Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

As Rod Serling’s preview began to attach a bit of meaning to the impending title “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” a week ago, I did wonder just what I’d make of the episode once I’d seen it. While I make a certain show of seldom managing to broaden my scope by watching old movies, I once found the time to see Sunset Boulevard. The episode coming up did appear to have a similar plot.
( It’s different in The Twilight Zone )

With my knowledge of The Twilight Zone having been limited more or less to “what everyone knows,” a good number of episode titles still feel like enigmas. “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” just the third episode in my complete Blu-Ray set, had me going back to what I did know and guessing at “some sort of ‘little’ man and some sort of allusion to a considerable anxiety of the 1950s and beyond...” It might have taken Rod Serling’s preview at the end of the previous episode (the only time he appears on camera this early on, which is one of the things diverging from my expectations) to realise just what lay ahead. That did amuse me a bit.
( Back in the day )

Once I’d got the shrink wrap off a complete Twilight Zone Blu-Ray set and proven the show’s episodes weren’t all that long (even if that might point out how many old movies I recorded to DVD off Turner Classic Movies but haven’t got around to watching), it was a bit easier to move on to the second instalment of the series. “One for the Angels” hadn’t been adapted into a short story and wasn’t one of the episodes that gets brought up to invoke the show these days, so I was wondering a little how this second step would turn out. I also have to admit that, in the three-decade-old issue of the science fiction journal I returned to just a little while ago, there’d also been an article by Gary Westfahl offering “extracts from a nonexistent book” of capsule biographies from science fiction film and television that had offered faint praise at best for Rod Serling.
( Making the pitch )

Every once in a while I drop into an independent movies-and-music store that’s stayed open in the area mall. Most of the time this amounts to looking and leaving, but a little while ago I noticed a complete Twilight Zone Blu-Ray set there. Having been aware of the show for a very long time without ever having managed to see any of it, I wound up succumbing and using cash I’d taken out of the bank just in case I wanted to buy things at the recent anime convention. I did wind up thinking, though, that I’d once bought a “first season” DVD set of the show from a yard sale of some sort and never got around to watching it...
( Getting started )

One more three-month block defined by new anime series showing up opened with me aware something would be different in my case. My latest long vacation was scheduled for the block’s last weeks. For the moment still lingering behind many other people and awaiting their judgments on shows, this might not have been an overwhelming difference. Still, I did work through a bit of scheduling to make sure I could finish everything I’d been thinking about seeing before leaving. I also happened in the opening weeks of the quarter to view Princess Mononoke at the movies. Perhaps this could be seen as a more genteel version of “no wonder movies are the way they are with people only willing to spend money on ‘expected quantities,’” but I did seem able to find something added by “the theatrical presentation.”
( From days of yore: Albegas and Minky Momo )
( Into half-remembered territory: Attack on Titan )
( On with the show: Oshi no Ko )
( Recent streaming: The Apothecary Diaries and Zenshu )
( Taking my own chance: Gundam GQuuuuuuX )
( Travelling samples: Lycoris Recoil and Himitsu no Akko-chan )

After resorting to one of my library’s ebook lending services to read a volume of the Peanuts Every Sunday colour collection I’d never quite got around to buying as a proper printed book, I didn’t rush into the following volumes. That delay could have contained an element of “is it better to look forward to some things than to look back?”, but maybe I should also admit to wondering if that would get to the point where I couldn’t say anything about them here at all (although I suppose I’d managed to say something about the Sunday pages and daily strips together...)

( “I go by the colors of the countries on the map... See? Some are pink.. some are yellow..” )

Not that long ago I got to thinking about just one of the old portable computers I have lying around. My old MacBook Air, bought not that long before a trip from a store selling used computers as well as new machines, had been a thoroughly portable machine. However, it only had four gigabytes of RAM with no way to increase that. This made me refrain from upgrading it to the final operating system versions it could support, even if the absolute final version among them has passed over the “no security updates” horizon. At last, the thought of installing a version of Linux on it occurred to me, and perhaps just before the latest burst of general lugubriousness over perceptions of rotten software from Apple. (Many years ago, during a previous burst, I set up an even older black-plastic MacBook to dual-boot into Linux, so I suppose that setting up just-in-case escape routes has been something I’ve been proving I can do for a while.)
( Booting and rebooting )

That I scraped together the resolve to step outside weekend routine and head to my area’s big anime convention in 2019 could feel in the immediate years afterwards like “at last yet almost too late; at least I can say I once saw what they were like.” Even after starting to get on cruise ships again I was at least noticing warnings that conventions had never been healthy places. In the leadup to this year’s “Anime North,” though, noticing davemerrill’s panel announcements might have tipped a balance that had already been shifting. (That had something to do with being invited to describe a university anime club experience at the time of the very first Anime North.) A few daydreams about taking the chance bounced through my mind, and then I bought a Saturday pass, perhaps a few more days before the convention than I’d managed back in 2019.
( Preparations and panels )

Last May, certain technical difficulties (that went away without my doing anything) as much as trying a new program got me posting that I’d continued drawing on my iPad for a number of months. Since then I’ve kept drawing; bringing that up again is pretty much a matter of going back to that new program at last.
( Some evidence included )

“There were computers from other companies than Radio Shack?” seems just amusing enough a realisation for me to use it in explanations of how I got to delving into “old computers,” but I do wonder about it oversimplifying things. In any case, there have been things about the particular computer I was using when I came to the realisation just mentioned that I learned well after the fact. It doesn’t seem that many years ago that I was looking at the list of software on a Color Computer archive and really picked up on a program named “TW-80” to the point of wondering about its name. From reading old issues of The Rainbow magazine I’d known about a word processor for the “CoCo” called Telewriter. When The Rainbow’s editorial content had still been dot matrix printout, full-page, typeset ads for Telewriter had promised to transcend a text display that might seem unpromising for word processing (with sixteen lines of thirty-two characters each and no lowercase, just capital letters in “reverse video” boxes to indicate them) by drawing characters on the highest resolution graphics screen. I’d known how the program had become Telewriter-64 as the Color Computer reached the 8-bit memory limit and then transformed into Telewriter-128 on the Color Computer 3, which had a much improved text display. The not quite in-between number, not mentioned in a Rainbow article on word processors that had shaped my awareness of the options there at the end of the 1980s, tickled my fancy enough to load TW-80 in an emulator. I sorted out it pressed the equally improved graphics of the “CoCo 3” into service.
( Listing included )