Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

As I got around to the fourteenth volume of Witch Hat Atelier I was conscious the manga’s anime adaptation was nigh. The opening episodes had already been previewed; I knew in the most general sense that they seemed to have impressed. Despite noticing a few people passing along a rumour that “all the episodes have already been finished!” (which has me recalling a report the anime’s premiere had been pushed back by months), though, the general caution I’ve accumulated has kept me thinking I’ll wait and hope once more for some form of all-clear report after everything has shown up. In the meantime, of course, I did have the latest instalment of Kamome Shirahama’s original work.
( Plans amid the crisis )

Department store mannequins showing up in Rod Serling’s next-episode preview for “The After Hours” did manage to get my attention. This could, though, have been due to antique memories of a kids’ TV show from my youth that involved a mannequin coming to life after a department store closed, and those memories might have been stronger because I’d bought a book about kids’ TV shows produced in a city near me during the twentieth century, even if I haven’t yet got to the entry for that particular show. I was ready to suppose things wouldn’t be quite so cheerful in The Twilight Zone.
( In any case... )

“Mr. Bevis” might have stood out a bit in the list of Twilight Zone episode titles. I can wonder, though, if that had to do with the thought that if there’d been one extra vowel in the title, the resemblance to an “edgy” cartoon from the early 1990s would have been that much stronger... (Even if the best efforts of others to promote that particular animated series just made me edge away from it, though, I did wind up delving into a late-1990s spinoff from it.) The next-episode preview did pique my interest for it, anyway.
( The eccentric touch )

Whatever carried forward from its next-episode preview to “A Passage for Trumpet” itself seemed to have had me wondering in advance again about Rod Serling’s sentimental streak showing up. As the episode got under way, I was also wondering if I’d be able to keep up a different sort of streak of setting at least a few thoughts down.
( A distinctive number in the end )

As a title in the list of Twilight Zone episodes “The Chaser” might not have stood out all that much. Rod Serling’s on-set appearance in the next-episode preview for it amused me, but for a reason distinct from what I then understood the episode to be. As it turned out, things were a bit different again.
( Among the stacks )

Watching “A Stop at Willoughby” finished the fourth of four Blu-Ray discs stacked and overlapped on the first of the six “pages” inside my Twilight Zone set. Beyond that mere bookkeeping detail, I’d been anticipating the episode. Distinct from the handful of episodes I’d read adaptations of years ago and from the further handful episodes that seem part of “general cultural knowledge,” I’d happened not that long ago to see it brought up with a suggestion it showed people at the beginning of the 1960s might have been as inclined to dwell on “a kindlier past” as people at any other time. That, though, might have led to certain anticipations of my own.
( On a different line )

Feeling wearied ten years ago by the effort of coming up with posts here might not have afflicted me for all that long. Before that mood lifted, though, it did turn into the motivation to sign up for Tumblr and start posting “computer magazine covers” cadged from the Internet Archive and a few other sources. Not that long after I’d started, so it now seems, efforts to clean that service up injured it, and yet there are still other people posting there and operating on a lower key might make it feel a little less reprehensible than some other services.

To push towards the ten-year mark I did resort to posting covers from some computer magazines I hadn’t quite accumulated scanned copies of back when starting. I do feel as if I’m closer to the end than the beginning of that second pass through history. At this point, aware of the certain amount of time that goes into “skimming a magazine and putting together a capsule description to go with the cover” and how I keep feeling like I’m short on time after work these days, I’m contemplating whether I have enough content to just go on to reposting covers from “fifty years ago,” “forty-five years ago,” “forty years ago,” and so on; it might even amount to “a post every day of the month.”

Alternating between the “volumes” of Red River still marked out in the thicker omnibus re-releases and volumes of other manga, I made it through what’s been republished so far of the “transported back to the ancient Middle East” story. There was just a bit of a temptation to say something about what I’d read, but I let it slide away.
( Then, not that long afterwards... )

Another “on-set” appearance by Rod Serling in the next episode preview for “A Nice Place to Visit” stuck in my memory and had me anticipating the story to come. So far, the ending twists in The Twilight Zone having a certain amount of “obviousness” hasn’t bothered me too much; there seems a bit more to the episodes than that.
( Just visiting )

As I started watching “The Big Tall Wish” I suppose Rod Serling’s next-episode preview of it must have faded from my mind. Its first moments had me feeling as if I’d just been reminded it would involve an on-the-ropes boxer and the boy who believed in him. I might have remembered at some point that Serling had written Requiem for a Heavyweight (which I watched at the beginning of my “Turner Classic Movies period,” although that had to do with knowing Cassius Clay made a short but significant appearance in the movie before becoming Muhammad Ali), but I suppose I was wondering more if Serling’s sentimental streak would be out in force. Then, I had something larger to consider.
( The invisible become visible )