Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

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 )

Advance reports the latest release over in Japan of “the Macross movie” Do You Remember Love? would have English subtitles got my attention. That particular piece of the Macross franchise hadn’t been included in the recent rollout to streaming services outside Japan I don’t have a subscription to. While I am quite aware a good number of other fans assign all the blame for that continued absence to Harmony Gold, I have to admit to being willing to wonder if there might be something to the occasional counterarguments the number of entities involved in the production of the movie four decades ago could have something to do with particular problems with its overseas rights. (I also understand that when the English dub of uncertain provenance was released on videotape years and years ago, Harmony Gold didn’t appear to have been involved...) In any case, I did start contemplating taking a rare step indeed for me.
( Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence )

The hobby shop a long walk down the road from me where I bought a flying model rocket last year contains plenty of other model kits. It shouldn’t be a surprise in this day and age that those kits include “science fiction robots,” and of course a good number of those particular kits are Mobile Suits from Gundam. I had started seeing those kits in other hobby stores years before without this shaking my conviction that my days assembling model kits were now decades in the past. In this store, though, I did notice a particular kit I’ve seen enough about “Gunpla” to understand as a no-tools, no-paint, no-stickers, no-glue endeavour perhaps suitable for the rust-caked returner too. It was also the Strike Gundam from Gundam Seed, and perhaps a sense of defiance in the face of general fan judgement nudged me towards buying it. Of course, defiance can be foolish.
( Plastic fantastic )

Jumping the gun on the fortieth anniversary of the Transformers for the sake of coming up with an “unpopular fandom opinion” this leap year, I supposed that would preclude trying to make a post about how their comic book had gone on sale in May of 1984. At the start of this month, though, in the course of a mere twenty-fifth anniversary I saw a trailer for a special theatrical showing of the first episodes of the Transformers cartoon, which also amounted to jumping the gun. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I started recalling having seen a particular comic book ad for “Transformers without their corporate name,” and was amused by the thought it must have been in one of the early Transformers comics themselves, given I didn’t read a lot of comics in my youth.
( A comics quest )

Not all that many months after we’d made it back from our first cruise in years, my parents presented a short list of upcoming cruises to me and asked which seemed the most interesting. I said that I appreciated in a certain way that they’d noticed a “circling Japan” voyage, but the cruise that promised to observe the upcoming total solar eclipse would be something that wouldn’t happen again.
( Money paid and chances took )

Happening on an “Apple news site” post a little while ago about how to emulate the original Apple I single-board computer using a system-specific program I’ve had installed for some time was a bit of a surprise. I did get to thinking, though, how having already tried out OpenEmulator’s emulation of that computer did add something to an awareness of certain dark comments about the survivors (who in this case haven’t played by “hacker rules” for years) having written the history books and the Apple I not being all that useful regardless of the lovable “Woz” having designed it. It could, I suppose, do a bit more than an Altair 8800 with no expansion cards (I gather the earlier computer in that unenhanced state couldn’t do much more than blink its panel lights and produce RFI interference capable of evoking musical static from nearby AM radios), but rather less than an Altair or other “S-100 bus” machine well equipped. When I got to the point where the article mentioned how to get an Apple I version of Wordle running, though, my interest picked up and I resolved to start up that particular option in OpenEmulator once more.
( A squashed-down game )

Getting a word processor from my own salad days running that much better in the relative convenience of emulation had seemed one more small achievement; as ever, the emphasis appeared required. Not everything done in an emulator is locked within a low-resolution window on a more modern computer screen, but Max-10 was more on the unfortunate side of that. I could save something typed into it as “plain ASCII” and export that file from its Color Computer disk image. However, that meant discarding the formatting that was pretty much the whole point of the graphics-based word processor, treating it as just a more awkward predecessor to something like BBEdit. Back then, the point of most “productivity applications” was to produce printouts, and that was the problem.
( ASCII and you shall receive )

Putting together a post about some small accomplishment in a hobby-like pastime can seem to coincide with my specific interest in it wrapping up as I drift along to something else (even if I sometimes drift back after a while). Getting a second opinion of sorts on one of the very first word processors wasn’t quite the end of my use of the emulator of an equally antique computer I’d just got running, though. While the version of Electric Pencil for the SOL-20 to be found with the emulator could only save to virtual tape files, I knew that emulator could also be configured to use virtual disks and the early operating system CP/M. With that, though, came the flickering thought that just maybe I might also be able to get a sense of a slightly more advanced word processor from the past.
( Certain technical details )

A few months ago, I stopped in at last to a hobby shop that I’d been passing for a while. Noticing it sold flying model rockets among other things to assemble, I took a closer look at what was available, then started thinking about just perhaps getting back to one more pastime.
( Blasting off once more )

Happening to think again of a program I’ve used to make “double hi-res” images for the Apple II (in emulation most of the time), I checked it out once more and discovered its programmer had added a feature speculated about before. The program can now also boil its input down to the earlier but perhaps more familiar “hi-res” Apple II format. I suppose it’s an alternative to a different program for Windows that converts to that format, which I run using “Wine.” (It’s not altogether a replacement; to get the graphics files made by the command-line program onto Apple II disk images I’ve used the utility “CiderPress,” which still means using Wine.)
( Amid those homely, minor charms, though... )