old.

I still get that twinge of jealousy with all his equipment that would have cost a pretty penny back then.  Not to mention his parents never seem to care about him wardialing thousands of calls on their line.  My parents freaked out everytime a computer would dial me.  But how else would I join those wionderful BBSes and get my TradeWars on?

WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars

Wiki Articles of the Day. My attempt at making the wikipedia chain addictions into something (anti-)productive for you, the reader! (Henceforth tagged as WAOTD.)

Hedy Lamarr - Talk about a Renaissance woman. Not only a gorgeous and celebrated actress, but also an award winning scientist.

Hedy Lamarr (November 9, 1913 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American actress. Though known primarily for her great beauty and her successful film career, she also co-invented an early form of spread spectrum encoding, a key to modern wireless communication.

I may slot these into the extrinsic posts instead.

Yes, this is quickly developing into a Youtube meme, but that is because it is good.

A 3-year-old girl explains Star Wars succinctly, in less than 2 minutes:

The format war is over.

Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

Now we can finally all go buy a damn movie player. Even though we won’t notice that much difference over regular DVDs. And now Microsoft can scramble to change their XBOX360, or not.

click the link at the top or the link below to see the full press release.
continue reading "Sony avoids another Betamax - HD DVD is officially dead"

A model that became one of my favorites the instant I saw it. This is a custom model entered into a contest on starshipmodeler.com called “Wrecks”. And, while there are many great entries, there is no doubt why it won.

It even won my heart :snif:

This is so wrong, but oh so right.

Joel Hodgson and some of the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew have set up a website for a new show they are making: Cinematic Titanic.

Fromt he blog/description, it sounds like it will be in the same format as MST3K, with B-movies and silhouettes and all. J. Elvis Weinstein and Trace Beaulieu are also in on the project, and the three of them happen to be the original cast of MST3K.

Interesting at least. I’m not sure why they are going back to old roots, but I hope its from inspiration and not from lack of living expenses. Mike Nelson’s Rifftrax were mildly funny to me, but nothing that made me laugh as much as MST3K. But I wonder if this project is in response to Rifftrax’s apparent success.

The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Star Wars Fandom

The Secret of Star Wars Fandom

If you run into somebody who tells you they thought the franchise was quite enjoyable, and they very-much liked the originals as well as the prequels, and even own everything on DVD, and a few of the books, these imposters are not Star Wars Fans.

Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.

Not me, I am merely a pauper among nerddom, although I do my best. I heard about a movie called King of Kong that made a splash at Cannes or Sundance or somewhere a few months ago. It’s a movie about old arcade game champions and how they still compete today. I searched all over for a trailer of preview or something back then, and couldn’t find anything.

Fast-forward to today, where I caught Sicko at the Alamo, and one of the quirky trailers they showed was for the King of Kong movie.

I never realized that the world champion was so arrogant about being good at old arcade games. He literally sounds like Walken in his “When I put on my pants, I make gold records” form.

The Star Wars 30th Anniversary, we knew it would come to this…

It’s the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. This week there is a celebration and convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center called Star Wars Celebration IV. A featured exhibit at this event is called The Vader Project, in which 66 artists were invited to submit their own version of the Darth Vader Helmet.

Here’s a Flickr gallery with the helmets. Some samples:

This viral video has been sweeping over the net and coming at me from every direction. I usually don’t repost ones that are so widespread, but, since drzy has taken a turn towards robots lately, I feel I must.

So, I give you Nazi, American, and even Japanese mechs in an alternate past… a short CG film by the folks at cee-gee.net.