To someone I have loved, and forever will...

Dear, well... I like to believe you know who you are,

Even now, after all this time, and the situations and the events and the many people who have come into my life...

I have not forgotten about today.  I don't think that I could if I tried.

Happy Birthday, little hobbit.  May it be a very wonderful one.

God bless,

Chris

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Steven Spielberg is right: Movies need two months in the theater!

I've been arguing for over five years now, since we started going back to the cinema in the wake of COVID, that movies must spend some time in the theaters before going onto streaming video or some other digital delivery service.  A film represents more than just casual entertainment.  It is the result of the efforts of a lot of people who collaborated together to produce something that, ideally, has not been seen before.  Those people deserve appreciation, and acknowledgement.  Their labors merit watching in as big a venue as is feasible.

When movies come out in the theaters, they can take on a life of their own.  A good movie without much fanfare can become a "sleeper hit" that finds success by word of mouth (two examples of good sleepers are The Artist and My Big Fat Greek Wedding).  Movies get talked about, and vigorously discussed.  It's something that they make an entire art of in places like Europe, where movie goers will often repair to a sidewalk cafe and converse about the movie with friends and family.  That's how we did it when I went to Brussels a long time ago, anyway.

Movies in the old-fashioned way are communal experiences.  Watch a film in your living room, and what can be said about how much you were moved by it.  But seeing a movie in a theater, with other people sharing the same room, and something almost magical happens.  When Avengers: Infinity War came out, on opening night I saw it in a packed theater.  The stunned look on everyone's faces after that movie ended is something I'll never forget.  It was a look that said it all: "Oh crap, NOW what?!  How can there possibly be a good closure to this?!"  You can maybe simulate that at home, but it's just not the same.

A typical movie, not a solid stinker of the sort that Ed Wood used to make, deserves at least two weeks, maybe three, in the theater.  That's enough time to weigh whether it really resonates with audiences.  But then there are some movies that come to demand much more time getting projected onto the big screen.  Those deserve at least a month listed on the marquee... if not more.

I'm not the only one either believing this and in fact I'm in good company.  Steven Spielberg has been at CinemaCon this past week and he had something to say about the time movies spend in the theaters.  Mainly, that there needs to be a sixty-day window for new movies to be available only in theaters.  Bringing up his forthcoming film Disclosure Day, Spielberg said that "This is a movie that needs to be experienced, and what you need to get from the beginning to the end is a seatbelt."

I love having good movies on my iPad.  The night that Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker came out on iTunes, I gleefully loaded it on my tablet so that at last I had the complete Skywalker saga on one device.  Not long ago I finally watched Dune: Part Two and that's on my iPad also.  It's a great convenience to be able to do that.  But it's something that I can wait a little for, if that means more people get to see the movie as its director and producers and cast want and need us to see it as.

I know that I'm not the only one who believes this, who feels this way.  Surely there are other cinemaphiles out there who love the movie-going experience and want others to know what that's like, too.  Maybe they will chime in like Spielberg has, and persuade the studio execs to hold out on the instant gratification of home-audience profits in favor of something deeper and more meaningful, if only for a few months.

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My latest project: Mobilizing Zork

I'll be the first to admit: I have no idea if this is going to actually go anywhere.  But for the past few years I've had an idea and it's always seemed like a fun one.  And it would definitely be a challenge to pull off.  But things have changed since my forays into programming (with the C language, in 1995) and I'm thinking that this might really be possible so, we're going to find out.

A while back a crazy notion hit me: to play Zork on my iPhone and iPad.  Yes that Zork: the 1977 text-only role-playing game.  A game that kept countless insomniacs awake long into the night as they explored the Great Underground Empire in all its riches, its horror, and occasional hilarity.  There were no graphics at all involved with Zork: like most any good story it played out primarily in one's imagination, with only the on-screen descriptions awaiting your command for the parser to further the tale.

Envision that on the screen of an i-device or something running Android.

It's too wild an idea not to do.  The absurdity of it: a modern mobile appliance, with all its portable power and potential - thousands upon thousands of times the combined computing capability that put the space shuttle into orbit on all those missions - running a text adventure.  The text adventure, mind you.  The game that in one way or another has boasted the core technology of every role-playing game on every device in the past half-century.  It would be at once a step forward and a loooong leap backward, to do that.

Well, like I said, it's too perverse not to try to pull off.

A few months ago Microsoft published the original source code for the first three Zork games.  Yes, it's open source now.  Meaning that it can be played and finagled with to one's heart's content.  It's noteworthy that these are the first three of the original Zork games.  When the game was first created circa 1977 it was  much too big for the personal computers then just starting to hit the market.  So Zork was split into three games.  This source code is for the full experience.

For the past few weeks I have been in the process of taking the source code and running it through ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and some other artificial intelligence systems.  Pouring in the raw code and producing something that should, theoretically, be compilable into an app for iPad and iPhone.  It hasn't been easy, not for the least of which reasons being that I don't have a Mac or other desktop computer powerful enough to test the finished product on.  And so far as I can tell I've only been recreating the game's engine.  The associated geography, items, monsters etc. are still waiting to be implemented.

But what has been produced so far, well... it looks an awful lot better than the discombobulated code that I was generating for that Computer Science 101 class at Elon three decades ago.  I've some confidence in it.  A lot of people who know better about such things than I swear that AI has become pretty competent about creating source code.  Which, I still consider "cheating" in vast part.  But maybe AI in this case is a pretty sensible tool toward creating a piece of software.  I don't know.  What I do know though is that so far I've a few pages worth of code ported to the language and syntax of i-devices.  And maybe that will sooner than later be something letting players discover a place first explored by their parents and grandparents.

So, that's my project.  We'll see if it comes to any fruition.  That is if a grue doesn't devour me first...

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My "new" favorite show on television: The Golden Girls

I was eleven when The Golden Girls premiered on NBC in 1985.  I was watching that very first episode and it cracked me up hard!  Most Saturday nights at 9 I would tune in to watch the latest misadventures of Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia.  It wasn't just me either: my dear sweet grandmother was a huge fan of the show too.  Sometimes we would watch it together if I happened to be at her house that night.  Her favorite of the ensemble was easily Estelle Ghetty's character Sophia.  Heck, Granny even looked a lot like Sophia... and she could wisecrack like her too.  My favorite character was Rose (Betty White): so many ditzy things that she often said.

So for the past few weeks I've been tuning into MeTV on weeknights at 10 and then on Sunday nights at 6 and 8 to watch The Golden Girls.  It's just like watching it with my grandmother all over again.  Although now that I'm a bit older (okay, forty years older) the jokes that had gone way over my head at the time - especially the ones involving eternally man-hungry Blanche, played by Rue McClanahan - are something I can now readily understand.  It's made it like I'm watching the show brand new again, for the first time.  I think now though I am tending to favor Dorothy.  Maybe because I've become a bit more jaded by life, more world-weary and quick to offer up wry commentary.  And also because I'm a bit of a Bea Arthur fan (can you believe that she was in the second Star Wars production ever produced, okay it was the holiday special but it still counts!).

Anyhoo, it's a very funny sitcom, if you've never had the pleasure of watching it.  And well worth your time to catch it if you're finding yourselves needing something to give you a good laugh guaranteed to make you smile. 

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Artemis II: They're back!

 

A short while ago the four astronauts of Artemis II successfully splashed down in the ocean off the coast of San Diego.  They made it!!

(I had been afraid of this mission.  They were in my prayers a LOT.)

For over a week I have been tuned in whenever I could to NASA's official YouTube feed, usually streaming it to the high-def television set in my living room.  I couldn't help but reflect on how our parents and grandparents (and now even some GREAT-grandparents) huddled around the tiny screen of the family TV to watch blurry black and white images from the Moon during the Apollo program over fifty years ago.  And now we get to watch it in full-size resolution in beautiful color straight from the Moon and across the Internet to our devices.

I've been hanging on everything that the crew of Artemis II did, and when they sent back those amazing pictures from their swing-around the Moon, it was the most beautiful spectacle that's I've seen in a very long time...

It's like we're back to a place where America was much more hopeful, far less cynical.  That era from before I was even born, when we could do amazing things.

Let's pray that feeling lasts awhile.

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Artemis II has launched and is on its way to the Moon!

 

Godspeed Artemis II.

Or as Walter Cronkite would have said:

"Go Baby, GO!!!"

Watching Artemis II launch, I felt like a seven-year-old kid all over again.  It was 45 years ago this month that the Columbia launched on the very first mission for the space shuttle system.  I had wanted to finally watch real astronauts go up into space.  The mission had been delayed a few times already and I didn't want to miss it.  Finally, about ten minutes before time to head out to school at 8:30 in the morning, Columbia ignited and began its ascent.  I couldn't tear my eyes off the screen but Dad said "Okay, it's up.  NOW can we go?!"

I truly hope this will be a successful mission.  I've harbored a lot of concerns about Artemis II.  It would be such a shot in the arm for national morale... and the feelings of the world in general... if those four astronauts return safely.

History happened tonight.  May this be only the beginning of the next adventure of man's journey into the cosmos.

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New trailer for Masters of the Universe is here!

Masters of the Universe is officially the movie I most want to see this summer.  It looks like it's going to be all kinds of bonkers good time!  It comes across as every Masters toy I had as a kid put into a big box and shaken around and then poured out on the carpet.  The design, the color palette, the voices...

This is going to be a supremely big dumb fun movie.  The perfect two-hour getaway from the craziness of the real world.

Here's the new trailer that dropped yesterday.  Lots of stuff in this one, including our first look at Jared Leto's Skeletor as he delivers some dialogue.

I think that there should be a collector's popcorn bucket and that it look like Man-At-Arms's helmet.  Practical and fashionable.

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