Showbits

As with this time last year, I'll be AFK for a few weeks as I enjoy a summer vacation in Missouri, then Washington and Missoula. I have some Showbits content queued for the next two weeks, so there will be something to read while I'm gone.

I didn't want to leave the site in a precarious position while away, so once I'm back and available to smooth out any bugs, I'll be upgrading Showbits to WordPress 2.6 (that being the software that powers this blog). If, while I'm under the hood, there are any additional features you'd like to see implemented, please let me know!

In the meantime, I may be blogging on my journeys for my day job, so if your interests are not just cinematic but also retrocomputic, surf on over.

When David Szetela delivered his keynote speech at KansasFest 2007, he revealed a fact that is little-known to all but diehard geeks (which was, of course, exactly who he was addressing). It connected two of my favorite things: the Apple II computer and the Terminator movies.

In the Terminator films, the audience is often treated to the perspective of these cybernetic organisms sent from the future to change the past. This red-hued vision makes assessments and executes routines faster than the human eye can perceive — but if you watch a certain scene in the first movie frame-by-frame, you may spot some familiar algorithms.

Read the rest of this entry at Computerworld.com »

Just a brief post to indicate that Showbits updates will be scarce this week, as I am leaving in a few minutes for KansasFest, the annual Apple II expo held in Kansas City, Missouri. I'm on the convention's planning board, which is a conflict of interest that prevents me from covering the event for most publications, but I hope to blog about it elsewhere.

Also, I've added some new, minor functionality to Showbits. When reading individual posts, look near the bottom of the post (just above the comments) for a link that says "Print this entry." to get a printer-friendly version of the page, or or "Email this entry." to send the page to a friend. Voila!

And now the trailer for the next Fantastic Four film is up.

I know why I watch this stuff: after watching the best parts of a bomb excerpted into trailer form, I'm saved the time and money of watching the rest of the movie. Here, we have Johnny Storm chasing the T-1000, who has some pretty nifty powers but whose motivations are unclear. I'm happy for them to stay that way.

I saw the first Fantastic Four film at KansasFest 2005 as our annual geek field trip; other such titles have included Superman Returns, Terminator 3, X-Men, Planet of the Apes, and both Bourne films. Obviously, we've had both hits and misses. But based on past experience, I think we can safely rule out this Marvel flop as a likely candidate for KFest 2007.

It's a shame that Marvel's cinematic adaptations can't be more consistent, as they have great potential. I rewatched Spider-Man 2 today, and the original X-Men last week (more on that in a future post). So far, four-fifths of these two franchises are fantastic; but the other Marvel films I've seen, such as Daredevil and Hulk, were simply painful. I'll take my Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno DVD sets anyday.