“Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace” on IMDB
Sci-Fi/Adventure, 136 Minutes, 1999
I won’t be seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens [IMDB] for at least a few more days. I hate crowds nearly as much as I adore the franchise, so will sneak into an early matinee sometime soon. All of the fuss has made me think of the last “Star Wars” premier I was excited for. (more…)
As being reported everywhere (arstechnica.com, engadget.com, gizmodo.com and many others) Windows 95 is 20 years old today. I stood in line for it. First, perhaps, we should set the stage.
Uncle Jeff at his office in Cincinnati, date unknown. Click to enbigger.
Friends, I know you may have had suspicions, but I’m ready to admit the truth: we’re hobos. Not practicing hobos, mind, but rather hobos-by-birth by way of my great uncle, Jeff Davis, the first bona fide King of the Hobos.
Yes, it’s true. I come from, as defined by Urban Dictionary, the “good, hardworking, trustworthy, honest, good-for-nothing, unreliable, foul-smelling vagrants” who man the traveling carnivals of the United States. My great-grandparents, Carolton and Ruth Mae Davis, operated a cook house and my grandfather would spend summers traveling with them.
This cat was internet famous for a few minutes. She was also mean and dumb as a rock.
Way back in the history times of 1996 there were no truly “portable” computers; instead you had what were graciously called “luggables”. There was no Wi-Fi or 4G or anything else that my children annoyingly take for granted. If you wanted to read about the web when you were away from your blazing fast 486-class PC you needed to carry around a loosely bound sheaf of paper that other people had written things on.
With the simmering success of the Occulus Rift, Sony’s announcement of their “Project Morpheus” device for the PS4 and persistent rumors that Microsoft is doing something similar for the XBox One this definitely seems to be the year when head-mounted VR will make its push into our living rooms. What people forget is that this is far from the first time that this has been promised.
As I posted about before, I won part of the PlayStation 4 “Greatness Awaits” contest. In a stroke of pure-freakin’-genius this contest allowed fans to leverage their gold trophies as entries to win props from the awesome “Perfect Day” PS4 commercial. I won the Dagger from the Elder Scrolls Online segment.
The dagger, based on designs by Bethesda and ZeniMax Online Studios, looked awesome but wasn’t very “presentational” so I spent the last couple of weeks creating a suitable display plaque inspired by those in the “Hearthfire” add-in in “Skyrim”. (Here’s hoping the design is reused for Elder Scrolls Online!)
I’m extremely pleased with the results. I’ll be posting more images and a project walk-through soon, but for now I’m happy to simply present the final product. I was also lucky enough to be a beta participant for Elder Scrolls Online (on the PC) and while I can’t offer specifics, I am enjoying myself! Here’s hoping I’ll be able to use a virtual version of my actual dagger at some point!
Cleaning out the attic and found this little hybridized technological bastard from 18 years ago. WebTV (later bought out by Microsoft and rechristened “MSN TV”). I originally purchased it to do interface and human-factors testing for some or another client. If I remember correctly I think was set up for, maybe, a week?
In celebration of the release of the Playstaion 4 the PlayStation Greatness Exchange is giving away all of the props from the excellent “A Perfect Day” commercial (below). In what is a certified stroke of marketing genius this is the second contest which has allowed fans to leverage their PSN Trophy collection to win actual prizes.
(Yes, my PSN handle is “kiwidust”. Feel free to ping me if you catch me online. Apologies in advance: I rarely do multi-player due to the enormous, towering, stack of unplayed games looming over me.)
I tossed my lot of trophies on the Elder Scrolls Online Dagger and…. please provide your own drumrolls, I won! I haven’t actually taken delivery yet (who know how long that will take) but I’m already in negotiations with my lovely bride on how (and where) to mount and display it. Here’s a few close-ups of the piece provided by PlayStation:
Here’s the commercial. You can see the dagger in the first few seconds being drawn for combat by the thiefy-looking guy on the right. He better not have scratched my dagger!
Once I take official ownership, I’ll be sure to gloat some more!
