My friends and I finally exchanged christmas gifts. It was delayed by going home for christmas and not having a chance to meet up beforehand, and then by the plague I contracted and other general delays. But the exchange was made, and I got some very nostalgic gifts. I also got a watch, which is very nice, too nice for me, heh, but I need to take it to a jeweler to shrink the band a bit. But that’s not the nostalgic bit.

I got the Space Quest Collection (the latest one, I read there was another created by that name years ago), containing the 6 games, for the PC. And I also got the Activision Anthology, 45 Atari 2600 games, for the PS2. Lots of nostalgia. Oh, also, the title is just a joke, in and of itself, but it’s not meant to imply I don’t like the nostalgia I go into detail here.

I played Space Quest I today, I was a little dissapointed to see that the version provided was the VGA version. See, Space Quest I was originally an EGA game, and that was the version I knew and loved. They remade it a few years later, redoing all the graphics and changing it from a text parser game to a mouse-action game like some of the later creations. Still, I had never played that version, and I managed to beat it today, being a relatively short game when you know what to do (and I still know most of the puzzle elements by heart). But it was funny to be stuck on the little differences made to the VGA version, most frustratingly being the copy-protection they introduced. Most of their games have that kind of crap, and you have to refer to the manual, which they provided… as a PDF. They also recommend printing out the PDF as well. Heh, no thanks. But as all the games run in a licensed version of DOSBox, it’s easy to ALT-Tab out. I already had a version of the original EGA version of the game as well from a couple years back, so no matter.

Space Quest I, the EGA version

Space Quest I, the VGA version

I had played Space Quest 2 and I think 3 in the past, so I’ll play them again here, plus I’ll have 4, 5 and 6 from this collection, so it’s pretty kickass. The real selling point is that it’s all supposed to work flawlessly in Windows XP. Well, they cheated and used DOSBox, but still, presumably they tested it. I did discover a weird bug in Space Quest 2 during the save screen, it sort of screws up and leaves a bit of the screen on the game screen, which gets refreshed as you change it (like walk over the corrupted area, or just leave the screen and reenter). I hope in the damn police guys in the arcade (vaguely remember it from one of the Space Quests) are managable, as running it directly on a fast computer tended to make it impossible.

The Activision Anthology is actually kind of interesting. You pick from the 45 games from a rack, and play them on a TV (by which time it goes fullscreen). There are a lot of good classics on there which work as well as I remember them, like Plaque Attack, Crackpots, Dolphin, Oink, and my personal favorite, StarMaster. Those are some of the ones I used to have way back as cartridges. They also included some decent ones like Kabobbler and Pitfall, and some trash as well, heh.

StarMaster – The Great

Plaque Attack – The Good

Demon Attack – The WTF

It includes a set of 80’s songs that play in the background of everything, which repeat just a little too often, but still add a lot to the nostalgia factor (though ironically most of them are songs I liked much later in life, not in the 80’s). They also offer some interesting things to unlock, like commercials for some of the games, and patches (which I assume are graphical renderings of the real patches you could win by submitting proof of score to activision for certain games). The lamest attempt of value added crap to the collection are different viewing modes, like playing games where the game screen is textured on a rotating cube, or rotates slowly or zooms in and out. These games are meant to be pretty damn hard because there’s no ending for most of them.. you play until you die. I can’t imagine why you’d want clouds or stars interfering with your Dolphin run. But fine, they are there.. and they are turned off, heh.

The thing is with most of the early Space Quest games, and with all of the atari games, I doubt most people could just sit and play them and enjoy them. They are archaic, the atari games especially, playing for points, most of the time no ending, graphics quite startling at times… even I look at some of them and go “wow” because I remember them being so much better, but I’m sure that’s just because back when they were new, anything was amazing. The nostalgia power is high, I can still enjoy such games. Can you?

My apartment is just a mess. Spent the last couple of days trying to clean, but I was strangely unmotivated. So many pizza boxes, so much increased mass. I’ve just been working recently, work and sleep for the most part. People wonder how I can work so much, work on the weekends, work during vacation time, etc… well, it really helps not to have a life, honestly. Without the distractions of a lover, or hobbies, or even TV (which I never watch short of downloading a few things), work becomes your life. Is that bad? I don’t know. If I was forced to only work from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, I suppose I would just spend a lot of time being bored.

Meanwhile, I think I’ve physically reached the limits of what my body can tolerate in terms of mass. Walking is becoming a problem. It once was just a matter of terrible leg pains, which could occur anywhere between 5 minutes or hours, or never during that walk. Now, it’s some wicked back pain, which either causes, or is merely in addition to, general weariness and tiredness. I’m not even sure how I can exercise effectively with this kind of crap. Of course, there isn’t even an alternative, for if you reduce calories, I’m told, you just get fatter anyway because of some famine-anticipation biological imperative. Of course, I’m sure the calories I’m taking in are excessive regardless, but even if reduced to normal amounts, I’d probably still have problems for the next, oh, 20 years. I’m considering joining the gym at work, but it still requires willpower… I have very little of that. The problem is that it’s so hard to see progress, if even there is. The only progress I really see is in the other direction.. things don’t fit, I’m leaving the realm of even the largest articles of clothing available from non-specialty stores. I’m talking about places like Sears, places like The Gap never created clothes for me. I’ve often been criticized for my lack of “style”, well, fat isn’t stylish, particularly styled clothes aren’t made for us. Except in the Other kind of specialty stores, of which I have never had to go, and have always resisted, because it seems like the final defeat, and which I will soon have to patronize….

Such things I would give to be merely too tall.

As my little footer bar indicates, my webhost is Canadian Web Hosting. I got them because, well, they are canadian. And they host. Web.

Anyway, I decided to poke around their FAQ some time ago, and I saw this bit. Now, my English isn’t great, in fact, according to FireFox 2.0’s spell checker, I’ve already made (and ignored) some mistakes. My grammar must be far worse. Comma, splices, be, damned.

Anyway, here is where they web host sets the record straight for any disbelievers:

8. Many Companies claim to be Canadian and have servers in Canada but they are not. Are you really Canadian?

Yes.
Canadianwebhosting.com is owned by Canadian and operated by Canadian. We have been in the web hosting business for over 8 years, operating in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

– from http://www.canadianwebhosting.com/qanda.asp

Owned and operated by Canadian, eh? My instinct is that it should be Canadians, or equally correct but more worrisome, a Canadian.

Now, Canada being the fruit cake multicultural place that it is has lots of people who speak broken English. Fine, but this kind of mistake, if it is indeed a mistake, in that critical attempt to show the truth of things, I find hilarious.

Now let’s go back to that…building…thingy, where our beds and TV…is

-OR-
Does Anyone Else Remember This Show?

The opening titles

I’ve recently rediscovered a show I once watched as a young lad something like 10 year ago. It’s actually available on Youtube of all things, the entire series.. see far below for links. I’ve also, er, acquired it, through other means. This site that lists several shows, classic kids tv gives some info, and a link to Shock which actually released the first series in it’s entirety very recently (before it and it’s sequel were chopped down to telemovie length). In any case, the show is Region 4, or Region 0 in Pal, depending on which bit you read, either way I can’t play it. If ever it’s released here, I’ll buy it.

The show was created in 1991 and starred a group of people that, if you were to find some commonality between them other than being alive and human, would probably be the desire never to leave Australia, as it seems none of them really appeared in anything readily available outside Australia again. Looking up some of the bio’s from people who were in this show, if they even have a bio online, indicates many of them were stage actors in australia, and have remained so since, or perhaps dropped out of spotlights altogether. Which is annoying, since the star of the show I thought was strikingly attractive. I had nearly forgotten about that since I first saw it, since I couldn’t remember the show too well, but I now remember that I thought the lead was quite stunning. Now, of course, I’ve aged 10 years and she hasn’t on the screen, so it’s weirder, but I think only 5 lashes is sufficient punishment. The show was created in two series, each with 12 episodes, and the 24 episodes in total follow pretty well a huge story arch, with perhaps a dip in the middle where the two series are separated, but still the story wasn’t effectively resolved at that point.

The main protagonist of the show, Alana from the future, was played by Katharine Cullen, and just like the other people in the show, it’s pretty well impossible to find anything about her, in fact, wikipedia and imdb don’t even have a birthdate, but I reckon that if her age on the show in 1990 was supposed to be 14, that it’s likely that she was. As I said, I always thought she was quite attractive, and now that I’ve rediscovered the series and have remembered that fact, I’ve been trying to work out why. I think it’s the eyes and the broad nose, and the cheeks. Anyway, she hasn’t been in much else. IMDB claims she was one of the many Gatherers in The Tribe that Stayed in Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Hell if I can spot her, but I wouldn’t even know what she would look like at 8 or 9 or however old she would be. She was also in a play that had a picture in a paper with her name on it, so google found it. She’s probably late 20s in that picture. Anyway, I was unable to wring anything more from the internet, my stalking skills must be on the decline.

The Katharine that was young

The Katharine that grew (top left, obviously)

So here is a synopsis of the introduction of the show. Alana, said Girl from Tomorrow (several tomorrows, into the year 3000 of them) sneaks in to the science dome where her historian-guardian Tulista embarks on a 28 day trip to the evil year 2500. She returns moments later with bad man Silver-Thorn who took control of their new Time Capshul (intentional, since they all pronounce it like that, it’s cute). The people in the future use the power of thier minds to fight him, so he decides to rule the past instead, grabs Alana and together they plummet into the year 1990. Alana is separated from the time capshul, and having received no training in history, she is pretty much screwed. But she does meet up with Jenny, a comperably aged girl (who helps her evade a raging grocer), her brother Petey, who’s young and annoying, and their newly divorced mother Irene. Together, with their powers combined, don’t beleive Alana is from the future. And so the show continues.

The show is interesting for a couple of reasons. One of which is that it takes place in Australia, so it’s all accents all the time, but other than that the show could have really taken place anywhere, if you remove all references to Vegemite. The sci-fi elements are low-key, sort of like Star Trek TOS, the technology is there, but we don’t really have to know how it works. This constrasts with all the Star Trek’s since, which try to explain it in their own fantasy terms, and really, reversing the polarity is something the enemy should just expect by now. The show is also low-budget, at least, I have to figure it is given what it was, a children’s sci-fi on australian television. But they managed to use it pretty effectively, the scenes of the future aren’t particularly corny, just a little sparse. The special effects are decent, as are the props, for the most part. Some of the effects from the transducer scream Post-Production, but altogether it’s not so low budget that you see the set shake or shadows on backdrops. The ‘electricity’ effects are particularly nasty, but what are you gunna do.

Coloured-light pianos and reflectors are more intuitive control interfaces

PJ basically shows Alana how to subvert security at every turn, nice graphics otherwise

Another curious element is that the show’s protagonists are almost entirely female, and even minor players in high positions are women. Alana, the protagonist, is female, as is her friend Jenny. Petey is male, but just a wee lad so he doesn’t have dominatory effects. Jenny and Petey’s mother is single after a divorce. Later on a male protagonist in the form of a new beau of the divorcee comes along, but as the main protagonists are Alana and Jenny, it doesn’t undermine them much. The world council head (in the year 3000) is asian, and also a woman. In fact, they did a reasonable job for the year 3000 casting, since lots of nations are represented there. The inventor of the time capshul is an indian man, but the historian making the dangerous leap back to 2500 is female. Unfortunately there is a bad womanism here, which the world council head remarks to the historian now in ugly 2500-era garb that she wouldn’t have the courage to wear those clothes. ha ha ha. Well, whatever, Still better than her being recast to Nurse Chapel.

Interestingly, the antagonists are both male. Well, I’m talking about the really evil people, not the ones who merely get in Alana’s way in the 1990’s, which are also, I see, mostly male. But at least in this series, the two main evil characters, Silverthorn from 2500, and his bribed young henchman Eddie from 1990, are both male. That never seems to change actually, I think perhaps in the second series there was a woman hench..person, in 2500 (but the costuming makes it hard to tell) and there was a woman who did bad things under orders, but the main enemies were all male. Oh well, the point of this wasn’t that the antagonists were male, but that the protagonists were female, which is refreshing.

Time Travel has inhrerent problems in philosophy and physics, and in storytelling for that matter. For stories, basically, if you can travel at will back and forth in time, like Back to the Future, then you have to decide whether you can change history, or not. Changing history is interesting, leads to paradoxes, or rather, just deferred madness. Like, in Back to the Future Part 2 where they go back to 1985 and see it all dystopic, that is because history was changed and on travelling forwards, the timeline they are in is that altered one. That is all well and good, though the bit in the first movie about people fading away is just crap.

The other system you can use, which makes things a lot easier is to just say that the past is immutable, any changes you think you are making to the timeline are already in it, meaning you were destined to make those changes. This is like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban, since they didn’t really “change” anything, it all occured as it did in the first “pass” of the timeline, they just didn’t realize the implications, but they were destined to do it, it was contractual.

The Girl From Tomorrow is weird in that it seems to think that the immutable past theory is true for the first series, then go, oh shit when they see it’s not true in the second series (which I will discuss in more detail later) go and employ the theory of a changed history, which story elements in THAT series show elements of the Harry Potter version, of a destiny and an immutable history. Say what? Oh well. I’m actually surprised that Alana, as a character in the first series, didn’t even consider the implications of changing the history, and going to security guards asking them if they’ve seen her Time Capshul. Still, kids show.

Also, a problem with time travel is the concept of space travel at the time. The Girl From Tomorrow claims to follow the rule that it doesn’t travel through space, and that fact is actively used as a plot element in the second series. But in the first series, it is totally violated in the last episode. Oh well. This is the same sort of system seen in Back to the Future, except I don’t see why movement relative to earth is special. On the very first experiment with the Delorian, that dog’s one minute leap into the future should have had it 1800 kilometers away, in space, perhaps in the earth itself, since the earth revolves around the sun at 30KM per second. And that’s just the earth’s movement, what about all other movement. It couldn’t be calculated since as far as I know there is no fixed point in space to which all otherwise relative movement can be measured, but in any case, the car wouldn’t be on the road. For safety’s sake people, the only time machines should be space ships, why won’t anyone listen!

The technology from the future is of the sort that’s indistinguishable from magic. The main future element Alana brings with her other than the capshul is the Transducer, a headband like thing with a cystal in the middle. It focusses the telepathic aspects of the pituitary gland apparently. It is the main tool from the year 3000, it can be used to levitate, heal, and if emotionally unstable, untrained or evil, can be used as a weapon to explode CG balls. The people in the future even have little dots tattoed on their faces representing the levels of mental control they have. Other bit of futuristic brikerbrack Alana has with her from the future is a large bracelet which is actually her PDA called P.J., which has the ability to break into government computers, synthesize voices, project holograms, and has absolutely no security regarding how it’s used or who uses it.

Any sufficiently advanced future is indestinguishable from magic

Here I’ll do a rundown of each of the shows, here be spoilers. I tend to focus on the more interesting or odd bits, these aren’t meant to be full reviews or synopsies. If I seem to be making fun of the show, that’s just my way, it’s still a good show in my opinion, but it may require having seen it when young.

(more…)

I used to think “no one is going to hotlink off me, my stuff is so esoteric, no need to think about it” but somehow people find my stuff and then hotlink the hell out of it. Myspace is quite bad for that, 13 year old girls posing as 18 year olds and 40 year old guys posing as 13 year olds post lots of stuff, ripping off other sites. As long as the drain is minimal, I don’t mind so much, but for me, if I want to share something, I’ll upload a copy of it, since hotlinking is mean.

Finally tracked down this one guy who was hurting me a bit, by linking one of my damn movies from the junk directory. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from exactly since the referal page never had it, but I kept getting reports from this referer that it was being linked.

I finally found it, on a sub page, and I never spotted it before since it’s a bunch of pictures, and a bunch were broken. So I viewed the source and searched for my domain. The guy freakin linked an mpg in an IMG tag, so it was always broken, but it still touched my server for the bandwidth.

I changed the name of the file (it was the locker animation I had done for my brother’s business way back), it was called fulllocker.mpg, now it’s full_locker.mpg. I decided to see if I could do something else with that, cause now I get 404 errors reported from this hotlink, so I decided to fill it in with an image file, renamed to fulllocker.mpg. Fun stuff.

The obligatory links:
What he wanted, the movie file (for fun)
What he gets, the image file (renamed back to gif for this post so you don’t need to mess with the browser settings, but referenced in an IMG tag this works fine as .mpg extension)

I just returned from an entirely too short a weekend up at a cottage near Georgian Bay. It belongs to a guy named John who I know through another friend. Spent Friday night, Saturday and Sunday until nightfall up there. It was really a nice area, got to do some fun things I had never done before, and as Curtis wasn’t there, somehow fate deemed me to be the recipient of all the injuries. I’ll likely blog about the cottage trip in a more positive way once Alicia sends me all the photo’s she took and I can put together a storyboard entry. However, right now, I’ll deal with the injuries.

So a pre-existing one that has been exacerbated is on my left foot. I have some painful blisters and open sores relating to something I haven’t quite worked out, but appears to be mild athletes foot (amusing since I am no athlete). Anyway, walking around in sandles really opened them up and caused some bleeding.

Another set of injuries happened on both feet, the top of my left foot, and the underside of the big toe on my right foot. Caused by sharp stones and zebra mussels while swimming after an inflated tube that had gotten away from Alicia. Very sharp cuts which are at least healing quickly since they were so cleanly sliced. However, more bleeding and pain occured.

Most painful was what happened to my big toe nail on my right foot. I had taken the SeaDoo out for a ride, got to 55mph on it, only the second time on it, and the first time I managed to go that fast. Never fell off, never had a close call… but on dismount I smashed my big toe on what I figure was a rock in the sand in the water. My toe bled profusely around the nail, and I beleive it turned black for a while. Right now it weeps fluid when I put pressure on it (like when walking), and it aching lightly. I don’t know if I’ll lose the nail. If I do, it will be the second time.

And the strangest injury I have is a bruise on my right arm on the underside. Not sure how I got it, and I think I first noticed it yesterday, so I figure whatever happened occured saturday morning or friday night. It’s looking quite evil. Laura suggested it could have been a spider bite, which did little to reassure me. Further, I looked up spider bite on google images, and I decided that I’d rather have it be a bruise.

The loathing part I think can be covered by my own feelings of myself when it comes to some things I noticed about me this weekend, but I’ll keep that to myself.

Again, it seems people (and as a consequence, google) is very interested in my photo that I did for a little contest (well, just people submitted, for fun, we weren’t going to win anything) to do an interesting alteration to a source image.

But people have linked (hot linked, thank you very much) to it so much (without citing the source) that it now appears on google.com and google.ca’s image search in the second position (it fluctuates, but at least on the first page of results) when performing an image search on the word ‘junk’, just becuase the image is in my junk directory

Anyway, here it is again, with the source image for comparaison:

Mouse over to see the source image (wait as it loads)

Here are the larger version of the two images:
photo1orig.jpg
photo1alter.jpg

Anyway, it’s fun blogging with recycled material.

This is a journey into an event that occured at my house back home two weeks ago, but I only recently got these pictures to tell it.

We had a huge pile of wood in the firepit waiting to be burned, it had been sitting around for years, that is, it was good and dry and probably would have gone up by itself before long. We get a burn permit, and intend to burn all that dead wood.

Bad things occured to someone during this fire, just seconds before it began. Here is the aftermath (you can click all these pictures for the gorey details):

Note that the usual bounds of the firepit are described by the bricks.

See if you can spot the alarming thing in this shot

The fire exinguisher was not always there,
the gas jug was originally right next to the pit, and has lost its deposit

The desolation of Smaug

The firestarter suffered a similar fate as the weeds

The poor fire starter here won’t be named, since using gasoline, without letting the vapours dissapate, on 2 year old bone dry wood, is perhaps not the best thing to do. 1st and 2nd degree burns later, they are doing fairly well. The pit has started to recover, but perhaps next time a couple balls of paper would do.

At least they remembered to stop, drop, and roll.

So we had a nice little wildcat strike in Toronto’s transit system, and it caught me entirely by surprise, embarassingly enough. Wildcat apparently means I don’t know anything about it, get screwed over as none of the cabs will return my calls or my hails, and end up near death trying to get to work. I had lots of time to try to do something about it, I was up at 6, but I tossed and turned and watched episodes of things on my computer, since I was intending at showing up at 10am anyway. Silly me.

I went out at 9am, walking uncharacteristically to the next stop to avoid all the kids who get off there (and thus block all attempts at getting on at my usual stop). At first, I was like ‘it’s been 15 minutes, where the hell is the 34″… then I thought for a minute… “hmm, it’s been 16 minutes, where the hell is any bus at all?”
Then a passer by asked “Oh, is the strike over?” “What strike is that?” “TTC is on strike, but it was supposed to be resolved for the morning” “When the hell did this happen” “Earlier this morning….” “Damn.. thanks.”

And so I decided to go home to regroup, which is fairly easy when you are a single person. I walk in to find maintenance being done on my ceiling (which I had reported friday when I was home sick, and they came in several times over the course of a few hours to look at it, disrupting my attempts to block out the jackhammering on the balconies outside, whilst trying to recover) and go into my room to consult webpages. Ah, there we go, TTC, no service, thestar had things to say as well, strike on, not over yet, woe to you mere mortal. Joy.

So I pull out the phonebook and start phoning cab companies at random, since I never consider cabs a viable form of transportation (they fall off my radar usually), to get endless busy signals, which seemed about right. So I resolve to walk and try to flag down a cab, which proved fruitless and embarassing. So, in a final sigh of stupidity, decide to walk it.

Essentially, the walk is straight down Eglinton from Mt. Pleasant to Don Valley Parkway (There are more bits to either side, but for anonymity’s sake, I’ll use major roads). On the bus, it seems so plausible. And it might have been too, if not for the heat. 30 degrees, 42 humidex, not pleasant when standing still, but marching for the two hours required to get to work was somewhat more painful than I expected. I had only bought a single 710ml Powerade at a store at the start of my journal, and it is fortunate I did that much, as I’m sure I would have collapsed otherwise. However, buying two would have been better.

The problem with Eglinton once you get down to about the halfway point between Mt Pleasant and the DVP is that there just isn’t anything around, it’s just a pavement desert, no stores to buy drinks, not even shade for the most part. The heat was terrible, the slight inclines of the road unwelcome. I ran out of drink near Leslie, had to start taking more frequent breaks, my heart was racing dangerously, and it was hurting in my chest. I was getting more tired, dizzy, and wanting to collapse. I might find a little bit of shade behind a utility pole, and try to rest, but as soon as I trudged on, my heart would race again. Not to be melodramatic, but it felt like I was near death. Not sure what sunstroke is, but if I were to give a name to the feeling I was having at about the Leslie point, that would be it. What I experienced was more dehydration (which to me is ludricrous, I mean, I have my own hump) but maybe my dizziness, weakness and heart-speed would have been in the sunstroke category.

Finally made it to work, and collapsed a bit, it’s been hours, and I’m still recovering, my head still hurts and I’m a little dizzy. I’ve drunk rather a lot of liquid, and only hours later needed to use the washroom, to discover I not only looked like hell, but have sunburn on my face as well.

I’m not sympathetic with the drivers this time, or with TTC, or with anything at all. I mean, if only they had bantered about a strike for a bit before this, there might have been time to do something (which I guess was the point). They can’t screw the owners directly, but we can, only through being screwed ourselves. Which is how it is for public-facing services. We are merely the tools they weild, they risk backlash at themselves, but if they convince us that they were pressured into the position, then it’s hoped we will direct our anger at the owners themselves. In any case, we’re the ones who get dicked around with. I pay higher fares (or in this case, lose a day’s use of my Metropass) and I doubt any lasting change will come of this.

I mean, there are other actions, like the TTC apparently refusing to side with the drivers when they get kicked and spit on during fare disputes. Their job action? To not argue, basically the bus is free (sorta, some will still argue, the rest will just be really angry at you, or suggest you wait for another bus). I was with them on that, since it was against the TTC and not the fare-paying public.

I’m tempted on my next ride to pay my exact fare, and then kick and spit, well, not really, but it’s certainly going to be hard to go down to the station this week to fork over approx $100 for the June Metropass and feel I’m making a good move. I should just buy a car.