We start things with a little music that I stumbled across. If you don’t remember the coin-op video game Empire City 1931, then congratulations, you’re young or didn’t spend far too much time in arcades. It’s one of those light-gun games, but what stood out to me was the jazzy tune it played:
This led me to Karanba72’s channel which probably has any old arcade chiptunes you can’t find anywhere else.
What else?
• Fans of Doctor Who are being tempted by this 64oz TARDIS coffee mug. As a caffeine and beverage connoisseur, I don’t think this will be a great coffee mug. It’s porcelain, so if you fill it up, it’s not going to stay hot for long. Still, it’d make a pretty cool desk accessory for holding pencils, rulers, and sonic screwdrivers.
• Rumor has it that we’re getting a Knights of the Old Republic movie, based on video game of the same name. If you haven’t played KOTOR, I recommend that you do, since it’s still one of the best-written Star Wars games out there. That said, I’m not sure how they plan on adapting the plot to a film, since it really works best if you’re going in blind and have some investment in your character.
• I’ve posted about London’s “fatberg” problem, where food cart grease and other things put down the sewers make giant clogs that have to be manually removed, but the issue has leveled up: Now a blue whale sized “concreteberg” is stuck in the sewer system.
• Stephen King fans will get a film based on a story many thought would never be adapted to the big screen: The Long Walk. If they go the direct-from-text route, some horrific things are going to happen to the kid-aged characters, and if they come up with a way for those things to happen off screen and leave it up to your imagination… that could be worse.
• No Man’s Sky continues to be upgraded and brought closer to what the initial trailers promised, but players are leaping ahead of the developers and building cities in the game.
• I was unaware that Snoopy was lost in our solar system. That is, the test Lunar Excursion Module (named after Charlie Brown’s dog) that was used as a run-through for landing people on the moon. After orbiting the moon once, its extra fuel was used to send it off into the black, and some people are trying to find it.
• And speaking of lunar landers, I stumbled across this online version of the old Lunar Lander vector-graphics arcade game! I only wish I had the original thrust lever to push instead of keyboard controls, but you can’t have everything.
Somehow, when he was in the second grade, my 8-year-old kid knew more about the movie IT than I did. Apparently, his peers either had older siblings that had seen the film and passed the high points down like legends told around the campfire, or they’d seen it themselves somehow and had returned to pass the terror on. While Josh is still leery of clowns, explaining the main plot points of the original novel made it a little less scary. Stephen King’s novels largely rely on making compelling characters for us to root for so that we’re scared of something happening to them, not so much the actual monster. So when I described the clown’s true form (no spoilers), it took the edge off. It was kind of like saying “Jason Voorhees? He’s basically a hulk-zombie in a hockey mask.”
The photo to the left is of a new betta fish that’s been adopted by a preschool classroom that shall remain nameless. What won’t remain nameless, however, is the fish itself. Under our finny friend is a sort of primary election to name the fish from a classroom of three and four-year-olds that I found amusing, especially as you get near the end.
