Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Revisiting at last both an anime movie and an OVA series I’d first seen back in university addressed just the beginning of my “it’s been long enough” thoughts. The next title that had caught in my mind would give me a chance to reflect on those first, different years after university. However, I have to admit to thoughts of diminishing returns. I’d hoped I’d be better able now to understand what Patlabor 2: The Movie offered, and perhaps I did. Going into Bubblegum Crisis I’d wondered in an amused way about the varied constraints on what could be made commercially available at the dawning of “the anime market in (North) America” and how that would have changed formative experiences for less-connected fans; going out of it, though, I was a bit conscious of certain simplicities in that OVA’s core stories I didn’t find all that interesting. For the next title in my mind, I was thinking most of all of how Macross Zero seemed more a simple matter of that old insistence, or assumption, that once a title you’d seen “fansubbed” had been licensed, you were obligated to buy the legitimate release, just perhaps regardless of your previous reactions...
( Out of the shadow world )

Happening to think for the first time in a while of a TRS-80 Model 100 mailing list, I looked at its bookmarked web archive and saw some recent messages beginning with a question about “the Z-machine for the Model 100.” (That question had been inspired by news of some Infocom source code becoming “safe to distribute.”) As the discussion explained how someone had managed to get “the virtual machine that ran Infocom and later adventures” running on the portable with the aid of REX, a recent storage development for it, my amusement might have been tempered by reflecting on how I’d used the somewhat different (and more “volatile”) REXCPM to run the old Infocom interpreter for that operating system, but more to prove it could run than to play through games using it. That more people had their own chance to squeeze text adventures onto the Model 100’s small screen seemed good in itself, but perhaps thoughts of “paths not taken” left me wondering if I ought to at least try that other option myself.
( Paths now taken )

When my RSS reader pointed me to a retrospective on QuickTime as “an Apple innovation of the 1990s that managed to have made it out of that decade,” it just so happened I’d managed in recent days to have simulated an early stage of that step towards “multimedia” myself. While working with the Snow emulator to try out “dot matrix printing” and “old word processors,” I’d kept an eye on its development. A “branch” promising steps towards offering the Motorola 68030 microprocessor had got my attention, but I’ll admit to wondering how many steps would be needed until it became available. When the first “030 Macs” showed up in the general “cutting-edge build,” it was something of a pleasant surprise.
( Speeding up and stress testing )

While asking myself “what can I post about here next?” I happened to think of a project creeping towards completion, and pushed to finish it at last just so I could mention it. After revamping my home page last year (but well over “a year” ago when counting in months), my thoughts had turned to a sub-page where I’d talked up “some of my favourite MSTings.” Aware of all the time that had passed since I made that page and the links that had “rotted” in that time, I decided to revamp it. Rewriting my descriptions was a slow process, though; I suppose I was thinking they would have to “stick around” in a way these posts don’t quite have to.
( Additions and contemplations )

Watching Patlabor 2: The Movie again, about twenty-nine years and eleven months after I’d first seen it, marked the latest “it’s been that long, huh?” moment in time since I attended my introductory anime club showing at university (one month before they screened that movie). I had been thinking, however, of further iterations on that idea to make a bigger deal of my personal anniversary. Other titles were coming to mind that I’ve seen once yet never quite got back to despite taking some interest in them (and, quite often, having DVDs or Blu-Rays sitting around, many of them unopened...) Those sole viewings weren’t separated from now by quite as much time as the movie, but I was still ready to think that, again, “it’s been long enough.” For the next title in mind, though, I’d still be dropping back in on a different part of my university years.
( Enter the Knight Sabers )

Watching my way through “the six-movie Star Wars saga” every year does feel extravagant whenever I remember all the other movies I have ready to hand but don’t find the time for in other weekends. These saga journeys have been possible ever since Revenge of the Sith came out on DVD (which seems to have been the factor placing them in the fall), so I suppose I’ve more than made up for those personal wilderness years when I was half-convinced that to confront any of the Star Wars movie in any form would snap my desperate resolve and reduce me to the same savage complaints as “everyone else.” What saved me there was at last looking a little deeper into the online presence of one fanfic writer who’d seemed able to be positive about the then-incomplete-in-the-middle whole thing, too late to see what I knew from some later allusions to as a critique of “Zahn’s Thrawn novels” but not too late to join a little community of other positive fans. (I’d discovered that writer through happening to look into the columns then on fanfiction.net, and I’d been pointed to that site by other MSTing authors recommending it as an inexhaustible source of outrageous “bot fodder,” so I suppose Mystery Science Theater 3000 played a certain role in saving my own Star Wars positivity...)
( An unacknowledged anniversary )

In some fashion familiar to me, including how I can’t think back to a resonant moment of discovery but have to resort to saying “one way or another,” I became aware of a manga now available called Red River. The thick “three-in-one” omnibus volumes might have been obvious enough in the bookstore with their red spines. At a certain point I happened on a brief explanation of it as a “thrown into the past” shojo manga that had begun in the mid-1990s. While some past concerns that I’d been running low on manga to read with new titles not catching my attention have faded, perhaps the sense of an older manga that wasn’t “long familiar” amused me and had me thinking this was a chance to broaden my outlook, if only by a tiny bit. I went and bought the first collection.
( Plunging back )

After assembling my first Gundam model kit (and the first full-blown model kit I’d put together in quite a few years) I bought another “Entry Grade” Mobile Suit from the same hobby store and built it as well. I was a little inclined to ponder how both of these kits “left out accessories” from how their Gundams deployed in their anime, the better to motivate you to move up a grade, perhaps. With that in mind, when I saw a third Entry Grade kit that happened to be the very first Gundam and was labelled on the box (this time in Japanese and English) as including a “Full Weapon Set” extending to more fanciful armaments left out of the compilation movies, I was motivated to buy it.
( Fine details within )

Poking away at the Snow emulator to explore a few corners of the antique Macintosh experience has stayed interesting enough to get me wondering about making another post on the subject. The whole matter of “old computers,” though, can leave me thinking “it interests me, but anyone likely to see this here would, at best, just sort of shrug and think ‘too much detail.’” The best I can do is keep this introduction short and put everything else a click away.
( Guest appearance by actual antique hardware )

At the seventy-fifth anniversary of the appearance of the first Peanuts comic strip, I went back to my library’s ebook lending service and signed out the final Peanuts Every Sunday colour collection. I didn’t rush through it, aware that I was coming to the end of the strip, if in a selective way. There was, too, the enduring thought that I might not be able to say very much about it.

( “Yes, sir.. I want to buy a red kite..” )