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.