Tab Clearing...

• If your laptop or phone is getting long in the tooth, the best time to upgrade is three months ago: How the AI boom is driving an inflationary surge in consumer electronic prices.


• The guys with the Roman statue PFPs don't know jack about the classics they claim to love.


• War Films and the Experience of War.

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Prince's Gate

It's been forty six years and... *glances at watch* ...two weeks since Operation Nimrod, so I've settled in to watch The Final Option via Amazon Prime Video.

Sir Not Appearing In This Film

The things you like best about the best Star Wars movie probably came from Leigh Brackett, the "Queen of Space Opera". The original forms of Lando, Bespin, and Yoda all originated (albeit under different names) in her original rough screenplay.

The Luke/Leia/Han love triangle was in there, too, and rather spicier than it was in the final form onscreen in The Empire Strikes Back.

What I love most about the first two movies is how much obvious retconning Lucas had to do to beat them into the eventual Skywalker canon. We all saw that kiss on the Death Star, George.

Remember, Han didn’t just shoot first, Han shot only.

Greedo got burned down without even getting a shot off.

Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be

Did you know you can get lots of TV for free? It's streaming through the air, all you need is one of these things. It's silly to pay a cable or satellite provider to get local network channels when antennas still work.

The cool thing is that in the age of digital broadcast television, every station gets a handful of additional channels, and they stock these with a host of channels very reminiscent of the old local UHF stations that played reruns and syndicated shows.

My favorite is MeTV and not just for their Saturday morning cartoons. They also have a great Saturday evening lineup* that kicks off with Svengoolie, a classic b-grade monster movie show with a cheesy host character.

Last night they showed the original Friday the 13th, which I hadn't seen since it was still fairly new.

I was in eighth grade, spending the weekend at a friend's house playing Dungeons & Dragons (Module B2, if you must know), and my friend had an older sister who was so cool because she was in college and drove a late '70s Firebird, and she asked us "Hey, do y'all wanna see a scary movie?" and of course we said yes, so we watched the camp counselors at Crystal Lake get massacreed on HBO.

Friends, it scared the pee out of younger me. Like, nightmares and stuff. Put me clean off horror movies... especially of the slasher genre ...for the next decade.

Looking back now, no wonder Stranger Things was right in my wheelhouse.

Funnily enough, that salaciously scary movie I watched in '81 or '82 took surprisingly little editing to be okay for broadcast TV in 2026. They blurred some boobies and might have cut some dialog, but it looked like most all of the gruesome stuff was still there.

Also, it really wasn't scary at all. I didn't jump at the jump scares and the slasher stuff wasn't very gross by modern standards. It was all kinda cheesy in fact. Ah, well.

*After Svengoolie, you get the Adam West Batman, Star Trek (TOS), and Adventures of Superman. If you're a night owl, those are followed up by Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

What a loss...

The sun went down on Saturday with the news of the shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island and rose on Sunday with reports of an antisemitic terrorist attack in Australia.

Then on Sunday night comes the news from California, where Rob Reiner and his wife had been found stabbed to death in their home in the Brentwood neighborhood of LA. The danger here wasn't a random shooter or an ideological terrorist; no, the suspect in the double homicide is the couple's own adult son.

I immediately thought about 99-year-old Mel Brooks, who has already buried his best friend, Carl Reiner, and now will be attending the funeral of his friend's son, who was practically a nephew to Brooks.

What a legacy Rob Reiner left, though! From his acting role as Mike "Meathead" Stivic in All in the Family to maybe one of the most amazing decade-long streaks in motion picture directing history, starting off with the iconic mockumentary This is Spinal Tap in 1984, followed by...

Pleasantly Surprised

I've watched The Expanse through in its entirety some four times now, and seen parts of it even more than that. I think it's far and away the best sci-fi ever on the small screen. Good story, good writing, good characters, and the whole thing is extremely well executed, production-wise.

But I'd never read the books.

Therefore I felt like I was maybe setting myself up for disappointment when I finally ordered Leviathan Wakes on Kindle the other day.

It turns out that I needn't have worried. This is one of the rare incidences of the book being every bit as good a book as the movie is a movie. Polished it off fairly quickly and now I'm a few chapters into Caliban's War.

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Satisfying

We wrapped up the second and last (presumably) season of The Lazarus Project over dinner last night and it was quite satisfying.

Going into the last couple episodes of season two, they had rather a lot of balls in the air, but they tied up the loose ends and landed the plane quite nicely, with a bit of a twist at the end and room left to pick up where they left off with further adventures should the opportunity arise.

Grade A storytelling. It helps that Joe Barton wrote all sixteen episodes, so there wasn't any of the unevenness or style differences that can sometimes happen in more conventional series.

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Dark Groundhog Day

Bobbi and I stumbled across a Brit TV series called The Lazarus Project about a dude who notices that he is living the same stretch of time repeatedly. It turns out that there's a secret organization with a time machine whose job is preventing cataclysmic disasters... plagues, thermonuclear wars, that sort of thing ...and he's a mutant who can detect the timeline being tampered with. He gets recruited into the outfit and becomes a time agent.

We're two episodes in and I'm hooked.

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Tab Clearing...

• Bobbi and I have been watching Ballard, the spinoff from the Bosch: Legacy series, and it's quite good. Keith Roysdon riffs off that to write about cold cases, a topic he's very familiar with, here.


• Cambodia's calling for a ceasefire with Thailand.


• Musk Starlink shutdown attempted to sabotage Ukrainian Kherson counteroffensive.

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It's time to start running!

So there's a new Running Man movie coming out. More of a re-boot than a remake. 

It appears to be a lot closer, conceptually, to the original "Richard Bachman" novel than the late-'80s Schwarzenegger flick. I was not a fan of the Arnie movie for the same reasons I'm not a fan of the Verhoeven Starship Troopers: It's a movie based on the back cover of the novel.

Still, there's a lot of added "BIFF! POW! CGI FIREBALL!" apparent in the trailer of the new version. I'm willing to give it a chance, though.

In preparation, I just re-read King's original story from The Bachman Books and I remain convinced that it's his best short novel. Remembering that it came out in 1982, it's a very early and influential cyberpunk dystopia.

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Predictable...

I mean, there are certain movie franchises that are fairly predictable: James Bond, most MCU flicks, Mission Impossible... They have certain tropes and themes that occur in every movie.

The one that really gets me though is how they can keep doing Jurassic Park flicks, because literally the same thing happens every time. It'd be like going to see Titanic 4: MORE ICEBERGS!

But I guess if the special effects are good enough, it's worth a few bucks.

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Headcanon

Ruminating over Star Wars yesterday came on the heels of having watched Revenge of the Sith on Friday night and the original movie Saturday afternoon, and it all just reinforced a belief I've long held.

We all saw that kiss in 1977.

I will go to my grave insisting that the whole "Luke and Leia are siblings and Darth is their dad" thing was entirely retconned when the original movie blew up the box office beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

"But, but, George Lucas says..." Yeah, yeah, he also says that Greedo shot first*, so we know he's a bald-faced liar.

*As everyone who saw the original unedited Star Wars knows, Han didn't shoot first... Han shot only. Greedo didn't even get a shot off before Han smoke-checked his bounty hunter ass.

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This Is The May

Star Wars Day, May the Fourth, was jokingly celebrated on the internet in the Carboniferous Period of social media and has gradually morphed into something that actually sorta happens in meatspace.

It has its detractors, of course. Even Christmas has the Grinch, after all...

But, you know what? I can't hate it. It's one of the few bits of nerd culture that is so big it can't be kept inside the gatekept boundaries of Nerddom. Let people have their fun.

 

Val has left the building.

Val Kilmer, who passed away yesterday at age 65, was one of my first movie crushes, in Willow. He did a brilliant comedic turn in the Abrahams, Zucker, and Zucker classic, Top Secret. Check out his spot-on timing in this scene...

Of course he was in three gun nerd movie classics: Tombstone, The Ghost and the Darkness, and Heat. His story in this Reddit thread about filming the latter is pretty cool.

I'm going to choose to believe that my AR mag body that was used in the big shootout scene in Heat is one of the ones used by Chris Shiherlis.

Tab Clearing...

• Jim Grey talks about the effects of cropping on printing larger size photos, illustrating it with a photo of a seagull taken with a 16MP Nikon Df.


• Logistics continue to not be a thing in Middle Earth.


• The Generative AI Con.

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An Army About Five Minutes After Sunup

Most pop culture understanding of the Battle of Kasserine Pass comes from the movie Patton or the book An Army at Dawn.

This in-depth Substack essay offers a counterpoint to the typical narratives...

This article explores those characterizations, and while the Battle of Kasserine Pass is often remembered as a humiliating defeat for the U.S. Army, this perspective oversimplifies a far more complex and dynamic engagement. The battle, part of the larger Tunisia Campaign, exposed flaws in American leadership, coordination, and combat experience, but it also showcased the resilience, adaptability, and sheer firepower that would define the U.S. military in later battles. Although initial German advances created chaos and forced American forces to retreat, the tide soon turned as U.S. artillery and infantry stiffened their resistance, ultimately repelling the Axis offensive. The battle was not a catastrophic failure but rather a painful learning experience—one that forced the U.S. Army to rapidly evolve into the battle-hardened force that would go on to liberate Europe.

Nostalgia...

Last night's Svengoolie double feature had the classic Jim Henson flick The Dark Crystal, and I'd forgotten what a fun romp that was.

Combined that with last week's Labyrinth and you have a bangin' GenX Nostalgia Machine...

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When R2D2 goes rogue...

An internet connected appliance is a hackable appliance.

Robot vacuums manufactured by Ecovacs have gone rogue, with some customers reporting the tiny tech tools chased them around their homes and barraged them with profanities after being hacked.

Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson is one of those people. He told Australia Broadcast Network about an experience in May with his Deebot X2. the uniquely problematic model from the Chinese manufacturer.

Instead of Skynet infiltrating our fortified bunkers with T-800 Terminator killbots, it's 4chan infiltrating our living rooms with robot vacuum cleaners that bang into our ankles and call us names.

This future is somehow both duller and dumber and yet also more dystopian than the one I was promised.

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Unholy Terror

Watching The Terror I’m reminded that period nautical dramas shoot a large percentage of scenes on deck or in the captain’s cabin, which gives 19th century seafaring an unrealistically light and airy vibe.

That, and they haven’t figured out how to broadcast smell.

Something like seventy dudes crammed into a 100’ long ship… It must have smelled unholy belowdecks, especially with those retrofitted steam engines. Like the locker room in a burning slaughterhouse.

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Okay, this is cool...

The original cast of The Avengers assembled again... to dub their lines in the Lakota language.

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