TRON (1982) Review

A tale about a human crossing over into a virtual world hidden inside video games, this movie predicted much about a rising technology using an amazing combination of live action, animation, and pioneering computer generated special effects. Featuring a simple story that’s owes much to Spartacus, the sheer spectacle of the unusual imagery made this a cult classic.

Turn on a TV set or go to a theater and you’ll immediately be bombarded by brilliant and unreal visions of people or things doing physically impossible actions in defiance of the laws of physics or existence. In a world filled with computer generated (CG) graphics it all seems humdrum today.

Rendered by artists using computers instead of airbrushes and paint, CG is used in everything from commercials to sports broadcasts (virtual 1st down lines, anyone?) with no way to escape it. Let me take you back to a far gone period where this wasn’t the case and computers themselves were still mysterious rather than ubiquitous.

The early 1980s to be precise.

Desperate to regain a declining youth audience in the late ‘70s, Walt Disney’s movie division was willing to try new things. While conventional animation was considered dead or at least comatose, a slew of live action movies breaking the child friendly G rating were commissioned. Among them were The Watcher in the Woods, The Black Hole, and the radically experimental TRON.

Technical Difficulties

Since last Saturday, I've been having problems with the DSL service provided by my ISP with frequent outages. Tech support is supposed to be investigating it, but nothing concrete has been found so far. So I'm way behind on posting and other Internet related doings.

Adding to the grief, I was so ill yesterday I accidentally clicked on the close button for the movie review that's been so troublesome. Exhausted, I thought I was clicking on the cancel button but it turned out to be the close out without saving button. More than half the review was lost, so another setback.

For the hat trick, the window in the basement blew out again. That's been the only easy thing to fix!

UPDATED 1/16

Somebody ran into our new mailbox and knocked it down the hill into the trees. I'm thinking of climbing up or down to get it, in the mean time we have to pick up the mail in town -- 12 miles away. 

At least the first pass on the movie review is finished and I may get the thing up tonight.

Evens and Beginnings

Titled thus due to boredom with using "odds and ends" for posts

Things have slowed a bit on the blog due to my working on a movie review that has a great deal of extras. While I've grown to love seeing all the details of how a production came to be made, it takes a great deal of time to wade through all the content. Looking up a previous review of a connected movie has added more to do, since I realized the old one needs a rewrite to include bonus content too.

Earlier this week I had the chance to eat at a restaurant I'd been wanting to try out for years. Hu Hot is billed as a Mongolian grill, so I was salivating at the opportunity to sample their hot sauces. In the end, I focused exclusively on their second hottest, due to a strong craving for garlic. The food was good though it was something of a learning experience.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

UPDATED: We have water again as of late last night. It turns out the wind blew out one of the small windows in the basement! Old farmhouses sometimes had windows to let in light that are about a quarter of the size of normal windows. Just one blown back into the basement was enough to turn it into a deep freeze.

Original post:

All sorts of warnings have been given about how bad today would get and I was too ill the second half of yesterday to remember to fill containers with water. That mistake came home to bite me on the behind, of course. While I was at church, the water froze and none of the tricks that normally get it going again in subzero weather worked for my father.

While the raw temperature at the house was only –4 F (-20 C), wind chill was closer to –18 F (-28 C). The blowing wind is the culprit behind the frozen pipes and it will be days before things get better. Overnight forecasts indicate around the wind chill temperature for the high tomorrow!  Add in wind and we’ll see –50 F (-46 C). Blowing snow will be the insult added to injury.

As a result of the preparation fiasco of this autumn, the 50 gallon water drum was never filled and thanks to yesterday, no other containers were. There are few things more annoying than breaking the Sabbath to me, but it turned into an emergency when no empty gallon jugs were to be found. At some time they were thrown away to my ire. So a trip to the local grocery netted four gallons of water for drinking purposes to last the next couple of days.

As far as the toilet goes, I’m melting snow in buckets for that purpose. At least I don’t have to use an outhouse! I don’t even want to imagine what that would be like.

Into the New Year of 2014

2013 was not a good year for me or my immediate family, so I bid it good riddance. Another year begins in mere hours here and has already begun in the East. Hopefully it will be better than this one was. Expectations for 2013 were low and frankly negative, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when it turned into a year of one bad thing after another.

2014? Haven’t a clue, yet it is not likely to be a great year. That said, it could be an improvement for me. For others, I don’t know.

My only prediction is that a lot of people in the United States are going to wake up to the fact that we’re in an economic downward spiral, not a recovery. Worldwide, things will continue to become more unstable. No foresight is required to see these things, it’s just the established pattern.

In my personal life, I hope to see some improvements since I’ve already started working on them. Zero resolutions for the new year, I’m already ahead on that. As far as looking forward to anything, the only item that pops into my mind is getting to teach about the Old Testament in Sunday school for adults. That’s going to be fun.

May the new year treat everyone well!

The Invisible Boy (1957) Review

When a true sequel to Forbidden Planet fell apart during the planning stages, MGM decided that Robby the Robot would still get a vehicle written around him for the next year. Instead of a hard science fiction story, a simpler story aimed straight at young boys was chosen. Though nowhere near the quality of the earlier film, moments of intelligence shine through this kiddie flick about a not very intelligent brat.

This review is actually an extension of my Forbidden Planet one, since this movie is an extra in both the DVD and Blu-ray releases. Little did I know when I started watching this flick that I’d encounter a boy so annoying that he rivaled Kenny (aka Toshio) from the first Gamera movie! Is that considered a spoiler? If so, consider yourself nearly as spoiled as Timmie.

Yes, that’s a Timmie with an “ie”, not a “y”.

Looking every bit like a B-movie, but sporting a slightly better budget, The Invisible Boy starts off in promising fashion with a motorcade arriving at the Stoneman Institute of Mathematics. A front for an underground computer laboratory and research center, it is run by Dr. Tom Merrinoe (Richard Eyer), the main programmer for “the Computer” at its core. Holding the collective knowledge of all of humanity, it is being used for things such as checking rocket launch calculations.

Okay, that sounds underwhelming, but back in the 1950s this was amazing stuff since virtually nobody had any experience with the brilliant idiots we now tote around everywhere. To the layman, computers were a form of black magic capable of doing almost anything. Every day brought a new advancement in science, much of it on the military end.

Forget Mystery Meat, How About Mystery Spam?

Just in time for the end of the year, I found a new referral spam in my Blogger statistics. http: // semalt . com / competitors_review . php? u= (then my blog address) is obvious spam due to it having text suggesting that someone is competing with my website and checking me out.

Using a virtual machine and TOR to be anonymous, I checked out the address. It only gets me to the home page where a requirement to register first stopped me cold. Of course, it wants you to log in using your Facebook, Google Plus, or Microsoft Live accounts. Oh, nothing suspicious about that, is there?

It offers to show you what your Google rankings are, which is interesting given that you can sign up for Google’s own tools for free to do the same. As the page loaded, I noticed that it loaded counter . yadro . ru , a Russian address I only fleetingly glimpsed. Some sites report this as a malware infection while others that it is simply a tracking site like Google analytics. Still a bad guy according to most, so consider it a red flag.

The privacy policy and terms of use pages are generic giving no useful information. There was no way I’d sign up to find out what lied beneath the barebones page other than to look at the source html. In there the meta description of the content bills the site as a “Professional keyword ranking monitoring service with competitor analysis. Fee plans.”  Also found in the code was the yadro address, so that is being loaded as a hit counter.

My advice to all who get a variant of this link in their statistics is to avoid clicking on it. Semalt is most likely only there to harvest data to access your email and social accounts with the possible additional goal of selling SEO (search engine optimization) methods.

UPDATE

I’m seeing more hits from this spam showing up in StatCounter now and they are coming from computers in different countries with differing versions of Windows and screen resolutions.  This means a bot net of infected computers is most likely being used to push the spam rather than forged addresses.

Please do not click on the link and if you have, run an antivirus program along with something like MalwareBytes or Spybot to make sure you haven’t been infected.

Health 12-28-2013

Hopefully this is the last post on my health for the year. It was not a good Christmas. My father and I both got sick earlier with him getting the worst of it. By the time Christmas Eve rolled around, neither of us were able to go anywhere or do much of anything. It got worse on Christmas day leading to a cancellation of a trip to visit my sister and her family in Indiana.

I’m still not feeling well and suspect the rotavirus going around is behind both our ailments. Shining forth amidst the gloom is one bright ray of hope for during the entire time I’ve managed to keep doing daily weight training. While far from easy and usually the only thing of any merit done, the new regime has stayed intact.

Usually when I get ill, I have flare ups of secondary infections often of a respiratory nature. First the sinuses try to kill me then the bronchial tubes. So far, only the sinuses have made an attempt with no success in enlisting their allies next to the lung sacs as is their annual tradition around this time of year.

While premature, the possibility the big experiment with daily weight training is having unexpected benefits involving the immune system is on my mind. Two days ago, I was able to help load and unload bags of wood pellets. That did cause problems recovering, but it was amazing that I was able to at all.

One thing I don’t like about weight training is how long it takes me to stop shaking afterward. It’s been half an hour and I’m vibrating worse than I normally do. Maybe it will improve in time.

The Christmas Post

It’s 9:08 PM on Christmas Eve and I’ve got nothing in the way of inspiration for this post. Christmas with the Rat Pack is playing on Media Monkey, my head feels like its filled with cotton, and I’m suffering from dizziness.

Being a devout Mormon, no eggnog is involved. Bad health is, but I’m still counting my blessings since things could be far worse.

For some reason the shepherds in the hills being told of Christ’s birth has been haunting my mind the last few days. Why would a heavenly choir appear to those relatively poor denizens near Bethlehem? The meek may be the ones to inherit the Earth, yet why them?

After spending forty odd years on the planet, it has struck me how self important the powerful and well off are. By well off, I mean anybody who doesn’t have to scrabble to just survive, which excludes most Americans of the current age. I watch people wandering around lost in their own worlds and wonder if they’d even notice such a thing happening.

Even if they did, they’d attribute it to their own importance. Bah, humbug to vanity, I say.

Sometime much later after gaming with younger friends…

Another random thought: With all the focus on gifts, shopping, and decorations, there is a worrying element of losing perspective to Christmas. So I won’t be hoping for loot for myself, that’s for kids.

My wish is that everyone who reads this post will have a merry (or happy for the Brits) Christmas filled with comfort, joy, and love. That’s what it is supposed to be about, after all. That which is material must fade to dust over time, but true friends and family can be eternal. So let us be grateful for those we care about in our lives and for those who don’t have that, I especially wish that you find caring people in the days to come.

Forbidden Planet (1956) Review

A smart, literate script that derived much of its plot form Shakespeare's The Tempest propels this film from what could of been an expensive B-movie into a true top tier movie. Featuring a flying saucer, a robot, a mad scientist, and an alien monster it sounds like kid’s dream. Oh it is that, alright, but good acting and cutting edge effects made this science fiction film a true classic. UPDATED December 2013 with a full rewrite, HD screen captures, and Blu-ray details.

Younger people have frown up in an era dominated by special effect, but this wasn’t the case in the past. Once upon a time, there was no such thing as computer generated effects, or CG. Special effects were done in laborious, painstaking ways, with wires, matte paintings, and miniatures. Of late, there has been a renaissance in using the old methods, combining them with CG. But amazingly, there were genuinely well done special effects in the past (though kids today will laugh at some of them) with certain films being milestones in the art.

MGM’s Forbidden Planet is one such film, but the expensive effects were only part of the reason this bold experiment is considered one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. The introduction of Robby the Robot (who cost an astounding 100,000 1956 dollars) definitely contributed, as did Anne Francis' short dresses (an actual plot point). But the main ingredient stirred into the mix was that the director and actors took the story seriously.

Looking Back: 2013 and the Blog

After the catastrophic collapse of traffic to end 2012, it looked like a bleak year coming up for From the Sidelines. Being a small blog and because I don’t work on promoting it, pageviews are highly dependent on organic search traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo – mostly Google. Every tweak, alteration, and seasonal mucking about of that mighty search engines algorithms seems to affect it. UPDATED with final figures.

Above is a graph of the traffic for 2013 according to Google Analytics. December has taken a downturn that reminds me a little of last December. A lot of reports of weirdness from search engine watchers makes me suspect that changes are being rolled out yet again.

In the end, December leveled out to my surprise. It seems the blog rebounds after every change Google makes now. As the trend shows since the middle of the year, traffic isn’t growing and is unlikely to.

The most visited posts for 2013:

Analysis? Selling Links for Money Spam

Either I’m beginning to become a connoisseur of referral spam or I’m just bored with the usual offerings. Today brought something slightly different to my Blogger stats that piqued my interest: http: // prlog . ru / analysis / from-the-sidelines . blogspot . com . Having my blog address in the spam brings such a warm, fuzzy feeling. Wait.. no, that’s indigestion. Anyway, it was a blink and you’ll miss it hit and run.

Ever curious, I fired up my copy of Ubuntu on a virtual machine and used TOR to anonymously check out the site the link came from. Don’t try this at home unless you know something about security or reformatting your hard drive. Never click on suspicious links like this, leave it to crazy people like me.

Health 12-16-2013

Eleven straight days of weight training after todays workout indicate my theory of keeping the body confused may hold water. Time will tell.

I’m very tired today, due to quite a bit of running out and about starting on Friday. A trip to and from La Crosse to see the second The Hobbit movie was followed up by a trip to a party thrown partially for me by the Taylors, older friends from church. Good food and good company made up for getting stuck trying to go up the driveway.

Between being spoiled by the Subaru and having trouble gauging my level of force on the accelerator (a byproduct of doing weights), I’m having a deuce of a time relearning how to properly drive in winter conditions.

Sunday featured more driving than usual, because I’ve been brain dead and triple booked myself for after church. Fortunately for me, things worked out and I was able to make all my stops. I held up very well by my standards, so that was encouraging.

Even though I’m not up for doing much today, it isn’t as bad as it’s been the past couple of years.

Memories of a Past Virtual Life

For those of us who have been on the Web for a long time, part of the wired existence is watching  sites take root, bloom, and then wither away. Some were casually visited sites, but there are the ones we sank way too much time and attention into. They are virtual communities, that perpetual next big thing on the Internet, serving as places to socialize, argue, befriend, defriend, and quite often reflect the social order of high schools.

I’ve been online in some form or another since 1993 with two decades of watching all this happen. Experience is a great educator and a little over thirteen years ago I got quite the education about people online (and offline) thanks to a movie news and fan site called CountingDown. Due to various soap opera experiences and a decision to embrace “real life,” I departed it permanently around 2003. I never looked back.

Which makes it strange that I’d be flashing back to that period of my life this week. I had the feeling the site was no more and sure enough, www.countingdown.com doesn’t even bring up an error message. So I did a search for information about it being shuttered and at first only came up with people asking the same question.