“Striking Sparks” — Page Eight
Meanwhile, at a local precinct…
Yay! We get to start opening the story up a bit. Max has been attracting attention. More below the jump!
Bobservations
Archaic Formats
Remember VHS? You probably do, unless you’re really young. Going to the video-rental store (remember those?) and getting a crick in your neck from leaning your head sideways while walking along the aisles so you could read the box spines. Rewinding. Worrying about tape damage. We still have a bunch of old home movies on VHS, which is kind of a problem because we haven’t actually had a VHS player in at least ten years. A while back (before DVD) I converted a bunch of them to digital and backed them up on CD-ROMS. In Indeo5 format. That turned out to be a mistake, because a few years later Macs stopped supporting that codec when they switched over to Intel chips. Fortunately even though I couldn’t play them I could upload them to YouTube. It’s not a solution I like, but it worked. For now.
Reminds me of the time when my sister wanted copies of a couple of her old Biker Mice From Mars scripts. I was the story editor, so I had backups. I always keep backups. I have a fire safe just for backups. So I opened the safe and dug down deep into the Biker Mice strata and pulled out a manila envelope containing — 5-1/4″ floppies! Each containing a massive 360K of old scripts written in MovieMaster. Good Lord. I had to mail the things off to a friend in Texas who collects obsolete computer equipment. Neither he nor I had MovieMaster any more, but he was able to send them as ASCII files which I was able to manually reformat. What a pain.
But I’m learning. Whenever I can, I convert something I want to keep into analog format. Pictures? Printed. My daily journal? Hardcopy. There are electronic versions too, stored off in the Cloud, but I want a version that can still be accessed even after the Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse. Because you never know what they’re going to take away next.
Gotta go, my trusty Gmail Notifier is alerting me to a new message. Love that little thing. Simple, reliable; you know it’s just gonna be around forever.
–Bob out
Of course I remember those things, we STILL have a VHS player and we find movies from time to time. And I think my dad still has his set of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Also there was that movie, The Ring, which had a cool scene where she analyzes the haunted tape with a special gigantic machine.
Now that you bring it up, I believe I have a fancy collector’s edition of the Original Trilogy on laserdisk in a closet somewhere. Talk about archaic formats…!
Archaic: yes. Better than any release of the ‘remastered version’: also yes.
I remember having a few laserdisc movies I loved as a kid – we had a LD player specifically for karaoke but it played movie discs too.
In Indeo5 format. That turned out to be a mistake, because a few years later Macs stopped supporting that codec when they switched over to Intel chips.
For those of you not of that vintage, this would be ironic since Indeo is the “Intel Video Codec”…
That I was not aware of! But ironic indeed.
okaaay. now, will the armored car be a cheapo service, or will it have an on-board system?
nah, THAT would have been something the fully professional thieves would have prepared for.
Oh sweet! Sassy woman detective is on the case! I love characters like this!
I remember, what was her name? Agent Hanson? Yeah, she was one of my favorite characters in Heroes Season 1, and I wish they had given her a more prominent role. I have a thing for competent, good police officers in media. Too often cops are given the role of the villain or the hapless idiot. Hell, one of the only movies I can think of where the cops are the good guys is Robocop.
ok now that you’ve done the near-impossible (remembered a movie showing cops in a good light), do the impossible…
remember a movie in which a priest or another clergy man is shown as both good and competent.
How about movie and series? Serenity and Firefly and the character of Book. Wish we had gotten to know more about him.
granted. I saw the movie and it was the first I ever heard of the series.
watched the series and loved it. you are right about Book.
I’ll give you three. Friar Tuck in any iteration of Robin Hood, the clergymen in any Zorro show, and Cort from The Quick and the Dead.
But if you want to extend it some, the Monk With No Name from Bulletproof Monk was also righteous, as are many of the monks in shows like Kung-fu and Kung-fu, the Legend Continues.
The first that springs to mind is “The Exorcist.”
I love the alt text (on all the pages).
Hello from the future! I’ve stumbled on this comic for the second time in a decade or so and I’m finally going to get through the whole thing.
I’m digging this detective – she can “protect and serve” me anytime.