Friday Night 80s – Week 4

It’s that time again. 🙂

1982’s “Hey Mickey”, which resulted in much speculation about a fetish for a certain mouse. O_O

And… (Since I’m late AGAIN), a two-fer

Another 1982 classic.

BRIEF Update and SWTOR CR8-O-M4T!!!

Otherwise known as a Czerka Corp Crate-O-Matic in Star Wars, The Old Republic.

I scored one yesterday!

What is it, you ask?!? A curiosity primarily, BUT it’s also the absolute most rare item in the game. It allows you to disguise yourself as a shipping crate, which supposedly will let you not be detected by enemy non-player characters. I have yet to verify that claim. At any rate, it’s potentially handy for stealth based characters at the very least. 🙂

So yes, FINALLY a bit of good luck. If the thing was sellable, I could write my own check for an obscene amount of in-game currency via the game’s trade network. One does not simply SELL a crate-o-matic however. It’s a rare goodie.

The Actual Update:

Beyond that, there’s not much to report. We’re in a holding pattern until we talk to a termite inspector and a lawyer so we can better plot a path forward. Right now, there are so many variables flying our way from out of left field, it’s hard to formulate any sort of a plan.

We did find out today that the roof on the new place is indeed older than disclosed and in worse shape than the initial home inspection said.

We’ll see how much, if any, of that is from termites.

Monday Meals Returns (Late)

LOL

My food posts used to have quite a following. The weather here has been horrible though; more rain than I saw in 10 years back in California. Then the last two months has been house / moving / kitty drama.

I had a few food posts ready to go, but the pics disappeared (along with motivation). HOWEVER, I did manage to find my birthday dinner pics from… a while back. 😉

Yes, we started with spare ribs. My go to for MY day… for a few years now. No, they’re NOT undercooked either. THAT is insanely deep smoked flavor as they were cooked as low and slow as I possibly could. I think they took about 10 hours. Most quality rib joints only cook theirs for about 6 hours.

There was also some corn bread:

And some homemade mac and cheese:

The Panko breading on top didn’t brown too well unfortunately. Blame the cheeses.

My world famous, made from scratch guacamole (appetizer):

And salad and veggies also, but the pics seem to have disappeared… Well, all but one:

Fett Uber Stark

Just something to take my mind off a departed pet and the worst real estate deal ever.

She Didn’t Make It

I mentioned in my “Month from Hell” post that on top of everything else, we had a really sick cat on our hands.

If you look closely, you can see she was bloated around her mid section, but insanely thin around her hips and “waist”

After Banfield passed us off immediately to a pet emergency center (after telling us for ages she was just overweight), and we got jerked around by that pet hospital for a week and $1500, we took her to another pet ER. They did surgery and cleaned out what turned out to be some sort of a massive infection in her mid section. The Internal Medicine vet and the Surgeon had never seen anything quite like it.

After a day recovering in the pet hospital, she came home with us. She seemed to be slowly getting better despite not eating or drinking much at first. We took her with us to the new house today so we could get some work done while still keeping an eye on her.

New space, so (particularly being an indoor only cat) she was a bit nervous, but seemed to be adjusting, and enjoying the attention. We packed her up in her carrier to take her back to the current (rental) house, and when we opened the carrier, she was dead. 😥😭😟

We had her ten years… adopted her probably a little earlier than she should have been put up for adoption, given how small she was. She was almost all of what got me through many of the bad days I’ve had over the years. $7000 total spent (which REALLY hurt our house repair budget) and all we got with her was two days.

I miss my baby kitty. I’ve cried off and on all night. I want to scream but nothing will come out. The worst part is I can’t stop wondering if she’d still be alive if we mistrusted Banfield sooner or at least hadn’t taken her on the trip today. 😫 I don’t know if what happened was that bounce back phenomenon where a dying person or pet seems to recover temporarily, long enough to sort of say good bye, or we did something that killed her.

I’ve been miserable to the point of not being able to post (and I’ve had numerous topics lined up ready to go) or reply much for almost two months. Now this…

Life has been nothing but one giant shit sandwich since we began the move out here.

R.I.P. Chloe. There are NO words for how much you’ll be missed…

Saturday Morning Fun – Week 1

As recently promised, this is the start of my new weekly spot on the days of Saturday Morning Cartoons… although not all Saturday Morning shows were cartoons.

There are several more popular or well known cartoons, BUT I figured I’d start with something a little on the obscure side. Primarily because I stumbled back upon them recently and the theme song has been stuck in my head for weeks. I give you 1984’s two season wonder:

KIDD VIDEO:

Yes, TVs really used to look like that.

Kidd Video was the adventures of a teen band trapped in cartoon land and trying to escape from (and thwart) the villainous “Master Blaster”. The show also featured the live version of the group going a music video that was (loosely) connected to the plot of the episode. As one video (which I’ll post below) said, it was MTV for kids.

A bit ahead of it’s time as well, since the meta level theme was musicians (the kids) trying to escape the control of the evil corporate music executive (Master Blaster). I’m half surprised nobody attempted a reboot when the war over Streaming and Digital rights heated up.

Fun show however, and unlike quite a few shows back then, it was NOT merchandise driven. For 80s bubblegum pop created for a cartoon show, the music wasn’t half bad either.

Note also the now all but forgotten Subaru Brat “truck” that Whiz is driving and how the other guy rides in the back… without dying! Different times indeed. 🙂

Here’s that video, telling a little more in-depth version of the show’s story:

YouTube has several videos of full episodes, as well as the group’s music videos that ran as part of the show.

Back to School:

Because it wouldn’t be Saturday Morning TV without Schoolhouse Rock…

Friday Night 80s – Week 3

Almost forgot here. It’s been a hell of a week. Since I’m late however, here’s a 2 for 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjPau5QYtYs

Safety Dance was a mainstay of the Friday Night 80s on Star 94.1 back in the day. 🙂

AND… THE one that started it all; the very first video EVER on MTV… back when MTV actually played music:

And the Latest “Reboot It, Reshoot It” Award Goes To:

The CW Network (yet again) for their planned reboot of Babylon 5:

J. Michael Straczynski Explains Why Babylon 5 Had to Be Rebooted (Gizmodo Article)

Image via TVSeriesFinale.com

“You cannot step in the same river twice, for the river has changed, and you have changed.”

The above image from TVSeriesFinale.com was actually attached to an article about why Babylon 5 will never be rebooted. THAT was 2018 though, and they failed to account for the CW Network’s obsession with reboots (and DC Superheroes). Yes, announced a day and a half ago, The CW is indeed working on a reboot of Babylon 5.

Never let the tackiness of whipping a dead horse stand in the way of pandering for profit. You name it, the CW (and CBS) will reboot it.

Will it be the same without Jerry Doyle (and the other originals)? Questionable. Such is modern TV (and movies, music and even video games).

*sits back and waits for the announcement that Buffy and Angel are being rebooted… or maybe FIREFLY!*

Is My 35mm Nikon Now Obsolete?

Cellphone camera technology has officially hit the point of wowing me. I remember the EARLY days of phone cameras when the picture quality was on par with a floppy disk video game’s VGA graphics, lol

Enter the Samsung S21 Ultra:

Image via Samsung.com

One spec sneaked into that pic already; the FRONT camera is 40 Megapixels. By comparison my Nikon D3400 is a 24 Megapixel camera:

Image via Walmart.com

That’s nearly identical to the kit I got at a big box membership store before our honeymoon in Hawai’i. The camera let me take some pretty spectacular shots. Most of the ones I posted here from that trip were actually taken with my iPhone 10 simply because the file sizes were too big with the Nikon:

Suffice it to say the Nikon turned out images that were twice as good and enlarged better. We have five of them on our dining room wall. Apple is still plodding along at 12 megapixels for it’s newest camera phones. The lens quality is better with each new version, BUT the iPhone 13 is still 1/2 the base level image quality of the Nikon.

Let’s get back to the Samsung though:

Image via Samsung.com

Yes, you read that correctly… The primary ‘wide angle’ lens is 108 megapixels!

An actual pic from the camera, via Samsung,com

Samsung is also claiming a 100x “Space Zoom” on it. The folks at the local phone store said one recent customer zoomed in on a water tank on a hill in the distance (eyeballing it, it looked like about 2 miles away), and they were all able to read the print on the water tank.

What is “Space Zoom”?

I had to look this one up myself. It’s a combination of optical and digital zoom. Any true camera nut will tell you that there’s no substitute for true optical zoom. It’s real picture quality vs artificial enhancement. HOWEVER… all you have to do is look at the picture above this one to see that the camera phone definitely seems to have good lens quality also.

Test Drive Pending:

Will it replace a true 35mm DSLR camera? We shall soon find out. My spouse and I got fed up with our insanely high bill from AT&T, and switched carriers. We’re going to save over 30% monthly on our bill and get two new S21 Ultras. We’re just waiting for the phones to be delivered. After some test driving, I’ll report back on the camera quality. Maybe I’ll even do a full review.

Our Nikon D3400 is considered an “entry level” 35mm camera. There are ones out there with higher resolution capability. Most of them come with extremely high price tags also. I’m skeptical that the Samsung’s phone can compete with a professional level DSLR with a good lens kit. Lens size, and even file format makes a difference. RAW files save an incredible amount of detail that even a JPEG loses.

An Expert Explanation (AKA Don’t Believe the Hype)

In fact, I found somebody who did a quickie comparison on YouTube already:

If you don’t want to watch the 5 minute comparison… The image quality was extremely close in most cases, however, when he got back to file format / size and the ability to edit pics at a professional level, here’s what he had in the notes of the video:

“Why did I lightly edit the Canon 1DX Mark II pictures instead of the Galaxy S21 Ultra pictures? Because the highly compressed .jpg images coming out of the Galaxy S21 Ultra would probably have fallen apart if I tried to push the color as much as I did with the Canon 1DX Mark II.”

He goes on to explain that camera image sensor and lens size make a huge difference in how much light can be captured, and thus how much fine detail can be captured. A dedicated DSLR camera has 12x the lens and camera sensor size.

The fact that the newest camera phone can turn out 99% equal quality base images is due to the phone essentially photoshopping the image immediately after taking it. Settings like portrait mode use a combination of minor lens manipulation and built in filters to enhance the the clarity and color of picture.

Conclusion:

A camera phone isn’t likely to replace a true professional’s camera kit for years to come. For the rest of us who simply want our vacation photos to look as good as possible, the need for a dedicated camera may very well be drawing to an end.

Despite the above video being very credible, I will be doing my own testing and posting the results here. We’ll see for ourselves if a camera phone has finally reached the point of replacing a 35mm DSLR for the typical home photographer.

The Superfriends Live On!

For those not blessed enough to know, the Superfriends was the DC Comics Saturday Morning Cartoons show from 1973 to 1985:

There are, as it turns out, quite a few of these remakes on YouTube. This one is even kind of close to the animated original:

So why the big deal? 12 years running was probably a record on Saturday morning cartoons. More than that, I had a really crappy childhood. Even my family was a bad influence. The fact that I turned out halfway decent with a sense of right and wrong, can largely be attributed to this show. 🙂

Granted, nowadays I like more sophisticated plots, but this still takes me back to a time when heroes were heroes and villains were not poor misunderstood victims whose violence and cruelty should be excused.

This gave me another idea for a fun topic on the blog. I already have Friday Night 80s started. I’m going to start posting some of the best of Saturday Morning Cartoons on Saturdays.