Month: January 2020

New at GeekyDomain: Geek Nostalgia

Had a heck of a week over at my GeekyDomain gig.

First there was 80s action figures. All the top action figure franchises launched with their own cartoon, back when toys were cool. I dunno what happened to toys now. Tell me something named “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” would have made it if they came out in the 2010s. Most people never even know that they were originally done as a parody of comic book franchises. To see more of the action figure 80s including the really arcane stuff, see my IMGUR gallery.

But then, as if that weren’t enough geek nostalgia, I noticed that Radio Shack / Tandy post-mortems were all over the web… but they only told half the story. As a Generation Xer, I have a duty to document my unique observation point of view in history, so I made the most definitive retrospective on Radio Shack’s rise and fall you’ll ever see online. With a gallery of Tandy handheld electronic games!

I got around to ramblin’ about the legendary Trash-80 as part of that, so for those of you looking for a broader gallery of computer nostalgia, I also did an IMGUR dump of computing history focusing on the home desktop revolution.

You see, we Gen-Xers are a sparse lot, wedged in between the teeming masses of the Boomers on one end and the Mills on the other. Gen X is the only generation with a point of view bridging the period in between. Historians decades from now are going to be pawing through records trying to find Gen-Xers, who aren’t always marked by their appreciation of prosperity.

 

GeekyDomain Round-Up: The Witcher, Green Gifts 4 Geeks, and Sci-Fi Novels That Need An Adaptation

It’s come to this: I’m so busy working for other people’s sites that I can’t get the chance to blog on my own, so I have to do digests. Probably for the best. I’m on three posts per week at Geeky Domain now, so the pace is getting spunky.

“If You Liked The Witcher, You Might Also Like…” explores the genre of the occult detective. Revisit Kolchak, The X-Files, and a cameo from Vincent Price because I’ll take any opportunity to insert him.

You see in the banner on that image that for a goof, I compared the “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” song to “Bravely Bold Sir Robin…” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Right after that, we lost Terry Jones, who co-directed same for the Python troupe. Sad loss, and another Python down.

“Gifts for Green Geeks” is a gift list for responsible geeks who want to carry on their geekery while adhering to a new standard of reducing their carbon footprint. Gives me a chance to continue my contrarian climate-advocacy views from old classics like “If Anybody Cared About Climate Change, We Could Have Solved It By Now.”

“Five Sci-Fi Novels Just Waiting To Be Adapted To Film” is a nerdrage rant about how Hollywood isn’t adapting anything quality anymore, get off ma’ lawn and all. But each of those five sci-fi classics I picked are all works with a strong argument for being potential box-office champions. We can do that or we can try to retread Spider-Man for another Uncle Ben death scene. Your call, Hollywood!

“Time is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans!” — John Lennon

 

The Quest For the Weirdest Kurt Vonnegut Adaptation

The scoop: Over at my long-standing 366WeirdMovies gig, I undertook my own side challenge to figure out the best / weirdest Kurt Vonnegut film adaptation.

So far, the score is settled at Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) as the best, but maybe second-weirdest. A strong case is to be made for the utterly bonkers Slapstick of Another Kind (1982), but it is a terrible movie, almost painful despite its all-star comedy cast. Last and definitely least is Breakfast of Champions (1999), which is not only bad, but damn near a war crime and a deliberate sabotage of Vonnegut’s work by a director with nothing but hatred and ugliness in his heart, Alan Rudolph.

I have seen Mother Night (1996) too, and while it is very good, I didn’t recall it being a contender for weirdness.

Continue reading “The Quest For the Weirdest Kurt Vonnegut Adaptation”

New at Geeky Domain: Collectible Guides For Marvel Figures and Star Wars Funko Pops

You get a 2-parter here because I’m too busy to break it up into individual posts and God knows when I get back in here. Two recent product lists to announce:

  • An Infinity of Collectible Marvel Figures – Come see Ant-Man swipe the Incredible Hulk’s can of Coke, then browse our selection for the best current Marvel universe figurines. We went with aesthetic appeal over most popular character, plus I get to pour my heart out for underrated B-list Marvel characters.
  • These Are The Star Wars Funko Pops You’re Looking For! – What could be more self-explanatory than “Star Wars Funko Pops”? But my twist is that I delve into the background on these characters, the actors who play them, their position in the ‘verse, and why they’re the definitive characters to collect for any Star Wars fan.

What else? I didn’t even mention it back during Christmas, but my first post at Geeky Domain we ginned up a quick and sloppy Christmas gift guide for Yoda fans based off The Mandalorian! Since most Baby Yoda merch doesn;t even ship until spring and is available for pre-order only, I figure it will be more useful next year than this year.

Is there anybody who has blogged more about Star Wars at this point than I have? I mean I can’t prove it – Half the stuff I’ve ever written for the web is now found only on the Internet Archive, if that. I was nattering about Star Wars back on the BBS era, before the World Wide Web, before Google, before AOL. I suppose people who write for Wookiepedia and the like can claim more Star Wars blogging than I, but that’s the people who specialize. And I don’t even count myself as a big fan of the series!

I figure these two posts go together because they’re the only choice left in geek cinema fandom now. You’re either a Marvel fan or a Star Wars fan. All the other franchises are extinct in American cinema. And they’re both owned by Disney, the mouse that frikkin’ roared, God help us all!