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The Relic

Sunday, July 21st, 2024

Yesterday I found this in the attic:

It’s my calculator from high school! This was purchased in 1988 and I used it throughout year 11 and 12 and into university. It’s not a good calculator by todays standards, but in 1988 it was high-end and not only was it very useful for my schoolwork but I also used it a lot for schoolyard gambling via the inbuilt random number function.

As you can see I ~~vandalized~~ decorated it quite a bit!

In addition to ‘Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds‘ scratched under the display (and made more visible by adding crayon) it also has ‘The Mission‘ on the top…

And ‘Phobia‘ (a Nephilim song) on the side.

On the back we see ‘Nephilim‘, an R-rating sticker (from a VHS or magazine), a band name written using letter stickers and my own name (which I blacked out) followed by ‘T32‘ for Tutor Group 32, my high school class.

Apparently only one instance of ‘The Sisters of Mercy‘ on the back was insufficient since I also carved it at the bottom, and then covered that with two wonderfully retro stickers from my then-favourite record store!

Perhaps most delightful is the graffiti around the keys. It’s difficult to photograph because the ink has mostly faded, but I’ve circled all I could find. They are: ‘Jesus Loves The Sisters‘ (yellow), ‘Burn‘ (a song reference, purple), ‘Fields Of The Nephilim‘ (green), ‘Jesus‘ (white), ‘Depeche‘ (above the ‘mode’ button, blue), ‘SMC [heart] Bob‘ (in Sue’s handwriting, red) and something I can’t read under the ‘Inv’ button (orange).

And of course in case you missed it, a big fat GOTH in letter stickers 🙂

There’s countless memories in this simple device, and just seeing it yesterday brought back so many of them. For me this is priceless, and it’s now been very carefully packed away to survive another 30+ years 🙂

Posted in Blog, History, Memories, Tech | 2 Comments »

Old Tech

Saturday, July 20th, 2024

I’ve been doing another attic purge, and in the midst of book recycling and comic donating and unwanted toy trashing I found a few boxes of almpst-forgotten old tech. Let’s see some of what was in them!

The above is a small Polaroid camera that used special film to produce tiny stamp-sized photos. The photos we took using this have mostly faded over the years, so this is a classic example of ephemeral technology. The same technology continues today in the Instax cameras, which I’m sure will fill attic boxes in years to come.

The above was our first Polaroid, and produced the full-sized pictures that were known worldwide. We never used it much since the film was so expensive. Over the years the plastic of the flashbulb yellowed, the rubber used for the strap became brittle and broke, and the adhesive on the back of the brand sticker lost its stick.

This was the only portable CD player I ever owned in the US (or ever?) and I don’t recall ever using it except perhaps in a car via the cassette adaptor. It no longer works, probably due to a belt for the motor having perished long ago.

To my great surprise this portable minidisc player worked, and the disc inside contained a recording of a physics lecture I attended about 24 years ago! The detritus on the microphone cable is the remains of an elastic band that had perished over the years. I used to have a minidisc player in my car, and we still have a console-sized minidisc player set up downstairs, although I haven’t powered it on for many years!

This is a relic of a bygone era: a wireless mouse from the days before Bluetooth! That thing on the left is the receiver, which connected to the PC via a serial port. I can barely remember ever using this, although I imagine it was wonderful when I got it.

We used our first (and only) camcorder a lot, although these days it seems impossible large and cumbersome. It also no longer works, having problems reading the tape and with the eject mechanism. Many years ago I encoded all the movies from cassette onto CDs but we haven’t watched any for decades.

Some computer memory and an Ethernet card. These were for old laptops, including…

My first laptop! I loved this and used it mostly for gaming. It seemed fairly small and portable at the time, although by todays standards it’s far too large and heavy to port around. I plugged it in but it doesn’t get past the above screen. I recall the hard-drive failed one day when I was using it and it has basically been a brick ever since.

This was my last laptop, a still-small Sony model. I used this a lot including to code my PhD simulation and have very fond memories of it. Alas it broke in two ways: first the harddrive started failing and then this happened:

I had another laptop as well; a very small VAIO model I took with me when I traveled. I recall it also broke but don’t remember what I did with it. Perhaps it’s still in the attic in another box?

The left was Kristin’s first phone, the middle my first, and the right my first that could message. The Virgin one still feels wonderful to hold, and closes up to be extremely tiny. I remember I had to pay per text sent, and since I didn’t have a contract I had to purchase top-up cards at the store!

There’s also this phone, and to be honest I don’t remember it at all. The Ultraman Tiga sticker on the back is proof it was mine, and my guess would be I used it between the two in the previous photo, in the very early 2000s.

As technology improved so did our phones, and the above were what we (and most other people!) were using before smartphones took over. They’re still beautiful little pieces of tech – especially the ones on the right – and I have fond memories of them.

Incidentally I attempted to power on the phones I had chargers for but none of them would get past the startup screen. Maybe they’re looking for a signal that no longer exists?

We’ve had lots of digital cameras over the years, and the above are what remains. A couple of them are dead and the ones that still work utilize memory cards I can no longer read and even the best one (the lower right) produces images of quality much, much less than our current phones. They were all great in their day, but they’re just curios for non-collectors now.

This one is very small and I remember I loved how easy it was to carry it around with me. We even had a smaller one, but the CCD failed and I’m sure I trashed it years ago.

As Apple users for decades now we have a good collection of obsolete Apple products including the above two tiny iPods. We actually have seven iPods in this house, two of which are still in active use!

All the above – two iPads, two iPhones, an iPod touch, an iPod (that went through the washing machine and emerged unscathed) and a first generation AppleTV – are old enough now they can’t be updated and some can’t even hold a charge. They’re all electronic junk now, and will soon be recycled at our local Apple Store.

With a few exceptions (the minidisc player, iPods and one phone) everything on this page has now been trashed or recycled. This is only a selection of what I found, and the amount of items tossed was heavy enough that I could barely lift it all.

A few of the other items I kept are worth sharing here as well, although special enough they warrant their own dedicated posts. Watch for them!

Posted in Blog, History, Memories, Retro, Tech, Time | 1 Comment »

The Japan Postcards

Friday, July 19th, 2024

It’s been more than a month since I returned from Japan, and I think it’s time I did the partner post to this one from a few weeks back. I was hesitating because six of the 35 postcards I sent us from Japan have unfortunately yet to arrive. Since it’s been a few weeks since we got the last one, I’ve all but given up on them 🙁

Why so many cards? Three reasons: I like writing and sending cards, the variety in Japan is astonishing and I had lots of stamps! The cards I send from Japan tend to fall into two categories: the tourist ones such as the four shown above, and the pop-culture ones such as these:

From the left we have a Godzilla card, a Junji Ito card and an Ultraman card. All these are metallic and foiled, and look wonderful.

I suppose there’s a third category as well: ‘unusual’ which includes shaped and lenticular cards. I’m beginning to think the Japanese post office has it in for such cards, since a lenticular I sent us back in January never arrived and I believe two of the missing ones from this last trip were shaped and lenticular as well.

Postcards are almost always written in the hotel room of an evening while watching trashy TV, although sometimes I’ll write them at a restaurant or to pass the time while traveling (on a train or plane for instance). Notably I almost always write them in laundromats, and have done so in about seven countries now.

Writing so many cards would be a challenge be for many I suspect, but I have a simple system: one describes the day (what I did, what I saw, what I ate, what I bought etc) and the other is unrelated musings or crazy nonsense. The above is an example of the former. (Yes almost all the clothes I took with me were discarded to make suitcase space!)

And that is an example of the latter. Bernard had sent me a set of (honestly terrible) Star Wars rubber stamps and the Chewbacca caught my eye and traveled with me. One thing led to another and soon enough the stamp was writing his own postcards under an assumed name. Did you get a card from APELINQ?

As I said I had loads of Japanese stamps, both because Sue had given me some in Australia (leftovers from her trip) and because I went crazy in several post offices. The above are the staples that have been in print for years now, and you’ll see them on Japanese cards going back a decade or more. There’s also a dog, but I think he must be on one of the missing cards.

Every month Japan prints a special set of themed stamps, and whenever I visit I buy them and use them. I forget the actual themes of the sets I purchased while I was there, but I believe one was ‘summer’ and another ‘flowers’. The rabbit and moon were from the same themed sheet, but I don’t recall what it was.

I hardly sent any flower stamps to myself, and there was an entire sheet of food stamps I don’t have any photos of because the ones I sent myself were probably on the lost cards.

As with most trips I try to vary the stamps on the cards I send, and since each of these themed sheets has ten unique stamps on it you very likely received some not shown here. Why not check yours and see?

The top left one was from a themed sheet showing photographs of tourist locations. I liked these a lot and since this is the only example on the cards I have received I assume I used them on the missing cards. I hope they one day arrive!

I wonder what the other circular bird stamps were and who got them?

I purchased the above stamps (which came from the same commemorative sheet) in Kinugawa, from a post office that was extravagantly staffed and stocked for such an ‘abandoned’ town. As usual communication was via translator, and the young lady that served me went to extraordinary lengths in giving me printed guides on how to mail items in Japan and how to affix stamps. She also gave me dozens of airmail stickers that I promptly lost, although I notice some of the cards we received have them on which means someone in the postal service affixed them!

I hope writing this post triggers some sort of cosmic reward, and the other six cards arrive soon. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed a glimpse into the postcards of my trip, which for me are always the #1 souvenir 🙂

Posted in Blog, Japan, Postcards, Stamps | Comments Closed

Classic Doctor Who Trading Cards

Monday, July 8th, 2024

I bought thirteen packs of Doctor Who trading cards last year and I think they’ve aged enough. Time to open them!

As you can see there were four series, released from 1994 through 1996. Unusually these were printed by an American company, but even though I knew of them and looked for them at the time I never saw them sold here. They of course only cover classic Who, since the relaunch was several years away when these were printed.

The above shows the contents of a series 1 pack. Ten cards, each nicely designed (especially for the time) and with a great deal of text on the back. I would have loved these thirty years ago!

A nice touch is that the first three series continue numbering and share design, and it’s almost impossible to tell which particular series a card comes from if you don’t look at the number. Here are cards from each of the first three sets:

Series 1 and 2 have a small (about 1 in 500) chance of autographs in the packs. Of particular interest to me was the Jon Pertwee autograph apparently possible in series 2, and there were traces of excitement in the house as I opened the packs. Alas I was not lucky, and in fact only got two chase cards between all 13 packs:

The leftmost is a glossy card that has a puzzle piece on the back, and the rightmost is a very nicely done foil card (both these came from series 3 packs). These are of average quality for chase cards of that era, and I think would have been satisfying enough to pull from packs.

The 4th series was a surprise. Not only is the design completely different and the numbering resets, but the cards are uglier, many of them are poorly aligned or even miscut and the text written on the back not as good. If I’d bought these in 1996 I would have expected consistency with the first 3 sets (based on the wrapper) and would have been disappointed with the changes.

Overall though, it was fun opening these 30 year old packs of cards, and I’m happy I only got a single double and now have about a third of the full set!

Now let’s go back even further… almost fifty years to be precise!

Back in 1976 Ty-Phoo tea (in the UK) had a promotion called The Amazing World Of Doctor Who. This comprised a booklet, wall chart and set of 12 trading cards randomly packed into boxes of tea. Here’s the full set:

I bought these (for only $5!) at the antique store we visited the other day. They’re in incredible condition for their age, and as a relic of now-ancient Who they’re fantastic. As a fourteen-year-old I would have treasured these!

The back of each card has the name of the character/monster shown, and information on how to buy the book. Based on the rates quoted, you’d have needed to drink a lot of tea to collect a full set of these, so I suppose I’m fairly lucky I own them!

They’ll happily live in a case in a box in a chest for ever 🙂

Posted in Blog, Collecting, History, Otaku, Retro, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

60 More Hours Of Ultraman!

Tuesday, July 2nd, 2024

As of my last update I had watched over 360 hours of Ultraman series. Only a fool would have stopped, so let’s catch up with what I’ve seen since then…

Ultraman Z (2020, 25 episodes, 12.5 hours)

This one has a fantastic cast with likable guys, lovable girls and the brilliant inclusion of ex-villian Jugglus Juggler as the captain of the defense force. It started very strong, but kept getting better and better until the very end. I loved the many cameos (Geed, Zero and Ace), the fact Z got the Beliarok sword, and that robot versions of famous kaiju were used as Earth defense vehicles. In addition to great characters and story, the special effects are great and the final ‘Zestium Beam’ in episode 25 may be the best ever in Ultra-history! The opening theme is great as well. This is one of my all-time favourite Ultra series.

Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Absolute Conspiracy (2020, 2 hours)

This is a short web series (on YouTube) that introduces ‘The Absolutians’ led by the incredible powerful ‘Absolute Tartarus’; a sort of evil version of Ultramen with incredible visual design. The story is about Ultras investigating the universal threat of the Absolutians. In truth, this series is just an excuse for lots of over-the-top and CGI-heavy fights, and the plot is bonkers madness. Tartarus is super cool, and it was cool to see Belial and Tregear before they turned evil, but the highlight for me was the splash screens introducing every Ultra when they appeared. It was lovely to see 80 again! Overall a fun watch.

Ultraman Trigger (2021, 25 episodes, 12.5 hours)

This was a heavily hyped series, since it’s the spiritual successor of Ultraman Tiga which remains one of the highest rated Ultra series of all time. Overall I enjoyed it, but not as much as Z. The plot is heavily based around the history of Trigger himself, who has a dark side (‘Trigger Dark’) and an evil ex-girlfriend! It was all a little weird but the cast is good and the chemistry between them – especially the flamboyant intergalactic thief character – was strong. The effects in this series evolved from ‘great’ to ‘extremely good’, and I think this was the first series where some of the CGI was essentially seamless to the live action. I liked the ending, but it was somewhat unsatisfying since there’s currently no translated way to watch the sequel film. Worth watching.

Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Destined Crossroad (2022, 2 hours)

This is the sequel to the previous year’s Ultra Galaxy Fight series (and is also on YouTube) and the story continues on directly with the Absolutian threat. One notable element is the addition of a brand new ultra – named Regulos – who is held capture by the Absolutians and is a bit of a mystery. I wonder if we’ll find out who he is…? Plot aside, this is another endless series of high-powered fights between Ultras and all sorts of foes and since it includes dozens and dozens of Ultras it’s obviously red meat for a fan like me 🙂

Ultraman Decker (2022, 25 episodes, 12.5 hours)

Tsuburaya have been knocking them out of the park for a few years now, and this series from 2022 continued the high production values of Trigger and Z with a – once again – great cast with wonderful chemistry. The leader seems stilted at first but isn’t at all, the robot (Hane2) is fun but the girl (Kirino) is mesmerizingly cute and – for me – stole every scene she was in! There were a lot of nostalgic episodes in this one that gave me the feels, and more than once this story resonated with my past experiences visiting Japan. The future storyline segments involving the ‘original’ decker were especially good science fiction, and I’d love to see a series based around the human Decker from the future. I loved that I’ve got a bunch of the cards Decker uses to transform since they’re the same ones used by the Ultraman arcade game at that time (that I got addicted to in a couple of Japan trips). This is another wonderful Ultra series.

Ultraman Regulos (2019, 6 episodes, 1.5 hours)

This is a YouTube series about a mysterious Ultra who trains to become the grandmaster of ‘Cosmo Beast Style’ martial arts. It’s an unusual introduction to a new Ultra, and making him a martial artist is cool but it’s also a bit weird. This of course explains the character that was introduced in The Destined Crossroads, and it was clever that it’s also a backstory for Absolut Diavolo. Oh, and it’s bonkers as well.

Ultraman Blazar (2023, 25 episodes, 12.5 hours)

This was the first post-Shin Ultraman series and it shows. For starters Blazar’s host is an adult with a wife and child, and the series is divorced from previous lore, with all-new kaiju and no crossovers at all. The team is much more believable and human than in any previous show, and they question events in the same way the characters of Shin did. The story is full of mystery, and slow-burning under the monster-of-the-week episodes is an unfolding conspiracy unlike anything in previous Ultra-series. Blazar himself is a very unusual Ultra, and if I have any criticism of the show it’s that we don’t learn enough about him. The special effects are extremely good, especially some of Blazar’s attacks. One of my all-time favourite Ultra series, and this will be my recommendation for a starting point for older viewers.

Ultraman Regulos: First Mission (2022, 20 minutes)

A short YouTube special where Regulos (and Ultraman Ribut) team up to defeat a threat. Basically an excuse for Regulos to show us his ‘Cosmo Beast’ powers, it’s silly fun and as with the others in this series heavy on lore and Ultra history.

Ultraman Rising (2024, 2 hours)

This Netflix Ultraman animated film just came out, and it tells a story of a young baseball hero who unwillingly inherited the mantle of Ultraman. The kid-friendly story involves a baby kaiju and occasionally gets a bit too cute, but the show is loaded with references to Ultra-history and is a labor of love by those who made it. The visuals are beautiful, and special mention must be given to ILM for the special attack effects which are breathtaking. I enjoyed this one much more than I thought I would, and very much hope we get the teased sequel.

While I was watching the above main series, I also made the Bandai model kit for each Ultra! These were inexpensive, easy and fun to assemble, and all of them look great. I hope Bandai makes similar kits for older Ultramen.

That’s 420 hours of Ultraman so far! Am I done? Of course not! I’m currently watching Ultraman Max, have three other old series on DVD to watch, and the brand new series Ultraman Arc begins (on YouTube) this weekend! Guess who’ll be watching it on day one? 🙂

Posted in Blog, Otaku, TV | Comments Closed

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