is when the poor victim starts to use words that are meaningless to others, such as talking about "my PC" or "being online" as if everybody else should know what is meant!

If the insanity is allowed to go unchecked, the victim may begin to believe that the imaginary world is the real world and that Achaea does not really exist.

Some fancy that qualities of their own existence, such as their health or life experience are nothing more than numbers!

Chilling, isn’t it?

Most distressing of all is when the insanity appears more akin to a case of possession by some vile, alien creature. Victims in this final stage may call life a game, and imagine that they are nothing more than playing pieces in that game, controlled by some greater being.

If you’ve been asked to read this scroll, consider this: have you been showing signs of insanity?
Are you willing to take the first step and admit that you are ill and in need of a cure?

To those of you who see others suffering: insanity is a disease of the mind. Those afflicted with it should not be ridiculed, as this tends to aggravate the condition. Speak to them privately. Show them concern and understanding. Remind them of their true reality and home here, in Achaea!

Nobody wants to see insanity o’erwhelm us all.

Related posts:

1. virtual worlds, virtual drugs
2. yes, abq has free city-provided wifi
3. Movies i have seen countless times growing up

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

here is the latest version of it…
for those who have read it before, there is a chronology fix and i added a follow-up thread that i had somehow missed before that has important info…

in the Dreamcast Technical Pages message board archives (now known as the AlwaysGame.com SEGA Forum), i found this thread about a regular of their board, Thomas Vazquez, aka “z167704″, with whom they had shared many hours playing PSO, Quake, and other Dreamcast online games, turning up missing right after the september 11th attacks… in fact, they had played Daytona USA with him the night before…

it all makes for a rather long read, but, this is some heart-wrenching, unbelievable stuff and there is not exactly a happy ending here…

i think the whole ordeal is relevant to everyone…

it all starts with this thread

and then, on september 25th

october 12th, aftermath and more of what the future may be like

and you could have a look at this

and this all has to do with a subject i yell about quite a bit…
the people who say that we should all “get off the internet and go out and meet some REAL people” or that you do not have “real” relationships on the internet…

tell THESE people about “real” and how these are not really “real people” they know and how they don’t really have “real relationships” between each other…

Related posts:

1. My annual 9/11 post i think EVERYONE should read (v2)
2. 9/11
3. search terms that bring people here

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

i am standing at my espresso machine, waiting for it to brew, and i look up out the kitchen window and there is this HUGE blue hot air balloon… i mean, this thing was CLOSE and LOW… MASSIVE…
it looked like maybe the pilot lived here and he was looking for a parking spot…

i picked up my jaw, dashed into the bedroom, “mary! mary! hurry! come look! you gotta’ see this! it’s better than goofy golf!”
poor girl probably got to sleep about 5a, but, she managed to stumble to the window, i look out the living room window and there is another balloon a little ways out, in the place where i usually see a balloon or two in the early mornings (somewhere around here, you can take rides between like 7a and 10a)…
i go look out our bedroom window, and AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!, one very low, floating right above our bedroom! dark dark blue, almost black, HUGE, and just hanging there almost right above my head…

then i come to my senses…

CAMERAAAAAAAAA!!!!

so, i run and grab my camera, run out on the balcony, point at the blue one and beep beep beeeeep…
NOOOO!!!
so, i run inside, and grab her camera, run back out to the balcony, the blue one is seriously getting away and is nowhere near as close, turn the camera on, sight it up, and beep beep beeeeeep…
NOOOOOO!!!! DAMMIT!!!!

run inside, fire up the software, hook up the cam…
EMPTY???!!! other one, also empty!!

BATTERIES!!!!!!!

to the cabinet, stuff falls out, dig up the AAA’s, dump the dead ones on the floor, load up two new ones, run outside and…

gone…

run down the stairs, look west…

nothing…

south…

nothing…

run around the building, look east…

nothing…

look around for an animal or something to kick…

nothing…

(nothing i feel like getting in trouble for, anyway…)

go back upstairs, mary is back in bed, sound asleep, i look out every window, nothing…

like i had only dreamed it…

so now i sit typing this, going and looking out the windows every couple minutes, drinking my espresso, which is cold after all that…

next time, dammit, next time…

Related posts:

1. AIBF, day 3, first event
2. NINE hot-air balloons from my balcony
3. flickr’d photo: hot air balloon season is here!

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

there is much to agree with in both the article and the comments thread…

as an added bonus, there is a great anti-microsoft rant in a user comment…

among the highlights:

If you told a stranger to Earth what they get away with on the desktop, they’d think their babelfish was broken.

Related posts:

1. links – couple of star wars dvd bits, a few various
2. links – a few various, a few from site feeds, and a .name
3. Bird’s Eye Tourist

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

anyway, i will comment on some, but not all of the new pics, so, to see them all, follow the links above…
more importantly, this will be a two-part post… i am posting one part and miss mary is posting the other, so, be sure to read her post as well… (i will remind you of this again at the end of this post, btw…)

firstly, from the mayjune subdir, the laserdisc turtle…

i cannot find this image on the net, oddly enough, so, i took a pic of it on our tv… for those not in the know, laserdiscs that only used one side of a disc had this turtle on the other side, as the message in the pic suggests…

and now on to the more recent pics…

this is the view from my parents’ back yard… these are the sorts of pics that make me crazy that i still don’t have a real digital camera…

the reason i went down was to help out while my mom was in hospital, all the pics from the hospital are in the photos/2004-aug subdir and are labelled “GCRMC” (gerald champion regional medical center), but, here are a few i wanted to comment on…

she did not have a private room like dad did, and there was usually someone in the other bed… that can really ruin your day… one was a woman in moaning pain, the next was a woman with gasping-for-air attacks… mom does really well in the hospital and surgery, so, at times we were more concerned about the person in the next bed…

the smoking patio… i have spent much time here during my now two hospital visits… smoking is not really allowed on the grounds of the hospital anywhere, but, this is where staff sneaks away to and a nurse pointed it out to me during my first trip…
you get to meet staff and other family members who are visiting, so, needless to say, you hear some very sad stories…

this is mom on the last day, waiting to be released… she had her gall bladder removed (same as dad did back in march) and, as usual, bounced back remarkably… she’s a real trooper…

waiting to be released is boring… they say you are leaving today, then you have to wait for paperwork to be done…

i think that was all the ones i wanted to comment on, you can see the rest of the pics at the links at the top of this post… or just go to our photos, which are all grouped by date…

i was there about two weeks and miss mary was there with me for the last week or so, and, on our last day, we went to white sands national monument and took a couple pics…
as i said above, this is a two-part post, miss mary will tell the white sands story and show the pics, it was her first time there and it was a magnificent experience…

Related posts:

1. apartment progress report
2. How have you been?
3. back home in abq

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Stanley Kubrick’s films were landmark events – majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery – this is what he found

and here are some excerpts giving you a hint of the weirdness within…

starting with a bit of background…

nine years had passed since Kubrick’s last film, Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a vast country house somewhere near St Albans – or a “secret lair”, according to a Sunday Times article of that year – behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. Nobody even knew what he looked like. It had been 16 years since a photograph of him had been published.
He’d gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths Of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the 1960s (Lolita, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films a decade in the 1970s and 1980s (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing. What the hell was he doing in there? According to rumours, he was passing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 30mph.

and…

“The good news,” wrote Nicholas Wapshott in the Times in 1997, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, “is that Kubrick is a hoarder … There is an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwick Bury. When that is eventually opened, we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the Droogs and Jack Torrance.”

and then, inside kubrick’s world…

There are boxes everywhere – shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive.

Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. “This used to be the cinema,” he says.
“Is it the library now?” I ask.
“Look closer at the books,” says Tony.
I do. “Bloody hell,” I say. “Every book in this room is about Napoleon!”
“Look in the drawers,” says Tony.
I do.
“It’s all about Napoleon, too!” I say. “Everything in here is about Napoleon!”

“Somewhere else in this house,” Tony says, “is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon’s inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it’ll tell you.”
“Who made up the cards?” I ask.
“Stanley,” says Tony. “With some assistants.”
“How long did it take?” I ask.
“Years,” says Tony. “The late 1960s.”

In one portable cabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes related to Eyes Wide Shut, marked EWS – Portman Square, EWS – Kensington & Chelsea, etc, etc. I choose the one marked EWS – Islington because that’s where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaner’s, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find, to my astonishment, pictures of the doorways of the houses in my own street. Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words, “Hooker doorway?”
“Huh,” I think. So somebody within the Kubrick organisation (it was, in fact, his nephew) once walked up my street, on Kubrick’s orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth.
It is not, though, as incredible a coincidence as it may at first seem. Judging by the writing on the boxes, probably just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this cabin.

The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front – Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California, and so on – and they are in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten “F-P” on the positive ones and “F-N” on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked “F-C”.

“Stanley loved typefaces.” Jan pauses. “I tell you what else he loved.”
“What?” I ask.
“Stationery,” says Jan.
I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. “His great hobby was stationery,” he says. “One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, ‘What are you going to do with all that ink?’ He said, ‘I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.’ Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink.” Jan pauses. “He loved stationery, pads, everything like that.”

I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the town from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.
It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn’t ripped.

Related posts:

1. the end of whining about “those black bars”?
2. moving day
3. Coens in the ‘querque!

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

so, we have the criterion laserdisc of halloween and a standard laser release of the omen and we watched them both the other night…

first up was halloween, the film credited with starting the “slasher” genre…
and, it was not long until we were wishing it would hurry up and end…
of course, after starman, the thing, escape from new york, and now this, i think we are ready to really and truly give up on john carpenter…

the only good thing i have to say about it is that the music was very good…

one interesting device i noticed was that, as the movie built up to the climax, it seemed to me that the director was intentionally using a lot of shots to show the time of day… no indoor shots without plenty of windows and most shots prominently showed the placement of the sun, like a ticking countdown to nightfall… in fact, at one point, it is suddenly and abruptly night, which gave me a feeling of “it’s night already!? they’re out of time!”…
while this kept me (almost unconsciously) estimating how much time was left, i really could not care less if these people were actually going to survive or not… we were hardly told anything about them, so, they really did not seem like real people, just actors doing what the director told them to…
and, as is always the case, the characters seemed to behave in very unbelievable ways… i know this is a staple of the genre, but, that is one of the things that alienates me from the genre… too much of having to give up reason to follow the story… not that there is usually much of a story… i often hear horror described as a sub-genre of sci-fi, but, to me it seems more a sub-genre of action… any film where you can relate pretty much everything it covers as just “this happened, then that happened, etc.” is an action movie… no concepts to ponder, no characters to get to know better, no reason to care WHY things are happening, most of the time… all of that comes in scarce tidbits, which is why, to be totally coherent, you need a whole series of films… maybe by die hard 3, i might care what happens to john maclaine, maybe by halloween 9 i might know why michael myers killed his sister and all these others…

if they were better movies, i might take that journey…

or maybe i will listen to the commentary on halloween and see if john carpenter can reveal to me the subtle intricacies…

then, with a bad taste in our mouths, we took a chance on the omen…
this one was much better, but, there was very little action, just lots of dialogue and concepts… it was more like a mystery to be solved…
now, i must say i thought the dialogue was very weak… it got the point across, but, there was no personality, no cadence, no art… with good dialogue, you can take a line out of context and, if you know the characters, you can usually deduce who said it… and this is true of life as well… the omen is one of countless movies where you could have mixed and matched the dialogue between characters… the characters were definitely not defined by how they said what they said, they were just telling us what we needed to know to advance the plot… in a movie filled with dialogue, you need more personalized speech to really carry it, or at least to keep it interesting… (cf. david mamet, btw…)
but still, it was a good movie… pacing was good, i was never really bored, the material was great, and the music was superb, even though it was mono… the actors were varied; the kid was great (not that it was a demanding part), the various clergy were good, and the nannies were great, but, too many other parts seemed totally interchangable…

we liked it… it does not go on “the shelf”, but, i will definitely watch it again sometime to look for other nuances… i just don’t expect much from donner in that area…

i just have a hard time calling it “horror”… it was more of a mystery, as i said above… yes, there were horrific IDEAS, but, again, that makes it a movie of IDEAS, not actions…

as far as “horror” goes, we have only really seen a few and disliked most of them… (btw, remember, we pretty much only count what we have seen since we started into the world of dvd and home theater, since we now “see” movies differently than we used to… i have seen literally thousands of movies, but, i know a lot more about movies now and feel i need to give them all another chance…)
i will briefly touch on a few and try to avoid sci-fi horror, like alien, forbidden planet, or event horizon, just to try to prove we are capable of contemplating another genre…

we have seen a nightmare on elm street and wes craven’s new nightmare and only new nightmare was any good to us… i guess because it was likeable even if you scoffed at the genre… hell, it scoffed with you… but, even new nightmare is in “the pile”, not on “the shelf”… it was good once, may be again, but, we are not in any hurry… the next viewing would probably be for the commentary…

poltergeist IS on the shelf… now that is one creepy film… the chair-stacking scene chills me every time… in fact, there is so much good about that movie, i will not even get started lest i go three paragraphs…

then, there is that “m. night” dude or whatever… we have seen both signs and sixth sense and disliked both of them… and there was very little that we found disturbing, creepy, and very very little that was anything like scary… sure, a few disturbing concepts, no action movies here, but, still, they are old concepts and the films really brought very little, if anything, to the genre that we had not seen before…
and, btw, we generally despise surprise endings… in fight club, it explained a lot, in sixth sense, it seemed just a gimmick… (iow, with the former, you want to watch it again more to understand the symptoms better now that you know the cause, in the latter you want to watch again to see if the film is internally consistent with the ending…)
[must've re-written the last two sentences twenty times to ensure it was spoiler free :P]

now, one horror movie we really liked was the others (and, no, not because it had our beloved nicole in it, though that doesn’t hurt it any)…
that was one SCARY frickin’ movie!
i mean, it was disturbing!
and, one of the best uses of surround that we have ever heard…
we were jumping, cringing, hoping that what we knew must happen next would not happen; i think the others, so far, is the only movie to actually put a fright in us…
it was just plain well-directed… the kids, the rules of the house, the cinematography, including the overall look, the time setting, it just starts pulling you in to an alternate reality, so, you already have no idea what to expect and it unhinges your mind from the everyday, emptying it, so it can fill it up with what the director chooses, hopefully freeing you from expectations of normality… like misdirection… and the unfamiliarity
means it will be more unpredictable, which means it has the potential to be scarier… and the director did not disappoint, though, admittedly, the first half of the movie is much much better than the second half…
it is a dvd, not a laserdisc, so there is no “shelf vs. pile” issue (all our dvd’s are in one place), but, if there was a choice to be made, it would go on the shelf…

so, anyway, next in our horror education will probably be clive barker… we have nice laserdiscs of the serpent and the rainbow, hellraiser, and lord of illusions (or is it the frighteners? can’t remember)… i read the great and secret show and loved it (though, more fantasy than horror)… i found it to be very original, creative, and interesting, so i figure i will like more of his stuff… having seen some clive barker long ago, i think it is safe to assume it will be truly horrifying stuff, with more in common with event horizon than the other stuff i have been covering here…
hopefully in a good way…

Related posts:

1. march movies
2. Movies I watched – April 2009
3. Follow the music… August Rush

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

here are some excerpts…

The world of massively multiplayer online games is often a dangerous place, what with constant threats from bloodthirsty monsters and murderous non-player characters. But now players have even more peril to contend with: addictive drugs that can incapacitate or kill their characters.

The designers of Achaea, one of the biggest online text-based games, have recently introduced a virtual addictive drug — known as gleam — as part of a story line in which a crime ring has been attempting to infiltrate the game’s cities. And some players can’t take it fast enough.

Achaea characters who take gleam get hooked quickly — suffering typical addiction symptoms: violent vomiting, shivering, irrational sobbing, begging for the drug and even overdoses resulting in death. Some of the game’s players are angry about gleam’s introduction into their world.

and then, there are virtual performance-enhancing virtual drugs…

In A Tale in the Desert, players discovered that by dosing their characters with a potion called Speed of the Serpent, they could gain extra waypoints, a valuable attribute allowing for instant travel across the game’s wide three-dimensional globe.

Speed of the Serpent was poisonous, though, and required the ingestion of an antidote within 30 days, or the character would die. If a player took the potion a second time, the antidote was needed within 29 days; a third use meant 28 days and so on.

Eventually, as players succumbed to their desire for the extra waypoints, the interval between potion and antidote was short enough that even the hard-core couldn’t keep up. According to Andy Tepper, the game’s lead designer, 18 players’ characters have died from addiction to Speed of the Serpent, more than from any other cause in the game’s history. Unlike in many multiplayer online games, where death means little, in A Tale in the Desert, a character’s death is final. It means starting over from the beginning, no small price for dabbling in a little performance-enhancing potion.

meanwhile, elsewhere in the virtual multiverse…

But even the larger games have elements some consider akin to addictive substances. For example, in Galaxies, smuggler-class players traffic in spices, spells that increase characters’ skills.

In an article in RPG Expert called “Life of a Smuggler,” the author wrote that spices can offer terrific benefits, such as increased strength. Yet there are also side effects, like lowered strength and vomiting, that last as long as the high.

Given the side effects, though, one might ask why the risk is worthwhile. [the eternal addict question, eh? -i_p] The author’s answer sounds just like it came from a real-world drug dealer.

“OK, who will buy and use your spices? Almost everyone that tries them a few times gets hooked,” the article read. “Free samples are good for business!!”

Related posts:

1. people don’t get PlayStation Home
2. problems with LaserDiscs and HDTV
3. flickr’d photo: dad dying at home

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

for those not familiar with the concept of feeds, it is a way to gather
content from a site, without going there… this blog of mine has an atom xml
feed, so, you could get my posts in your favorite “feed aggregator” (along
side feeds from other sites), rather than stopping by to see if i’ve posted
anything new or signing up for the email notification…
at livejournal, people set up xml/rss/etc. feeds for various sites, or use
feeds already offered and you can add those feeds to your lj friends page for
a public online aggregator… there are hundreds of choices, everything from
daily comics like garfield and dilbert, to news, weather, movie reviews, all
sorts of stuff…
you just have to see it to appreciate the sheer coolness of it…
since i have few lj friends, i fill it up with these feeds and then i get
stuff from sites i would not otherwise go to everyday, in one convenient
trip… so, you can see the stuff i am interested in and, if you share those
interests, it can make for a good daily visit…

here are the feeds i have on there currently…

some post several items a day, some once a day, some once a week or once a
month, some post rarely, which makes it even handier to have it appear on my
feeds page… and some may be broken, so, i am still waiting for them to post
something…

firstly, i get posts at “syn_promo”, where people publicize cool feeds they
have found or have made…

astronomy photo of the day

ask yahoo
answering trivia and imponderables, using yahoo

blog of death
sort of a big, far-reaching obits page

boingboing blog

coming soon
a movie news site

dictionary.com’s word of the day

engadget
gadget news, reviews, etc.

filmadd
news of movies added to the Internet Archive

filmtease
an unusual movie trailer review site

found magazine’s find of the week
unusual objects people find

aaron swartz’s googleblog
a blog about google

googleblog
the official blog of google.com

penniphile
the writings of penn jillette, mostly new entries to “road penn”

word spy
dealing with new terms, slang, etc. as they enter the language

quote of the day
not as good as refdesk.com’s quotes of the day, but, they have more than one
per day, so it sort of balances out

snopesrecentadd
one of my favorites, posting urban legends as they are added to snopes.com

thinkgeek
various merchandise of interest to those involved in modern technology

and wordsmith’s word of the day

oh, and almost forgot, i also get “ljnifty” where people post various fun
things you can do with livejournal, such as adding feeds to your friends
page…

and i add cool new ones as i find them… and occasionally remove the ones
that get annoying or boring…

anyway, if that sounds interesting to you, as i said, the link is on the menu
on the left side of this page… “My LJ Feeds”
i stop by at least once a day and it is a pretty good collection at this
point, after some tweaking…

now if only i could get scifi.com’s “today in sci-fi history” on there, which
is almost always interesting to sci-fi buffs… (there is a link to this, as
well, over there on the left…)
i would add the fark.com feed, but, it does not have comments links and the
comments threads are at least half the fun of fark…

btw, geez, it seems today is list day on my blog…
admittedly, i am trying to come up with posts to make so i can knock that huge
“april pics” post off the front page…

Related posts:

1. finally got change detection again
2. update about the site changes
3. 108427489793807139

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

heros of mine, they are…
so, i thought of the link in our little orrl thing…

the writings of Penn Jillette
(yes, the big one of Penn & Teller)
Philosopher Warrior Extraordinaire… from his articles for PC-Computing, dating back to 1990, his Excite articles of the late 90′s, plenty of various writings, articles, columns, on a wide variety of subjects, and his wonderful “Road Penn” journal, beginning in april, 2000 and continuing to this day… also has interviews, chat scripts, and more….
jan30,03 – they lost their domain name, so, for now, this link goes to the wayback machine’s archive of the page…

and it still does as their new site seems to no longer have their writings…
(btw, the most recent link there on web archive is to a copy made AFTER a porn site got their domain name, so, go for second most recent or older…)

one of my favorites, of course, is one he did in ’92, i believe, for pc computing, called “We’re All Going to Hell”…

ok, i was wrong…
his writings ARE on the new site…
well, good…

Related posts:

1. My LJ Feeds Link
2. wtf, google!?
3. finally got change detection again

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

well, here is Premiere.com’s idea of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time (via Fark)

though, i found fark’s comments thread about this article to be a much better read, with many more suggestions i agree with than premiere’s…

(btw, both fark links above go to the “Avantgo” versions, which is a very nice lite alternative…)

Related posts:

1. 9/11
2. links – ABQ cams & blogs, and 9/11 on fark.com
3. 108427489793807139

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Space Channel 5 Remix Soundtrack

i read this one long, long ago and tought it was perfect, and i was relating it to the folks a little while back, so, just had to get the full text for any and all to see…

stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Ed finally decides to take a vacation. He books himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeds to have the time of his life –until the boat sank. He found himself swept up on the shore of an island with no other people, no supplies…nothing… only bananas and coconuts.

After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to him. In disbelief, he asks her, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?”

“I rowed from the other side of the island,” she says. “I landed here when my cruise ship sank.”

“Amazing,’ he says. “You were really lucky to have a rowboat wash up with you.”

“Oh, this?’ replies the woman. “I made the rowboat out of raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm branches. And the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree.”

“But, but, that’s impossible,’ stutters Ed. “You had no tools or hardware. How did you manage?”

“Oh, that was no problem,” replies the woman. “On the south side of the island, there is a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed. I found if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. I used that for tools and used the tools to make the hardware.” Ed is stunned. “Let’s row over to my place,” she says.

After a few minutes of rowing, she docks the boat at a small wharf. As Ed looks onto shore, he nearly falls out of the boat. Before him is a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white. While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, he could only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, “It’s not much, but I call it home. Sit down please. Would you like to have a drink?”

“No, no, thank you.’ he says, still dazed. “Can’t take any more coconut juice.” “It’s not coconut juice,” the woman replies. “How about a Pina Colada?”

Trying to hide his continued amazement, he accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they have exchanged their stories, the woman announces,
“I’m going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There is a razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom.”

No longer questioning anything, Ed goes into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet, is a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside of a swivel mechanism. “Wow! This woman is amazing!” he muses, “What next?”

When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but vines, strategically positioned, and smelling faintly of gardenias. She beckons for him to sit down next to her.
“Tell me,” she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, “We’ve been out here for a really long time. You’ve been lonely. There’s something I’m sure you really feel like doing right now, something you’ve been longing for all these months. You know…” She stares into his eyes.

He can’t believe what he’s hearing:
“You mean—”, he swallows excitedly, “I can check my email?!”

Related posts:

1. links – web-based tools and the world’s biggest cyndrical aquarium
2. new pics uploaded
3. a morbid day at our place

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

101 Ways to Save the Internet [wired.com]

Where’s a superhero when you need one? The Net, which once seemed so invincible, is under attack by the forces of evil. Viruses knock servers to their knees.. Spammers hijack our inboxes. Hackers and identity thieves menace our collective security and personal privacy.
Desperate solutions range from abandoning email to requiring a license to log on. Halt, fools! The Internet’s problems stem from the same virtues that make it great: open architecture, the free flow of information, peer-to-peer cooperation, and a bias for linking strangers, not disconnecting them. Take those away and the Net might cease to infuriate us – but it will also cease to amaze us.

Here’s a smarter approach: 101 proposals that harness the Net’s own superpowers to defeat its foes. Up, up, and away!

a few examples…

Build a .sex red-light district – Icann, the committee that assigns top-level Internet domains, refuses to create an adult zone that can easily be kept from kids’ eyes. Porn won’t disappear, so deal with it.

from the “Microsoft To-Do” section of the list…

Hey Steve, fire someone – Somebody’s not living up to the company’s tough talk on fixing bugs. Developers, developers, developers should be accountable, accountable, accountable.

Give away a good spam filter

Ship antivirus wizard – Why can’t the paper clip guy tell us something important, like “This message is infected with Sobig”?

Take the blame – Software license agreements that absolve you of, oh, deleting three years’ worth of email are irresponsible. Bugs are negligence, and negligence should cost you, not us.

from the “Google To-Do List”

Crawl the Internet Archive

Let us link to a page we hate without boosting its ranking

from the “Your To-Do List” section…

Switch your ISP – Some offer anti-spam and anti-virus tools and support. If your current provider won’t help you defend yourself, find another that will.

Death to fax machines – Send us an attachment instead.
Stop with the jokes – If we get the one about French military victories one more time, we’re going to come over and unplug you personally.

people who continuously forward junk to me get treated like any other spammer…
people, please, just repeat the mantra from the Earthlink Internet Hour radio show:

I will not forward forwarded email
I will not forward forwarded email
I will not forward forwarded email

Turn off your HTML email – It makes you vulnerable to viruses – and bugs us.

Tell Kelly on Geocities to take down her Macarena tribute page It’s over, Kel.

damn straight! i have written much on this subject in the past and i am sure i will write more in the future…

Celebrate diversity – With nearly every computer on the planet running Windows, Outlook, and Explorer, it’s too easy for a single virus to spread everywhere.

and, finally…

Add a “Skip All Flash Intros” option to Macromedia players

in the words of Sam Steele, “Flash is evil.”…

I will not forward forwarded email
I will not forward forwarded email
I will not forward forwarded email

go and do likewise…

Related posts:

1. finally got change detection again
2. random email to the future
3. My LJ Feeds Link

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.