Eric wanted to rent the DVD of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and having seen only half of it I am giving it my absolute highest possible recommendation. I had a hard time deciding on a video clip to preview here, but I settled on this one.
I’m not a gamer. My interest is casual. Yet I feel strongly that it is the mentality behind gaming that helped propel us into the technological age we are now in. Hippies, Science Fiction fans, comic book kids, and Rock and Roll combined to give us what we have today. It’s all due as much to cultural change as it is advancements in technology.
This photograph is from the monumentally important article “SPACE WAR: Fanatic Life and Death Among the Computer Bums,” by Stewart Brand, published in the December 7, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone. Yes, that’s right. 1972. The caption reads, “Bruce Baumgart, winner of the Five-Man Free-For-All at the First Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, brandishing control buttons in triumph.”
I am deeply appreciative of the reality that the things we take for granted — telephones, cars, radio, TV, Web browsing — were at some point in the past merely strange ideas. We owe a great deal to the oddballs and misfits who made them possible.
Eric and I have successfully struggled through setting up streaming media integration between the Xbox 360 and Windows Media Player 11. Very cool! With all of the various dedicated streaming media set top boxes out there, it’s nice to have it work out-of-the-(X)box at no additional cost. With this, I don’t need to bother with Verizon’s FiOS media manager.
Way back last February I featured Star Trek: New Voyages, a continuation of the original TV series, created by devoted fans. Here’s how a low-res copy of one of the shows looks, taken from my PC over the home network and scaled up to 720p by the Xbox.
Fun! Now the question is, where is this technology going? Well, the exciting rumor is that the Watch Instantly service on Netflix will be available through the Xbox Live site. That would be great! Even better if the entire Netflix catalog were available, especially with HD offerings. Ideally, I would like to forget not only the red Netflix envelopes, but the format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD; which at the moment appears to be favoring Blu-Ray, because Warner Bros. is dropping HD-DVD.
I don’t know about you, but Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan makes me feel so Christmasy all over. A couple of years ago we gave Eric a Khan ornament, and this year we gave him Hallmark’s new, deluxe light-and-sound Khan ornament.
Click a little button and you hear Shatner and Montalban going at it! Blasters and overacting combine to make this year’s tree the most festive ever. I give this ornament a rating of Warp 10.
Star Wars came out over 30 years ago! It really does now seem like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but it was two years after Woody Allen’s movie Love And Death.
Hey, it’s been a whole week since we saw Bill Mumy in Springfield, MA. Yesterday he did an online one-hour audio interview that you can hear by clicking here. I agree 100% with Bill’s politics.
Once again I highly recommend listening to the Mumy Jukebox. I’m enjoying his new CD, The Landlord or the Guest, a lot. Mumy’s Lost In Space co-star Angela Cartwright, for whom I had a major crush, designed the art for the CD.
