The true (but necessarily vague) tale of the time I had to sue someone for stealing from theLogBook.com. 😯 Also included: more weird radio stories, waterproof droids and… a cat on crack.
Listen here:
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/10292010-ohpoopy.mp3]
Right-click here and “save as” to save to your hard drive or MP3 player; leave feedback with this post or in the forums.… Read more
A bit of background here: several years ago, my dog attracted several potential suitors despite the fact that we’d been told she was already spayed (hint: she wasn’t). It was kind of like the dog version of The Bachelorette, in that you didn’t so much have lots of moon-eyed soft-focus close-ups in fabulously romantic mansions and vacation spots, as you walked out the door to see dogs gettin’ it on in the front yard. (Thankfully, this was years before Evan was born – how in the world would we explain such a sight now? “Well, son, they’re hiking the Appalachian Trail…” But I digress.)
Both of the dogs pictured in that earlier blog entry still live near here, and they still drop by, often bearing gifts – as if to say “Pleeeeeeeeease, can we do that thing again? ohpleaseohpleaseohplease!” These days, post-spay, Xena’s more like “Howdy, want to follow me down to the pond on the adjacent property and go swimming? Maybe gang up and kill one of the pond geese or something?” It’s altogether unlikely that she’s physically capable of caring any less. (I really need to learn her secret someday, my life would be much happier. Or maybe I need to go kill a goose to release the tension? Anyway…) The male dogs bring her dead deer (or pieces thereof) and other strong candidates for road kill – it gets disgusting, especially once it’s built up that beautiful aroma that only comes from not-so-freshly-dead animal carcass that’s been baking in the noonday sun. Guess who gets to dispose of these “gifts” from Xena’s boyfriends? Who else?
So imagine my unfettered delight when my wife informs me that the backbone and ribcage of some unfortunate creature has been left at the top of our driveway by some ex-boyfriend of Xena’s. Nothing says romance around this house like dead things. When I walked out to look at this latest gift from the gods, er, sorry, dogs, I was completely perplexed. At least the usual dead things have some meat on them – there’s some practical value to a dog. This poor thing, whatever it had been, had no such value.
But once I laid eyes on it, I realized that, as the head of the household, I had a responsibility to do the only thing that would resolve the situation to anyone’s benefit and with any kind of dignity whatsoever. … Read more
As a sort of post-script to this previous post, in which I held my memory upside-down, shook it hard, and watched old quarters tumble out, and while glancing through a catalog that was still stashed away in the back of one of these recently acquired Star Wars goodies, I had another memory come tumbling back into focus, reminding me of just how intertwined my memories of old toys and old video games are.
I remembered my tenth birthday, July 1982, with great clarity. Unbeknownst to me, my mom had been stockpiling Star Wars goodies for quite a while, getting what she could when she could, and was getting ready to foist all of ’em on me at once. But she needed me out of the house for this. The solution? She had my older brother drag me down to the arcade for a while – a long while. We were there for at least a couple of hours, so I’m assuming he was buying some gift-wrapping time. I distinctly remember playing Star Trek and Kickman aplenty during this sortie, which may subconsciously be the reason that one of the latter is sitting behind me right now as I type this. Shawn kept shoveling quarters into my hands, and we were actually there long enough for me to get a little bit bored with it. (Me? Bored? In an arcade? I must’ve been running a fever.) … Read more
The princess here is greatly relieved – and completely exhausted, which I’m sure you’ll find understandable, after her recent escape from the Death Star.
That’s right – the second box of Star Wars goodies has arrived. This one contained only two items…but these, which were also represented in my original collection, are what you might call the biggies. … Read more
Previously, on Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods… you may remember a while back I was trying to come up with some simple, elegant, and zero-cost solution to a photography/video project I wanted to shoot for future use in the ToyBox portion of the site. Truth is, one idea had already occurred to me, though I had dismissed it as being a bit too cheap ‘n’ cheesy. In the end, it’s the one that came closest to working. But despite some of the inherent flaws – gravity, really, being the main one – I think the results were kinda cool. Since we’ve already had one wave of bad weather blow through, sleep is pretty much out for today (pity, that), so I thought I’d try to go ahead and knock this project out. Read on to see some of the pictures – and to see what crazily cheap-ass solution I came up with. … Read more
ARGH. I think I’ve mentioned a few times recently that I’m working on a monumental project – creating a Flash movie, viewable online, for just about every game review existing in Phosphor Dot Fossils. That’s a lot of work, seeing as we’re at well over 100 arcade reviews and a comparable number of reviews have been done for various consoles. But now I’m running into a speed bump: the infamous “flicker” of the Atari 2600. I was trying to create a video clip of Star Wars: The Arcade Game (seen above) and ran into this dilemma. When too many moving objects occupied the screen at the same time, the Atari 2600 would have to draw them in staggered cycles. This produced the “blinking” effect that made games such as Pac-Man infamously hard on the eyes, because for every cycle that the software in question redrew the screen, it didn’t have enough memory real estate to draw everything on the screen at the same time. So Pac-Man would be shown in one cycle, a couple of monsters in the next, and the other two monsters in the next – and while modern machines and modern displays with 60-frame-per-second refresh rates on their video might be able to pull this trick off seamlessly, if they even needed to resort to that approach, the 2600 was slow enough that it showed even to the naked eye. Painfully so.
Star Wars is a particularly bad example of that – if a TIE fighter got off too many shots on the same screen, they would all start flickering madly until the number of object on screen dropped off. Worse yet, the program for Star Wars on the 2600 draws the two side walls of the Death Star trench in staggered mode…so in the resulting video, I can see the left wall of the trench just fine, but not the right wall, and not the barriers across the middle. I’m trying to figure out some video tricks to put a “trail” effect on things so they’ll be forced to stay on the screen all at once…but so far, not much luck. I really hope this doesn’t scuttle the project or force me to use emulation for the 2600 video. I want to be able to show everyone the real thing, for two reasons – #1, from a standpoint of academic and historical accuracy (and yes, I really do see this as an academic project, silly as that may seem), and #2, because it enforces some playing time for me on an almost daily basis, and I’ve enjoyed that tremendously here of late. There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that I set out to put three minutes of Star Wars game play on digital videotape and wound up with about 25 minutes of footage from one game. I don’t have any idea how these tall tales get started.
We finally got some rain today, much-needed rain I might add. I’m normally not too thrilled to be feeding horses and working with horses in pouring rain, because they want to get into the barn where it’s dry and warm, and it might not occur to them to, say, not walk right through me to achieve that goal in their haste. (My persistent sneezing has returned after this morning’s horseplay, so perhaps the horses are smarter than I am.) Today, however, I found new faces to feed – a couple of my sister-in-law’s donkeys have joined the herd, although they’re isolated in their own round pen. I haven’t worked with donkeys before. There’s a big one – well, relatively big for a donkey – and a small one, so I spent the morning calling them Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior. I was about to go in to feed them when I realized that I had no idea if they were kick-happy or not. I announced my presence by telling them I’m sure we’d all get along just fine, because I have food, and food is a good thing. After someone kicked a big wet clod of mud right past my head – he was a safe distance away but got spooked by my presence and tried to run away, kicking up mud instead – I said “I can see we’re going to have to work on this relationship a bit.” I guess I need to start putting on a Mike Myers faux-Scottish accent, ’cause that man can talk to donkeys like nobody’s business.… Read more
“The wheel turns, does it not, Ambassador?”
Okay, that line’s from the first episode of Babylon 5, and at this point, Babylon 5 is about the only thing that hasn’t been recreated in fan-film form (though if you’re willing to put up with cheap visuals, there’s a clip in my multimedia section on the right-hand side of your screen proving that even the space battle stuff wouldn’t be completely impossible). But it fits the situation so well, I kinda have to use it.
In the 1990s, with Doctor Who cancelled and no new Doctor Who on the horizon, it fell to the fans to keep the saga alive. Fan writers went pro with Virgin Publishing’s New Adventures. Fan actors like Nicholas Briggs and Gary Russell produced audio plays set in the Doctor Who universe, making barely-legal use of existing sound FX records from the series itself, and not realizing they’d both be doing that as a full-time business venture with an actual BBC license (and completely legal use of those sound FX) by the end of the decade. And would-be movie makers like Bill Baggs and Keith Barnfather started taking little bits and pieces of the Doctor Who mythos and making their own movies.
UK copyright law has an interesting loophole that allowed this to happen without these amateur filmmakers getting sued into the 16mm film era. While the BBC owns the copyright to Doctor Who, the copyright in individual villains, aliens and companions lies with the writers who first created them. In other words, the BBC doesn’t own K-9 – Bob Baker and Dave Martin do. The BBC doesn’t own the Sontarans – the estate of the late, great Robert Holmes does. And so on. So these amateur filmmakers couldn’t even touch the Doctor, the TARDIS, or the Time Lords, or certain characters who had been created by the show’s producers (such as certain companions; K-9 wasn’t originally intended to be an ongoing companion, and in fact an ending of his debut Doctor Who adventure was filmed that left him behind). So the Sontarans, Draconians, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, and others got their own adventures sans the Doctor. (And just as often, other characters in their adventures would wind up being played by former Doctors and former Companions; Sophie “Ace” Aldred was a mainstay of the amateur film circuit.) Cheaper video technology and the emergence of desktop CG and editing made this possible, and even after the 1996 Doctor Who movie starring Paul McGann the fans’ cameras kept rolling.
It’s funny: Doctor Who is now riding high, with its last renewal giving it two more seasons. And Star Trek is, at least temporarily, history – and now it’s Trek that’s in the hands of the fans. The most visible of these endeavours, Star Trek: New Voyages, is making serious waves by inviting former writers and actors of real Star Treks past to join them – and they’re being taken up on their offer. George Takei and Grace Lee Whitney have agreed to star in the next “episode” produced by the team of amateur actors and filmmakers at New Voyages HQ in Ticonderoga, NY, and they’ll be taking part in a story scripted by TNG writers Michael Reaves and Marc Scott Zicree. And this comes right after another “episode,” currently in post-production, written by D.C. Fontana and starring Walter Koenig, due to be released for free download later this year. David Gerrold is also writing two scripts for the New Voyages, one a rewrite of a never-produced TNG season 1 script, and the other a sequel to The Trouble With Tribbles.
Wow. Now, to be fair, there are parallels here – pro writers like Terrance Dicks and Marc Platt participated in Doctor Who fan films, Mark Ayres scored some of them, and at least one fan film, The Airzone Solution, told a story completely unrelated to Who mythos but starring every Doctor from Jon Pertwee forward, with the exception of Tom Baker.
Needless to say, the shelf of Doctor Who “spinoff” videotapes on my shelf at home gives away how fond I am of these things. I’ve only just started watching the Star Trek: New Voyages stories, and while there’s an inherent fannish goofiness to them – Captain Kirk is played by an actor whose history includes a steady gig as an Elvis impersonator – I have to admire the craftsmanship of their meticulous reproduction of the classic Enterprise bridge, their uniforms, and their CG effects – roughly on par with early Babylon 5 (aha, there is a connection!) and light years ahead of what some of my friends and I used to do when we were cooking up our own fan-made spoofs in the early 90s.
There’s always going to be a debate about whether or not these people could be spending their time better coming up with something original, and just how far over the copyright lines they’re stepping. That’s a valid debate. But some of them, I suspect, just simply want to tell their own Star Trek stories. There’s a reason Who fans kept shining a light on little corners of the Whoniverse: they love the settings, characters, and backstories. They couldn’t even so much as mention the Doctor, but they could continue to explore the universe. The Trek fan flicks are a similar phenomenon; fan projects other than New Voyages are looking at original crews on ships and missions we haven’t seen before, so in a sense, much of the Trek fan film community is doing what the Who fans were doing ten years ago. The New Voyages gang, for good or ill, is getting so much attention precisely because they’re leaping right across that line and saying that these are, in fact, the voyages. Time will tell if it catches up with them in a legal sense; for the moment Paramount is turning a blind eye because they’re offering their productions, made with thousands of hours of volunteers’ time, as free downloads.
Then of course, there are the Lucasfilm-sanctioned Star Wars fan film competitions, where the vaults of Lucas’ sound effects are opened and things are left up to the fans’ twisted imaginations. In a sense, Lucasfilm has probably taken the best proactive approach possible that doesn’t involve alienating the fan base. Not that any other sectors of fandom are waiting for the intellectual property holders of the objects of their respective adorations to adopt a similar policy, mind you.
I guess what has me so fascinated with this is the amount of skill and creativity and, yeah, sometimes, just pure cheek that goes into these things. I admire that. It’s a better use of everyone’s time – both the fans making the stuff and the fans watching the stuff – than, say, re-editing Phantom Menace so there’s less Jar Jar.… Read more
Seems like I promised you fine folks a look at my Christmas haul a few days ago and then never followed up on it. Here ’tis.
This is one of the Star Warsiest Christmases of my entire adulthood. We have here the “Rebuild Darth Vader” deluxe action figure, the Trivial Pursuit Star Wars DVD game, and another copy of the Tales Of The Jedi audio dramatization. (I’ll be exchanging that one; I already had a copy and could’ve sworn that my lovely wife knew about it, but then again, I got it just before November sweeps, a dark period where we just didn’t get to see each other, at all.) Also got the first two Planetary hardbacks (thanks Dave!), this year’s Hallmark Star Trek ship ornament (the movie-era Enterprise, still the best looking of the bunch), and some new work boots and gloves. Also, a book written by Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin. I also got a Wal-Mart card, which finally helped me snag We Love Katamari (a.k.a. Katamari Damacy 2) and some blank DVDs, one of which now has the Doctor Who Christmas episode on it (OK, I’ll admit, I’m just showing off there). Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the three gifts my wife gave to me early (the travel Scrabble set and two CDs from the new Chronicles Of Narnia flick: the soundtrack itself and the ‘music inspired by…’ CD) and the complimentary copy of “Confessions Of The Game Doctor,” signed by none other than Bill Kunkel himself. Granted, that last one was so I could do a book review, but it was still darn nice of him to send it.
Anyway, this being the last entry for 2005, I’d like to throw out many thanks to my friends, family, internet cohorts and animals for putting up with me another year. I know it isn’t easy sometimes. Here’s hoping that 2006 is kind to all of us.
For your viewing pleasure (and probably intense amusement), I’ve added a couple of pages to the multimedia section: a selection of rediscovered artwork from 10-11 years ago, and an equally rediscovered (and quite by accident!) video clip for your amusement. This one isn’t cats, horses or tornado damage, I promise.
I’ll see you on the flipside.… Read more
Hopefully you’re getting your Christmas shopping wrapped up. The stores are being picked bare! I was listening to some friends recently lamenting the state of the market on the Xbox 360, and the fact that so many of the consoles – which Microsoft doesn’t seem to have made enough of – are winding up in the hands of scalpers. I also mentioned recently that I had gotten back into the Star Wars action-figure-collecting swing of things, and all of this stuff combined reminded me of a really funny and amazingly bold fellow we saw at the first “midnight run” for Phantom Menace toys in May, 1999 in Green Bay. As I’ve mentioned in the past, this event was a circus compared to a similar “midnight run” I experienced in 2002, when the Attack Of The Clones toys hit the shelves; on that occasion, it was about seven fully grown men waiting behind a rope at Wal-Mart to get a look (and yes, I was one of ’em). But the 1999 midnight run was such a cross-section of every extreme of fandom – including, again, the fellow in Jedi robes who roller-skated through the store, buying nothing and blasting John Williams tunes from his enormous jam box – that I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
There was another slice of fandom in attendance at that event: the Opportunist.
This smartly-dressed fellow – well, as smartly-dressed as one would expect someone in Green Bay to be at midnight on a weeknight – snatched up the rather slim supply of 12-inch Darth Maul dolls very quickly. He then stood between the registers and the store aisles, offering them to anyone within just-above-a-whisper range for $20 a pop.
Understand: he hadn’t bought them. He wasn’t selling them to you for $20. He was asking $20 to let go of them so you could take one and go through the register and actually pay for it there. Unfortunately, having balls the size of the Death Star didn’t prevent this guy from being relieved of his handful of Maul and escorted out of the store. That wasn’t chutzpah. Watto had chutzpah. This was just stupid. Just the fact that he was pitching his wares – which, after all, weren’t even his wares to pitch – at a conspiratorial whisper was just so instantly suspicious and yet uproariously funny. He might as well have been selling death sticks. I half expected him to wave two fingers in the air to convince people to “buy” them.
Hey, little girl, you want a Sith Lord?… Read more
Maybe my ode to Star Wars figures got me thinking about this, but I’ve had a couple of interesting thoughts after watching Episode III and then the original Star Wars back-to-back.
Where are you taking this…thing?: Whatever media handles the years between Sith and Star Wars, I hope they realize that a big part of the story is going to have to be the homogenization of the Empire. In Sith, we see Palpatine with a handful of hangers-on who are decidedly alien; by the time we get to Star Wars (or, if you’re one of those people who must call it this, A New Hope), the Empire has not only become completely human, but it has become unabashedly racist. Chewie is a thing. Imperial officers are all not just male humans, but, if you want to read further into it, white male humans. Neimoidians, Geonosians, Gungans, the Kamino cloners, the various races represented on the Jedi Council in its final years…we never see these folks again. Imperial genocide? Did Palpatine order this, perhaps remembering all that fun he had with his little green friend? (Wait, that sounded incredibly bad.) Did Vader? Why? This could be a huge arc story to cover between trilogies, and it’s so conspicuous that it really needs to be addressed.
Who was his father?: On further reflection, I’m infinitely relieved that the connecting tissue was removed from Sith that would’ve explicitly joined the dots from Darth Plagueis’ experiments in creating life to the “immaculate conception” of Anakin Skywalker. There’s enough there for the folks who have been paying attention to make the connection, but it isn’t spelled out as Star Wars gospel…thank goodness. Here is why that’s a good thing. By coming right out and saying that Anakin was created by the Sith, there is an excuse for his actions that declaws the point of the entire saga. If the clone troopers are all preprogrammed to enact Order 66, there’s the implication that Anakin, if he too was a created being and not a natural born one, could simply have been hard-wired to turn to the dark side. Even that implication tries to absolve him from his actions, and while the saga is, when viewed as a whole from a distance, a story about redemption, it completely loses its teeth when there’s even a hint that “the devil made him do it.” Anakin Skywalker does not deserve to get off that easy after all the lives he’s taken in cold blood. He earned those neato bloodshot yellow contact lenses for a reason (though I’d argue that the moment for that to appear would have been following the killing of the younglings, not the killing of the Separatists, who could hardly be described as innocents…sheesh, George!). Anakin is lied to and manipulated, yes, but he also makes some extraordinarily bad choices, and giving him an out that’s as simple as “maybe he was programmed to do it” doesn’t cut it. I’m glad that was left on the cutting room floor.
Teach you to commune with him, I will: Okay, so Yoda and Obi-Wan have to have some special, arcane knowledge to commune with Qui-Gon, who has become one with the Force and yet retains his identity. That’s good. Now, it practically demands that we ask “How did Qui-Gon contact Yoda in the first place if Yoda wasn’t expecting it?” And that’s a good question, because how can Obi-Wan contact Luke if Luke isn’t expecting it (which he clearly isn’t)? Maybe it’s just that Yoda and Luke are that good because of their concentration of MIDI, chlorine and stuff. But any media that deal with Obi-Wan between Episode III and Star Wars might want to elaborate on this. It seems like the initial contact would have to come about because the deceased makes an extraordinary effort to be heard; the listener can then learn to attune their senses to that contact to make it easier. But…who taught Luke this? (Though it seems like the apparition of Obi-Wan we see after Luke has trained with Yoda is capable of doing more – he moves around, he’s clearly visible, and the conversations are longer and more detailed, so maybe Yoda is now making that communion a standard part of Jedi training. Maybe I just answered my own question there.)
Please understand, my obsessing over little details like this doesn’t mean I’m picking the Star Wars movies to bits because I think Lucas hasn’t done his homework. It’s because the whole saga, whether by design or accident, holds together so well that I even put this kind of thought into it. New chapters of the story are going to be crafted soon, and I think these would be interesting things to address in those chapters. There are stories behind these things, and I’m all about the story. (Well, and any action figures that come out of the story, per yesterday’s blog entry. Which reminds me: it’d be a damn shame for Hasbro to ditch the 3 3/4″ scale before we get to the live-action Star Wars TV series…… Read more
