Laserdisc Rot

I was on the fence on doing another fun media post like last week's yelling about Star Wars and the importance of "canon" , but I had something I actually wanted to write about and get off my chest. This week was a flurry on my Appalachia Cinema Preservation Society project , particularly that I launched Social Media accounts for it. (Links for those will be at the bottom in case you want to follow it anywhere). For the past... gosh... at least four years my only social media presence was on Mastodon (a niche microblogging network that is part of the ActivityPub - one popular, yet laughably incorrect way to describe it is to say it's like email), and in order to get ACPS represented elsewhere, I created new accounts on Facebook and Instagram. For about the last half-a-week I've been putzing around on those sites trying to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do on them. The reason I originally left Facebook and Instagram was because of all the data collect...

 This past week contained May the Fourth and I can't help but think of Star Wars. Always. The two posters that literally hover over me in my home office Back in 2010, I went to Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando, FL (which now feels like a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away). I was excited for a lot of reasons but up on top was that Leland Chee, the manager of the Holocron, the "Lucasfilm continuity database," was giving a presentation on the new continuity rules moving forward after the recent Disney acquisition. If you were like me, you were a Star Wars fan of the 90s, but if you weren't one of us specific weirdos - let me describe it to you: we were desperate  for any media. Hell, salivating for any memorabilia we could get our hands on. When Taco Bell had merchandise tie-ins with the Nintendo 64 Shadows of the Empire game? Yeah we were on that. I had every book that was structured like Tales from Jabba's Palace  that gave the backstory of every stra...

Okay I promise I won't keep stretching the rot analogy in my headlines after this. I'm just proud that I'm still writing. A little over two months ago I broke my leg. It was during a late ice storm and I was trying to take the trash out. I slipped and it full on felt like my leg bent underneath me. There's also a good 100 yards between the house and where the street is, so I had to limp back. Our dog, Callisto the cute Corgi, likes to come out with me to take out the trash and she just had this look of impotent concern as I slowly hopped towards the house. She's a good dog. I mention this because I finally got the clean bill of health from the doc today. There's still a slight fracture that hasn't fully healed on the leg bone but the ankle is fully okay now. He had some concern early on that we might have had to do surgery. Very grateful that it never came to that. For the first two weeks I had to just sit in one place and heal. If that didn't mean leavi...

Earlier this week I realized how I missed blogs and so I put out a call on my super niche microblog network for blogs to add to my RSS feeder. In return folks were all "where's your blog?" I didn't want to disappoint the *mumbles an incredibly small number under my breath* amount of people that wanted to hear more from me so I have revived the LaserDisc Rot blog. I'll still post thoughts on media here. Sometimes. Maybe. 🤷 But I'll at least do this weekly (and maybe more depending on how loquacious I'm feeling). The big project in my life right now is the Appalachia Cinema Preservation Society. It spawned from my old dream to open a LaserDisc Museum and Theater - and that dream still smolders in my heart. But I had a friend on my super niche microblog network also  putting serious consideration into wanting a theater - specifically one of the three derelict historical theaters in his township. The theater that I was once looking at for a potential site for...

In the last two weeks, two related events happened in the United States: one was that a police officer was spooked when an acorn hit his car - he hit the ground, and, terrified, he unloaded his weapon at the acorn; the second was Air Force engineer, Aaron Bushnell, self-immolating in protest of the United States' involvement with Gaza - the responding police officer pulled a gun on him. Cops only know violence. This phrase was rattling around in my head on the day that my partner and I unwittingly chose Memories of Murder for our evening film. We're both fans of Bong Joon-ho and Song Kang-ho, but we just happened to have not seen this particular film yet. So down I sat to watch it with the phrase "cops only know violence" in my head. I didn't realize how primed I was for this film. Set during the 80s in South Korea where a small community was being stalked by the country's first serial killer. The police weren't ready to recognize what they were dealing w...

I thought I'd try to do a regular review as a challenge to keep me writing. I further challenged myself with reviewing any films I had watched in the past week. Since I didn't watch anything relatively recent I thought I'd review the most obscure film I watched this week. Which means I'm reviewing Jack Arnold's 1953 film It Came from Outer Space. Among Jack Arnold's long career as a director, he's known for a short but influential stint where he focused on horror and sci-fi which included Creature from the Black Lagoon , its sequel, Tarantula! , The Incredible Shrinking Man , and a few others, but he kicked off that run with this. Our lead is Richard Carlson, who would further collaborate as the male lead in Creature from the Black Lagoon , both times as a scientist. In It Came from Outer Space , amateur astronomer, John Putnam, played by Carlson, observes a meteor crash over the tiny desert town he lives in with his girlfriend, Ellen Fields, played by Barb...