Round up 2o2o the everything else.

 I spoke too soon when I said there was no bad music in 2020. I forgot non binary retard, Sam Smith did his own version of I Feel Love by Donna Summer. A totally unnecessary edit and a complete train wreck.

Oh and if you're just joining us here, this is the bit were I shoe horn in all the bits I've forgotten over the last few days, and add sundry other bits and pieces like books and Youtube

First up is forgotten stuff and also ran bits.

Travels to To Oishii Tokyo. 

A sort of food unwrapped with a scandinavian bird in place of Kate Quilton. Its on NHK world and the one we saw concerned Konjac root. How it is and what its used for (mostly Oden stew and choking people, it's banned here.)

I'll add 4 seasons in Japan as well, just for focusing on so much obscure wild life. A big brown sea slug in a bay and several crabs in a lagoon were just one of the highlights of lockddown for me. but there are loads of episodes just like this.

Youtube.

Been deep in the comicsgate hole for most of 2020, so if you want action and adventure and no one talks about orange man bad or pronouns in  your comics, look into some of those guys. 

In fact I have a few good series for you to check. 

Theramintrees for one of the best demolishings of Christianity ever.

Looking into the work boy and getting it to run via the original software hosed out from the gigaleaks.

And speaking of gigaleaks. The out of the blue leaking of a whole load of Nintendo roms and info, has to be the best thing this entire year. Includes smug link from Links Awakening. Proto art, beta roms for a load of gameboy and Snes games along with some tools and a bit from Yoshi's Island where he bombs a village in helicopter mode.

Finally got round to looking at the His Dark Materials trilogy and its doesn't disappoint. The show is good, but has taken a few woke pokes including Mrs Coulter of all things that aren't in the book but I'm not going to argue against casting here. Its spot on, all leads are good, and we get Moriarty as Stanislaus Grumann.. Which is cool.

Review of 2020 continues.

 Yesterday I put up our annual review of the year. 2020 which of course sucked. So you'll be wanting a lot of television to take away your pain and... well that was knacked as well.

SARS2 did in a lot of live stuff and on a positive note killed off Eastenders for a while before coming back, much as it was. 

If you want our Miranda awards they're at the bottom of the page under the good TV.

Good TV

Perry Mason. Sky Atlantic

I sincerely hope that this is getting a regular season or at least an update to this. As, fucking hell, it's good. It details his transition from a two bit private eye, to unorthodox public defender via depression era America. So think old cars, segregation, police corruption and revival churches. This centers on a child abduction and murder, kinda like the Charles Lindbergh case. One to catch on DVD. HBO, SKY Atlantic.

Hubble. BBC2

A humble documentary about the troubled star scope. Its just an excuse to see a billion good things that had been discovered by the venerable telescope. Includes galaxies and star clusters. Proving that the BBC can put out a good show if it has to.

White House Farm ITV.

A similar form to Perry Mason. This focuses on the Jeremy Bamber murder case back in the 1980's in which he killed members of his extended family and his subsequent police case and capture. It has that authentic 80's jank that only those that were there will understand. Hangovers of 70's fashion and design with kitsch and earlier heirlooms. Well worth watching.

Tutankhamun in Colour

Final BBC entry here. This is a monumental colorizing job on old photos and film from the Howard Carter / Lord Caernavon expedition to Egypt, where they rediscovered king Tuts tomb. It brings it all to life with some excellent photo editing work. Also Carter was a bit of a hero, giving full props to his native workers and that, when most back then wouldn't.

The Miranda Awards for televisual ineptitude. Worst of 2020.

Twilight Zone. Reboot.

The worst of the worst. A woke reworking of the classic Ron Serling show. Do you want all cops kill minorities no matter what you do story. Of course you don't. Want a meteor storm that turns all men into rapey monsters. Apart from a few low T soy boys and a queer kid. Its depressing and woke, worse of all its fuck all fun. 

Eastenders.

For once they managed to kill it off thanks to SARS2. They ran out of episodes and had to air the glory years such as Dirty Den and Angie and Arfur Fowler stealing the xmas club money. Apart from that, though it sucked. A Marchioness disaster rip off in which Denny dies (yay) and that whole episode from the perspective of mental Ben. Which, apart from sounding like Merzbow in places due to him being deaf, is ruined by it being depressing as usual. 

The final bit is the whole Ian Beale getting assassinated and no one, ever calling it Kill |Beale. Which is a missed opportunity.

Review of the year 2020

 So, we can take it as read that this year has sucked balls. Big time. A train wreck of massive proportions all thanks to SARS 2 electric boogaloo. So you'll be wanting a round up of the year, where I didn't get to go to many record shops and just downloaded stuff from Youtube and Bandcamp at random.

The good.

Clone 20 years of Creme or

A free download. You know what you're getting here. Smudged up electro, New oldskool house and acid tracks and a few wavy gems. Myriadd, Perseus Traxx and Lake Haze are the stand out tracks here but there is no duff one here. One to put away for special occasions.

A Jazz reworking of Walking in the Air.

Do you want it to sound like cinematic orchestra or something from Ninja Tunes back catalogue some 20 years ago. Well this is my treat to you from the Kristoffer lo and some university jazz ensemble. Magic stuff.

WAP Traxman mixxx.

Despite Cardi B being utter trash, this has been this years monster hit and best appreciated in its original form as fucked up ghetto shit. I can think of no better person to juke this up than Traxman himself.  

Delroy Edwards. Slap Happy.

A cool mix of old school house with a freestyle edge to it. If I have to single out anything that I really love its going to be Rock This Place. Also look out for Wagon Wheels EP if you want more of the same. Both on L.I.E.S. Records.

Benedek Mr Goods.

Fuck it might as well add this on L.I.E.S. as well. In a similar vein but with a more go-go edge to some of these tracks. Driving music is the boss. Also with a boiler room live set so you can appreciate it more. 

Uf0.Viewpoint of Cala Llonga.

Finally this for shoe in of acid track of the year. Only heard this a few days ago and really loved it.

Worst tracks of the year.

Crucially not much. SARS2 kept us out of the office for ages so I wasn't subjected to Kiss FM (a blessing.)  So the only thing I heard was an Irish guy doing grime which was fecking horrible. And Becky Hill murdering Forever Young for Macky D's. Rather subject myself to Ronald Mc Donald's 600 mile long salty French Fry than listen to slow Interactive covers.

anyway back tomorrow for Boxing Day TV Hell.

Zoomer.

So its about that time where I set up the best and worst music, TV and stuff of the year. The Miranda Awards for telelvisual awfulness as I call them. I decided to compile a notepad file of what sucked and rocked this year. Though it's more good than absolutely awful seeing the year we had. 

Currently we are in Tier 4, which is complete social isolation and you are not out allowed. Ever.

Cactus club is not relegated to Zoom meetings, which is fine if you like putting your face on screen, but I hate this. I have my web cam taped over for a reason, I just don't like showing my face. If they could do some sort of animal avatar with text to speech voice (Microsoft Sam) option, that would be fine. I could even mic spam the old aha ha ha and soi soi soi memes for their benefit (but won't).

Best of all would be using Zoom without a webcam,  just listening in and no participation. Maybe speaking a bit, but that's not fun for me.

Edit. Just this but mandatory.

 

Phone stuff.

Found a phone at work during the week. Someone was clearing out a load of old stuff and I got this along with a DSi which works perfectly and contained literally a million pictures of kids goofing around before I formatted it for hacking.

The phone however was locked. and, looking at its specs, is considerably worse than anything I've actually used, including the touch screen only work issue Blackbastard I had circa 2013. Which fact fans, was my first ever Mobile. 

I never got anything android to sync up right either. Old Apple, while being an utter cunt to do at least lets you look at digital photos, and digital only, Android, doesn't. Thought I'd have a look at the internal storage, seeing as SD and chip was removed. Then thought about removing the password lock, to let me at least let me nose about the file system.

Which brings me to my main rant. All phone unlocking software is borderline unusable for a freeloading perspective. 

Most software will do nothing unless you pay for it, it will not unlock or remove anything and expect you to pony up money in advance to do stuff. Like I say, its borderline unusable.

What we need is some sort of FOSS android explorer, akin to testdisk is for Hardrives. Something that will when you sync up your phone immediately bring up a menu that lets you explore the file system, browse files and copy things across to PC/Mac Linux Amiga, like iTunes but not shit and more hackery.

If I could program, I'd totally do this (that or a PVR HD dumper, face it, this is going to be the future front for preservation.) probably add in a unlocker too, to make it a swiss army toolkit.

Finally had a look at a crack for this before remembering that all cracks are malware shit, without exception. Downloaded one and Antivir caught it immediately.

Melted Coins research.

 No, this doesn't mean a new book is ready for release, I've still work to do typesetting and editing. I just want to draw your attention to something interesting I've found.

One of the things you'll learn about when reading the Hardy Boys books is that 38 of the original stories were rewritten in the 1960's to remove outdated references (no more automats and roadsters) and the nixing of stereotypes (mostly people talking in accents). 

A few things got rewritten entirely and a few got, what I would call the directors cut, which is, a brief trim to cut out most flavour text and expressions. Previous example would be in the Hooded Hawk mystery is the culling of the Krait encounter in the woods near Chet's farm.

 The UK editions also got a few bits and pieces removed, mainly Americanisms, spellings and more importantly book order, which is radically different here than back in the states. There's a page here outlining what editions we received and when. 

In all there are five books which keep their original text here at the expense of their revised cousins. They are:

The mystery of the melted coins

The flickering torch mystery

The secret of pirate's hill

The clue in the embers

The mystery at Devils Paw.

What I found out and have seen nowhere is that these texts were also edited and condensed. So you lose bits and pieces to keep it to 160 pages overall. Having pdfs of the originals and all the UK editions to hand, help out immensely. I wouldn't have known that they had done this if I hadn't been typesetting the books and looking through the original text. You lose some Americanisms here such as all US coins, and a few bits and pieces of continuity are altered. In all its not bad.

And for good measure seeing as the remake has bugger all about Chet being conned by a shady summer camp and a lot more about Seneca Indians. I don't see why it wasn't released here.  Unless of course the story of the worlds dumbest counterfeiters are of interest to you. 

Of Hawks and Hoods.

 Time for another book upload. This time its the Hooded Hawk mystery, a strangely current mystery involving falconry, kidnapping and Indians coming over in a boat.

Despite the title of the story, at no time is there a hawk, what they do get sent to them is a Peregrine Falcon, one of the fastest birds in the world. But still not a hawk. there is a Goshawk owned by Prince Tava (or just Tava in the remake) and yes its a proper, member of the hawk family. BUT and I paraphrase a Peregrine is a Falcon and not a member of the hawk family.

Rant over, I'll now give you a recap on the main story and a few differences between the two.

The Hardy's receive a Falcon in the mail, Fenton is working on a case involving Illegal Immigrants being smuggled into the states via small boats and the kidnapping of prominent Indian Nationals son, Tava Nayyab.

In the meantime, the boys learn how to handle her, freak out Aunt Gertrude and on a trip out to Chet Morton's farm, they intercept a pigeon carrying rubies in a capsule around its leg.

After a bit of sleuthing for their dad in the Sleuth, their boathouse gets bombed. Later Chet Morton invites them to his farm for a fish fry, they find a mysterious cabin in the woods, and a young Indian with a Goshawk. When they investigate the Hardys and Chet get whacked.

Much later they find a poisonous snake (a Krait) and more clues that it was leased by Indians, which leads them to a boat called the Daisy K. After more shenanigans, an assailant lobs a bomb that blows up the Hardy home and steals their falcon (after a few unsuccessful attempts). Getting Sam Radley to look out for them and provide back up leads the boys to an island in Barmet Bay to break up the illegal ring and a showdown on the mountain to recover Tava from his kidnappers.

This is not a bad book really. The story feels current, especially with the current asylum seeker crisis in the English channel, involving small boats, and this is one of the few books with foreigners as the bad guys. Demoting Prince Tava to the son of a wealthy industrialist is actually pretty genius. there are rich Indians, and India is now something of an emerging economy. It makes sense.

The original isn't bad, and you are largely spared people talking in accents, here, just the Hardy's Italian gardener which is altered to non accented speech in the remake. It's the usual later book, directors cut edition. Complete with Krait encounter in the woods and an expanded encounter on the mountain where the boys grab (illegally) a falcon fledgling with the help of another falconer.

Finally the cryptic thanks to Professor John Craighead, lead to a page on Wikipedia about prominent ecologists Frank and John Craighead, who did indeed write on Falconry and about living in India with an Indian prince in 1940, as well as conducting long running studies on ecology (largely on Grizzly bears). Maybe have to see if its worth reading and see how it influenced the book.

Anyway both are up now so Original. remake for your reading pleasure.

 

World of Crap gets cancelled.

So, its come to pass. That a popular non political, twitter page and blog about Rainbow, I follow, has come out in favour of Trump in the most mildest way possible. A milquetoast argument about having a fair election has predictably descended into the usual "she must be a Nazi, shut her down."

There is an opinion piece up on Russia's Toady setting out that it is the media that defines wokeness, and cancel culture is a symptom of this, plus a demonization of the working class.

There is general don't let the proles speak about this from the trendy London media set (though as a Londoner far away from the general Hampstead and Islington ponces that they're actually describing, my opinion counts for less). 

Also there is a few bits and pieces about how the Labour party (which I've voted for in the past) has lost the working class from its demographic focusing on race, gender and other middle class issues.

My own views are a match to this, to some extent. I swing more rightwards and am a liberal voter normally, albeit one that wants Brexit and some dialogue about immigration that doesn't get bogged down in feelings or accusations about being a Nazi, because bad people get deported.

I don't know who is behind the explosion of far left views, possibly academia, possibly not. I've been part of this for 5 years now, since gamergate. I know, I know, flogging that old, dead horse, but its a slow slide into politicizing everything, and you cannot dissent, or put a foot wrong (and as a monumental fuck up, this scares me more, I'm human I make mistakes.) or the left will eat you.

It's not just the left mind. There is a certain snowflakery about the right too. All Jesus freaks and god weirdos. Plus Trumps outburst and general unsportsmanlike refusal to concede in an election he lost fair and square, finally put him off me, more than any of his racist, sexist shit he did. Which means that all you see from them now is, count the ballots, and the election was stolen from us.

Which it wasn't though.  

Cactus club.

 So its with great sadness that I report that we lost our club treasurer this past week. Its been a horrible year for me getting out and about, but club has been reduced to monthly zoom meetings, which as I hate webcam shit with a passion I've not been taking part.  Seriously my cam has been taped up since I bought my current laptop and have no intention of ever removing said tape.

We stay in touch through monthly emails and this came out of the blue yesterday, I kinda know the guy through facebook, from a Lithops forum of all things. If you're part of the MSG (Mesemb Study Group,) he was in charge of the seed list, so you may know him from there.

He grew a lot of mesembs and used to share photos online on the group I'm part of (yes I'm a fan too.) But trailed off a while ago. I knew he had a site up somewhere he'd link off to. Site is here if you would like to see what he grew or are just a mesemb fan then please have a look.

Bill Wymans Mobile Recording Studio.

 So America has a new president, and Trump is predictably being a cunt, not budging from office. So what the world right now needs is... The Rolling Stones Mobile Recording Studio or rather an old BBC programme about it.

Bill Wyman set up a project called AIMS and set off around the country to find local talent and give guidance and more importantly, a recording gig in the mobile studio. The culmination of this is whittling the acts down to a manageable amount and a charity concert at the Albert Hall in South Ken. in aid of the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The tape I have is the legendary "Gostbastes" tape which does indeed contain Ghostbusters but also has quite a bit of music on it. There is the back half of the Montreux rock festival 88 with Gary Davies as host. And this, AIMS project.

It takes in the East Anglia leg of the tour with a lot of local acts from Norfolk and Suffolk. We get a genuine look at the studio which has the mother of all mixing desks along with 1" tape and two engineers straight out of Rockstar Ate My Hamster.

In fact its a lot like that with a few local rock bands and a rather good Christian band called Supafrutas which is surely an oxymoron. No Christian rock is good especially one with a choir of kiddies.

There's a dutch guy going by the name Mola Mola who was one of the winners as such. Had a video made of his track, with some blue screen trickery and a spot at the titular gig at the Albert Hall. 

Along with all the guitar wankery there is a lingering shot of them programming a Yamaha DX7, the old techno workhorse, and some Simmonds drums, which you might remember from Italo Disco, which begs to mind, what tracks did the Stones use a DX7 on.

At 30 mins its too big for my Youtube channel but will upload to Archive.org so at least it'll be archived, though the tape isn't that hot in places as its quite jumpy and jittery.

Finally we are halfway through Hooded Hawk's book encoding. The original is all formatted and we are currently editing it down against my original UK edition so it scans nicely.

Anyway Bill Wyman AIMS tour uploaded, here.

Updates of a sort

 Finally have a few bits on from last weeks, excitement when I found a tape of some obscure Mario game show. 

The tape has predictably calmed down and turned into a Olacak A Kadar a Turkish comedy show. The Travel Channel tape largely contained something from Cirque Du Soleil, and "Gostbastes" did indeed contain Ghostbusters, but mainly it's quite a bit of the Montreux Rock Festival from 1988.

Nothing really to write home about, though its hosted by Ooh Gary Davies, with a bit with Steve Winwood in an interview. Your acts are;

The Sisters of Mercy, Lucretia

Double, Gliding 

Then Jericho, 

Londonbeat,

Sabrina and yes it is Boys Boys Boys.

Mica Paris (Sadly interrupted)

Blue Mercedes

And that is as far as I've got, though looking online there's live bits of Run DMC too, so this is cool.

Anyway, along with the usual guitar bands there is a DX7 there and an Oberheim is used at one point. Whether its live, I have my doubts. There is a bit of Yazz and Coldcut from the top of the pops earlier. There is a black dude on stage to perform the jazz scat samples that Matt and co have sourced for their track.

Memory has it there is either an Orbital or 808 State clip of them performing in front of a big modular synth set up, which is totally fake of course.

I wouldn't mind seeing the top of the pops, where they played the Plasitkman mix of Shamen's Ebeneezer Goode, when it was at no.1 for the fourth week, also but I reckon that is memory holed into oblivion.

 

Süper Mario

 Do you like Mario? Of course you do, but would you like it even better if he was: 

A, Turkish,

 and B, an obscure TV programme you could play along on your touch tone phone in order to... well I don't know Turkish at all, so there may not be any point to this all.

Bonus background on this, for a while, we've been bringing back a bunch of tapes thrown in the recycling bin at work, tossed during lockdown. They are from, I'm guessing, a Turkish house clearance, as they are all from Star TV from back in the 90's, with a few home broadcasts thrown in (some Top of The Pops and Sabrina Live at Montreaux festival is on the one pictured below along with..).

Gost Bastes 

I've dug out my old Video grabber and along with OBS, am currently going through these tapes and grabbing anything interesting and obscure on the way. Hence our current find of Super Mario.

SO WHAT IS IT.

Remember those times on Going Live where you would play a game using a touch tone phone. Those with the highest score would win, it was normally something like, Top Banana or such, but there were other games as well.  Well Süper Mario is exactly like that but drawn out into a whole show.

You essentially play Mario World, until all your lives are lost, the first Yoshi's Island bit via an old Touch Tone Phone, indeed most of this are just long beeps as you try to jump and fail. The host, Gül Ozan, gives words of encouragement and when its game over, a cheeky wave. but apart from that, well your guess is as good as mine. Those with the highest score after all this get.. well I don't know.

There doesn't seem to be much more to add, except that it's up at Archive.org as its too big for my paeon Youtube account, without splitting it down.

Süper Mario

With that all I have to do is give you a wave good bye.

Welcome to despair.

 Short one this, but have been going down memory lane again.

Met an old friend from school I haven't seen for about 25 odd years. Just walking down the street, a chance encounter that, had I gone my usual route, would not have seen at all. We got talking, and said he still sees some of the old crowd from BTEC days and that he's married now.

Further on I decided to look up another person I worked with back in the day and actually fancied at one time. She has a website up and does mixed media art, and I have to say its pretty good. Though as a massive nitpicker the cactus is actually Gonialoe Variegata (previously Aloe Variegata) but I'll let it stand.

You can visit it here.

In other news the Byuu post has been updated, and I've been slowly scanning bits and pieces, mainly old bits from the Brian Lamb exotic collection. I have a few old journals to scan, and for all you Hardy fans, have started on the Hooded Hawk mystery original, which is another extended directors cut, nothing major different yet.. 

Travel Channel tape

 Currently going through this tape, which contains part of a Panorama (I think) Documentary on X ray damage, and the Hugh Grant / Robin Williams film, 9 months, on Sky with bonus Kleenex sponsorship. We've come to a part where the film has ended and were in entirely unknown territory. 

Like the Power Rangers tape which contained some Mr Masturbator (Motivator) keep fit bits and some CITV stuff, we're now into some Travel Channel stuff from I'm guessing 1996 or so. There's some ads from one of those CD box sets (70's music rather then the more usual Classical Collections), trails for Birds of A Feather on SelecTV, and a healthy dose of Technical Difficulties complete with a channel logo and easy listening muzak.

Travel Channel is no more now, just like Bravo and the aforementioned SelecTV. It lasted to the middle of the year where an update from SKY put it out to pasture. It was a go to in the past year as they used to show Andrew Zimmern  shows at 9pm. If for some reason you wanted to see Bizarre foods America or the World versions of said shows, this was your go to. 

Not bad shows either, mostly keeping watch to see what he would actually eat, mostly offal with the occasional ethnic niche treat. Can remember him eating Shaved Ice in Hawaii, and visiting the ever present Nouvelle Cuisine ponce, straight out of somewhere like Seattle or Brooklyn for the win.

But most of the time its somewhere deep in the country, eating roadkill or freshly hunted stuff with the local backwoodsmen or at a local fair. 

Am I sad to see Travel go, kinda. It was OK and apart from that never really had anything to interest me. Maybe an update when I've finished the whole tape.

A full on tat upgrade.

 Both Hidden Harbors are done now for you now, you can judge for yourself just how racist this book is, and then burn it seeing as its 2020. Get it from here and here

A note on the remake. We never really got a version of Hidden Harbor in the UK, I guess its due to violence and themes. I previously attributed it in House on the Cliff to a prescription drug smuggling theme that wouldn't translate whilst overlooking the sheer amount of guns involved and shoot out at the end. 

Hidden Harbor has similar themes, whilst the "racism" of the original would preclude it from being a substitute as The original Melted Coins was used, thanks to the new versions summer camp plot. 

The Hardys being demolition experts in the remake and blowing up a submerged tree with dynamite, would bar it from sale here, especially as the whole IRA were in full terrorist mode in the UK at the time. 

So like House on the Cliff, I've decided to anglicize it as if Armada were bringing it here back in the day. It's not the full American text, I guess its about 99% the same with a few bits and pieces changed here and there for period descriptions. It's not much an Amphibian plane is changed to  sea plane, and extra l's and u's are added to words.

New Scan stuff.

Thanks to redecorating, I now have a whole bunch of stuff to scan. A few booklets and loose stuff are done and I've found some Frosties cards from a Gameboy promotion. The art is something, and it's not the whole set but I'm slowly scanning these in. 

Favourites are 

Hair metal Simon Belmont looking like Wolf from Gladiators.

Retarded Paperboy.

And a whole clusterfuck of bad Gauntlet 2 art.

Update

 Been doing some DIY to my bedroom so forgive the short post here.  Its a long overdue updating, as it was last done about 15 years ago. Its gone from a green room to a nice grey minimalist overtone look.

In related news I have all my books piled up in the computer room like some mad hoarder. I've tried to separate them into stuff to go and stuff that remains and will need to get to the last lot in the cupboard now I can get there. Hopefully a few will be able to go in and the charity shops will start taking them now.

Le Anime et stuff.

 Got two things this week, first up is an update of stuff and the second is a video, both are French, or rather in the first case, French Canadian.

Videotron Update.

Not sure if I ever wrote about this before, but for a time our cable box was supplied by Videotron rather than Cable and Wireless. This meant we had some primitive games to play on our TV as a service along with cable television to our notoriously bad reception area.

There's an update of sorts on HG101, where one of the games (an ambitious adventure title is being reworked as a Coleco / NES game.  We still have our old remote in the cupboard at home along with a found manual, I picked up from the rubbish years ago. 

And if any of the games should get a rework, then its the break out game where you got an extra life for hitting a goldfish or the Qix clone, both were pretty good. 

The booklet I will have to dig out and scan if I haven't done already done so. Maybe add to Archive.org as well, but see below.

Jeane et Serge.

We picked up a tape called Jeane et Serge (Attacker You) along with a south bank show on electronic music that may have been overwritten by Power Rangers, along with something that just says X ray Documentary 1996.

Jeane et Serge is part of the Dans La Meme collection which has dubbed versions of Kickers, Ai Shite Knight, Story of the Alps: My Annette, Hiatari Ryoko!  Swiss Family Robinson: Flone Of The Mysterious Island and Pollyanna.

 I've romanized some of the titles here to their Japanese originals, and will kind of add a scan when I'm not busy. I have decorating to do, as my bedroom is being overhauled for the first time in years. We have a lot of stuff to shift.

From what I can tell, its a volleyball anime with some romantic overtones. The UK missed out on some stuff can only really remember Robotech or Voltron, being the parallel series back in the day, and that was strictly cable only. 

 Edit 

South bank tape is entirely overwritten by Power Rangers. On the upside have recorded some Mr Motivator bits and pieces and some ads along with some CITV from a Saturday. Still no sign of the Videotron manual though.

Hidden Harbour Mystery A review of sorts.

 Just got through proofreading and editing the original version of the Hidden Harbour Mystery, aka the frightfully racist one, and I have to say its a thing.

For those of you who don't know the Hardy Boys stories were rewritten in the late 60's early 70's to remove stereotypes, outdated language and stuff like that and round the boys ages out at 17 - 18. instead of having them grow up over the novels. The later ones got a rewrite for brevity's sake but the earlier ones often were completely rewritten. Hidden Harbour is one of those.

Elements remain that are common to both. In this case a libel case, a feud between the Blackstone and Rand families and the setting of Larchmont Georgia. But for all intents and purposes there are two books.

The remake has the boys camp out near a small pond near the two families estates, which could be the famous hidden harbour that set it all off. They get shipwrecked on a small island where they find some old letters hidden by a lighthouse which just so happen to be pertinent to their case. 

The original has them shipwrecked while on a cruise and accused of whacking Mr Blackstone and stealing his money. 

The libel case pertains to who wrote a series of plays about the civil war ancestors of both families. These go down with the ship. The boys rescue Mr Blackstone,who they befriend whilst aboard and also notice a shaky Ruel Rand near their stateroom, Mr Blackstone gets KO.d and the boys rescue him and wash up on shore with Frank getting separated from Joe and Chet.  When they finally get together, the cops arrest them for the above assault.

So far so good, so where does the racism come into it.

Spoiler alert, the main bad guy in this is called Luke, a black geezer who dresses like, what we would call a pimp, I guess it would be a sort of Jazz get up back then, loud suit and a diamond ring. He talks with a heavy ebonics style of speech (they gave accents to nearly everybody in the old books.) and he runs a gang or secret club of fellow African Americans. He is the son of the main servant of the Blackstone's, who despairs of him and basically thinks of him as a wastrel and a fool.

He runs a gang of fellow blacks, and recruits them into a goofy secret society, which sounds remarkably modern, apart from the secret society nonsense, down at hidden harbour.

It is him and fellow youths, who has been perpetuating the feud between the two families, trying to kill Ruel Rand's mentally ill brother, Ewalt, off with a rock at one point. Its pretty near the point, especially due to BLM and that, and its the first time I've seen a black dude as the criminal in the Hardy universe. 

The whole thing ends up with the boys being lynched by a lynch mob and Frank pulling out his knife and cutting the rope and managing to calm the crowd along with the Blackstones and the Rands saying who was whipping up the feud.

Summary of this is, its pretty good. I don't know if this is a Leslie Macfarlane book, it has his style, but the black characters are more sympathetically written in his books. See Hidden Gold where a black farmer rides to their rescue on an old Model T Ford. Although its dated in places, its also bang up to date, in places. Mob justice and the madness of crowds. Copywright and disputed authorship, and being framed for a crime not committed.  

If you see it give it a go,you won't regret it.

 EDIT Forgot the most hilarious part of it all. Chet spying on Blackstone's Grand daughter and the Hapless private eye she sent after them making out. Due to language creep, Chet says he's watching them making love (Romancing on the detectives part and pretty one sided at that, she want's nothing to do with him.) making him sound like a massive sex pervert in modern parlance. 

Hackney Junk Tour

Strange, that now the Charity Shops are open, I can travel around now, and go on a junk tour, for what seems like, the first time in ages. I have a mask for the local transport (essential) and a decided to venture out.

Decided on Hackney for a few reasons, A. its a nice walk from Bethnal Green, and B, it has a few shops to look in, that have, by and large, been good to me over the years.

First of all the bad news, when I got there the Salvation's Barmy is closed, which is normally a good choice, but apart from that hiccup the rest of the shops were open. Had a good look around the Oxfam and Cancer research places and got a few records and CD's including a Persian drum CD which is ace.

Hackney itself is horrible as always, with the usual scum of the universe petitioning for some left wing cause and that. There was a black dude out in the street going on about how black lives don't matter and getting into a slanging match with a white guy and his bird. Made my day that.

Went into the delicatessen instead of the corner shop and ended up with what can only be described as Ponce cola. For £2 you get a 500ml bottle of a Fairtrade Fentimans rip off type. As premium cola goes, its not bad, would rather a Jones Soda for that price or just a regular Fentimans.

Passed by the plant warehouse and had a look in.. Some of the stuff there seems to be suffering, I notice the big Espostoa is looking a little worse for wear. They have a 10 cm / 4" pot of Lithops for £12.50 which is a bargain. I got the same deal from Kew for £5 many years ago and can vouch for this. 

Experience is knowing the difference between one plant with many heads and many plants with one head. Get a bunch of 2" / 5 cm pots and some well drained, peat free compost and repot and resell to your hearts content. The other place is to pot up each head, keep 'em on a bright window sill and see if they flower, and try and pollinate for some seed.

All in all a good day.

Tiny Bobble

 There seems to be a new version of Bubble Bobble for Amiga computers out now.

Done by the demo group Abyss, it's a new version not based on a port from the ST. Mostly arcade perfect, it has more colours and added animation than the previous version, but sadly no extra rooms, so if you make it to level 20 without dying you'll not be rewarded. 

To be honest the original Amiga version of this is not bad, got it as a pirate ages ago, for my aunty and it seemed OK. Maybe I was spoiled by having the NES version back in the day (though that doesn't have any secret rooms either.) as that's the version I played the most. 

Its not as if there are any bad ports of Bubble Bobble either. most of the popular systems got a port of the original. With varying degrees of success. Only the Gameboy version is lousy, and that is due to the small screen.  

Rather than give you a review, (my Amiga has been dormant for the past 5 or so years, and haven't played around with Win UAE for about the same time either.), I'll post up a few links to where you can get stuff to play this below.

Anyway you can grab the ADF file from here along with links to Tiny Invaders and Tiny Galaga.

Also fans of fake micro console the Pico8 can play a version too, and that is found here.

Edit. Finally got WinUAE to play this, and from what brief poking its got, its not half bad. Hats off Abyss team.

Marks on Doors and the like.

 Number 27 of The Hardy boys adventure is the Mark on the Door. For all you fans of Mexico who couldn't get enough of The Aztec Warrior we have the boys go to Baja California and Sinaloa State in search of one Elmer Tremmer, who is mixed up in a stock fraud case.

The remake is more up to date with submarines and a bit of oil smuggling added to the mix, whereas the original text has none of that, just a lot of Mexican wilderness.

Like in Aztec, there is the old canard of eating cacti to stop dehydration, (it will not work for reasons explained below.) And one of their Indian captors gets put to sleep by eating a special cactus hidden in their lunch, (really no, a lot of puking and shitting is involved, especially as it's implied to be Peyote,) in order to escape. 

Talking of Indians, they are explicitly described as Tarahumaras in the original and of unknown tribal origin in the remake. They do most of the work for Vincenzo Cardillo, the real bad guy of the piece, and guard the Hardys when captured. There is some dignity to them even in the original, even if they speak with an accent. This is changed to more Spanish in italics in the remake with a little bit of broken English thrown in. 

There is also Yaqui an old Indian tracker, supplanted by a younger guy called Tico in the remake, In both stories they act as a guide although Yaqui seems to be much more taciturn than Tico is, who is much more matey with the Hardys in general.

Chet also puts in an appearance, upgraded to a full member of the team in the remake, where in the original he stays behind in Bayport.

You can grab either the original from here or the remake here. Judge for yourself which is the better story, 

Snooker.

 Been watching  the snooker on TV. It's the World Championships which are normally held mid April and coincide with the first may bank holiday.  

So far its been good semi finals, Rocket man Ronnie O Sullivan beating Mark Selby 17-16 in the first and Kyren Wilson beating Andy McGill by the same margin in the other. 

I had to postpone watching Perry Mason (on catchup) as this was truly an epic come back by Ronnie. Playing weird shots to unnerve his opponent, requiring the last 3 frames to win, and then putting in a break of 138 as a response and winning the next two to go through to the finals.

I didn't see the McGill  - Wilson conclusion and by all accounts it was also an epic final, but seeing as this blog goes out every Sunday, its currently halfway through the final, so I don't know how this will turn out. But I will keep you posted who wins.

EDIT Ronnie walked it winning 18-8.

Whatever Happened to Byuu

 Whatever happened to me. That is for those not interested in old television, a link to the theme tune to the Likely Lads. 

Apart from being the correct way to spell Byuu, it has no bearing on this post, except to pose the question, what ever happened to Byuu?.

My second or so post on here was about the MSU1 unit for the SNES, at the time, ten years or so ago a way in the emulator BSNES to simulate the failed CDROM add on that Sony was developing in the mid 90's for the SNES.  

The author Byuu, was someone I've been following or so for years on forums, a mercurial chap best known for his work on the Emulators BSNES and its all dancing follow up Higan. The former a cycle accurate SNES emulator and the latter a expanded out into a multitude of systems taking in N64 during lockdown and when I last saw on the twatter, preliminary PS1 emulation (only Ridge Racer played if I recall correctly.)

Then, nothing, a few name changes from Byuu, to Near and Higan got rebranded as Ares, then bang, he deleted the whole thing. His site remain up although relevant emulation parts are archived,

 Seems like he moved to Japan and retired from the scene, I knew of the first as he regularly posted food and stuff on his twatter from Tokyo and places, but until looking into this never knew he'd retired from the scene. 

As someone who cannot program in any capacity I do kinda think he was cool even though I never got half the things he put up. but that whole scan and document every US / Euro SNES game to check for inconsistencies are what got me into doing the UK Hardy boys scanning project. Something barely documented and with a few inconsistent PDFs lying around the net. I could do better and this was the inspiration needed.

Whatever you do, big guy, I hope you have fun, and enjoy your retirement.

Edit: Seem s like he showed up on the twatter again, pushing a new re translation of Bahamut Lagoon for the SNES, ironically one of the first fan translations I ever downloaded back in dial up era. 

He's still retired from the scene, and it seems Higan has gotten a ZX Spectrum core to it now, which is cool. My words still stand though, nice retirement dude, keep safe.

Double Edit: Terrible news, seems that Near has passed on due to pressure from Kiwifarms of all places. Seems like there was a suicide attempt and no one can get in touch with him. I hope for his sake that he is OK and that he just wants time away from twitter, and it's not real. 

But if it's true then. Fuck....

The Witchmaster's Key

A.K.A. We need to talk about the Witchmaster's key. 

Book 55 of the Hardy Boys mysteries and one of the last from the original canon of mysteries. It's one of what I like to call the tour type of Hardy boys mystery, where they get to tour a country for some spurious reason, Aztec Warrior, the last title I put up fits into this profile quite neatly as does this.

The downside is this, if you have any familiarity with the country they tour you'll know its taking some liberties with the geography and places.  

The main plot is that some articles relating to witchcraft have been stolen from a museum from an old friend of Fentons and they boys jet over to England (with some stops in Eire and the Isle of Man for good luck) to track them down.  They visit Stonehenge (which in some fit of irony, was in the news) and get involved with the locals, who seem to be keen on practising the old religion.

There are subplots about an artisans village (no, me either) being targeted by mysterious arsonist and some genealogy with a distant relation of the Hardys being a witch or so it seems. Both would have made better main stories than the witch museum thefts.

Norfolk doesn't really have moorland being much more a place of either dry Heath or broadlands wetland habitat. Had family in Suffolk which is to the south and can tell you whenever we ventured to the north coast it was flat lands of gorse, and reeds. No heather here.

Ironically there is an actual witch museum in Boscastle, Cornwall, which also linked back to the Isle Of Man. A place known for witches, and extensive Fairy lore as well. 

There is a trip to Soho, up London which makes it seem much more seedier than it is. I guess they went round the porn bit as the gay quarter and record shops have always to my eyes seen quite respectable. There aren't many tea shops there or blacksmiths, think bougie coffee places and a few clothes places that could conceivably be from around that time. 

It is mainly a rats nest of streets and without a good map you can lose your bearings quite easily. One thing the did have quite right was Medmenhams book shop which is probably a cover for Foyles up on Shaftesbury Avenue near the edge of Soho.

Finally, this is one of the last books we got here before Armada shut down. It does not have reference to the next mystery in the series (the Sting of The Scorpion) as it wasn't released yet here due to contractual reasons.

  

Junk Tour Returns.

Junk tour returns with the boot sales starting up again, after the SARS II electric boogaloo break. 

It's the first boot sale of the year for me thanks to that little mix up and armed with my mask from work, it's time to venture out to see what I could find.

First of all the main boot sale I go to is out at the edge of Kent where it meets London. It's two buses there and back. Along the motorway and along the verges, noting the wild life. I've seen orchids in flower there one Sunday, a few years back. 

Even though I should get up earlier and not leave it to the last minute.

 As I say, leaving earlier, it's like the tide is coming in and everyone has to scurry to safety, This means I have about an hour before everyone packs up and leaves.

I did find a few things, a kids book about Basil Brush, and some British Knights Trainers thrown away, they seem decent, so will have to give them a clean up.

A couple of good doggos seen there too, including what looked like an acutal Greg Mitchell from Reeves and Mortimer (seriously he looked like a toy dog, very blonde and short haired) and the rare mega teckel a big brown version of a dachshund on stilt legs. 

I got to see a stand of Rosebay Willowherb almost going to seed along with some thistles, so expect to see fairies floating round pretty soon.

Ideal phone.

Been thinking about phones recently. Apart from going from none, at the start of the decade to owning three in 2020, they are all pretty much of a muchness. This is a run down of all the phones I've owned with a good approximation of my ideal phone.

Blackberry was like owning an unpopular home computer back in the 1980's something like a BBC Model B with all the support that gathered as well. I know they're ARM now but back in the 80's they were the fail. It's the only phone I've ever cracked the screen of, and predictably fucked it up good.

The only good things about it is that it would connect to a PC with ease and used Micro SD cards for storage so you could grab stuff off it or put stuff on with no problem.

My next phone was my current work phone. This was its replacement and is one of the 1st generation Moto G Motorola phones. It's still works and was used principally as a camera for ages before being demoted to a work phone. It's also the only phone I've ever bought with cash money, the rest were found.

Its kinda like a hermit crab, as its storage is  absolutely stuffed with bugger all room to add new stuff, Largely due to a bloated android system and ill written apps. I wonder if you could run an OS from the memory card. rather than internal storage.

My current phone which is also android but also closer to iPhone in its layout. That stupid SIM card tray and no external storage, but also with a much better camera and a higher operating system.

Finally I had an iPhone 4 which was my work phone for ages, Apple killed support for it years ago and all 32 bit apps have long since been shoahed from the app store. It was a nice palm sized beast even if it did run ios, which required iTunes to sync anything unless its photos. Nice built in apps too.

Ideal phone, then?

Taking the three systems I've owned and breaking them down to essentials, I would part them out as such.

Blackberry. Connectivity to PC.

Android. Wealth of apps and a decent camera.

iPhone. Design and built in apps.

If I was designing an OS, it would go something like this. 

Around 500 MB > 1GB in size. Compact and no bloat whatsoever. Optionally to run from an SD card.

Must connect to a computer without the need for any additional file manager software on the computer behalf. 

A well designed bunch of system apps. This includes a calendar/ diary, basic notebook, world time clock, weather app, internet browser, Camera , text, phone and file explorer. A basic calculator, Sound Recorder and some system benchmarking tools for checking battery life. I really don't want to any Siri or Alexa ok Google type bollocks so it won't be added. 

Mandatory ad blocking system wide and a draconian attitude to app permissions. Think script block but OS based.

A  removable battery and headphone socket would also be mandatory as well.  

Aztec Warriors and that

Having a better week of it this time around, than last time, sky have our mini box up an running and we have a few more tapes brought home and have tackled the ones in the fake library book cases (If you have old videos you'll know what I mean.)

So far there is an opera taped from Channel 4 by my granddad and a bit of Gerald Durrell on Sky News from way back when, before it goes into Ken Russells Salome and Oscar Wilde.

This is not why you're here though. I've transcribed another book and this time its The Mystery Of the Aztec Warrior, the first in the series of Hardy boys books if you're from the UK. Americans can be content with the fact that the Tower Treasure is already up for you to read.

Thoughts and that.

So far an easy ride, replacing lost tildes from the N in Senor in spell check and adding a few hyphens and italics that are lost when they're scanned by whoever does it. Even better it seems to be based on the UK version as it has the Arctic Warrior at the end rather than the Haunted Fort.

It's not a bad introduction, basically the boys go looking for a guy mentioned in the will of the Brookes family and go to Mexico on an extended break to do this. There's even mention of using thread from Agaves and the old canard of getting water from Cacti in the desert to quench your thirst (see also The Mark on The Door for more on this). Me I'm already tackling the cluster fuck that is The Witchmaster's Key, expect it to be scathing.

Aztec Warrior can be found here.

Finally if you want derring do and the risk of life and limb and some classic arcade games, then this is a good read.

Breaking down.

Feels like I'm going through a phase in my life where everything seems to fall apart. A few cases in point.

I suffered a choking fit in the cancer research shop yesterday, you know one of those where you can't breathe. After a while I got better but not before everyone thought I was some sort of plague carrier for SARS 2 electric boogaloo. They offered me a mask but I had my own with me. I know I'm fine but its that accusation that I'm not that carried over and it bugs me.

I tried in the week to get a photo of a cartoon guinea pig for my mum from an old diary chucked out, only for me to be cunted down by some Karen in the block asking why I was photographing her diary, she chucked out. I had no real reason that, only that I liked the design and that but of course I can't say that and fear took over and now I feel like I'm the monster.  Some how I just wish to be like normal people for once.

Last straw is the TV downstairs broke and we got lucky with grabbing a new one from Currys. Set up is a doddle but doing so broke Sky Q so now we have to get this working especially the small "satellite" box for downstairs TV, which is ironically closer to the router than the main Q box. Also we lost picture on the VCR and as we're back full time, grabbing has slowed significally. 

3DS Stuff

Was going to talk about a Kew article I saw about decolonising botany, but really cannot be arsed. Better people have done a much better job than I ever could. Nothing needs decolonising, just more support for local people in the countries where those plants grow, oh and of course some cash to fund those parts.

No I'm going to talk about how I managed to hack my 3DS and a few notes about the guide to do it here.

I'm 90% there at the moment, gotta download the alt CFW and apply a few bits and pieces so an old flashcard can run again, but it's a lot less painful than doing the Vita, no command line fuckery for certain, just a long line of things adhere to.

So those notes then:

An easy way to get the ID0 folder number for Seedminer. As this is the first folder you should see when you double click on the Nintendo 3DS folder, open a file in notepad and right click on the ID0 folder and go to properties. You can then copy the folder name there and paste it into notebook. Typing it out will not work using some one else's ID0 file will not work. 

Later stages your DSiWare folder is officially called the Nintendo DSiWare folder.

Here is a picture explaining where it is (unless you've bought no DSiWare games then it does not exist and will have to be created). You can follow the guide as normal from now on.

Hope that helps out a bit.

Phantom Freighters and the like

Have a new selection of books for you to read now. This is the Phantom Freighter another Hardy boys mystery. Number 39 if you will. It comes in both the original and UK edition remake.

To be honest, it's not a bad little mystery, the lads are investigating a few related mysteries. A shipping company that really does not want them to travel with them, and a courier service delivering boxes to residences where the original owner is not in but a gang member is. 

There are a few differences from the original to the remake. Chet has a hobby where he's making lures for fishing and there is a section where they test them out.  

In preparation for their often aborted trip on the freighter the boys get smallpox shots and have some crummy passport photos done., while obviously outdated the photo bit is obviously relatable nowadays, especially from the booths you see in malls and bigger supermarkets.

Finally the ending is changed from Joe Hardy squeezing through a duct to enter the radio room of a ship to them simply tricking the captain in the original.  I know which one I prefer.

Anyway original is here and the remake is here. Enjoy.

VHS MESS

Finally have a few new bits of VHS Mess for you. On a video with the cryptic label of BFG, Snow White and Cartoons we had no hope of finding anything strange.  

BFG is of course the well loved cartoon version of Roald Dahl's book. It''s got David Jason in it as the titular giant. It's not bad.  Snow White is the Cannon Video version with Diana Rigg as the evil queen and Nicola Stapleton as a young Snow White, I guess fresh from starring in Simon and The Witch.

No it's the third one, that nebulously named cartoons that got my attention.  I kinda guessed that the Snow White might have been the Disney one (it's not,) but I guess the cartoon bit was some old Warner Brothers Merrrie Melodies stuff or Tom and Jerry.

What it actually is, is Fables of The Green Forest.

A sort of 70's anime version of Animals of Farthing Wood where no one really dies but the dubbing is fucking awful. No seriously there are whole episodes on Youtube in the original Japanese and what sounds like Spanish and its charming if a bit old.  

The English dub is shouty and horrible with some awful music to boot as well. The episode I have is a small lemming critter trying to evade a pair of foxes one is, for some reason, an old granny in a shawl.

He tunnels, they pounce and shout out. He tunnels some more and hides out in a barbed wire covered log and the fox fucks up his paw. Granny covers herself in snow to become a makeshift snowdrift. Lemming dude sees through this obvious disguise, evades her and gets picked off by an owl. 

Then the tape ends.

It has it's charms when not saddled with a horrible dub (there's a reason we went for subs back then) and there's a whole playlist up on youtube for you to look at. One of those 70's oddities to play along with Rascal Raccoon and Anne Of Green Gables.

Hate and more hate

There is a certain demographic of people that you can hate these days, with  no comeback whatsoever. Call them names, and class them as less than human and no its not any oppressed minority you'd usually suspect.

I'm talking about the working class white male. Most certainly Brexit voting, overweight with tattoos and a big England flag outside their house. They're fair game for the sort of middle class liberal Twitter limpets who post bollocks 24/7 to their feeds. 

They are the sort of folk they look down on. You can call them knuckle dragging, gammons and there's no comeback. They're not a minority but they should be. 

I'm reading up about the anti statue protests up town. It's a mix of the far right, football thugs, patriots, white van man and dare I say it, concerned ordinary working class blokes who decided to protest in London against the far left hysteria.  Of course it all kicked off with the police and that, but the same happened with the BLM marches last week, and they were never branded as such.

To be honest, I hate both sides, The left being vandals and never being called out on their shit, the far right for being violent thugs as mentioned. They make it worse for the centrists such as myself and if you think its some Youtube alt right spiral, well I've held these views since the mid 90's. It's nothing new and in 30 years time will still be going on just with no push back on far left ideas as they take the piss out of the far right (and rightly so.)

Anyway you'll be wanting something to cheer yourself up, after that. I found an old clip on the end of a Bruce Lee tape of the One O'clock news, with a young Michael Buerk reporting on a microlight journey from the UK to Australia. 

A brief bit of searching on line I found what it referenced, here. Its a link to the MAAS museum in Sydney who have the actual microlight as an exhibit. The bloke doing it was an ex journalist and went around the world in a microlight back in 1998. So this is a bit of a dry run for him.

3 Stories.

Apologies for this in advance. When I post race stuff all the mentals come out of the woodwork. I'm still haunted by the boat missing cunt on one of my Steve Lawrence posts several years on. Anyway, on with the show.

Story 1.

Bum riots.

I fully understand the rationale behind the riots. I fully understand that you do not kneel on a guy for 8 minutes for essentially having a counterfeit note. I also fully understand the US Cops are full on Robocop mentalists.

I don't understand burning and looting your own communities, often of black run small businesses down because free stuffs yo. Worse every day I log into the twatter its an avalanche of bad take after bad take. 

White people need to bend the knee.

ACAB / Shut down the police.

Anti fa are anti fascist. Rather than the problem to the solution. Seriously only Metokur and Sargon on facebook are keeping me sane here. Largely because Metokur just wants the world to burn.

I've seen white lives matter trend and its largely KPop weirdos, a real case of cancer begetting cancer.

And I've seen the UK protests turn ugly from a largely legitimate peaceful protest. Going to watch to see if there's a spike in SARS 2 electric boogaloo cases in the coming weeks, in said communities.

Story 2.

Our Maddie.

This one is sort of linked to work, but its also to do with the ongoing Maddie McCann case.

It's news now because they've picked up a German nonce because he may have something to do with her disappearance.  (I'm waiting for some actual evidence before I'm rushing in. Habeas Corpus yo.)

Context: They had a little girl who wanted me to help her on with her coat at a place I work at. Her mum was getting her phone fixed out the front, apparently they can come to you to fix it now. I helped her on with it and she started to follow me around (she's about 3 I'd say).  Luckily her mum had finished getting her phone fixed and she could see her come up. So she went back.

Did a double take this morning, going over it in my head, if she went missing, I'd be the last person she saw, not a good look for an autard like me. The press would have a field day too. I'd never hurt anyone but they are not to know that.

Story 3.

Books and that.

The copyright cunts are bitching at archive.org for their inspired massive lending library scheme. Worse they're trying to get it taken down for good. This means no wayback machine, no prelinger archives and a whole lot more. You can read more here.

Personally as most of the books there are out of print or mostly difficult to get I see no problem with their lending library scheme. You don't see anyone protest about this though.

DJ Kat show and a doppleganger

Haven't had much to write about old cable stuff lately. Was reminded of Rod Hulls daughter Catrina Hylton Hull, from a twitter post and now can't remember if we ever wrote about the DJ Kat show.

I hate to be one of those people who keep repeating themselves but there is a good write up on IMDB for those wondering what it was.

Read that, good, here is a few more supplementary facts for you, though facts maybe just random memories and stuff.

Along with ITV they used to show the Super Mario Bros Super show here and quite a few obscure cartoon slots back in the day.  Think Mrs Pepperpot aka Spoon Obasan and the Sylvanian Families along with a few guest spots such as cookery with Lesley Waters.

Sadly as I never taped nothing back in the day, I have sketchy memories of this as well as a few clips on line from people such as Sid N's Youtube Channel (a nice bit of anime for you to prove we're not lying to you.)

Also another mystery has presented itself to me not related to this. I have a double playing acid on IFM live fest. Me with hardware, except its not me and of course didn't stick around to see who it was, have decided to keep tracks on their archive . org profile to see if they upload the set where not me is playing live.  

The Basic Game

Not many people had home computers as a kid and console shit was a rarity in 80's Britain, so our sole reference for video games was the arcade games in random places such as the chippy or the takeaway. So the rare people I knew with home micros were a revelation.

A mate had an old speccy computer, and a black and white TV. He had a few games for the system including a vertical scrolling football game (this would have been about 87 if anyone wants to try and track this down, It may have been called football fun but that seems highly unlikely, and scrolling through a list of speccy games on the worldofspectrum site nothing seems to ring a bell.


Apart from sketchy memories of old soccer games and playing Buckaroo. We played another game that he'd made up entirely. TBH the game I'm describing here is pretty much system agnostic and 'runs' on any computer system with basic. Hell if I give you the instructions you can run this in notepad.

I can only remember this as the basic game and works like this:

One person types out three lines of random numbers into basic and the other person, either turns away or shuts their eyes.  When the typing is over, you must designate a number that is the kill number, one that which must be avoided at all costs. You then call out to the person to make their move by saying top, middle or bottom and see if they can make it to the end of the line, one space at a time, without hitting the kill number.

I suppose you could, if you were good at programming, make this up in basic for any of the classic computers, print up a random string of numbers that fill 3 lines, blank the screen and then put a cursor onscreen with the prompt to move either top, middle or bottom, via arrow keys (or more likely w a s d).

In fact this is the sort of thing that would probably have been a basic type in back in the day complete with typos and a fantastical plot.

Battle Angel Alita

Finally got round to seeing this, as it was on Sky Movies, Friday, and all I can say is, wow.

Didn't realize it's a James Cameron film either, and after Titanic and Avatar which in my eyes are both abysmal films. This is a real revelation.

I won't spoil it and I've purposefully used the naming from the old Manga release we got here of the anime. It's something like Alita: Battle Angel (and GUMN in the original Japanese) but don't let that put you off. It's epic.

The plot, has her found mostly broken and tossed out on the scrap heap at the edge of town. Repaired by Dr Ido with the mech body that would have been his daughters replacement legs, she explores the world and learns that there is a big fuck off midgar style plate that serves as an upper city and that the world was plunged into a post apocalypse wasteland due to a war with Mars.

I will not spoil any more but will say this, it's miles better than Captain Marvel.  For one, when Alita fights, she gets knocked down, loses and picks herself up and fights again. She's flawed in a way that Captain Marvel isn't.

I know the MCU has its fans and that but I found the whole thing to be boring, she was a perfect superhuman and apart from smashing a blameless Streetfighter cab, largely a personality vacuum.

Alita isn't. She displays emotions, and acts just like a teenager would, which is cool and entirely in keeping with her character. I can't remember what emotions Captain Marvel did but I don't see her getting smacked around by the Kree and then coming back to wipe them all out. It just went on with her acting like a big space Karen, wanting to talk to the manager and that.

The only weak bit is Dua Lipa's track on the end credits, which although good doesn't really fit, would have preferred some sterling electro or synthpop maybe Luke Eargoggle or Analogous Doom as the outro, The main music is fine and is by Junkie XL which is cool he's done a lot of film work, think "Deadpoof" and you'll be halfway there as well as A Little Less Conversation by Elvis.

And yes before you as its set up for a sequel and you do get used to her big eyes in this.

Overall score. 9

Dumping carts and that.

Doing a couple of related things today. Looking into dumping out Vita game cards that I own, and cannot find a good guide that will allow me to.

I have it all set up and what I can see from looking at Persona 4 The Golden is that it seems to be an exfat file system and with a few folders. A lot of files in MP4 format and a folder with the file system in it. Can remember there was a thread on RHDN ages ago about hacking the PS2 original, but as I cannot code at all. This is beyond me.

All I really want is a tool that will let me hook up the Vita and dump the contents of the card via USB so I can run it on from my SD2 Vita. (Incidentally will need to set this up as well.)

Also been looking into doing the full Monty and getting the PS3 hacked. Every guide I see for this is either super detailed or written by a chimp. A chimp who's English is remedial at best.

Its either a full range of caveats in a forum post or a few vague instructions of downloading this shady shit from Mega and adding it to a USB drive.

I'm guess I'm spoiled by how the PSP went down and how easy it is to do that. But I'm seriously thinking of looking at shitty video guides on youtube written by gobshites with terrible taste in music and heavily accented English low in the mix.

Oh and anime avatars, not that there's nowt wrong with that, mind. Its just shitty hip hop instrumentals and mumbling.

VIta again

Finally got round to putting custom firmware on my Vita. As per this guide here.

As it went, it was pretty painless to do, once you figured out what went were. Largely written for FTP users in mind you can do this entirely via USB cable. Your vita is being treated as an external drive and will have its own folder put up on your system and you can follow the steps there.

Also another note, When doing the Modoru step, please remember it has its own sub folder in ux0:apps put your pspupdat file there otherwise you will get an error message. This stumped me for absolutely ages and only by random clicking did I discover this and get it downgraded in the end.

Also, final, final note. Vitashell is a really nice file manager, well put together and is worth doing it for this alone. Sad, I know.

Impressions now I've done it.

Not sure what to play now, though. I used to be really into emulation and stuff, but now am not. Will have to see if there is a final burn derivative for the system and have installed Aderanlin for PSP which adds custom firmware to the in built PSP emulator.  Have an SD to vita on  the way and will hope you can transfer across all my home dumped PSP ISO's and save files from the PSP.

Will also need to see if I can add back TXK by Jeff Minter which I lost prepping my system for this.

Short version, forgot my psn login and had to make a new i.d i(ts vital for the hack to work,) had to update from firmware 3.67 to 3.73, and formatted my memory card to make way for new stuff.

Plus point I'm now enjoying Persona 4 all over again. Will have to see if 0syscall and  whatever they call the game dumper, work as I have a few games that require a firmware +3.60, so fingers crossed.

Looking into 3ds hacks, which, if I'm honest, looks like a fucking nightmare.

Of Hidden Gold and that

Are you wanting something to read? Something about looking for hidden gold in Montana and involving the Hardy boys detectives. Then we have something for you.

Hope the intro wasn't too lame for you I could have gone all pseudo-intellectual on you. A veritable Jordan Peterson style word salad, that while seeming intellectual is actually nothing but bollocks. (Also I'll be getting to the Crisscross shadow in due course, you don't have to go to those guys, unless you like the trainwreck of an introduction they put up there.)

Anyway Hunting for Hidden Gold, one of the original canon and a Leslie Macfarlnae to boot, it was rewritten in the mid sixties to be more action packed, and yeah, it still holds up.

Commonalities between the two include a protracted journey to Lucky Lode / Bottom, an encounter with Timber Wolves and a cave in caused by crowbar. Apart from that, though, its two different books.

The original is best, and while there are some questionable elements in this (African american's and their depiction's mainly,) this isn't a problem.

I'll suspect I'll get comments about this, but as it only pertains to the original, they're absent entirely from the remake. But there are some black characters in the original. It's slightly spoilery but here goes, the first encounter on the train is with the porter, they find out that someone they trusted had put  them on a train to Indianapolis instead of Montana. He get's the guard and it all works out.

The next encounter is different and has a bunch of guys riding to the rescue in an old Model T Ford, accusing some bad dudes of running over their chickens, they come to the Hardy's rescue. I'll not apologize for liking this, its hard to follow, though, as they all speak in ebonics. But I got the gist of it.

The remake, while not a patch on the original isn't that bad and stands on its own as a decent version.

Anyway you can read these two here and here.

More Tapes

Still in lockdown,  Have decided to go through my VHS collection (minus the Pron,) to see what can be kept and salvaged and what cannot.

Today's videos are two from the early 90's it turns out. The tape labelled three Saturday shows has some football highlights from  the Rumbelows cup, with Ian Wright as today's studio guest. America's top 40 with Casey Kasem (Shaggy) and some awesome shade thrown at him by the presenter and the Onion Field as the featured film.

Our other choice VHS contained Streetfighter II Anime which I thought was a rip from Bravo but turns out its just taped onto an existing blank tape and when it runs out we have the back end of an unknown film from the BBC and Some Channel 4 kids programming.

Which is boss as it contains the last half of Mork and Mindy, an episode of a Bill and Ted cartoon (never knew this existed,) A white fang cartoon and best of all The Finder aka Finders Keepers.

This is based on a children's book by the same name and is Australian (same vintage as Round the Twist.)

Actually pretty good, and is the stand out find here. A little blond kid takes part in some intergalactic gameshow. He can find things with a magic beeper and the episode I saw they had a time barrier which accepted lost things from the real world. They have an archive here of episodes, up on youtube which I recommend you do.

Finally we had some stand out ads. A few celeb shots for British Gas, Boom bang a ban Burt Reynolds on gas fires and Gangster Bob Hoskins for cookers.  A few music promo bits which are going to be a bastard to pass (album collections for Madonna and The Pogues and a lazy comp for carnival greats which include tequilla and the Lambada).

Obscure standouts are Mitsubishi (fax machines) Geosafari (edutainment cringe) and Texas Instruments (graphing calculators which is a surprise.)

Oh and a nice primary coloured Channel 4 logo that looks like it's made out of paint.

A final note, we've switched videos from the DVD combi unit to a sharp standalone video and its getting better results, a few tapes are playing now including the 3 shows one which was a right bastard in all machines previous. We can see my cousins kids school play, from back in the 90's rather than listen to audio as previously done.

Gypsy Girl and ads.

We've been attempting to digitize some old tapes via OBS screen recording program, with the main aim of getting some stuff that my aunty had digitized from 8MM film of various family bits and pieces onto disk or file, edited and put up on Youtube.

For a trial run decided to take a run at a tape that contains (Deep Breath,) Halloween H20 and Sky West and Crooked aka Gypsy Girl.  A star vehicle for Hayley Mills and a lot of old actors from TV, not limited to, Lovejoy's Ian McShane as a gypsy kid in love with Hayley. Catweazle aka Geoffrey |Bayldon as the vicar and Annette Crosbie as her mum, better known as Victor Meldrew's long suffering wife Margaret in One Foot In The Grave. Apparently up on Netflix, so give it a watch, it's worth your time.

Its a good film and proves that she could indeed act, she plays a sketchy, spacy mentalist type of girl obsessed with burying every dead animal in the church yard. There's a laugh out loud bit where she finds a dead bumble bee up a tree and presents it to the vicar for a Christian burial.

Ads itself are interesting too. There is a spot for Ebly a wheat alternative to pasta, something called BB Soda which seems to be the year 2000's version of Tab clear, (born 1992, died 1992) and a few spots for Southend on Sea and a your shout on Crown |Green bowling, by two lads from Streatham Hill.

We also have a tape from Channel 4's the human body from 1984 and the tail end of money matters which is cool. This is based on the book, Body Machine by noted heart surgeon Christiaan Barnyard, and seems to be on reproduction from what I've seen.

Will have to redo them though before I put them up. They seem to be using the laptops internal mic to draw sound rather than the TV itself, which is annoying as I can be heard commenting and at intervals, taking the piss. Maybe routing the sound through audacity may help, or more likely poking at the sound settings in OBS which maybe less a Heath Robinson way of doing it.

Edit. Turns out you can mute the internal mic and just have audio from the capture box instead.

Coping with lockdown.

The corvid 909 / SARS 2 Electric Boogaloo lockdown crisis is playing havoc with all my plans.

There's no junk tour as all non essential shops are shut and you can't go out anyway.

Stuff I liked doing was browsing in Smiths and when I went Saturday there were signs up saying don't read the magazines do to Corbyn 101.

However I've found a way around this as several sites are dedicated to putting up pdf scans or rather rips of current media so I can read my favourite magazines and put them back on the shelf, just as downloads from a file host site instead.  It's only until lock down is lifted and we won't choke any more. 

Now to find a downloader that actually doesn't want me to sign up to some free plan or shiet.

 On video news I've hooked up the VCR and am going through my video collection via Obs and video capture.

So far I have found, a schools program which is dull, really dull, and has piss poor tracking issues.

An even worse tape that has Thames news and looks suspiciously like the Day to Day, except this is the 80's.

A vintage tape full of football from the 70's to 80's. A bit of Liverpool at their best, Arsenal with George Graham in charge and Tony "Donkey" Adams on the sheets. They are playing Sheffield United if anyone cares. And finally a bit of Brian Clough at Forest before the tape wisely shuts itself down.

Finally a bit of Channel U XXX a station full of hip hop trash mixed with the phone lines may actually dump the ads from this as the birds on here look genuinely ropey. We're talking sub readers wives level here. That is if I can stomach non stop hip hop from people who should be either a crime statistic or behind bars.

Staying in.

Here's another boring update. Been self isolating and not that is not a euphemism. Not been out since Friday. Having to look for stuff to do around the house, to keep busy as this is definitely not my regular schedule.  

Took a look online at my DVD / Video combo that I got from my aunties place, and what I thought was a good project (seeing if its a DVD recorder) failed when I had a read through of the manual archived online.  It can copy DVDs to VHS but not vice versa.  

Will have to use Obs and  my capture card to rip stuff from videos that I have.  It's not the best idea but will like to archive the stuff I have so I can fill up some space for more junk.

More stuff to come includes some Vietnamese tapes (mostly UK stuff and junked what looks like a lot of  Karaoke tat.)  Maybe even the Pron tape which is 2 thirds Channel 4 stuff, including a episode of Quincy. Have the last of my mandatory use it or lose it leave days to take before the new tax year kicks in. So will give it a go tomorrow.

cough cough.

I aten't dead yet as Granny Weatherwax would say as she lay out with her sign upon her chest, I'm still kicking and healthy at the moment, asymptomatic as they say. Sars2 electro boogaloo is currently fucking up the western world with a liberal sprinkling of selfish cunts stockpiling bog roll and in fact anything that moves, and wearing masks that will do literally fuck all.

I've been self isolating, well my whole life's been self isolating but there you go. Also as my job is largely cleaning, I'm one of the front line, key workers, If they tell me to stay home, I will. To be honest I have leave to take by the end of  the month, and we'll see how the Wu flu situation goes on from there.

Seems like you need a book or two to read in these dark times. We just got through editing The Wailing Siren Mystery in both the original and UK edition remake.

A word of warning, both the original and the remake are from the UK. The original text was slightly anglicized, so I've tried to put it back to American English. My original was by Sampson Low which used The Sinister Signpost as the first book in the series. So it's not quite a 1 to 1 transcription. Think of it more like a 99% especially as I've amended some typos from the original.

The UK version really doubles down on the whole baseball game where Frank goes missing, the Sampson Low keeps all the terminology in which of course would go over the head of the average Brit. (To put it in perspective, this is what a baseball bat is most used for in this country.)  So much so, it's a wonder how they got all this rewritten so a limey such as I could understand it.

The original expands on various bits and pieces (meeting Officer Smuff and Con Riley on the docks, camping Bantz and as usual Aunt Gertrude getting toned down) and even gives the Hardy's girlfriends some detective work to do in the original.

But still its 90% the same, much like the Secret of The Lost tunnel and such.

You can download both original and remake here. and here. 

The Final UnimPORTant

This is the final part of the UnimPORTant series, where we put up hypothetical games that could be ported to systems from another. This time its Commodores well regarded 16 / 32 bit home computer system the Amiga.

Clu Clu land. NES.

This is a weird one, as the name is romanized wrongly. It should be Kuru Kuru land where Kuru Kuru means something that spins, and that is indeed what this game is based on.  You are a small blubbery looking fish that has to avoid the sea urchins and uncover the gold by spinning around poles in a maze.

I would have put this in my home micro round up but I think the Amiga is basically a better fit. Can imagine this being done in something like AMOS or that for the 500. It's not a bad game.

Kickle Cubicle / Meikyuujima.

A favourite NES game from R*Type producers Irem.  More of a block shoving type of game, you have to get all the bags in the allotted time.  Quite a nice little game supposedly produced for the PC Engine but remains unreleased.

Can easily see this for either Amiga 500 or 1200 series of computers.

Oids.

This is some Atari only thrust clone which for some reason was only released for the inferior ST line of computers. A nice port for the Amiga would be nice seeing as we can't have them having all the fun.

Ducktales.

Part of Capcoms Disney line up of platformers.  Would love to see this ported to the Amiga even if it incurs the wrath of the house of mouse.  With gameplay that involves Scrooge McDuck being his greedy bastard self, and rather nice music, including the Moon stage which is what its known for. This along with a few other games such as Megaman are why Capcom could do no wrong back in the day.

So that is it, we'll get back to normal posting now. There isn't much left to say except that I'd love a port of protracker to the old physical keyboard Blackbastard phones. Also as this whole SARS 2 electric boogaloo is going down now, a brief note that there is ten years worth of bollocks masquerading as articles so if you're at a loose end why not have a trawl through.

The UnimPORTant part V 16bit years.

The SNES and Megadrive or genitals if you're American posting.

You know the deal now, a bunch of games that were never ported over to the various systems at the time, but fit into the various system requirements of the native hardware.

Snes and Megadrive.

Apart from a few notable bits, the SNES lags far behind the Megadrive when it comes to homebrew.

There's a good port of Marioland for the Snes out and Nekotako as a new small print run game, but apart from that. Nothing.

The Megadrive fares better with a few chinese originals and bootlegs.  Seeing as they were relatively popular over here, lets give 5 games each, for the system, which were never ported.

Megadrive 5 first.

R*Type

Known as the home of shooting games, it's weird that this was never ported. Will have to check to see if Irem ever had the licence to port stuff. It's the only big omission I've seen on whole system.

Puzzle Bobble. Mega CD

This, every one knows, you line up bubbles in the launcher and try to pop 3 or more to clear stuff. It's either ported as Bust A Move (>_<) or a bajillion reskins of the same thing. I don't know why I added Mega CD to this as it could be done on the Megadrive. But would love to see it. Maybe a CD version of the iconic sound track.

Magic Sword

This is an old scrolling beat'em up by Capcom. I've played this in the arcade and is only one of a handful of games I ever saw the ending to. The others being Golden Axe and Darkstalkers. It's a middling game but I like it. Would love to see a port of it back then.

Powerdrift Mega CD.

An old superscaler racing game from Sega. I think it got a Saturn port as part of the ages range. But I would like to have seen if it could have been made to run under Megadrive hardware.  I put this as a Mega CD release, as the extra hardware would  make sense.

F1 Exhaust Note 32X

This is basically an old twin screen F1 game I saw back in Cyprus over ten years ago. Apparently never getting a home release, I have this as a provisonal 32X hardware release as its both obscure and little supported.

SNES ERA 5

This was my jam back in the day and therefore I know more of what was released and what wasn't.

1 Bubble Bobble.

Would love to see Taito's island hop coin op here too (Rainbow Islands) but to be honest, a good port of Bubble Bobble would be nice too. Seeing as the NES version is one of my favourite games ever a port along those lines would be excellent.

2. Bombjack.

Tekhan aka Tecmo did a few good games back in the day and this is another single screen job that wasn't ported over either. I envisage those two I mentioned up there as small rom carts (8mb or so). Seeing as there were a few coin op classics ported in its death throes. I'd love a home brew version of Bombjack.

3. Suikoden Snes CD

This is way out of the realms of possibility but, when I got this for Playstation back in the day. I was taken by how it looked like a late era SNES game, one of the style over substance RPGS such as Star Ocean or Tales Of Phantasia.  Could this have been done for the SNES CD, who knows, but I'm sure it would have had a port if it had taken off.

4. Gauntlet.

Would love a port of the original game here.  There are a few games that would make excellent use of the multitap, and this game is ideal for 4 player support.  The downside being Atari taking in the mid 90's and its corpse used to pump out old IP and bastard clones of the VCS till this day.

Anyway this I could happily play on the SNES.

5. Elite.

Apparently this was being done back then and was abandoned. Its the old home micro game where you trade through galaxies and shoot pirates. Ian Bell has a lot of the games for the old system to play for free under emulation if you like that sort of thing. I much prefer Frontier, but a port of this could be fun.