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The story progress so far: porting the game onto the Sub-Etha Internet causes not only the inevitable server connection issues, but lags the interface so that it always thinks you’ve pressed enter a second time, and advances the tiny window twice with each command, requiring you to scroll back constantly to make sure you’ve fully mined the last major paragraph. I can only hope there’s a vibrant community of text-adventure fan-fic’ers who still make the most of this lost art, because my experiment with it was humbling, to say the least: it doesn’t make sense to allow the player to snooze out of bed, not to the same response.

By “Army of Lovers.” Because I keep forgetting the names.Found this song after all these years, too, thinking the title was “it’s automatic.”

Time-delayed from the actual 50th anniversary of the show—referring, of course, to the time a broadcast takes to be uploaded to a PB torrent, then for me to get around to it—which meant so much in middle school, but now seems like any other Hollywood hokum. (This, from a middle-ager who digs what they’re doing on Arrow. It’s all Alan Moore’s fault.) Still, it’s nice to see Tom Baker acknowledged for his contribution, not only to the character’s universal appeal, but in the end, to my childhood imagination. “Who knows?” he asks.

Dreading the prospect of returning to my regularly scheduled programming, I continue exploring later seasons of Mission: Impossible—though I swear, when Willy’s hair gets too long, I’m definitely stopping and digging out my Police Squad! DVD—and watched the episode they liked enough to remake as the opener of the Eighties revival, where the IMF must fool a hitman with the challenging MO of rolling dice to make his decisions “random”. (The latter I would find on YouTube, and yeah, it wasn’t a major studio production like the original, but at least they tried to correct the glaring mistake of faking the hotel address.) So, a cross between Two-Face and the Joker? Robert Conrad aced the role with that same James West confidence, and Lesley Ann Warren was a 70’s hottie.

Somewhere on the Garbage Island of time is a cassette tape with the theme song I recorded “over the air”, as it were (before I discovered and amassed quite a collection of audio cables and mini-plug adapters), when the show returned to syndication on one of the local UHF networks. The music alone was positively thrilling, with an energy that distinguished it from the soundtracks of spy-king James Bond, and went nicely alongside the end credits to Space: 1999, which Chris will tell you I ruined by humming to. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were in it, too, but we’d move away only a few weeks into the first season.
It’d be years later when cable afforded me the opportunity to revisit the series, and agree with the opinion that Steven Hill was the better frontman than Peter Graves. I watch Phelps now and it doesn’t even feel like the Sixties anymore, though “The Mind of Stephan Miklos” will always be one of my favorite episodes. There are fewer of Rollin’s ridiculous masks in that brilliant opening year than I remember, but Barney still does most of the work, ninja or otherwise, and the Rogosh one makes me wish the IMF had been charged with breaking No. 6.

Some kindly soul’s been putting up every Doctor Who episode ever (which doesn’t remind me in the least of what a pirate might actually do, so we know where that particular epithet came from), so I got all of Tom Baker’s and Peter Davison’s eras as quickly as the handful of seeders allowed. The latter, of course, only to relive my infatuation with the comely companion for almost the entire run, because by then all other appeal from the Sarah Jane and Leela serials truly was gone. And it’s still not there, even in today’s popular incarnation. Sure, everything’s packaged better—including Jenna-Louise Coleman—as one would hope after forty years, but for all the accelerated storytelling and outrageous performances, hi-res audio-visuals and overarching plans for cosmic significance, there’s none of the simmering dread that something horrible was about to happen within 25 minutes… ushered in by any combination of thud, unearthly gurgling sound and excruciating scream. Often the Doctor’s very own.

The latest chapter of my past-blasting, courtesy of 남재’s Demonoid booty. All the Tom Baker Doctor Who’s are almost done (although I’d rather someone upload the Peter Davison era, so I can save myself from one day having to reunite with my beloved Tegan on VHS), Community recently reminded me of missed opportunities on the 90’s dance floor, and surely holding this in my hands again will force me back through time. Or into an institution.

I had forgotten how each year they’d introduce only a few new episodes with revamped opening sequences, then soon enough one Saturday morning you’d start seeing reruns from previous seasons. And you would think that with that many names in the credits, someone could’ve come up with more memorable stories, though that alternate universe one where the Superfriends were evil did get to me at an early age. They were going back to clean it up, but never showed it! Oh, and “Colossus”, the cosmic giant who flicked the Earth like a marble and then pocketed it; Apache Chief grew to the size of Jupiter and wrestled him in outer space while his duo partner, Superman, pushed the planet back into place. Madness. Total madness.