Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

The Twilight Zone: A World of His Own

2026-04-21T21:58:31Z

The Twilight Zone’s first season wrapped up with “A World of His Own.” In aggregate the show has been appealing to me. While thinking of reasons for that I’ve wondered if it has something to do with getting a new and complete story in under thirty minutes with every episode. I can get to contemplating the handful of volumes of “The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction” from the 1950s I managed to find at used book sales, for all that The Twilight Zone is more “fantasy” than “science fiction.” There’s also the recurring thought that there’s a bit more to each episode than just “an element of the fantastic,” much less “the concluding plot twist.” In any case I’d noticed from the next-episode preview this concluding story would involve a writer; I did think of that old saw “write what you know.”
( Writing what you know )

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An SF Centennial: Amazing Stories April 1926

2026-04-18T15:33:18Z

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 )

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The Twilight Zone: The Mighty Casey

2026-04-14T23:11:22Z

For Easter’s extra-long weekend I headed home to see my family, which meant getting away from my Blu-Ray player and Twilight Zone Blu-Ray set alike. I did strike up a tenuous connection to the show that weekend, though. On going through the issue of the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow from exactly forty years back and seeing the winners of an adventure game competition, I managed to start an emulator, load a disk image of the programs from that month, and begin an adventure titled “The CoCo Zone.” After an “imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit” opening and a beeped-out version of what I understand to be the familiar Twilight Zone theme (but haven’t yet reached in my set), however, poking through the hallways of a completely empty prison might have made the title begin to seem an effort at borrowed gravitas. In any case I was interested in getting back to the show itself. The episode ahead was the last one left I’d first experienced via comics adaptations (although I’ve read an additional volume of short story adaptations of episodes still to come).
( The national pastime )

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Bring 'Em Back Alive

2026-04-11T19:02:02Z

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 )

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Manga Thoughts: Witch Hat Atelier 14

2026-04-04T18:09:53Z

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 )

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2026: My First Quarter in Anime

2026-04-01T21:52:46Z

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 )

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The Twilight Zone: The After Hours

2026-03-31T22:20:39Z

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... )

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It's Been Long Enough: Gurren Lagann

2026-03-27T22:49:18Z

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 )

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The Twilight Zone: Mr. Bevis

2026-03-23T23:46:03Z

“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 )

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Looking Ahead, Looking Back

2026-03-20T22:59:01Z

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... )

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The Twilight Zone: A Passage for Trumpet

2026-03-17T22:06:51Z

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 )

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Ahead by a Century

2026-03-15T00:04:10Z

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 )

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The Twilight Zone: The Chaser

2026-03-09T23:41:56Z

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 )

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Manga Thoughts: The Colour Out of Space

2026-03-07T21:45:27Z

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 )

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The Twilight Zone: A Stop at Willoughby

2026-03-03T22:52:09Z

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 )

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A Minor MARCHintosh Moment

2026-03-01T23:09:57Z

After noticing a new “stable release” of the Snow emulator I took a look at the Mastodon account of its developer. The release was promoted there with the comment it had been prepared for “MARCHintosh.” Recollections of having seen a different “month for working with old computers,” “SepTandy,” came to mind.

I had been daydreaming about another small excursion involving Snow, but as I looked up the “MARCHintosh” hash tag I noticed people making a big deal of setting up their actual hardware. Managing to clear off the one table I can set projects up on, I got out my SE/30 and powered it up. Playing some “MacFlims” already loaded on its memory-card mass storage, though, amounted to most of what I could think of doing with it. A major “MARCHintosh” project involves long-distance online networking, but I’m still sorting out how that works, including the potential risks to the rest of your home devices, and might not have all the hardware to “do it for real” anyway. Snow itself promises the potential to “connect to the Internet,” but I haven’t quite tried that either.

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Ten Years of Tumbling

2026-02-27T22:59:57Z

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.”

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The Twilight Zone: Nightmare as a Child

2026-02-25T00:05:31Z

With a title and Rod Serling’s on-set preview, I had a certain theory of what “Nightmare as a Child” might involve. Although heading home for the long weekend (and coming back with another carload of nostalgic relics to help my parents downsize, something I might or might not say a bit more about in a later post) meant another interruption in watching my way through The Twilight Zone on Blu-Ray, I suppose the theory was still in mind as I began the episode. It turned out my theory wasn’t correct.
( On the steps )

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Red River: An Unexpected Bend

2026-02-19T23:22:00Z

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... )

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In the Cards?

2026-02-15T00:01:16Z

Being handed a pack of (small) Uno cards with Spy x Family theming got my attention. As I turned the pack over I spotted a McDonald’s logo. I did wonder if I had seen news of that particular promotion (surely involving “Happy Meals”) I was only just remembering now, but it was still a somehow familiar surprise for all that I tell myself every time I feel it “you’ve been aware of anime for so long that things have changed since your first days!”

It’s just possible part of the surprise came from the thought “the series is popular... but not that popular.” I went so far as to start the Netflix application on my iPad and note Spy x Family isn’t just on Crunchyroll. After that I did have to consider how I haven’t yet seen the latest block of episodes for all that a certain amount of “not what I was expecting from even an anime ‘1960s spy boom spoof’” disdain, shading into more measured comments about different varieties of “comedy” sort of competing in it, were countered by more positive summing-up comments.

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The Twilight Zone: A Nice Place to Visit

2026-02-10T22:42:28Z

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 )

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Increments Do Add Up

2026-02-08T20:13:32Z

Trying to draw something every day and saving those efforts has built up a bit of an archive. There are now files in it somewhat over two years old. On a whim I looked back to an early month I haven’t revisited for some time. The thought “Good grief, I have improved!” was strong enough to surprise.
( Possible evidence inside )

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The Twilight Zone: The Big Tall Wish

2026-02-05T00:01:41Z

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 )

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A Lucky Glance, a Personal Hesitation

2026-02-02T22:51:48Z

While I don’t often look at the Tumblr “front page” much more than once a day, today I happened to visit it at the right moment to see a post from one of the accounts I follow saying that “the Rifftrax folks,” Mike Nelson and company, have started a Kickstarter campaign to make four Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. I have to admit I haven’t pledged yet; my perennial caution about Rifftrax springing from how they started by putting down “big productions ‘everyone’ disdains” is involved there. I’m also thinking back to how an attempt to crowd-source funds for a fourth go at the Mystery Science Theater revival never crossed even its first finish line, and how after some time in limbo there was an announcement of Joel Hodgson “selling his stake” in the show. This Kickstarter followed in close succession, and I’ve already seen suggestions the new ownership had something to do with that. After all of that, I’m conscious I haven’t made much time to watch Mystery Science Theater episodes old or new since the last of the revival episodes premiered. Of course, I haven’t ruled out pledging either.

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Mac Like It's 1984

2026-01-30T23:49:15Z

When last I posted about the Macintosh emulator Snow, I’d been inspired by it beginning to offer the first 68030-powered machines to see if it could run QuickTime. Not that long afterwards, a “milestone release” promising serial bridging had me wondering if that previous diversion I’d found in it, “simulated dot matrix printouts,” would be easier to manage at last. I sorted out how the bridging was supposed to work and got a terminal program running in Terminal itself, but when I tried attaching the captured ImageWriter commands to the PostScript file that would turn them into more modern page images I realised from those garbled images that data was dropping out. Wondering if this had something to do with requiring the terminal to be set to a specific baud rate, I went back to the old manuals I’d found back while daydreaming about somehow converting my previous Epson-interpreter programs. Connecting at a variety of speeds and trying out different terminal programs still didn’t work.
( The eventual solution, and going forward and back )

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