Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Keeping up with a sort of digest of “Color Computer news” (it was where I’d learned about the regional antique computer exposition I went to last year), I saw a pointer to a video promising a detailed look at a game ported to computers including the “CoCo 3,” Rescue on Fractalus. The game (an early work from Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts) was a sort of science fiction flight simulator where you flew down valleys and over mountains generated via what was just becoming a buzzword, “fractals,” shooting alien gun turrets off the ridges and landing to rescue crashed pilots. While my recollections have my family only buying the game during the final closeout sales at Radio Shack on Color Computer software, by which the state of the art for people who’d bought more expensive computers had become Wing Commander, I’d played Rescue on Fractalus enough to take some interest in the video.
( Returning to the rescue )

When I set about watching through “sample episodes” from six decades of anime two years ago, I had only one series starting in 1970 available with subtitles. Unlike a few other early cases of that, I was uncertain about sampling it. My post about Tomorrow’s Joe began by lamenting how, for all that I knew the original manga had been a very big deal, the accumulating injuries of boxing unsettle me. I do wonder, though, if I’d protested too much; I can at least understand how the “repelled” versus “compelling” balance has varied over time and for different people even if some of the results of being punched repeatedly start to hint at “body horror,” something in general I really don’t do well with at all. (For that matter, clothing getting ripped in “staged fights” doesn’t appeal to me either. By the time this leads to admitting that bits of an outfit being lost over the course of a story might not appeal as well, maybe I’ve given enough away to be psychoanalysed.) All of that does lead into how, when I learned the original manga was being translated and released over here, I wound up buying a copy even if a “three-in-one hardcover” was awfully expensive, especially given the paper didn’t seem that different from the stuff that yellows over time in ordinary manga.
( A bone-white ring under the red-hot sun )

It wasn’t until I’d acquired the second volume of My First Love’s Kiss in rapid succession after the first that I realised the cover was on “the wrong side.” I hadn’t started buying another “girls’ love” manga, but a “light novel” series. With the way I now try to track down what manga is becoming available for purchase, I suppose my confusion was explainable. Having read a girls’ love manga with the art provided by the illustrator Fly (who I first became aware of through the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki novels) played its own role too.
( Beyond the back-cover blurb )

At the beginning of October I’d worked out an anime viewing schedule fitted to what I was still thinking of as increased constraints on my time. It would mix some antique series seen via “fansubs,” some not quite as old shows on Blu-Ray discs, and just a few brand-new streaming titles. I’d only seen one episode apiece of the “Blu-Ray shows,” though, before winding up in the hospital with a broken hip. While I have to acknowledge the personal good fortune of having family who could head to where I live and take care of things for the first weeks of recovery, the additional people in my place did make watching Blu-Rays on my big TV feel a little awkward. I dropped back to what I could watch on my iPad, which amounted to the fansubs and streaming titles. The “Blu-Ray shows” were replaced with a few more newly streaming titles that had at least got my attention before but for which I’d tried to come up with reasons why they had to fall by the wayside. It wasn’t until I’d recovered to the point of going back to work and faced turning in earlier again that I happened to wonder if I could have worked back up to “two episodes a day every day” in my time off and raced through an extra catalog title or two. Still, in that time I had read through a manga series I’d already finished, perhaps even rarer for me than returning to an anime series, and got a good way through an old multi-part documentary. Even that small variety might well been more satisfying than uninterrupted anime.
( Back from the past: Anne of Green Gables )
( Scheduled streaming: Blue Box, Mecha-Ude, and Love Live Superstar )
( Streaming additions: Sengoku Youko and DAN DA DAN )
( Blu-Rays eventually: Riding Bean and Otaku no Video )
( Back to one future: Space Battleship Yamato )

Not all that long, or so it seemed, after I‘d read Gou Tanabe‘s manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Dark Horse announced another adaptation was going to be translated and released over here. This time it would be “The Call of Cthulhu,” significant enough for providing the name for the whole “Mythos.” I got around to buying and reading a copy.
( Conceivably a survival )

While the waning months of autumn have been my habitual time to indulge in watching through my Blu-Rays of the Star Wars movies, my parents staying over during my recovery from a broken hip made me a little self-conscious about what I had on TV. (It did happen, anyway, that I spent some weeks of recovery at our family home so that my parents could head to appointments of their own, and there I did happen to see bits of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on TV, which my parents had tuned into first...) At last, though, I was by myself again during a last week before my planned return to work, and that made me decide to head through the saga in six days instead of six weekends. (There have been a few times where I managed to watch six movies in the space of a regular weekend, but in more recent years that’s come to feel a bit too time-consuming.)
( Picking an order )

After eking along my Tumblr side project of posting computer magazine covers for years, today the cover of the last issue of MacLife in my old subscription emerged from the now altogether depleted queue. I had been wondering for a while whether to just let that account sit, use it for occasional “reblogs” of the posts of others, or go back to a certain number of computer magazines I hadn’t quite managed to include in the lineup the first time around. One extra thought that came to me was that, in covering thirty-five years of computer magazines in less than that time, I’d more or less reached the fiftieth anniversary of the first issue of Creative Computing (even if that can leave me wondering how that magazine might have covered even the second half of the 1980s had it survived its corporate overlord a bit longer). Making “fifty years ago” reblogs would mean a lot of time in between them, though.

With extra time on my hands, I’ve been getting some reading done. When my thoughts turned to the more purely ebook-focused lending program my city’s library makes available, I browsed through the categories I’d set it to focus on some time ago and had one title catch my eye. Once I’d looked a little further into Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, I was further intrigued by recognising it was by Keith Houston, mentioned in the cover image to be the author of Shady Characters. I’d found a copy of that book in the remaindered and reduced-priced section of a bookstore years ago and been amused by its histories of punctuation marks notable and not so notable; if this newer history of pocket calculators was as interesting it would seem worth reading.
( Summing things up )

A long-standing habit of trying to post to this journal within seven days after my last post to it went awry this month. The explanation for that is going to wait, but with that left out I was left wondering just how to pick up the habit again, or indeed if I was going to at all even if I hadn’t sworn off web browsers.

It did get my attention (through a text snippet in my RSS reader) that the fifth test launch of SpaceX’s “Starship” rocket iterated again, this time to the point of making use of the elaborate feature of its launch tower that hadn’t been used the first time around because a much simpler feature of most launch pads had been left out. Catching a first stage to save on the weight of landing legs seems that much more grandiose than just having it cancel out its downrange velocity and return to the shore it was launched from. However, I guess I’m just a bit more cautious about the baggage laden down on SpaceX than I once was, and didn’t quite feel like making a post just about that.

Not that long after that, though, another rocket launch I’d been aware was impending took place, and this time I saw a recap via TV news. The Europa Clipper space probe might have depended on another SpaceX rocket (if “just” a “Falcon Heavy”), but its mission is interesting in itself for all that it’s going to take quite a while for the probe to get out to Jupiter.

Succumbing to temptation to buy one of the Raspberry Pi mini-circuit board computers boxed with useful accessories at the vintage computer expo I visited two weekends ago, I at least had an idea for a specific use for it. The person selling it (alongside much older computing hardware) mentioned a retrogaming multisystem I am aware of, but I was thinking of hooking it up to my TV to play downloaded videos. (That, I suppose, is at the very least as dodgy a thing to admit as a retrogaming system requiring ROM files...) While the latest Macintosh portable I’d been connecting to my TV worked pretty well, I’d wondered about making a more permanent linkup.
( Slight technical difficulties )