In Which I Post the Most 90's Thing I Have Found (so far)

As we exit the smoldering Chicxulub-sized crater that is 2016, I honestly just want to move right on and go right ahead and post my regularly scheduled posts as a cute, funny light in the dark.  To that end, here's something ridiculous I found in an old magazine:



There's a lot going on here.

"Forrest Gump" was a genuine phenomenon in the mid 1990's.  A lot of that had to do with the song score.  The soundtrack was one of the first CDs my mother owned and listened to on a regular basis (Side note: Soundtracks everyone's mom seemed to have a copy of in their car back in the day include "Forrest Gump", "The Bodyguard", and "Beaches".)  It was basically one-stop shopping for the greatest hits of the Baby Boomer era.

So here is an ad for a CD-ROM companion to that soundtrack.  You know how modern blu-ray discs have loads of special features?  This was like a blu-ray without the movie.  Also, you could only play it on your computer.  Also also, it looks like much of the content is now on the "Forrest Gump" 20'th anniversary blu-ray, which is nice.

So there we are.  A nice little post to kick the dust off the tires and get rolling again.  Next up, either drawings of dogs, drawings of frogs, or a review of Darren Naish's Dinosaur book.

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Sketch of the Day!

The Worst CGI In History

CHUD.com, a movie news website I enjoy, has been listing their choices for the worst instances of CGI animation in (usually) otherwise live-action films. They range from Wolverine's "Roger Rabbit" claws in "X-Men Origins" to the forty-two sauropod pileup in Peter Jackson's "King Kong". As a person who has blogged quite a lot about animation, I figured I should share it. Right now, they can all be found accumulating here, or you could start with part one and work your way through.
I have to say, I agree with most of the selections (Part One in particular, as it covers the Scorpion King sequence in "The Mummy Returns", which is easily one of the most downright embarrassing and Narm-tacular things ever put on a screen.) I have to nitpick, however, that many of the sequences were done with the best animation available at the time and simply have not aged well. That said, a fair number of them were... not. And I agree with their argument that we wouldn't be having this discussion at all if the sequences that could have been done practically were.
Take entry ten, the "Burly Brawl" in "Matrix Reloaded". Now, when I saw that at the theater I thought it was awesome. Then when I watched it again last summer it was still awesome... up until a point. There is a moment, and you can tell exactly where it is, when the film-makers eschewed practical effects and stuntwork for motion capture. This is about the only scene in the entire trilogy where they do so and... man, it just sticks out like you can't imagine. It looks like something out of "Happy Feet' and happens to be the only really badly animated scene in the trilogy.

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Speaking of absurdly bad-looking animation, I have a very strong feeling that this little slice of WTF that has recently made the animation fan website rounds is shaping up to be the next "Food Fight."

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DRAWGASMIC IS THIS WEEKEND!!! Actually, this may warrant it's own post later...

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Sketch of the Day!
Randimal anidoms!

In Which I dismantle some Old Computers before tossing them.

Wrapping up the Great Basement Cleanout, I ran into a few things that are poignantly obsolete. Things like VHS tape rewinders (tape decks tended to wear out and be the first part of a VCR to break, so this little machine would save them some stress), VCR head cleaners (special VHS tapes that cleaned the tape decks), cassingles (pretty much exactly what it sounds like; one of the amusing album covers below is a cassingle), dot-matrix printer paper (which came in big, long reams that you had to tear apart; I wish I had a picture to explain this better), and these guys:



These are backup disks for our very first computer that ever had a hard drive. I have no idea what's on any of them, so we couldn't really toss them. I'd gone through a lot of trouble taking our old computers apart and squirreling their hard disks away. (Yes, computerS. They retired to the basement and appeared to have multiplied) :



Wait for it...
Wait for it.....
Dude, I dissected a Dell.
(Really, nobody? Huh. Oh well, I didn't think it was funny ever.)
These are the "guts" (all except the hard drive, which would have fit into that empty space occupied by wires and stuff) of a Dell PC from the late 1990's. This was the youngest computer I had to dismantle. I saved the oldest for last:



Wa-hahaha... oh wow. (I apologize for the fuzzy photos, but I was taking them in a hurry while juggling my trusty screwdriver and pliers.)
This is our old Apple IIGS (Apple 2: Graphics and Sound), the very first computer my family ever owned. You can read more information about this baby at Wikipedia.
I want to point out the objects in the lower-left, because I'm sure some younger people are looking at them and thinking, "what?" Those are floppy disk drives. The smaller one near the middle was for 3.5 Floppies, the same kinds of floppy disks I showed earlier. They were called 3.5s because they were the then-remarkably tiny size of... three and a half inches. For the record, this kind of disk just went extinct very recently (I think I read that a major manufacturer just shut down production of them last week.) They were the dominant storage medium of the late '80s-well into the 1990's. Unfortunately, their capacity wasn't very large. Generally speaking, if you had a document that was more than 500 K, you were pretty screwed.
The larger disk drive is more hilarious/heartwarming to me. This was for a 5.25 inch floppy disk. These disks were actually floppy in that the namesake floppy disk was protected by thin sheets of just-barely-less-floppy plastic. Their capacity usually ranged just over 100 K, but they could be double-sided. Even so, you often had to stick in a veritable conga line of these disks just to get one program running. A modern desktop may take a while to boot up, but it's cake and ice cream compared to this.
So what does it look like inside?



Fascinating. The green piece (which I've saved and kinda want to frame because it's pwetty) fits over the front part of the drive. This was as far as I could dismantle this drive (I couldn't even crack the 3.5 drive.)
Inside the CPU...



There's a lot more empty space in here than there is in modern computers! I'm assuming that large object on the left is a fan or something. I have a great love for the "TRON" landscapes inside old computers.

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Sketch Crazy Found Art of the Day! Here, have some funny cassette tape cover art:



Not sure who the band on the right is, but thanks to this cover, I think I like them even if it turns out they are responsible for all the songs I've ever hated.