November 16, 2006 – Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods

Gaming ToyBox

8-bit music boxes

By Earl
November 16, 2006
1 comment

Classic game fans, I’ve got what you want for Christmas. Seriously. These are so damn cool.
Namco Dotgraphic Figures with Sound
Fresh from Japan.

Some assembly required.

Xevious, Rally-X, Tower of Druaga.

Galaxian, Dig Dug and Mappy.

What these are is, essentially, six individual music boxes. You can move the three-dimensional characters around on their backgrounds (each character has a “peg” and can be placed in any position where there’s a hole for that peg) as you see fit. Pressing the button on the base of each scene plays a sound sample from the respective game in question – a very loud sound sample, I might add.
Namco Dotgraphic Figures with Sound
Close-ups. I love the Dotgraphic stuff; that’s the same kind of thing as the magnetic Super Mario Bros. scenes I’ve shown for the past couple of years at OVGE, and these are just as cool. I’d rather that they were magnetic as well, instead of pegs-and-holes, but you know, it’s not like I spend a huge amount of time playing around with the magnetic Mario scenes, so this’ll do nicely.
Now, the thing that makes me absolutely crazy is that box art indicates that there are two “chaser” scenes which are harder to find than these six. Knowing what Namco’s hot classic properties are, those two are almost certain to be Pac-Man and Galaga. Now I’m gonna be losing sleep until I find those two.
Would these make killer trophies for tournaments at a classic gaming shindig or what?… Read more

Olivia vs. the Daleks

By Earl
November 16, 2006
0 comments

So I shot some video this morning of the remote control “Darleks” in action. Hooboy. Y’know, I think I like ’em better when they’re sitting still and being quiet. They don’t have the most powerful drives in the world – they either get “redirected” or just plain stuck in the grout between my kitchen floor tiles. One of them only has one working “head light.” I made rare use of my camera’s infrared feature to try to document just what’s going on with the IR signals between the two Daleks, which is kinda cool. And…of course…Olivia stopped by.

We just couldn’t keep away, now could we?

Olivia sits patiently in the background of the infrared shot.

In fact, the little stinker’s going to wind up in the photos for the finished article! Oh well, that gives it personality…

As you can see, she’s really terrified of the little dustbins.
Also, as promised, the Hearst automated alert system – slightly edited to keep the confirmation number private:
My Boss Is Stephen Hawking
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/ecscall.mp3]
😆… Read more

Critters Home Base Should We Talk About The Weather?

Wind and/or wuthering

By Earl
November 16, 2006
4 comments

It’s been an insanely windy 24 hours here. We’re talking sustained 30-40mph winds (and the gusts are worse). Needless to say, my already-battered mailbox has all but been left laying in the ditch by this. The resulting temperature drop – down to around freezing – has accelerated that time of year when Xena becomes a full-time resident inside the house. Which seems to suit Olivia just fine – it means that wagging tail is always just a pounce away, in the comfort of her own home!
Shall we do promos for global thermonuclear war?
At exactly the same time tonight, everyone working for a Hearst Argyle TV station got an automated call on their home or cell phones, testing an automated “emergency response” system to be activated in the event of major emergencies or disasters; I guess it’s there to tell us if the station’s been taken out by a surgical strike (though I can’t imagine who’d want to do that now that Dancing With Or Without The Stars is over), or, more likely, to tell everyone to Report To Work Now Now Now in the event of a 9/11-scale emergency. This system was put in place after Katrina all but wiped out our sister station (and one of the oldest continuously broadcasting stations in the U.S.) WDSU last year. It sounds like the mutant love child resulting from a menage a trois between WOPR, Speak & Spell, and some Commodore 64 text-to-speech program whose name I’ve long since forgotten. It’s like getting a surprise phone call from Stephen Hawking, and he’s calling me “Early Green.” I’ll try to record it off the answering machine later in the day before I delete it, for your amusement.
Twilight Zone Standard Time
I have a small cluster of VCRs which I used for converting international videotapes to domestic formats and vice versa. (If anyone actually still requires this service in the age of DVD, give me a shout – I give good PAL conversion.) One of these VCRs has been routinely slipping into another timestream. For example: the always-accurate clock on my DVD recorder says “4:08A” (I kid you not, the thing is tuned into the atomic clock or something, because I’ve never had to set it once in 3+ years). The JVC VCR, at this moment, says “10:12A.” I’ve come home from work at two in the morning to find the VCR claiming it’s in PM time somewhere. And 12 hours or so later, with no readily apparent explanation, wham, it snaps back into real time. This would be great if I could get it to record stuff from the future, you know? I’d suddenly become an avid (and quite probably much wealthier than I am now) sports fan. Sort of like a slightly more modern version of Early Edition. Minus the yellow cat. Which is probably for the best, Olivia would chase his tail too.… Read more