Review

Today, the name Tesla is synonymous with cars and Elon Musk’s company. Older readers may remember all the Tesla coils from video games and cheap sci-fi and horror films. For me, the name Tesla came to me via a rock band from the late 80s of the same name. It’s a long story. I’m old. Recently I wanted to find out a bit more about the real man, so I picked up this work by Marc J. Seifer, on Audible. It refers to itself as a ’life and times’ work so it’s not quite a biography as such, but it does give a decent amount of detail about the man, from humble beginnings in Serbia, through his inquiring mind and work in Europe, to his move to New York, and becoming an American citizen. ...

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of short stories ever since I read Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood” in my teens. It’s an underrated form of fictional literature in my humble opinion. If it was good enough for Hemmingway… I was looking through a few lists of great short story collections and one which regularly came up was this “Labyrinths” by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of him, and now in retrospect I’m a little embarressed as everything I’ve read about him shows how well regarded and influential he’d been. Indeed one version of this collection has a foreword by the great William Gibson. ...

That was a lot of Freddy for sure. It’s tempting to try to rank the films, but ultimately I think that’s kind of unfair, but I think we can group them. I will say that the first one was, and still is, the best if I had to choose. Also, none of them are awful films, they’re all still watchable for sure. The issue, as I’ll show with the grouping, is that some of them kind of blend in to one another. ...

So three films down, and technically four to go on this page - three from the main continuity, then a soft reboot of sorts. Some of these, as their titles suggest, get a bit formulaic, similar names, and similar themes as they develop Freddy’s backstory. There’s a little retconning, but for the most part it fits in, though who would marry even pre-Freddy Freddy is a mystery. That said, in the last 3 main films, that’s 3 in four years, so they were cranking them out and perhaps hence some similarities. Still, they all work. ...

Another BluRay film collection! I don’t remember how long it is since I’ve seen any of the Nightmare films, and I’m quite sure I’d only seen up to number 4 anyway, so here was a chance to rewatch what I had seen, and then see what the remaining were like. These were films I remember watching with friends on rental VHS tapes from the cheaper genre shelf of the local video rental shop (for me that was Tates or Spar). We’d be watching them on an old school CRT TV in 4:3 format around someone’s family TV when their parents were out, or on tiny screens in our bedrooms. ...

For a couple of years, some of my in-house functionality was being handled by a couple of Raspberry Pi’s - my old 1B was doing Pi-hole duty, and a 2 was my always-on Syncthing hub. I’d actually had no problem at all with either of these doing these roles, perhaps with the exception that the 1B, whilst fine for DNS sinkhole duties, when doing any work via the web UI, especially searches and analysis and such, was as slow as you’d expect. Syncthing on the Pi2 was fine; the only issue was a concern on these things running from SD cards for the long term. ...

Just over a year ago, whilst browsing Amazon.com, I saw a BluRay box set of Battlestar Galactica - and that’s all of the Battlestar Galactica - from the original series, the 1980 series through to the 2005 reboot all its spin-off films and the somewhat ill-fated prequel series. Of course, I bought it! How could I not? I really liked the reboot in the mid-naughties but could only see it again via a friend’s BD collection since streaming availability here in Japan has been a bit hit and miss over the years, and I’d never seen any of the other content (save for a few of the web episodes and films) and I hadn’t seen any of the Caprica prequel series. ...

“You have 20 seconds to comply” Such a famous line, and yet it’s not even said by the titular character, but we’ll come to that. Robocop was from an era in the 1980s when violence in films was controversial and directors like Paul Verhoeven were famous for their sheer amount of gun violence, or perhaps it was the love of squibs for entry / exit wounds? I was in my teens when I first saw Robocop in the late 1980s, on a rental VHS tape hooked up to a small 21" 4:3 CRT, with a bunch of friends who would get together to watch horror, sci-fi and generally low quality B Movies from local rental shops. The film played beautifully into the 80s obsessions of the Cold War, drug wars and fears of a Corporate led future. ...

“Be excellent to each other.” I first saw Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure after its 1989 release on VHS rental. This means it was in 4:3 aspect ratio with pan and scan (aka full screen) on my ~17" CRT TV in glorious mono sound. I watched it quite a few times, but I haven’t seen it since then. This time around I was watching the now trilogy of Bill and Ted films on my old 47" LCD TV, with real stereo sound from a real sound system, and presented in the correct ‘widescreen’ aspect ratio, all from Bluray! Truly I am living in the future. ...

2014, Directed by David Robert Mitchell, 1hr 41 mins. The basic plot of ‘It Follows’ goes like this - a malevolent entity is killing people who have a sort of curse they received by having sex with someone else who has that curse, and the only way to stop this thing stalking and killing them, is having sex with someone else, then it goes after the other person first. Once it kills them though, it goes back to the previous person, so it’s in a persons interest to pass it on. Simple, right? ...