krpalmer: (apple)
As the commercial established, on January 24, 1984 Apple Computer introduced Macintosh. Forty years is getting to be a long time, even if it doesn’t have quite the same texture as fifty. One thing that has endured over pretty much all that time, though, is those who are ready to proclaim reasons why the Macintosh will soon be doomed. I cast back through memories of old computer magazines I’ve leafed through and newer online comments, and after wondering if I could come up with forty reasons I wound up stopping there, just perhaps ducking a few that might bite harder.
Forty years, forty dooms )
krpalmer: (anime)
Having seen bits of animation from Japan antique enough to perhaps avoid a certain amount of the indignation churned up over the fans who conflate “old anime” and “whatever’s not hot at that very moment” has been something to post about here, but still not something to boast about. Depending on the generosity of a few “fansubbers” (or perhaps just one) is not the same as “learning Japanese and importing discs.” Still, one day I happened to accumulate enough “sample episodes” to have at least one or two of them from each year since Osamu Tezuka started adapting his Mighty Atom manga into animation and getting it on television. In that moment, I started thinking about marking the sixtieth anniversary of that premiere by watching a sample episode from each of those years, and now that anniversary’s arrived.
The 100,000 horsepower robot )
krpalmer: Charlie Brown and Patty in the rain; Charlie Brown wears a fedora and trench coat (charlie brown)
When I looked at the first of the handful of comic strips I read online each day, I was surprised to see a Peanuts homage presented in a different way than the usual references it makes to other comics. Daring its comments, I realised it was part of a distributed tribute to the hundredth birthday of Charles M. Schulz. I had known that day was coming up, but unexpected evidence of the exact date was still enough to get my attention. Heading to a particular Peanuts information site I check every so often turned up an explanation of the event, a link to more of the tribute strips, and a nice bit of personal reflection.

I suppose some of the tribute strips had me considering the schmaltzier side of takes on the original and the daring-the-consensus pushback. Regardless of the way intellectual property owned by big companies is elaborated on now to the point of raising “where are the new ideas?” lamentations, in the end I suppose I have a personal reluctance to be convinced every Peanuts comic drawn while I was alive was “disposable successors to the real stuff.” Those earlier days of the strip hadn’t been altogether unknown to me in my own early days, but I do remember coming upon certain references to extended storylines that remained puzzling voids at least until I started really hunting down old Fawcett Crest paperbacks in used book sales and stores. That might have made accumulating the volumes of The Complete Peanuts more satisfying.
krpalmer: (Default)
By happenstance, I came upon a capsule acknowledgement of the original Macross having premiered on Japanese TV in October of 1982. I’d been just too late for the actual “it was on this day...” date, but in a way that gave me more time to mull over my thoughts, and perhaps grapple with them too. That the futuristic year the anime’s story is said to begin in is well in the past didn’t register on me at all to begin with; I suppose “where’s my flying car?” complaints say as much about “stories and what we make of them” as much as “actual technological developments.” The occasional uncertainty as to whether mentioning “watching older anime” is a “foolish boast” even if I don’t add “and I can watch new anime, too” didn’t come to mind early on, either. The question “did the mere fact Macross showed up just prove long-maintained franchises weren’t such a weight on pop culture back then?” might have been a momentary distraction from the really heavy issue. Pondering that forty years back from 1982 itself was in the thick of the Second World War, regardless of how that conflict still weighed on (North) America’s merely cultural engagement with Japan around that year, could have just been an additional distraction from “it’s one thing to take interest in ‘something older’ (even if it’s serialized science fiction animation on TV from another country); it’s another to have been interested since a tender age...”
Although it hasn't been quite that long )
krpalmer: Charlie Brown and Patty in the rain; Charlie Brown wears a fedora and trench coat (charlie brown)
I managed to see some reminders that October 2 was the seventieth anniversary of the first Peanuts comic strip appearing in a handful of newspapers. Seventy years feels like a long time, and yet I got to wondering about “rates of change” (and changes I might have missed that matter nevertheless for other people) and what the world had been like seventy years before the strip appeared; for one thing, comic strips hadn’t been around back then. I suppose I did think a bit how I’d managed to find a copy of “The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics,” which had been in my high school library, at a used book sale just a few years ago, and found most of the comics from before 1930 or so hard to get through in large part because their lettering looked so crude.

Beyond the first matter of “seventy years,” I did remember it’s been a bit more than twenty years now since the strip came to an end, and supposed that it’s still remembered might count for something. (A while later, though, I did remember it’s closing in on twenty-five years since Calvin and Hobbes reached a conclusion in somewhat different circumstances, and that strip doesn’t have the spinoffs that might help Peanuts be remembered.) With all of this, I wondered if there’d be anything on “The AAUGH Blog,” and went there to notice something different. The “facsimile editions” of the old Holt, Rinehart and Winston books that had appeared five years ago and just got into the 1960s are promised to start reappearing again next year. Beyond that I have a complete set of “The Complete Peanuts” with strips that weren’t reprinted at the time, I’ve managed to collect three copies of “Sunday’s Fun Day, Charlie Brown” (in the tête-bêche Mattel edition) over the years, so I probably don’t need another copy; the thought of “an indulgence” can get to me all the same.
krpalmer: (apple)
To work a bit more with “RSS feeds” and perhaps cut down a little on “idly revisiting sites just to see if they’ve updated,” I installed the program NetNewsWire, which started up already checking a number of “Apple-centric” sites. That might have made a bit more aware over the past several days the iPad was introduced ten years ago this month.
An entirely personal history )
krpalmer: (Default)
Instead of being stuck with my own contemplations and taking in perhaps too many online comments, on seeing the regional science centre was holding a special day of events to mark the anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon I decided to head into the big city. It wasn’t until I’d got there and parked at a shopping mall with a transit hub at one end (to get to which now entails going outside and around where Sears used to be) that I realised I’d left my fare card behind, but fortunately I was able to buy a round-trip ticket card from a machine. Traffic was heavy around the science centre (itself fifty years old), so I felt content taking a bus there.

While exhibits at the science centre turn over slowly enough that most of what I saw was familiar from my most recent trips there, I spent most of my time going to talks. Bob Thirsk, a Canadian astronaut who’d gone into orbit on the space shuttle and a long-duration flight on the space station, made a presentation by himself and then participated in a nation-wide hookup with David Saint-Jacques, an astronaut who’d just returned from the space station. I then tried an “IMAX version” of the recent Apollo 11 documentary, although on a curved screen some of the up-and-down lines of some shots looked kind of skewed. A screening of a shorter documentary about a Canadian engineer who’d bounced back from the end of the Avro Arrow project to work on lunar module design was a bit easier to take in. After that, I had to catch a bus back to my car and get on the road again. It was a full day, but a solid enough way to mark time’s passing.
krpalmer: (europa)
Five years onward from May 19, 1999, I was still entangled in the unpleasant thought “to see it again, or to see its predecessors again, or to see anything else even somewhat comparable, might only have me at last seeing the problems ‘everyone else’ is still stuck with.” Ten years onward, it had been almost five years since I’d managed “not too late” to happen on even a few other people who weren’t stuck with anything either, but the specific day itself passed without much in the way of online access. Fifteen years onward, I finally managed to mark an anniversary of The Phantom Menace, and received a politely dissenting comment. Looking back now, though, I see I did manage to write a fair bit.
Saying a bit more )
krpalmer: (Default)
“For the first time in all of time men have seen the earth: seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depths of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful as even Dante—that ‘first imagination of Christendom’—had never dreamed of seeing it; as the twentieth century philosophers of absurdity and despair were incapable of guessing that it might be seen. And seeing it so, one question came to the mind of those who looked at it. ‘Is it inhabited?’ they said to each other and laughed—and then they did not laugh. What came to their minds a hundred thousand miles and more into space—‘half way to the moon’ they put it—what came to their minds was the life on that little, lonely, floating planet: that tiny raft in the enormous, empty night. ‘Is it inhabited?’”

Archibald MacLeish, 1968
krpalmer: (anime)
A "three decades of Gunbuster" piece on the Anime News Network caught my attention; when it was brought to my attention again by being mentioned on my reading list I thought that much more about the Original Video Animation series. My "default anime icon," after all, does invoke it, even if that might also have to do with how, when I saw someone on a message board rotating through "anime meets the Powerpuff Girls" icons quite a few years ago and started saving them myself, the Gunbuster one just looked the most appealing in the end.
It's been a while for me, too )
krpalmer: (apple)
I've supposed that having kept posting to this journal for over ten years means "anniversary" posts aren't as easy to make up as they once were; there might very well be comparable thoughts a decade back in my archive. Noticing a few comments about the first iMac having been announced twenty years ago today, though, did have me reflecting once more on how amused I remember being on seeing the first pictures on the Apple Computer web site with the hopes this might keep getting past Steve Jobs shutting down the Macintosh clone program, and how I'd been paid some money in the summer for nailing shingles (even if it was a family project), only to spend it in the fall on the last Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One in my university's computer store instead of one of the first iMacs...
The first iMac and beyond )
krpalmer: (Default)
Along with the countdown to the solar eclipse, I've managed to pick up on another occurrence in space by hearing we've reached the fortieth anniversary of the launch of the Voyager probes. This was further distinguished by the probe launched Voyager 2 having been launched on August 20, 1977, only to be passed on the way to Jupiter by Voyager 1, which didn't leave Earth until September.

The Voyagers were "the more detailed follow-up" at Jupiter with Pioneer 10 and 11 having made it past that gas giant's dangerous radiation belts years before the launch we're now marking, and Pioneer 11 took a slow route to Saturn to take a few not especially compelling pictures still in advance of its successors. However, the Voyagers had their own important and impressive part in turning "dots in the sky" into a succession of worlds. I suppose I did experience "these first and once-ever revelations" at Jupiter and Saturn after the fact through National Geographic cover stories (although Voyager 1 had opened up enough of a lead to Saturn the second article only included its pictures, leaving the drama of Voyager 2's camera-aiming gear jamming to books I managed to find later). It wasn't until Voyager 2 got to Uranus (even that had seemed a carefully underplayed "maybe it'll last that long" possibility in the early coverage I've seen) that I was following along in the newspaper. That encounter was unfortunately followed by the fatal last launch of space shuttle Challenger, although getting to Neptune three years later made for a better ending. I have heard Voyager 1 could have been sent to Pluto had it not been sent close by Titan (an important enough target Voyager 2 could have traded Uranus and Neptune for it); in one of the books I've found, though, some program scientists were asked if they "regretted" having taken close-up pictures of a satellite shrouded in peach-coloured clouds only to explain there was more to detect close up than just surface pictures. Whether some pictures of Pluto would have made it harder to dismiss in the next decade as "not big enough to really count, and obviously not interesting," I don't know, but I suppose they wouldn't have been as good as the pictures from the brief encounter of New Horizons.

Beyond that actual ending, of course, the Voyagers have kept sending back information, enduring not just years but decades after their first estimates of longevity to reach uncertain stellar terrain. Beyond that, there's contemplation of the time capsule records attached to them, although I can also consider that in a mere four decades they've gone from "a durable record not quite like one you'd play at home" to "at least they'd long outlast a CD, and they might be easier for even extraterrestrials of unknown mentality to decipher" to "and now vinyl's not just a statement, but an accessible one again."
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
Every month, I go back to my old copies of the computer magazines 80 Micro (preserved and passed along through my family) and Macworld (which I managed to buy in online auctions for the formative years in advance of us getting a Macintosh of our own) and leaf through the issues from exactly three decades back. Moving through the summer of 1987, I've taken note of Macworld's enthusiastic promotion of the new capabilities of the Macintosh II and Macintosh SE, but 80 Micro's somehow uneasy mixture of technical programming tips for only some of the mutually incompatible computers still in the Radio Shack catalogs seems easier to just skim. Even so, in August that magazine did return to where things had started for it with a cover story marking the official announcement of the TRS-80 Model I on August 3, 1977.
Ten plus thirty )
krpalmer: (Default)
 photo ca_100-b_zpss6ia1bwu.gif

It was a bit odd to really start picking up on the "Canada 150" logo "out in the wild" by seeing it on packages in the supermarket, and that might only have got me thinking back to the centennial itself and its assorted construction projects having happened well before I was born. I know free passes to the national parks are available, but I have to confess to feeling "camped out" ever since graduating from Scouts in high school (even with having travelled up north in an RV last year). However, once I'd begun remembering of an anniversary celebration that had happened while I was alive, I could start to see some new perspectives.

 photo canada125_zpsr2inrbfk.jpg

It had also felt a bit odd at the time to mark a "hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary" with its own logo, but there had been that worried feeling in 1992 that the country as it stood would crack apart in the next few years (and things did get pretty close those few years later), sometimes followed up by the feeling it would be a subsequent inevitability the flag left over those of us speaking English would be replaced not that many years later. For all that back then I did manage to get into an anniversary project called the "Young Space Ambassadors," which sent high school students to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal to see science museums and aerospace companies, I can think at least some feelings have changed and there might even yet be a reason or two to prefer now over then.

 photo canada150_zpsx8617m5v.png
krpalmer: (Default)
While on vacation, I was at least aware of the fortieth anniversary of Star Wars, but where I'd managed to say something at the fifteen-year mark since Attack of the Clones I didn't have the same drive to make a post about the movie that had got the saga rolling, much less find somewhere offering wireless online access that particular day. It's easy enough to be concerned this has something to do with "I get you cling to your disappointment because of how much you value the old movies, but why do those statements of value just seem to amount to 'they're cool?'"

The fragment of good news at the tail of today's radio reports, though, did get me thinking about a somewhat similar topic. I remember seeing newspaper articles about it having been "twenty years ago today" that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was officially released, and now it's been fifty. Since seeing those articles I have managed to listen to the album, and I can listen to it with definite interest and pleasure even if I try not to dwell on extreme judgments. At the same time, though, I do wonder just how many attention was being paid to the popular songs of 1917 fifty years ago. Aware just how many of the things I pass the time with are rooted in one way or another in my grade school to high school years, I'm conscious I could be dismissed with comments about pots and kettles or something similar (or at least told "you aren't looking hard enough"), but it is something I keep pondering.
krpalmer: (europa)
"Prequel Appreciation Day" has been moved up this year with the fifteenth anniversary of Attack of the Clones rolling around, but while I'm still away on vacation this does happen to be one of the days I can access wireless ashore, and while I didn't bring the movie with me memories are ready to hand.

I'd wound up feeling stuck between a sense I hadn't been triggered to hostility by The Phantom Menace the way what had seemed so many others had made such a deal of and the nervous fear watching that movie, the previous trilogy, or indeed just about any other movie would at last grind my face in how "obvious" the hostile reaction was, but the trailers for the next new Star Wars movie (one of which my brother had made a big deal of accessing by going online with the Phantom Menace DVD loaded in his computer's disc drive) had somehow managed to begin invigorating me again. After forming tentative theories and going back and forth on whether the "clones" in their white and black armour might even be on the side of the Republic, the opening crawl did jolted me by mentioning Amidala as "former" queen (the first hint other people could also be positive about the extension to the saga were "fanfics" that had speculated ahead with a great sense of Amidala being Queen, even if I hadn't looked beyond them yet to the group of positive people I would discover in the nick of time), but from there things managed to build, and the opening night audience had seemed to enjoy the movie in the end. I did overhear a "George Lucas has redeemed himself" comment from someone that did, after everything, provoke a sort of "I'm not that hostile to what came before" reaction from me, but I can still wonder if, in different circumstances, I might have wound up convinced "the real story started with 'Episode II.'"

I have to mention that as speculation because of the way certain people rallied to find something to be offended at even as I kept realising that while "shipping" doesn't do a lot for me I can get gooey and sentimental about the indisputable romances that don't match sheer imagination for others. By "the nick of time" I've already mentioned, I was stuck the same miserable distance from the then-latest Star Wars movie as from the others. In happening on the positive people who became "prequel appreciators," things managed to work out, although I can wonder yet if a "middle movie" caught between something with the freedom to look "different yet familiar" and the payoff for everything set up can feel somehow "overstuffed" and be a bit easier to just sort of take as part of the whole. At the same time, though, some recent comments noticed about Attack of the Clones being the most like the Flash Gordon serials at one root of everything do have a pleasant resemblance to thoughts I've had before about the movie being free in its variety to "be a Star Wars movie pure and simple."
krpalmer: (smeat)
In eking this journal along through the ten-year mark (although I've just taken a step of a certain weight in switching off crossposting to the Livejournal it started as when new terms of service there, pushed at us instead of just sort of snuck by, raised a gut-level uneasiness), I have thought it'll get harder to make up "anniversary" posts. However, where there might not seem to be much of a difference between, say, "thirty years since" and "forty years since," there is one between "ninety years since" and "the centennial"...

I've been contemplating for a while the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, but in taking note of what seems the general attempts these days to give it significance in the Canadian historical consciousness, I've got to wondering if Canada stands out by efforts to look back to the First World War singling out a "success." Just among the other Dominions brought into the war with Great Britain, my general understanding of Australia and New Zealand is that they focus on the futile struggles to break open a back door of the war at Gallipoli, and even Newfoundland, which wouldn't join the Canadian confederation until after the Second World War, looks back to the heavy losses of its small force at the Battle of the Somme.

There are risks in narrowing history to single moments in time. Capturing the ridge at Vimy was one operation in one more larger, inconclusive battle as crisis started really setting in for the Allies in 1917, and for all the mythologizing afterwards (although to say efforts to play up the battle only picked up in recent decades as its last survivors died do remind me I've seen a book from a Canadian centennial series that picked the battle as its "headline of that decade"), the war didn't help national unity so far as the conscription crisis pried apart English and French Canada. At the same time, I might have a weakness for "counter-counterarguments," and while making the Second World War "the good guys versus the bad guys" can neglect how much of it hinged on Germany turning to attack the Soviet Union and how much that reshaped the world afterwards, to the best of my understanding the First World War wasn't quite a matter of "the side scratching its head over why its flower of youth being fed into a grinder wasn't working somehow lasted long enough to declare victory"; to that extent at least Vimy could be seen as a step towards learning to get through the Western Front. I suppose, though, I've also thought that perhaps we've come to remember Vimy from the First World War because one specific moment that keeps coming to mind from the Second World War was the unsuccessful Dieppe raid.
krpalmer: (Default)
It's one small sign of how long I've managed to keep posting things to this journal, and a small illustration of how history keys together too, that I've managed to get from the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon to the fortieth anniversary of Viking 1 landing on Mars. The two are linked on the calendar even if by accident; Viking 1 had been meant to land on the American Bicentennial, but its intended landing site had wound up looking too rough to the improved cameras of its orbiter. When it did make it to the surface, though, it pretty much set expectations; I was surprised and somehow invigorated when Mars Pathfinder had seen more prominent hills on the horizon two decades later, and surprised again whenever another rover doesn't find the sand at its landing site as littered with rocks as the Vikings did. At the same time, though, I did spend at least a bit of today remembering the Soviet probes that had reached the surface before the Vikings, even if the longest-lived of them only sent back a few seconds' worth of an indecipherable picture before it gave out in the dust storm it had managed to touch down in.
krpalmer: (anime)
Back in March, I did manage to take note of the thirtieth anniversary of Robotech premiering on television, but I was already thinking ahead from that to a more personal anniversary. The channel I'd seen Robotech on, I'm now quite confident from checking microfilmed newspaper TV guides at the library, didn't start showing it until the fall of 1985, and as I could only see that channel on visits to my grandparents I saw my first episodes just before Canadian Thanksgiving. With that weekend having rolled around again, I did more than just "remember," and watched the episodes a drawn-up schedule matches those old impressions of having seen back then.
The unlikely starting point )
krpalmer: Charlie Brown and Patty in the rain; Charlie Brown wears a fedora and trench coat (charlie brown)
I was setting up to set down a pretty long and involved post when a simple anniversary I'd managed to miss for most of the day caught my attention at last. Today just happens to be the sixty-fifth anniversary of the first Peanuts comic strip appearing in newspapers. That might be simple enough to think about, but I did also happen to think it's been over fifteen years since the last comic strip appeared; lasting that long as a complete entity in a medium that in its simplest form might be supposed to be found afresh each day and then just sort of put aside until tomorrow seems sort of impressive.

There are times I've felt down or troubled and pulled forth particular moments of the strip as, indeed, a sort of "security blanket," but also times I've turned back to a collection or two while feeling good. If other people can keep finding the strip to do the same sort of thing, I hope it'll last for a while longer.

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