Monday, November 30, 2009

Backwards Compatibility: Back to the Future!


The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)

Ch-ch-changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time"
- "Changes" by David Bowie

My apologies for the relatively few posts I did in November, but that was in part because of some PC problems. My old PC's motherboard was starting to behave funky, so I decided to get a new one, an HP Pavilion with a quad-core Intel processor and Windows 7 Home Premium edition. The new PC must have picked up the hardware curse from the old PC, for the new hard drive was defective and had to be replaced. Finally, I've got the new system up and running with all the documents from the old system.

So now I can do everything I used to do on the old system, right? Well, not quite. The operating system on the old PC was Windows XP Media Center edition. Windows XP was the last Microsoft operating system to support programs written for the previous MS operating systems, including DOS and 16-bit windows. My version Windows 7 does not support some of these older programs so for now I can no longer run some of my older games, screen savers and desktop themes.

I am not along in my interest in old software. You can find plenty of sites that offer abandonware, i.e. software considered so obsolete that the original creators have abandoned the copyright. But why would anyone still be interested in these offerings from ancient floppy disks? Some of these programs are collected for historical interest; for example this history of windows. The vast majority abandonware collectors, however, are interested in the old games. Just as many great films were created before innovations such as color, sound and CGI, many a great game was created in the DOS and early Windows days. The 16 bit pirate game series Tales of Monkey Island was popular enough to inspire a slew of YouTube videos and new game. And thanks to a new generation of retro PC games, there is now a new entry to the Sierra Gobliiins series.

I know several options for playing my old stuff. DOSBox is a freeware application that can run any DOS application I've seen. Some PC game collectors have even successfully installed Windows 3.11 under DOXBox. You can certainly install Windows 3.11 on a Virtual PC, i.e. an emulation of a complete classic PC system. Another solution I could use would be to upgrade the version of Windows 7, which has more old windows support. So undoubtedly there are ways to run my old games on the new system. We have the pleasant situation where we can enjoy the advantages of 64-bit processing without giving up the gems from the days when home PC's were new.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Are You or Have You Ever Been a Klingon?

"Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilized is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business."
- Gertrude Stein

"All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world"
- "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" lyrics by Tears for Fears

I found a hilarious animated short on cartoon historian Jerry Beck's excellent blog, Cartoon Brew. The short purports to be an intercepted TV broadcast from Qo'noS, the Klingon home planet. As every SF geek knows, the Klingons are the warrior race that served as recurring villains of the original Star Trek series. The short shows that the Qo'noS broadcast day starts with a Klingon Propaganda Film. To give it that extra air of authenticity the creators of this short did it in the Klingon language. What? You don't know how to speak Klingon? Sheesh, how do expect to get a good job in this economy without knowing Klingon? Oh, OK, here's the Klingon Propaganda Translated.

In my attempts to see issues from both sides, I've looked up propaganda films from places such as North Korea and Cuba. The film is a spot-on parody of the propaganda films I've seen. Like so many of these films, it starts with a cute girl singing. Then in keeping with the genre, it praises the local culture, and then lionizes the military's great victories. Replace the Klingons with Koreans, and this film would look like it came from Pyongyang.

Once you look past the message that these films are trying to foist upon you, propaganda films reveal some surprising details about the country that produced them. The agitprop from communist countries, for example, show how profoundly conservative Marxist societies often are. The North Korean propaganda I've seen is cornier than 90% of the films in the Prelinger Collection. Sure, the Marxist revolutions are celebrated in these films, but they also project a strong sense of conformity. Check out Killer Chic and Gorki Aguila to get an idea as to how opposed these societies are to change.

And for more Klingon silliness, see a Klingon Board Game, the Klingon homeless, and the essential Klingon PC accessory.

The Difference Between High Culture and Low Culture is Measured in Dexter's Laboratory

"Classic: a book which people praise and don't read."
-Mark Twain

In a college course I took back in the 1970's, the professor asked the class "What is the difference between high culture and low culture?" After a long pause while the other students pondered this question, I broke the silence by saying "About 12 feet". That got a laugh, but hopefully it also made the point that this distinction between high culture, (i.e. the art worthy of serious academic study), and low culture (the popular trash that academics should scorn) is taken way too seriously. As is often pointed out, much of what we now consider "high culture" (the plays of Shakespeare, the Viennese operas) were the popular culture of their times. Many revered artists have worked in supposedly "low brow" arts. Lyonel Feininger, a leading figure in the modern art movement, once did a newspaper comic, The Kin-Der-Kids.

For that reason, I particularly enjoyed this YouTube video, Requiem for a Dexter. This video looks at Requiem for a Dream, a highly revered film that tells the story of four young people's experiences with illegal drugs. The point of this short is that many of the innovations of this independent feature film actually appeared two years earlier in a Dexter's Laboratory cartoon, "Topped Off", where Dexter and his sister Dee-Dee experiment with this mysterious substance that seems so important to their parents: coffee.

I doubt that the creators of "Requiem for a Dream", consciously stole anything from "Dexter's Laboratory". Most likely, Darren Aronofsky (the director of "Requiem for a Dream") and Genndy Tartakovsky (the creator of "Dexter's Laboratory" and director of "Topped Off") independently devised the same innovations for the stories they told. But why does Aronofsky earn so much more accolades than Tartakovsky for basically the same ideas, especially since Tartakovsky came up with these ideas first?

Dexter's Laboratory makes me think that my initial estimate of difference between high culture and low culture (12 feet) may be a bit on the high side.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Sympathy for the Devil, Part 2



"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it conscientiously."
- Blaise Pascal

"I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing
Till they got a hold of me"
- Alice Cooper, from "No More Mr. Nice Guy"

The topic of "Wicked" got me thinking about how often I have been pleasantly surprized by people who once seemed to have no redeeming qualities. For example, I have been revolted by almost everything I've read or seen about 1930's evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She preached a hard-line fundamentalist faith that held that every syllable of the Bible was true. Her revival meetings made frequent use of faith healing, a practice that degrades both medicine and religion. And shades of Jimmy Swaggart, she was involved in a sex scandal. I had totally written off McPherson when I looked up something on the anti-lynching movement, and discovered that for all her faults, she had one strong virtue: she was a fierce opponent of racism. Her revivals preached against racism and the Klan, and often did so in the heart of Klan country. She attacked lynching at a time when most other media outlets were reluctant to admit that the practice existed.

Back when the Patriot Act was first passed, I was disappointed with how many conservatives backed it. I knew that there would be at least one major conservative leader who would denounce this law as a violation of the conservative principle of limited government, but I was really surprised that the most prominent conservative leader to denounce the Patriot Act when it was first proposed was Phyllis Schlafly. As much as I've disagreed with her in the past, I've got to give her credit: she spoke up at a time when very few were brave enough to combat the mad rush to pass this monstrosity.

The left gets a lot of flak for the political correctness movement that has significantly stifled speech, especially on college campuses. But one should keep in mind that the leading organization for promoting free speech on campuses, F.I.R.E., was founded by a liberal: Harvey A. Silverglate.

I even have an example on the cultural front. For most of his career, Pat Boone has been singing bland Gospel music, mixed with his fundamentalist rantings. Nothing he did had any great appeal for me until 1997, when he showed a side of him I've never seen before: his sense of humor. Playing against his well-known squeaky-clean image, he announced that he had developed an interest in heavy metal music. He showed off his new musical interest with the release of the album "Pat Boone in a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy", where he perform big band arrangements of the songs of Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper and Metalica.

Needless to say, some of Boone's old fans were horrified. Apparently, they did not get the gag, and that is a shame. Boone was parodying both heavy metal and his own public image. And as musical parodies go, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" is brilliant. His big band arrangements skewer the often forced "Strum und Drang" of metal. I'm especially fond of his cover of Ozbourne's "Crazy Train", which almost morphs into the Chattanooga Cho-Cho.