Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Happening to pick up on a French bande dessinée that told the story of George Lucas making the original Star Wars did amuse me. It’s possible, though, that I might have had a thought or two amounting to “a different language, a different country... a different perspective?” When I also managed to notice that Les Guerres de Lucas would be translated into English and released over here, I suppose I was at once wondering about the chance to see something from a part of the “comics world” I’m more familiar with in the abstract than the specific (save, perhaps, for “vintage works”) and that much more cautious. Some people whose opinions on the subject being documented pretty much align with mine (which then reminds me some who might have the best chance of noticing my thoughts here have different reactions) did appear positive about Lucas Wars. I got around to ordering a copy from an area comics store. Once I’d received it, however, I left it sitting for some time among the manga I have waiting to be read. What brought me to the point of extracting it from the “comics bag” it was taped up in just might have been the thought it would somehow be better to begin reading it even one day in advance of many people making half-joking comments involving the month and day. I did finish it on the third of May, though.
( Getting to one point, and then others )

In the midst of “MARCHintosh” the Snow emulator’s home page pointed to “Doom for the SE/30.” I was a bit tickled by this latest example of “Doom being ported to unlikely hardware,” although when I checked out the project I saw it required more memory than my own SE/30 is equipped with. The certain emphasis on “MARCHintosh is a chance to work with real hardware” did somewhat diminish thoughts of at least trying the port in Snow itself. In the end I did get around to playing two levels inside the emulator, noting how many graphical (and audio) features were turned off or pared back to move a game intended for relatively high-end PCs of 1993 to a 68030-powered computer (“laden down by more operating system overhead,” as I can imagine some saying) that had been supposed “premium” back in 1989. A bit later on, the port was developed to the point of also running on colour Macs, and I resorted to Snow’s IIcx emulation. It was a little easier to make things out there, but I was also reminded of how my family’s LC II had to disable almost every bell and whistle in Marathon to run that “Doom clone” (from a certain detached and dismissive perspective) at any semblance of speed. (The question is whether “the LC II was just as compromised a ‘low cost’ machine as its predecessor” was outweighed by our having put an accelerator card into it not that many months after we’d got it.) In any case having to run this program in an emulator rather than on genuine vintage hardware kept me thinking it would be just as easy to launch a modern Doom port and have all the features working.
( To a semblance of productivity )

Not that long ago I was in the bookstore in my city’s big mall, passing by a table with “fantasy and science fiction” books laid out on it. From a glance I was conscious there were more obvious “fantasy” novels than “science fiction” there, only somewhat of a newer twist on that constant nagging thought that I don’t have as much of a connection to “new SF in print” as I once did.

One cover, though, did manage to catch my attention. I picked up Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, turned it over to read the blurb on the back, and carried it with me to the checkout. While a note on the cover about it being a “10th Anniversary Edition” was somehow a bit of a reproach, I wound up doing more than buying it in beginning to read it not that long after the purchase.
( Details not in the blurb )

Some knowledge of science fiction’s history and a certain weakness for “anniversaries” came together in recent weeks. A little part of me wanted to reach back a century and see just what the first issue of the pulp magazine “Amazing Stories,” cover date April 1926, was like. An awareness “pulp scans” are accessible (and in this case, so far as I understand, now clear of copyright problems) did, though, bump against part of that history just mentioned.
( Just a century ago )

Hydrogen leaks meant the Artemis II crew didn’t spend much time in pre-launch quarantine leading into February and helium flow issues meant they didn’t spend much time in quarantine leading into March, but as the April block of launch windows on a “Mission Availability” document I’d happened on approached my hope for the upcoming moon flight did spring eternal. That hope did have to stand in contrast to certain thoughts of the grim moods in the world back in 1968 and the awareness I’m not making as many “space”-tagged posts here as I once did. Then, mere days before the launch attempt, I ran into a link to dire warnings about the capsule heat shield with some gloomy follow-ups added. I’d known the heat shield of the unmanned Artemis I test flight I’d posted about multiple times had been found to have been more damaged than expected, I’d seen a report the way the new capsule would re-enter the atmosphere had been adjusted even if I’d wondered this amounted to a tradeoff, and I am aware that for all that there are plenty of complaints about the denial of inconvenient truths there are also sometimes people ready to work themselves into extra-pessimistic interpretations. However, the “what if deviance has been normalized?” question did prey on me. I thought “if it all works out, I can say something,” and thought “and if it all goes wrong at the last moment, what might I say?”
( What I'm saying )

With a new year beginning my personal schedule of anime to be watched wasn’t that different from the broad strokes of last year’s concluding months. Working to finish some long series, I’d filled the spaces between them with shows of somewhat varying vintage. As ever, shifting between new or nearly-new and older works is a small distinguishing factor.

In these recent months I have been conscious of the complaints of others about disc releases drying up, the blame loaded on that familiar target of a large impersonal corporation. Having made it through a different sort of collapse involving “more discs being made than were being sold” might amount to a different perspective, or maybe just an excuse to shrug. I am conscious of the temptation to twist “well, when you can’t buy domestic releases...” into something self-serving (rather than making a big deal of importing untranslated Japanese releases, of course). Having bought anime on discs faster than I’ve been able to watch those discs for years is something else, anyway.
( One purchase, anyway: Demon Slayer )
( End of one road: Urusei Yatsura )
( Holiday retrospective: Sanda )
( Bowling along: Turkey! )
( To the conclusion: Wonderful Precure! )
( A return in force: Gurren Lagann )
( Another conclusion: Shinkalion Change the World )
( A journey resumed: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End )

Going back to an anime movie and on to two OVA series with thoughts of marking that certain length of time I’ve been watching anime involved “second looks at last.” Plenty of other titles fall in the same personal category of having thought it might be nice to see them again but never having quite got around to that; there seem worse problems even when it comes to watching anime. One particular show shouldered forward in my mind for this new year, but there were times when I thought first of sample episodes in a previous “personal anniversary,” then of compilation movies, and wondered if I could quite insist I’d altogether missed out on it after my first experience. Then, I pushed that quibble out of my mind. A certain part of Gurren Lagann, after all, could be taken as “put your worries behind you and just do things!”
( Drilling ahead )

Perpetual personal uncertainty about “Rifftrax” didn’t block out all thought of contributing to their Kickstarter to return to Mystery Science Theater 3000 for four episodes, but I didn’t rush to make that contribution. Announcements to keep up interest piqued my interest with the news Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff would contribute to one episode; my introduction to Mystery Science Theater having been through MSTings that had “Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank experimenting on Mike” had something to do with that, although I suppose I have to balance “maybe the ‘riffing’ got a bit meaner afterwards” against “the characters could be ‘casually cruel’ to each other in the ‘host segments’ then.” However, my uneasy caution kicked in again when the second announcement of a movie to be “riffed” involved a “Star Wars ripoff” (which, like “Space Mutiny,” just happened to recycle special effects from an earlier ripoff...)
( What helped in the end, and beyond the end was a beginning... )

As “MARCHintosh” has continued I suppose I’ve been thinking more about the actual antique hardware I set up than doing things with it. One item discovered via mere emulation before the month began did at least provoke an idea, though. Going through a giant disk image of selected software, I happened on a “2020Patch” extension. After a while, I started to think about how the Control Panel only offers two digits for setting the year. Emulators appear to draw their clock setting from the host system such that I never look at files I’ve made in them and realise there’s something off about their date stamps, but that would of course be different with my SE/30. Once I’d examined some recent date stamps on it I realised they’d indeed wound up back in the early years of the twentieth century.
( Shifting systems and times )

In working my way through accumulated stacks of manga I took a little while to get to the latest Gou Tanabe adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story via Dark Horse, “The Colour Out of Space.” “On the treadmill of series already begun” might have mixed with “saving something impressive ‘for later’” to slow me down, but I suppose there was a bit of crawling caution too about seeing an interpretation of something hitherto just in my mind’s eye. The manga’s cover happens to suggest the insects that show up in the story, and I have to admit to my own case of hard-to-explain uneasiness around many kinds of them. Beyond that, I could suppose moments later in the story head towards full-blown “body horror,” and even artistic representations of people “melting” or otherwise disintegrating unsettle me that much further.
( Just don’t drink the water )