My taste in movies is a little weird or possibly excessively normal, in that I don’t really care about modern blockbusters, and I don’t really care about prestige cinema either, but what I do care about is movie-ass movies. Just the most regular kind of underwhelming films imaginable. I blame the fact that I’ve been a fan of MST3K for decades. After a while, you watch enough bad movies and you realize they’re not so bad and you’d honestly enjoy watching some of them on their own. Give me a budget Roger Corman flick over a Marvel movie any day of the week. I want to watch that kind of obscure 90s movie that ran on cable at an awkward time slot because it was cheap to license. I want to watch that those fake kung fu movies that they always seem to be watching on tv shows. I love a cult classic. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Back in the days before streaming, I loved independent video rental places because they tended to be staffed by the same kinds of fans of movies for movies’ sake. Heck, I remember the first time I walked into my dearly departed neighborhood video store and the staff were actively watching an episode of MST3K. I knew immediately I had found my video store.

Scarecrow Video is not my neighborhood video store and never has been, but I can tell they care about movies. Show them some love if you can, won’t you?

Like many others, I was introduced to Roger Corman's work through MST3K. The world is far richer for his contributions to cinema, in quantity if not always in quality.

Shout! Factory TV did a great documentary/interview series about Roger Corman’s work a few years ago called CULT-TASTIC: TALES FROM THE TRENCHES WITH ROGER AND JULIE CORMAN. I highly recommend it.

If we switch to the old Palm/Mac epoch, we could buy another 2 years to solve the year 2038 problem:

PDB Datetimes

Many PDB format files used times counting in seconds from 1904-01-01T00:00:00. This is the base time used by the original Macintosh (up to Mac OS 9). It may be noted that there were close links between Palm OS and Mac OS during early development. Using an unsigned 32-bit integer and the 1904 epoch, integer overflow will overflow will occur sometime in 2040. 

Others may be observed to be counting from 1970-01-01T00:00:00 (the Unix epoch base time), and uses a signed 32-bit integer which will overflow sometime in 2038.

A few weeks ago I read the ActivityPub specification and found out, to my surprise, that it was entirely push-based -- unlike RSS, a publishing server has to keep track of all the subscribers (or at the very least each subscribing instance) and notify each one of them individually every time there's a new post. I'm still reeling, but my immediate takeaway from this was:

1. WTF, no wonder instances have so much trouble scaling. Up until this point I'd assumed it was just due to media attachments.

2. This almost completely eliminated any interest I had in writing my own experimental ActivityPub implementation to play around with. There's a much higher barrier to entry if your toy project has to do stuff like keep a subscriber list in a database somewhere.

An actual demo video for BeOS! I remember reading a lot of magazine articles about it, and I tried their x86 downloadable version in the later era of BeOS when they were flailing around for an alternate market, but this is the first time I’ve seen video promotional material for it.

Some thoughts:

I’m on vacation, so naturally I have spent the past few hours thinking intensely about math.

Mostly what I’ve been thinking is, gosh I am even worse at geometry now than I was when I was a teenager and actually knew math.

Detailed image description

A screenshot of the online service Prodigy. There is vector art of an eye looking through a magnifying glass, and a spotlight graphic on the banner ad below.

Text reads:

Games: Where In The World Is CARMEN SANDIEGO?

1. THIS WEEK'S CAPER: The Case of the Missing Mummy
2. Last week's winners
3. The Acme Detective Agency Honor Roll
4. About Carmen Sandiego

© Borderbund Software 1986.

Banner ad: Don't miss this chance to test your knowledge of recent hit movies. Take the Showtime quiz. [LOOK]

PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE OR M FOR MENU

Recently I've been thinking about how Prodigy used to have banner ads at the bottom of most pages. This was actually INCREDIBLY futuristic for the time. The web was just barely a thing. Most people would still have been using Prodigy's client for MS-DOS at the time. The only reason it even looks as good as it does in the screenshot above is because they were using clever vector graphics techniques to deliver as little information over dialup as possible -- the same techniques that made early Sierra games possible.

A thing that is probably forever going to haunt me is that I have vivid memories of playing what was, in retrospect, almost certainly Mystery House — yes, that Mystery House, the game that gave rise to Sierra On-Line and the entire graphical adventure game genre — on a school computer in elementary school, but because it was so long ago, and my mind has filled in so many blanks over the years, actual screenshots of the game look almost unrecognizable to me.

Thinking about the weird quasi-false cognate status of the words azure (English) and aozora (Japanese). They look alike, right? It’s not just me. And they both refer to blue skies or at least the color of a blue sky.

Anyway, these two words aren’t related at all. The Japanese word has a really straightforward construction and I assume etymology. It’s literally just 青 “blue” + 空 “sky”. Standard readings on both kanji.

The English etymology is wild though. It’s Yet Another loan word from Arabic, but it’s so old that it doesn’t have the “al-“ prefix that’s a tell of more modern loan words like algebra:

Middle English (denoting a blue dye): from Old French asur, azur, from medieval Latin azzurum, azolum, from Arabic al ‘the’ + lāzaward (from Persian lāžward ‘lapis lazuli’).

(Also check out how that leading L got dropped because it was grouped together with the L in al! It’s like how “a napron” became “an apron”.)

By the way, there are a few actual loanwords from Japanese in English beyond the obvious ones like sushi or haiku. The one I always think of is honcho.