csixty4

Sometimes, I’m just blown away by the things people find.

The classic silent sci-fi thriller Metropolis was edited (”butchered”, some might say) in 1927, and the footage that was cut was considered lost. Bits & pieces of film had been found here and there, and there were production stills and notes. Some of those were used in the 2002 restoration, where brief descriptions of the cut scenes were flashed up on the screen to fill in the missing plot details.

But, in 1927, a copy of the original, uncut film was shipped to Argentina. Only July 1st, it was announced that this copy has been found in a vault at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires.

I have goosebumps. 80+ years later, this classic will be seen in its entirety for the first time since its premiere.

Sorry for the spoiler, but this is the happy ending of The Indestructible Man (1956):

Eva: I suppose you’ll be assigned to another case, and I’ll have to give up hamburgers in the front seat of the car for steaks in a restaurant.

Lt. Chasen: No, I thought about that. In fact, I decided to do something about it. I started by talking the Captain into a short holiday. And, just about an hour ago, I got you fired.

Eva: What? What did you do that for?

Lt. Chasen: I figured being my wife would take up all of your time.

Eva: Well, even if I wanted to say no, I couldn’t. You’re not supposed to say no to a detective.

Lt. Chasen: I figured that, too.

This guy is the hero???

I’m done with <$10/mo. hosting services.

My site’s been down all weekend. csixty4.com was actually null routed (0.0.0.0), and tech support said everything was going to be fine in a few hours.

I’ve since moved to a VPS from Linode. We’ll see how this goes. It’s $20/mo (versus $8 for JaguarPC), but hopefully it’ll pay off in better uptime & flexibility.

The John McCain campaign put out a Flash video game based on Space Invaders, called “Pork Invaders”. to show how McCain will fight against pork-barrel spending.  The invaders have been replaced with pigs, the UFO is now a pork barrel, and so on.  I give them kudos for offering HTML that lets you embed the game in your blog, facebook page, or any other web site where you’d like to play it.  That shows an understanding of how people like to use the Internet these days, and I’m going to take advantage of that to let you play Pork Invaders below.

I think it’s really interesting that the McCain campaign chose such an early game. I’m going to skip the snarky comments that come to mind about the game’s age and McCain’s age. And, I’m going to assume Space Invaders was chosen because it’s easy to program quickly & on a budget. Still, one thought came to mind when I started playing it, and I wanted to share it with you.

It’s a quote from Rob Fulop, one of the early developers for the Atari 2600 (VCS). It can be heard over the closing credits of the first episode of Once Upon Atari:

God knows what those video games did to the minds of the kids that played them. I think about this a lot. I meet adults now that, by the time they were twelve, they played 100,000 hours of those early VCS games that we made. Well, you know, I watched 100,000 hours of TV and, you know, when I was twelve, and I, certainly as I’m getting older, realize the effect that had on me.

A lot of kids walking around now are shaped by the video games they played when they were younger, and the message was pretty clear: you always lose. Now, it’s the nineties, and there’s a lot of nihilism in our music and in our culture. It’s like these kids grew up, and what’s coming out is “we always lose, there’s a pointlessness to our lives“. I believe video games had a key role in that inner world of a lot of people.

We didn’t grow up with that. People in my culture grew up with “it’ll all work out, you know. The End. Roll credits. It’ll always work out in the end.” The next generation that we helped create, that we helped form, was “we always lose”, and we’re all responsible for that.

I’m tired of hearing politicians and their promises. Sorry, but I can’t believe anyone who promises they’ll get rid of pork spending, or end the war, or anything really. When it comes to politics, we always lose, and people keep on believing that if we just elect the right person, everything will be hunky-dory. It wont. We always lose.