By Roy Mathur, on 2024-02-21, at 22:57:20--23:56:06 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
Herr Fygor Gestalt and I have piloted the VIMANA back to my tower of wizardry for a pit stop and to talk geek life instead of focusing on my multiversal malaise.
While I have no intention making a mental health blog or podcast, it has been rough lately. Multitversal malaise is my dram'd up gothy code for a bargain bucket bundle of anxiety, depression, insomnia, exhaustion, headaches, OCD, Tourette's, etc., in roughly that order of awfulness.
Given how blue I've been and how many times I'm going to say "moon", I've titled this episode "Blue Moon". Oh, for a chaise longue and a bit of a sit down.
Sofia Boutella finally has a proper shot debuting as the action star of Zack Snyder's 2023 reworked rejected Star Wars script.
Part one of a trilogy, A Child of Fire (groan) is about the adopted daughter of an evil emperor rebelling against his empire, after the village that sheltered her is invaded by one of his brutal admirals.
This is The Magnificent Seven in space, in the same way that Battle Beyond the Stars was (without the delightful camp) wrapped in a Warhammer-style Nazi-chic universe. There's also a good droid, a scene cloned right from Mos Eisley cantina, DJ from The Last Jedi, and a female Jedi in all but name, so how much did it really depart from Star Wars? The combat scenes, featuring a variety of brutal bludgeons, blades, and blasters, is absurdly bloodless to atain PG-13. It had possibilities, but Sofia Boutella's action headliner was thrown away on a big mess of a movie.
For distraction, I rewatched Moonfall, a stupendously stupid film of which, in pod 439 from 2022, I said:
I love the nerdy conspiracy theorist protagonist, played by John Bradley (Samwell Tarly in Game of Thrones). He reminds me of the similarly likeable nutty character, Bernie, from Godzilla vs. Kong. Second, the story is entertaining in its utter preposterousness.It is currently available on 4OD in the UK.
BBC1's comedic detective series from the 1997 to 2016, Jonathan Creek, was created by David Renwick, who was also behind the excellent One Foot in the Grave. The fiendishly puzzling mysteries (at least they were the first time around) occasionally resort to delightful pastich. The Omega Man could be an episode of The X-Files and House of Monkeys is Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Conan-Doyle's The Creeping Man.
I've rewatched only Jonathan Creek series 1 to 3 (1997 to 2000) featuring Maddy. Without Caroline Quentin, the show is good, but lacks the kick of their chemistry. Jonathan, our supposedly gentle cerebral magic trick designer, who wears a duffel coat and lives in a windmill no less, can be cold and shallow, so Maddy's manipulative tendencies are a good match for him. For example, in Black Canary, Maddy's sabotage, through subterfuge and playing gooseberry, of Jonathan's possible only chance at true love, matches his own surprising lack of sympathy to an ex's suicide attempt.
I'm enjoying the AT-LP3 record player I spoke about some time ago. I have since bought a brush set to add to a soft paintbrush, makeup brush, microfibre cloth, and a gallon of deionised water. This is hopefully the least destructive way to clean the stylus and a little stack of very cheap and very eclectic records I listen to though a single little Jam Audio tomato-shaped speaker. Cleaning? Well, yes, as some of the records, particularly West Side Story and Holst looked like they were used by a sneezing shaky Tony Montana as a coke sniffing surface.
Records? West Side Story film soundtrack, The Pirates of Penzance, The Spinners' Volume One, The Four and Only Seekers' Hide and Seekers, Holst's The Planets (LA Phil.), The Inimitable George Formby, My Fair Lady soundtrack, and Elvis Presley's Greatest Hits. There are also Mum's unfortunately currently inaccessible oldies in storage. The entire record collection cost about a quarter of the price of the budget automatic turntable.
While the sounds, tactility, aroma, and threat of atomic, biological, or chemical contamination of cheap old records can be a great experience, my main music collection consists of CDs and FLACs, which, loudness wars aside, knocks vinyl into a cocked hat for quality by a light year. Vinyl trades quality for so-called warmth (actually crackles), though real archival storage longevity compared to cassette or CD.
I have been enjoying my incredibly tall German-made Witter Music stand from Thomann. It is a skinny thing, about as robust as a newborn dragonfly. As delicate as it is, it is also wonderful. It can go really high and really low, which means you can have your music or shownotes at exactly the right height, no matter your how short or tall you are, or whether you are sitting or standing. After months of not playing my banjolele, because I couldn't see the music without getting multiple bodily cricks, I have started again. My caterwauling is horrendous and I don't care.
Yo ho, yo ho, a pirates life for me!---Yo, Ho! (A Pirate's Life For Me), Pirates of the Caribbean, Disneyland by George Burns and Xavier Atencio
As for it's lack of robustness, well, there aren't many, perhaps any, music stands this tall, so I'm being careful and making do. You see, not everything made in Germany is universally great. Take, for instance, a Diplomat and a Kaweco Sport fountain pen, both made in Germany and, unlike my beloved German Lamys, they are a disappointment. The first arrived with a cracked leaky section, the second with an abysmal nib. Don't let the fact that something is made in the West fool you. There are as many hacks over here as there are in China. Bias shouldn't guide your purchases.
Last night I did some non-online analogue social mixing at a local singles club I visited a couple of times before the pandemic.
Getting there though was a sweaty nightmare in the rain and the dark with Google Maps trying to force me to walk on major A roads instead directing me along safe pedestrian byways, even though I selected by foot as my mode of transport. At one stage I had to make my way down a steep, high, wet embankment. I arrived rumpled and, since I am out of touch with fashion, looking like Hagrid in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Thanks, Google, you idiot. I took a cab back.
The event was friendly, I talked to actual human people, and was handed a newsletter of future events. In other words it all worked out. Whether it's a viable avenure for finding one's paramour, I have no idea, but it gets me out of the wizarding tower.
We finally got one. The process was not the best with our time wasted by talk of useless add-ons, while not giving us useful information, such as the actual specifications of the second hand car we were buying. In the end, I had to go on Parkers to find them. The online paperless sale didn't work and some of the paperwork didn't arrive with the car. To say the least, it was a faff, and this was from a major dealer, not Arthur Daley.
It was also, like all cars are now, too expensive, and cost too much to insure and no, I didn't want to save 20 quid by having a blackbox installed. However, if our old car was the battered Millennium Falcon, the new one is Darth Vader's experimental TIE fighter. It's sleek and stupidly fast.
To again speed up my increasingly large RSS XML feed file, I tested removing the guid item tag from my podcast, duplicated exactly in the enclosure tag, because Apple says, "If a GUID is not provided, make sure that an episode's enclosure URL is unique and never changes."
I removed the lines using the command "g/guid/d" in Vim, as Notepad2 would leave behind a blank line. I didn't use sed or awk, as I haven't had time to investigate the busybox binary I have that seems to use some UNIX commands in non-standard ways.
As usual, Cast Feed Validator returned, "Your feed is fast!", but file size was a better indicator. Before: 351 KB, after: 291 KB.
I'm getting precious little reaction regarding my Hammer House of Horror revisit. Let me know if you are enjoying it or what I can do to improve it.
The format is exactly the same as for my Classic Doctor Who revisits and, for that matter, all revisits here on out.