Author: DOuG pRATt

Post-Pandemic Punk

A teen band in Los Angeles, The Linda Lindas, have a viral video.

The girls have been signed to a small record label. They got the idea for their band from Linda Linda Linda, a 2005 Japanese movie.

Schoolgirls are the subjects of countless Japanese movies, anime, and manga. From sweet, innocent and charming, to super-powered, to graphically pornographic, girls in school uniforms are everywhere in Japanese media. I rented Linda Linda Linda back when I had a 3-disc Netflix subscription. The movie is safely at the sweet and charming end of the spectrum. The DVD is out of print, and whoever owns the rights would be smart to make the movie available online as soon as possible.

Are there cybernetic assassin schoolgirls? Of course.

A song in English by a Scottish band really is the theme to the anime series. Here’s the complete recording. It’s one of the most remarkable productions I have ever heard.

Cheap Thrills

More of my urgent retirement time-wasting has been accomplished with my 60″ 4:3 video projector arrangement in the living room. The screen was a freebie from work, and the new-old stock Viewsonic projector was a $65 eBay acquisition. Upon arrival, the only thing that showed its age was the projector’s rotting air filter foam, that was easily replaced with some foam I had on hand. With a TV tray table and a $25 Bluetooth speaker, I can set everything up — and take it all down — in just a few minutes.

The trick to getting the best picture is watching everything with my laptop computer, so the projector runs in its native 1024×768 resolution. The laptop has the now-rare feature of a VGA connector, and the projector’s inputs are analog-only, including VGA. (Tech note: native VGA is required on the laptop, because copy protection prevents HDMI-to-VGA conversion from working.) Being an early 3-LCD design, the claim was, “vibrant, true-to-life images with better color brightness and a wider color gamut.” (Better than sequential DLP color was what they were implying.) I connected my X-Rite ColorMunki Display meter to the laptop and ran free DisplayCal software. The results live up the manufacturer’s claim. The resolution and color profile are adjusted automatically when connecting the VGA cable to the laptop.

Being intended for business presentations, the projector’s contrast ratio isn’t good enough for modern dark shows and movies. But this quirky, inexpensive, cobbled-together setup is perfect for my intended purpose of watching old cartoons and TV shows streaming over WiFi, or with a USB DVD drive I’ve had for years. It’s fun to realize how much video projection had progressed in the 20 years since the Kloss Novabeam of the mid-80’s.

Straight Talk

I’ve been wasting time watching audio-related YouTube videos, with turntables being a favorite topic. Back in the 80’s, electronics manufacturers did what they could to modernize turntables, while at the same time promoting their CD players. Along with direct-drive turntables and P-Mount cartridges, there were linear-tracking tonearms.

The music that’s played to demonstrate the turntable is by Jeremy Heiden. Something about the first track reminded me of an early 80’s Steve Miller song, with maybe an added splash of the Police from the same era.

Cannery Row Jury

I’m borrowing something from Cartoon Research. It’s a cartoon that really disturbed me as a little kid, so of course I watched every time it was on TV.

Jerry Beck & Co. have launched a streaming Internet cartoon channel. It’s on Twitch.tv, rather than YouTube. I think that’s a good idea, considering my last post. You can watch it for free, but full membership is $5/month. I’m considering joining up.

As Expected

From a message I, and millions more, received from Alphabet/Google/YouTube.

YouTube’s right to monetize: YouTube has the right to monetize all content on the platform and ads may appear on videos from channels not in the YouTube Partner Program.

I had a sneaking suspicion this was coming. Next up will be the end of embedding.