윤

Could’ve sworn I brought this up before, too, but I can’t seem to find a journal entry and a quick search of what old e-mail I have with me turned up no matches. Maybe it was a passing remark in rambling pre-blog website material? Anyway, I’m not sure what I was hoping to gain reading an interview of an actor from a spinoff series that failed to win my viewership (and looks to be going the way of the Trek franchise, as far as I’m interested), but this bit stopped me mid-scroll:

And I tell you never try to tie your shoes in front of an astrophysicist. What happens is they’ll tell you you’re doing it wrong.

All my life I have apparently been tying my shoelaces wrong, there is a much more mathematically beautiful way of doing it, that I was shown by Bill Nye [the Science Guy].

And lest I forget, while we were on the subject of shoes:

Part of me wanted to confirm my claim that The Dark Knight had nothing on The Chaser, but after watching it again on Blu-Ray this weekend, and even though the IMAX scenes pushing past 16:9 seemed like a sneaky step backwards for those of us old enough to remember pre-widescreen TV’s, I can’t bring myself to find anything wrong with a movie that ambitious, that successful, that powerful. It’s that the other one was just as intense, and cost less than what they probably paid Christian Bale’s mother. I’d like to think I live in a world where the good guy has some billion-dollar cellphone technology to track his prey (as opposed to a single flunky going from door to door), shows up outta nowhere and all his punches and kicks connect, and we probably would need to, with an anarchist planting that many bombs out there, but what if it was just a loner with a hammer, and the cops were as useless as Gotham’s were corrupt? BTW, I happened to notice the H.I.T cover at the bookstore near Media King last night and it dawned on me that he was the prosecutor!

Haven’t actually seen too much of the show (I preferred Harvey Birdman’s revisit of Jonny Quest: insane, irreverent and only 12 minutes long), but I do dig their box design:

From: Homer J.
To: spinn42@aol.com
Cc: hjerng@leland.Stanford.EDU,jae_yoon@hotmail.com,rajg@erols.com,rchenx@bigfoot.com,spacecobra@aol.com,cronnie@bigfoot.com
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 20:59:43 -0700
Subject: Tenchu Shinobi Hyakusen
Message-ID: <19991022.212220.-83303.0.JoeyJojo@juno.com>
X-Mailer: Juno 3.0.13
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Full-Name: Homer J.
X-Status: Sent
X-Juno-Line-Breaks: 0-1
X-Juno-Att: 0
X-Juno-Fcc: Sent Items
X-Juno-Size: 293
X-Juno-RefParts: 0

On Fri, 22 Oct 1999 15:56:51 -0700 Henry Hungtao Jerng writes:
>Maybe after reading this, Raj, you’ll want us to go back to talking about videogames?

And for my part, excerpts from my daytime preoccupations (videogame excluded), not always work-related, but passionate nonetheless:

….So the angle of my right hand must be kept as sharp as possible just before impact, for therein lies its strength and, ultimately, travel distance. (I have noticed that performance and accuracy, too, is increased when the left also assists by following through the swing motion in tandem.) And my stance, remember, should place the tee at my left foot. The titanium-faced club head definitely accounts for some of the drives which belie my standing as a mere beginner; perhaps this year’s tungsten models might make the expense worth it? No, another 1-wood would hardly round out my sparse bag–indeed, I remain equppied to play only holes less than a hundred and more than two–and must accustom myself to shorter shaft lengths with a set of irons….

….Just who was she, anyway, walking a small white poodle down busy Torrance Blvd. under the noon sun this balmy late October day? 5’2″, long, straight hair, 36C chest, per eyeball (a measurement proudly 85% accurate)–if not for my cursed luck in finally making that light at Sportmart I might have been sure. Or is this visual hallucination the start of complete psychological collapse due to failure to tide my obsession with big-breasted Asian women? Perhaps I can repeat the route on Monday; dogs require habitual maintenance, I should know. At least if I frequent the Subway nearby I can stock up on free sandwich stamps….

….Makes enough sense, that if the Purchase Order won’t post because expected receipt was set later than scheduled shipment for items reserved on it, then the solution is to change the date on the Sales Order. Integrated systems, bah….

….A machine that displays dreams has been my own dream since the cult classic “Five Million Years to Earth” (“Quatermass and the Pit” to die-hard fans), but whereas a Martian invasion of the Earth may never happen (not again, especially after that deplorable job by Tim Burton), I don’t think the idea’s that way off. Computers can do such wonders today–provide incontrovertible evidence that reshapes history, chart the course of galaxies, ruin the Star Wars trilogy–why not use their amazing processing power to interpret the visual signals that cross the brain during REM sleep? Sight, after all, is the product of neurochemical sensory stimulation, and identification of the resulting cues; if these could be catalogued in digital form, the more the better obviously, then compared to the same dream-time data, the cross-referenced images could be viewed. The principle would work like voice recognition or OCR software (or Homer’s brother Herb’s baby talk translator). Who knows? Someday it might be just as popular. Millions of web channels, and so little original content for them (Internet jokes today are recycled to the point where I’m receiving the same ones from the same people a year later), the subconscious imagination, however wildly psychotic, might be the last refuge for creativity. I could certainly dream up a better Star Wars prequel….

….Or was it D?

Okay, ignoring all the other chaff for a moment, this dream machine is a lot like my idea above. And oddly enough, I just got Quatermass and The Pit for John, since he’s the only other person I know who remembers it.

I finally found a comic book store in the vicinity (seems they’re zoned out of neighborhoods whose only purpose is raising smart Asian kids), and though the proprietors seem friendly enough, I’m a bit concerned they stocked only one with the cover I like, and on the day of release. But hey, at least I can return to the same lovely rut routine from ten years ago—an ish of Grant’s, a draught of Dew and thou—except now I’m preserving it for looks-back in another decade.

Of course, what’s different in this particular period between eras is the potent blogosphere (annotations used to come by way of Usenet), which fortunately has yet to succumb to the one-liners of Facebook and YouTube sideshows, offering at least enough literary criticism to produce some brilliant takes on each installment:

At that moment, Talky Tawny’s descent — not keyed as a commentary on superhero decadence or the past saving the present or anything, but just existing as something that is — the comic seemed to adopt a peculiar dream logic, or maybe a free-associative arrangement of otherwise discordant DCU elements, past and present, that tapped something surreal behind the histories and continuities involved. I think that’s as good a way to go with an Event like this as any – hit hard on how the DCU shouldn’t work, but must, and couple a dispassionately ‘realistic’ visual approach with catastrophic subject matter.

I think it’s the taste of the stuff, not the smell for me. And immediately going down removes any possibility of an adverse connotation.

Stargate Worlds is reportedly hemorrhaging resources while news today is that Trek Online’s Cryptic has been acquired by Atari/Infogrames. Assuming this isn’t another leveraged buyout, it certainly presents an interesting opportunity to compare results (assuming there are any) between the feisty upstart and an experienced developer with corporate backing, however shaky. Funny how despite all we’ve been through, smart money’s still on the latter.