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An Amateur Movie Adventure
Feb01

An Amateur Movie Adventure

I don’t know why I started on the voyage of discovery that took me on an adventure through movies made on VHS tape and Video8 and Super 8 film recorders of the 1980s and 1990s, I only know that I enjoyed the trip. Professor Pompanickel Goes Terminal – 1992 I first found this short movie on the Internet Archive where I learnt that “Professor Pompanickel calls Gareth over to view his latest invention – a method to traverse the Universal Data Sphere allowing Specialised Security to access data from anywhere, simply and easily.” In some ways this film made me think of that classic work of Canadian film production, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank; computers, virtual interfacing doohickeys, etc. Note the opening part of this film also features a walk through Portsmouth’s Guildhall Square. Beat The System – 1993 The writer, producer, and director of the previous movie led me to this more-polished production made by members of Bournemouth University in 1993. The theme of computers and people interfacing with them – hacking, if you will – carries through but now there’s an Orwellian gameshow element to the film too. Looking for similarities in the big world of big budget productions there’s a hint of The Running Man in this one. Die 6 Astronauten (a Super 8 film by Dagie Brundert, 1992) Every adventure needs a moment of excitement and that comes in this one courtesy of a complete change of pace and something completely unrelated to the first two amateur films. Die 6 Astronauten is a short, stop-motion, art movie featuring six astronauts (you probably guessed) and (you probably guessed this part too) it was filmed on Super 8 stock in 1992 by Dagie Brundert. It’s a wonderful little movie which follows the tiny characters of Hili, Pävonen, Ngoum, Pirx, Nelson, and Dupont as they explore our world and the treasures that can be found within its open refrigerators. 23 Barbiepuppen kippen um / 23 Barbie Dolls Collapse (1988) From the same art movie maker although a lot earlier in her chosen profession is this oddly mesmerising movie with a series of dolls falling over in different ways. That’s all there is to it. And yet you’ll want to watch it. You’ll want to guess how the next doll will tumble. Fall to the side? Fall on her face? Land on another doll? Compelling stuff. The Afterlife (1984) Something else shot on Super 8, but this time it’s from Ohio native actor and director Damon Packard who produced this short film – not of great quality but that’s half the appeal with these amateur movies – called The...

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Rutland High School Yearbook 1971
Jan15

Rutland High School Yearbook 1971

The Internet Archive is always a great place to have a virtual wander through if you’re forever finding yourself stuck in a timewarp of nostalgia like me. It doesn’t help you escape the timewarp of nostalgia – not that you’d ever want to because it’s nice there – but it does make it even more enjoyable. So, today’s discovery has been the the publications of the Rutland Historical Society and, in particular, the Rutland High School Yearbooks. You might have been able to work that out from the title of this post because I can see you and you look smart. It’s quite possible that some schools in the UK do yearbooks and possibly have for some some time but in my experience they’re a purely American phenomenon that I’ve heard about, seen glimpses of in films and on TV, and know next-to-nothing else about. This makes discovering scanned American high school yearbooks very interesting and for no other reason than it’s the year I was born in I’ve decided to take a nose through the Rutland High School Yearbook of 1971. The inside cover and evidence that before there were fonts there were still fonts. And what beautiful fonts they were! Look at that “70-71” and picture any other decade in which a more suitable font wrote something appropriate to the era. You can’t! Mostly because you’re not sure what I’m saying. I’m not sure what I’m saying and I just wrote it. I think I’m saying it’s quite seventiesish. A message from the superintendent Dr James Tinney. He knew that the students of Rutland High School were going to accomplish great things. But did he know know? Or did he get some kind of guidance through… … astrology!? No. It was neither of those things. He was just being polite. He couldn’t wait to see the back of them. But who is them? I’m glad you asked. David Cook. CRASH! Jan Eastman. D.A.R. girl. I dont know what a D.A.R. girl is. I think it’s probably got something to do with her hair. It’s quite impressive hair. Judy Godnick. Teensy-weensy bikinis and BIG MOUTH. Judy sounds like the sort of person I’d have liked. And she had a dune buggy. You never know when those will come in useful. You suspect it’s around dunes but you never know for sure. David Alberico. One of the Fantastic Four. I’ve ruled out Invisible Woman but he could be any of the other three. Richard Savage. Good head. Well, that’s nice to know. High schools were very progressive back in the early seventies. Barbara McKirryher. Which boy this week? The...

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Japanese TV Adverts
Jan11

Japanese TV Adverts

I don’t speak Japanese. I think that will become very obvious very quickly as I try to work out what these old TV adverts from Japan, home of bewildering imagery, are actually for. Let’s see. There are giant, flying insects, a man in a baseball uniform, crabs holding yellow boxes with chicken symbols on them, and a wind-up power cord winding in. This is probably an advert for Click Clack Cluck, a natural compound made from crab claws and cockerels that both repels insects and acts as a dampening field for electrical signals. Of course, it doesn’t work because if it did you wouldn’t be able to film the advert because of all the interference. That’s probably why the product ultimately failed in the market if I had to guess. That and the smell. I’m guessing Japanese people sometimes just fork up the money to brag about things. Take this woman who is both proud of her cleavage and her arm wrestling prowess. Watch as she defeats the latest challenger to her crown, an advanced robot killing machine from the Sony Corporation. “There can be only one,” she says with a mixture of pride and derision directed at the nation of Japan at the end. A pretty straightforward public service announcement here. If you’re not a sexual deviant then you can sit down without problems but if you feel the urge to stick things up your back passage then, well, you get what you deserve. In summary: things come out; things don’t go in. A lot is often said about the Japanese attitude towards family, especially elder members of the family, but this advert seems to show that the familial concern goes both ways as a doting grandfather happily shows that where his granddaughter is concerned he’s prepared to give up his arms to manufacture top quality soap for her flawless skin. Some products are so uniquely Japanese – Whale Hunting for Science Diplomas and Godzilla Deterrent Spray are frequently cited in lists like this – and this is another example. Arm Foam now comes in a canister. No more mixing it in a cauldron like your ancestors. If you’ve ever wondered why Japanese people don’t seem to spend much time at the beach – it’s the thought that’s kept me awake at night more often than any other – then the answer may just come from this old commercial which claims to have a juice drink guaranteed to appease the terrifying Bee People, mutant hybrids that inhabit the shorelines of Japan’s islands tormenting anyone foolhardy enough to risk a quick dip in the ocean. Like many adverts I...

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Women In Computer Adverts
Dec12

Women In Computer Adverts

Hang on. I haven’t put up a post about sexist advertising in the computer industry yet? Really? Everyone else has. I must rectify this omission now! Women have been used to advertise inappropriately just about everything you can think of. Sex, so the saying goes, sells. No sex also quite likely sells but it’s nowhere near as much fun to storyboard as sex-selling advertisements. And so for as long as there have been marketing people and as long as there have been things that anybody might buy there have been adverts for those things featuring women. Scantily-clad women. Often with barely even a passing thought to a connection with the product being sold. I probably saw a great many of the following adverts for computer games and machines featuring provocatively-posed women in various states of undress growing up and yet I can honestly say that at no point did I ever consider the merits of a purchase based on the model showing off her wares alongside the main product. Perhaps I’m just weird or an outlier as far as the advertising execs are concerned, or perhaps the advertising execs just didn’t care and fancied some auditions and photography sessions with young starlets anyway. I’m pretty sure that’s at least partially true. Anyway, let’s marvel at some of the wonderfully awful means of promoting computer software and hardware over the past few decades. From a publication called Vidiot and maybe this was simply showing that gaming was as much something for women as it was for men. Maybe. Maybe the two references to “end” in the blurb on the picture as well as describing the gamesplayer as a “lovely miss” aren’t innuendo and sexist condescension respectively. Maybe. All I know is that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near a centipede in shorts that tight and short. Although if I were in shorts that tight and short it’s quite likely any nearby centipede would scurry off in the opposite direction as fast as its multitude of legs could propel it. A roaring fire. A man in a suit – you can trust those sorts of men – and a beauty in quite possibly just bra and panties. And let’s have a read of the advert’s copy: Tuesday night Eileen dropped in and we balanced her checkbook on it. If you knew Eileen you’d know that’s a first. Wednesday, Judy and I computed the principal and interest on the new car she wants to buy. Someone fan me down; that copy is some hot, damn copy. Yeah, I think we all know what sort of balancing and computing’s been going on...

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1980s Computer Porn
Nov02

1980s Computer Porn

If you were a boy or girl at around the same time I was and if you owned a computer then there’s a good chance you’d have followed the same ritual I did every month: down to the newsagent’s for a furtive flick through the magazines on the shelves before picking up what caught my eye, then back home to the bedroom where the door would be shut and the computer switched on, magazine spread out on the desk by the keyboard, all ready for some passionate pounding, sometimes using two fingers. Good grief! Look at this filth for the BBC! With every byte counting there’s no room for spaces in the listing leading to dirty, dirty code. Makes me feel grimy just looking at it. “VDU28,0,24,39,24,134,136:” I have no idea what you’re saying but keep talking! “EVERY 7,1 GOSUB 1530” This Amstrad code is up for some repetitive action. It’s going to be doing it over and over again until it’s stopped! Naughty! That there is the holy grail of ZX Spectrum program listings: Z80 baby! Short and sweet, pulsing to the music you’re playing, poking away in two holes in the memory space. Oh yes! And look that those 201s! 201 is C9 in hexadecimal, and that means RET. Yeah, this code isn’t just going there it’s coming back for more. Insatiable! These days our listings embrace all the colours of the rainbow but back in the 80s the best you’d find was a little bit of black on white action thanks to some inverse video. This was pretty damn risqué back then. This Spectrum code will take what you give it and then flip it over, lay it on its side, look down on it from above, and spit it right back at you. That’s what we call European code and things were just a little bit nastier back in the 80s. You give it your depth and it’ll multiply what you’ve got by the cosine of PI over 6. When was the last time you had that done? Yeah, I thought as much. This C16/Plus 4 code is a bit of a hard mistress to please. You just want to get right down and do things but there are conditions you’ve got to meet first. Look at it, line by exquisitely conditional line; have you ever seen so many IFs in your life? You get a nice long listing split into many parts then you want some detailed instructions; you want some code that knows what it wants you to do and isn’t afraid to tell you exactly how to do it. You’re looking at...

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HP 9845 Games
Nov02

HP 9845 Games

An article looking at some of the computer games that were available for the HP 9845 from the 1970s into the 1980s. 9845 Games It would have been a real surprise if the at the time outstanding capabilities of the 9845 desktop series would not have inspired a complete series of computer games dedicated to those systems. Even Hewlett-Packard itself contributed a tape, the so-called Computer Games Library, for the 9845A and 9845B series with a selection of 14 popular games like Gomoku, Hangman, Life, Star Trek or Nim. Most games were character based, but some use graphics for action-type animations. Special binary programs written in assembler provided the required speed. Even a couple of games were developed for the 9845C color system, like HPs Gravity game which is part of the 9845C...

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