(1) Four good documentaries:
Atari: Game Over
Special When Lit: A Pinball Documentary
The Bug: Life and Times of the People’s Car
30 Bikes: The Story of Homestead Bicycles
(2) Finished my ATARI® / Sim Train World 3 project. I’m drafting a post around the process (for those interested).
I got starry-eyed on the coaster ride
Andy said, “Man, I need a break from the world outside
These days, my life just careens through a pinball machine
I could do so much better, but I can’t get off the TILT”
— Counting Crows, Palisades Park
(1) Finding and Losing Train Culture (The Imaginative Conservative)
(2) Special When Lit: A Pinball Documentary (2009) on Tubi
Artists specialize in designs. God is the greatest artist of all. This is evident in nature, but also in the designs that He has for His creatures. He has a unique plan for each one of us. Given the number of creatures, God’s designs are innumerable¹.
What an odd movie. I think I liked it. My university mentor was one of the original Detroit Mad Men, but my favorite English professor gave me a copy Adbusters and had us watch Brazil and read Zen and the Art of Motocycle Maintenance and The Little Prince. The Limestone Library™ has a copy of The Heart of Our Cities by Victor Gruen and Ogilvy on Advertising.
(1) The Coca-Cola Kid and the Corporate Comforts of Selling Out (Back Row)
(1a) The Australian Sound:
(2) The Allure of Ruins by James Lileks (Discourse)
(2a) Quotes from On Modernism’s Ruins: The Architecture of “Building Stories” and Lost Buildings by Daniel Worden:
Decaying and dilapidated architecture resonates as loss, as evidence of the irreversible passage of time, yet architectural ruins emanate past grandeur. Ware’s comics, then, focus on ruins and the melancholy they elicit in an attempt to render the irreversible passage of time into an aesthetic object. In both “Building Stories” and Lost Buildings, melancholy is remade into the imagination of the ruin as whole through an engagement with the built environment.
Architecture is a vehicle to convey both the affective possibilities of experiencing the past as a whole and the perpetual frustration of the inability to reconstruct modernity’s ruins seamlessly.
¹Daily Meditations on the Psalms
It will rival Flynn’s, 20 Grand Palace, and Happytime Pizza. The generous use of Formica® will be legendary.
All these drove my interest in [computers] [technology] [futurism_].
(IOI-643118) WarGames
(IOI-645119) Tron (and later Tron: Legacy)
(IOI-675123) Atari <<< Rick Guidice and John Enright
(IOI-675129) Origin Systems (2400 AD)
(IOI-678999) Walt Disney World: Tomorrowland, EPCOT, and Monorail
(IOI-681999) Apple: IIe and Mac Classic
(IOI-721972) 1984
(IOI-774444) Robotech
(IOI-791211) Geocities
(IOI-811303) Steven Levy: Hackers and Insanely Great
(1) High Plains Drifter Is Clint Eastwood’s Mysterious, Overlooked Masterpiece (Esquire)
(2) The Aesop for Children:
The Travelers and the Sea
Two Travelers were walking along the seashore. Far out they saw something riding on the waves. “Look,” said one, “a great ship rides in from distant lands, bearing rich treasures!” The object they saw came ever nearer the shore. “No,” said the other, “that is not a treasure ship. That is some fisherman’s skiff, with the day’s catch of savory fish.” Still nearer came the object. The waves washed it up on the shore. “It is a chest of gold lost from some wreck,” they cried. Both travelers rushed to the beach, but there they found nothing but a water-soaked log.
Do not let your hopes carry you away from reality.
The Two Pots
Two Pots, one of brass and the other of clay, stood together on the hearthstone. One day the Brass Pot proposed to the Earthen Pot that they go out into the world together. But the Earthen Pot excused himself, saying that it would be wiser for him to stay in the corner by the fire.
“It would take so little to break me,” he said. “You know how fragile I am. The least shock is sure to shatter me!”
“Don’t let that keep you at home,” urged the Brass Pot. “I shall take very good care of you. If we should happen to meet anything hard I will step between and save you.”
So the Earthen Pot at last consented, and the two set out side by side, jolting along on three stubby legs first to this side, then to that, and bumping into each other at every step.
The Earthen Pot could not survive that sort of companionship very long. They had not gone ten paces before the Eathen Pot cracked, and at the next jolt he flew into a thousand pieces.
Equals make the best friends.
This is not ranked. I’ve also given an explanation why it made the list. There’s always a kind of sadness when you finish great anime (like a good book or video game) especially when whatever you pick up next doesn’t quite meet the same expectations. This happened to me after completing KH1 and KH3 (Square Enix).
Robotech: The Macross Saga – The start of my interest in anime. I still post about Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, Max Sterling, Miriya Parina, and Lynn Minmay. I remember a trip to Boston with my dad in search of a copy of the Art of Robotech. Why was it groundbreaking? Prior to Robotech I had never seen anyone die in a cartoon. The death of Roy Fokker should make a list like this (see also Bye-Bye Mars).
Related
Weekend 461.0
Naruto – Bear introduced me to the orange ninja. I was probably more interested in Naruto than he was towards the end. I love the filler episodes between story arches. I can’t believe it’s the 20th Anniversary of Naruto.
Related
The Orange Ninja (and other links)
Belle – This is from the same director as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. The subject matter is very serious — child abuse, death of a parent, and social media addiction — but the intensity is diffused by a beautiful score. This was my first post-pandemic movie in a theater.
Your Lie in April – A beautiful series about love and loss and what we take for granted.
Related
Weekend 356.1 (Ending on a High ♫♫♫♫)
Weekend 357.0
5 Centimeters per Second – This was recommended by a friend. The context of the recommendation was a bit sad but everything in this film by Makoto Shinkai is perfect. I still check every train platform for what exists now only in memory.
Related
Christmas 2018 Sabbatical (Principle of Connectivity)
East of Eden – Kind of a quirky series. I watched this during the pandemic and it was a great escape from the daily news. There were some great scenes of NYC.
Related
Weekend 460.1
KH3 DLC Postscript
Clannad and Clannad After Story – I love the story of Naoyuki and Tomoya Okazaki (father and son) and The Road Home remains one of my favorite episodes in the series.
Related
Weekend 214.1
Weekend 223.1 (filaments and figments)
New England Spring Rain
Weekend 299.0 (Great Company)
Spirited Away – NO list is complete without a title from Hayao Miyazaki and No Face remains one of my favorite characters. The opening sequence at the abandoned amusement park is pleasure island meets the wardrobe. My other Miyazaki consideration was The Wind Rises.
Related
Weekend 172.0 (Aerotropolis Edition)
Weekend 272.0 (22.2 x 21.5 x 9.8 inches)
Christmas 2018 Sabbatical (Principle of Connectivity)
Weekend 461.0
The Tale of Princess Kaguya – I saw this with Bear at The Museum of Modern Art. My trips to Manhattan with Bear are always memorable.
Last Exile – I’m a sucker for anything with zeppelins (Fringe and Crimson Skies). The tech in this movie was very steampunk-like (reminiscent of Steamboy).
Related
Weekend 233.0 (Contrails)
I knew the fix was in when Maureen Dowd swooned over Eminem in 2002.
The Boomers’ Crooner (NY Times)
Two notes…
This op-ed was highlighted on the Drudge Report. Brent Musburger is a living legend.
(1) Fans Aren’t Gatekeeping Anything, They’re Just Wary Of Would-Be Dictators Trying To Take Over Their Hobbies (Forbes)
(2) Square and Disney Should Go Big for Kingdom Hearts’ 20th Anniversary (GAMERANT)
(3) Our Church and Our “Elites” (The Catholic Thing)
“And they [elites] have this additional disadvantage. They are unlikely to have darkened a church door, so that the spiritual heritage of Christendom is for them at best an uncharted territory, an unknown continent, and at worst, a monster of the post-Christian imagination, a bugbear to frighten secular toddlers.
The elites have been in the vanguard of cultural evisceration, in all kinds of ways. Only the Church can recover the abandoned land, and till it with love. By comparison with what people still within living memory once took for granted, there are now no dances, no socials, no local ball leagues, no community singing, few parades – and those but exercises in garishness and obscenity. And no genuine common life.”
(3a) Masks Off (Memology 101)
(1) Study history because it repeats itself
(2) Read any of the Austrian School economists like Hayek, Hazlitt, von Mises, and Reed (and extra fortification via Milton Friedman)
(3) Support independent content creators on YouTube and Indiegogo
(4) Donate to Project Veritas and Judicial Watch
(5) Subscribe to Church Militant, Epoch Times, etc.
(6) Boycott companies like The Walt Disney Company (DIS) and professional sports leagues like the NBA, NFL, and MLB
(7) Stop using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and find alternatives to Google
(8) Cancel your NETFLIX, Hulu, Prime, Apple TV, and Disney+ streaming accounts
(9) Start a library of books, movies, and music (you need hard copies to protect against censorship)
(10) Build a network of like-minded individuals. Despite what we’re told by the media, we represent the majority.