Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods

It’s safe to say that if you don’t feel like getting your geek on just a little bit, this is not the post for you. More »

This was e-mailed to me tonight via theLogBook.com Media’s contact form (hey, it works!), and while it’s just a little bit on the late side for me to even round up some DVDs to send there (what with the 10 days until the event and all…) I thought I’d pass it along for any retro-computing folks in New Jersey:

This year’s Vintage Computer Festival East will be held September 12-13 at the InfoAge Science Center located in Wall, New Jersey.

VCF is a public event celebrating the history of computers from the 1940s – 1980s. The morning schedule is for lectures and workshops; the afternoons are an open exhibit hall where everything is turned on and working.

Among this year’s highlights are the keynote address about RCA computers in the 1950s, an 8-bit musical concert, BASIC programming challenge, and the build-your-own terminal workshop.

Details are posted at http://www.vintage.org/2009/east/ where you’ll also find the latest VCF news. A 2-minute video montage of last year’s show is on YouTube. Or refer to the simple event brochure. Tickets are $10 for one day or $15 for both days; 17 and younger get in free.

The event benefits the InfoAge Science Center, which is a 501c3 non-profit.

RCA computers from the ’50s? Does that include the Studio II? Oh…wait. Studio II was the ’70s. Not that you could tell by looking.

I also wanted to draw everyone’s attention to the August edition of Le Geek – Ben may not get his site updated as often as he’d like, but it’s always worth the read. I also like the fact that the site is now in gamma – screw being in beta, we’re going straight to gamma! I look forward to the delta and epsilon editions.

With a not-even-remotely-heavy heart, I’ve decided to close my long-dormant MySpace account. I think tonight was the first time I’d logged into it in 2-3 months. Since almost everyone in my friend list over there is in my Facebook friends, I doubt anyone will be too disappointed (in fact, I’ll be surprised if anyone even noticed without me mentioning it here).

Still. No. Kittens.

A few announcements, since I’ve been asked…

• I am planning on having copies of my DVDs available at the CCAG show in Cleveland this October. There won’t be a huge number of copies on hand, because frankly, CCAG falls on exactly the same day as OVGE in Tulsa, and I just don’t have it in my budget to do a build-up of a huge number of copies for two simultaneous shows, but there will be some there. These will be at Tim Snider’s table, and all of the DVDs I’ve done so far (PDF, CGE 2K7, Best of CGE ’03 and Best of CGE ’05) will be available there.
• Did he say Best of CGE ’05? Yes he did. I’m editing Best of CGE ’05 right now, it’s looking good, and although it’s not true HD, it’ll filler yer HDTV with a great big widescreen picture. Best of CGE ’05 will be a two-disc set, however it’ll be a buck or two more than Best of CGE ’03 because one of those discs will need to be dual-layer, and dual-layer Lightscribe discs aren’t cheap (see also: CGE 2K7). This set will be ready in time for both OVGE and CCAG, with online ordering beginning after both shows.
• What about that book? I had been crazily trying to get VWORP! together in time for October as well, but I have to announce that it’ll be delayed until the beginning of 2010 now. There are several reasons for this: with the OVGE/CCAG weekend being the target date for Best of CGE ’05, that’s the item that needs my attention most right now. Putting VWORP! out anytime before the end of 2009 is kind of like writing a book on everything you need to know about the New World in 1491. There’s a heap of interesting stuff happening right as VWORP! would have to cut off for an October publication date: the tenth Doctor’s final episodes, Sarah Jane season 3, the Hornet’s Nest audios with Tom Baker… it just seemed like the least desirable cut-off point possible. VWORP! will wait until January 2010, where it’ll make a hell of a lot more sense to release it.
• And the next book after that? A little thing that we around here like to call Phosphor Dot Fossils. Like I was gonna leave that off the list! Hopefully no later than late summer 2010. After the book, I’d think that the next step for PDF – aside from it being the cool web archive that we all know and love – would either be as a TV project somewhat grander than the existing DVDs, or maybe as a brand name for a line of fine cat care products. Between you and me, I’m holding out for TV.

That’s all for now. Whether you’re in Cleveland or Tulsa on October 24th, in a way, I’ll see you there!

Oh, and one other thing – today is the absolute last day for Summer Byte Bundles! Those ordering links will stop working in the wee hours of the morning. Last call!

There’s a new DVD out in these parts. Like the rest of the DVDs I’ve done, they involve classic video game history – there seems to be a theme developing. This latest one goes back to the footage I shot in 2003 of the first Classic Gaming Expo I attended. More »

He got the hang of it pretty quickly… More »

Meet DadBot 500. His Wii code is 4625 4482 9938 8574, by the bye.

More »

So I got a slightly early birthday present there. Somewhere, my wife scrounged together some money, and, along with a Gamestop gift card that John “felixthegamer” Morrison sent me around Christmas, went and got me a Wii. I’ve only been obsessing over this thing since it came out, and my wife admitted that the tipping point was when my dad came to visit and actually complained because he was hoping I’d have a Wii set up – he knows someone who has one and he loves the thing – and was disappointed when Mr. Video Game Collecting Guy didn’t even have a Wii. You know, when you pass yourself off as a video game historian (though I’m starting to think that, given my post-NES-era blind spot, maybe video game archaeologist is a better title – it says “fossils” right up at the top for a reason, folks), and even make part of your living from it, and your 85-year-old dad busts your balls because you haven’t even got a stinkin’ Wii… well, that is kind of embarrassing. Considering the outcome of that complaint, I’d like for my dad to complain about my grievous lack of a million bucks and a hot tub next time he visits.

I’ll post my Wii code tomorrow or over the weekend, though I’ll warn you up front that, for now, I’ve just got Wii Sports and that’s it; I can’t even believe I’ve got one of these in my living room, and expanding the library certainly isn’t a line item in the budget at the moment. But you know what? I’m so jazzed by this thing that even Wii Sports is awesome. I liked it way back when, and I still like it – if it puts things in perspective, my three favorite video baseball games are Wii Sports baseball, the original Baseball on the Game Boy, and Baseball! for the Odyssey2. I don’t care about anyone’s stats or career batting average, I just want to hit a frakkin’ ball on the screen. Wii Sports will do me just fine for a while.

Without saying too much because I don’t want to jinx it, I’ve talked to someone about a job this week which would be a godsend in terms of pay, benefits, and being interesting to me personally with my areas of knowledge and interest. It would, however, be quite a drive every day, which means it’d eat into my Evan time. Thankfully, it’s not in broadcast, so don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you’ll have to put up with me again. As reluctant as I am about a job that would steal an hour or so of Evan-and-daddy time away from me each day, this would be a big help to us, and would kind of spin my career off in a different direction from what anyone might have thought to expect, so…think good thoughts, please.

More good news as it arrives; I’m just gonna continue to throw bad news into the round file. Along with all the bills. These people think they can just send something in the mail and get my money? What the hell?

Once again, a huge thanks to my wife, and to John too – this is just awesome.

No particular focus for tonight’s entry, so you’ll just have to keep up.

I guess we can do a Red Dwarf-style JCC reunion now. For months on Facebook, I’ve been looking for my friend Mark, with whom I hung out a great deal around the end of high school and a few years afterward; I remember he singlehandedly helped me move all of the heavy furniture into my Garrison Avenue apartment in late ’94 or so. He was also part of the surreal, please-tell-me-you-guys-were-high-when-you-did-this video experiment called Jump Cut City, a.k.a. JCC (a new and improved mini-site for which is horrendously overdue; until then, this’ll have to make do). About the time that I made the horrendous mistake of letting myself get bumped up to a salaried position at Fox 46 (translation: every moment of your life was now owned by the station), I dropped out of contact with a lot of people. Mark’s one of the ones I regret losing touch with the most, and tonight I was lamenting the fact that I couldn’t find him online anywhere.

My wife asked, “Have you tried the phone book?” And maybe this is a testament to the pathetically enormous amount of time I spent on the internets, but I had to admit that no, I hadn’t thought of that. Turns out she also knew him at around the same time – she was working at a comic book store that he frequented. She was eager to call him right then and there because, she reasoned, surely his head would explode at the very thought that two of the strangest people he’d ever known, two people he’d never really associated with each other, had gotten married and produced offspring who would carry our very strange genes forward.

So out of the blue we called him, and made his Saturday night more surreal. It’s been at least 15 years since I talked to him, and he sounded exactly the same. There’s much lost time to make up for, and I’m sure there are a lot of laugh-until-whatever-you’re-drinking-is-ejected-nasally moments ahead too, because there’s definitely a get-together in the works. But man, do I feel stupid – look in the phone book? Surely we have the technology to move beyond the phone book.

Slipped (mini)disc. For years, I’ve stubbornly stuck by my minidisc player instead of joining Generation iPod. Partly because it appeals to my curmudgeonly retro-tech side (Atari is to iPod as Odyssey2 is to minidisc), and partly because…well…it still works, why replace it? My wife and I have, between us, two Hi-MD players (which hold a gob of stuff on a single disc – for example, about two dozen full-length Doctor Who audios) and one NetMD player (which holds approx. 5 hours of stuff on a single disc). The great thing about these is that you can build up as many discs full of stuff as you like and swap them out on a whim: no “uh-oh, stop the world, I’ve gotta go back to the PC to put stuff on here.” Of course, there’s a lot of “upload stuff to the machine” time up-front, but before a lengthy two-way solo road trip to, say, a neighboring state’s capitol, that whole swapping-discs ability is awfully handy.

The weak link in the minidisc chain, however, is the software required to load stuff from your PC onto your MD: a horrific C++ monstrosity called SonicStage which crashes at the drop of a hat. Worse yet, when it gets into a “crashing spree,” there’s a better than even chance that it’ll corrupt the table of contents file on the disc and force you to start from scratch. I tend to leave some stuff on my music MD for months; as you delete and add things, the oldest items slide to the top of the TOC (hint: the top entries on my music MD’s TOC have involved members of the Finn family for many months). Having to rebuild the whole damned disc gets a wee bit old. I’m not a huge iTunes fan, but so help me, SonicStage may yet be the defining factor that gets me to become a Pod Person. I should be sitting up at one in the morning, thinking “Yay, it’s finally working!” and blogging while transferring months worth of tracks over to a freshly-formatted disc. Ugh.

And speaking of long drives through Oklahoma… …I’d say we now have an official “stay tuned” on the subject of OVGE (the major Tulsa-based video gaming convention) for later this year. I have no idea when or where or how big or how small, but all I have to say is…count me in. I’m already being asked if I want to exhibit at shows like CCAG and Video Game Summit this summer, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there’s no way I can make it in person. I’ll try to line up some way for the CGE DVDs and the old and new PDF DVDs to be there if there’s already an exhibitor I know and trust there, but the problem there is that I’m actually running a little tight on inventory – I have to make sure, in sending stuff out for non-local shows, that I’m not hindering my ability to fill online orders, and PDF Level 2 and the Brown Box have suddenly been moving fairly well thanks to mentions on a number of sites I hadn’t even sent the press release to! Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised – and maybe I shouldn’t admit to being surprised – but I had no idea that the project registered on that many people’s radars. I’m still quietly wondering if there’s not another application just waiting to happen with the same basic format as the PDF DVDs; what it could possibly be, I don’t know. I’m open to suggestions. In the meantime, I’m also open to the next OVGE show – no way am I missing it a second year in a row. OEGE energized me to get back into the swing of things for the first time in a year, and now I’m ready for a show where I don’t have nearly 20 years on the average attendee.

Good night, but not goodbye. I’d be remiss if I didn’t include at least a passing mention of the passing of Bea Arthur (see what I did there? I didn’t actually mean to do that there, but…eh, let’s move on). Long before the Golden Girls, she was Maude. I probably first saw her on the Mary Tyler Moore Show as a wee lad, but I don’t remember it; the first thing I saw her in that left a mark – more of a painful welt, really – was in the utterly bizarre cantina “sketch” of the much-maligned, aired-only-once Star Wars Holiday Special. I generally don’t crap all over that legendary show the way most folks do – in fact, I have a soft spot for it just for its sheer surreal-ness – but man, the portion of that special that featured Ms. Arthur was off-the-scale awkward. Imagine, if you will, a musical number set in the Star Wars cantina, lamenting how sad it is that the bar is closing, in a family-viewing-hour special based on a movie that’s incredibly popular with kids. Add to that the “life under the Gestapo” underpinning of the whole scene (the bar is closing because of an Empire-imposed curfew), and poor Bea had the dubious honor of singing and dancing her way through an “oh my God, did they really just do that?” segment of a show that was already strange enough. But she was a trouper about it – and for that, my hat’s off to her. A true talent who, for her trouble, really should’ve been made into an action figure, because whatever she was paid for appearing in that special, it wasn’t enough. Hey, that reminds me…

Torchwoody. Maybe an unfortunate pun there, but for the Doctor Who-and-related toy collectors out there, scificollector.co.uk popped a surprise announcement that they’re making a limited advanced run – 1,000 of each! – of the wave 2 Ianto and Captain John figures available now. They’re in different packaging than the “wide release” wave 2 figures will be, but the figures are actually the same. When released in June or July – painfully close to the San Diego Comic Con Doctor Who exclusives – the second wave of Torchwood figures will include Ianto, Captain John, Toshiko and the goofy business-suited Blowfish character (the one who stopped his sports car long enough to let an old lady cross the street in the first episode of season two; why this character was deemed more worthy of a figure than Owen, I can’t even begin to speculate).

OK, I warned you this blog post would be disjointed; I’m gonna bip it in the nuds now before it gets downright surreal.