A lovely book landed on my desk today: Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers by John Alderman, Dag Spicer, and Mark Richards. It starts with a reconstructed version of the Z3 Adder, a WWII-era machine that used “hole-punched movie film” to store data, and goes up through Google’s first production server, which is [...]
Oh, snap. I may have to become a Christian just for the occasion.
I blog today through a feverish haze, which is appropriate given the hallucinatory subject matter. In my debilitated state I’m just going to summarize comments on yesterday’s post, which make clear my numerous personal and nerdly shortcomings.
Falling asleep last night, feeling replete and self-satisfied from an evening spent not-watching the Oscars — yeah, I’m just a rebel that way — I played a thought-game: What are the ten physically largest living beings in all of science fiction? Here’s my list, biggest to smallest, generated — I might add, in my defense [...]
For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a piece about Zack Snyder’s remarkable 300, a CGI-heavy adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel. His next project after that is Watchmen. I had kind of assumed, after the Gilliam version died, that all future Watchmen projects were snares and delusions, but Snyder’s appears to [...]
I realize that Google launched a war with Microsoft today, and Apple and iPhone settled their trademark dispute, but as my 2-year-old daughter says: “guys, we have to focus.” A bunch of New Zealand fishermen have landed a colossal squid in Antarctica.
Lately I’ve been watching a feature-length fan-made Star Trek parody called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. There are dark abysms of Trek fandom that kinda scare me, but you know what? This is really very, very watchable. It was done by a small (but apparently very scrappy) group of Finnish guys, amateurs, who spent 7 [...]
The Keymaster and the Gatekeeper will be meeting face to face at a conference in May for an unscripted chat. Thus begins the rule of Gozer. Actually, it should be pretty interesting — maybe they’ll settle that whole teachers’ unions issue once and for all.
There’s a third trailer out for The Simpsons Movie, which shows every sign of being the longest, widest Simpsons episode ever. This is the first trailer that gives a sense of the tone and scope of the movie, which is basically no different from the TV version, though I assume somebody somewhere will swear to [...]
I just had to say that, and now I’ve said it, and we can all move on.
This post will strain my primitive HTML skills to the very breaking point.
