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What I'm Watching: Family Blood

A morning driving around in sunlight and dealing with the morning people made me wish for eternal darkness. Skipped over some bullshit soap operas and Buffy ripoffs with teenage vampires, found one adult vampire flick on Netflix.

Family Blood: Starts with the last moments of a vampire wrecking a family, so you know what kind of people this'll be about…

Then jumps to junkie mom Ellie in AA (which doesn't work) and new guy "Christopher" (from the last scene) who talks about "torn thru so many people". Then very long slow never-throw-out-b-roll shots of nothing interesting happening with her teenage kids.

Whatever city this is has "sketchy" neighborhoods of parks and great big houses with multiple floors and spartan concrete murder basements, ideal for serial killers/vampires; the black neighbor is right to be worried about gentrification, they'll just drain the lifeblood from your community.

Then Christopher turns Ellie by dripping some blood in her and snapping her neck; clearly the writer learned about vampires from Vampire the Masquerade, which this is the slowest fanfic of ever. Hours, days of footage later, Ellie starts to turn.

"I turned you into whatever it is that I am", says a guy who doesn't know he's a shit-sucking vampire? Everyone has known what a vampire is since Dracula in 1897 (earlier vampires just didn't get the reach of Stoker's novel). The boy who draws horror art all the time does recognize the symptoms, but doesn't say the V-word (Vampire, not vagina, tho he doesn't say the latter either). I hate this MacBeth-level actor bullshit of not naming the thing because it's "bad luck".

Also, apparently nobody uses their cellphone, because that would complicate a "plot" consisting largely of people slowly wandering around. "Dad" is seen a couple times but has no lines, probably to avoid paying scale. The speaking cast is very minimal.

It's very inconsistent about mythology. They don't have reflections, which is a strong supernatural power; it basically means they're just in your mind. They regenerate from any injury. They're superhumanly strong & fast. But sunlight & crosses do nothing, which usually work on any supernatural vamp.

The boy makes his first stake, and it's the best stake ever, stabbed with many times (but not left in the heart like you should do; I actually yelled at the screen), and then is still sharp as a razor multiple stabbings later. When I make a stake it doesn't last that long because wood's soft.

There's a few good vamp-on-human action scenes, but the only vamp-on-vamp is behind closed doors with just foley and shadows. Laaaamme. Builds up, but does not deliver.

★★☆☆☆ - I like the small personal stories, I could take the glacial pacing, if they'd shot just one good vamp-on-vamp fight scene.

There's a Turkish series "Immortals" which looks vaguely interesting, but Turkish shows tend to be pretty awful—badly written, badly acted, racist, sexist, and closeted gay/homophobic—the recent "Protectors" series as case in point—so I dunno if I'm up for 8 eps of that. If they made a 90-minute movie I might try it.

You know what was my favorite vampire movie? Dance of the Damned (1989). It has two speaking roles really, the sets & effects are minimalist, Roger Corman no-budget film. Just a sad stripper and a lonely vampire, for one last night. But it's perfect, never boring or filling dead screen time, and tense up to the last second. That's a ★★★★½ at least.

Near Dark (1987) is amazing, too, best vampires-as-hobo-junkies ever, but kind of sprawls out with the vampire pack, and the ending is absolute bullshit, shoulda been the girl bites the boy and they unlive unhappily ever after. That's also ★★★★½ but as utterly unlike DotD or FB as you can get.

I hated the Interview with the Vampire (1994) movie; the books are great fun, but cool badass mofo Brad Pitt as whiny useless Louis, and tiny neurotic anal-retentive $cientology cultist Tom Cruise as badass rock-star Lestat, was the dumbest casting fuckup in the history of bad casting. It's utterly unwatchable because of Tom Cruise squeaking out lines from his tightly-clenched sphincter-face that should be Lestat's. I know they beat Anne Rice with sacks of money to stop talking shit about it, but I think this film is why she went crazy and found Jesus. Also the sequel, completely skipping the book "The Vampire Lestat" and making Queen of the Damned (2002) which is sub-direct-to-video soap opera garbage.

I'd really like a new Castlevania season soon.

In 30 years, nobody else can make anything good about bloodsucking fiends?

What I'm Watching: Agatha Christie

The ABC Murders (2018, Amazon Prime): John Malkovitch is a fine actor. Sadly, he is 30cm too tall, very not Belgian, his accent fades in and out even in the same scene, and wouldn't shave down to a moustache, instead keeping a slightly scruffy Van Dyke which he ridiculously dyes in the first ep. Perhaps they should have done an animated Hercule Poirot show, and got him a Belgian voice coach.

Inspector Japp dies after a brief cameo (spoilers for plot-irrelevant elements, oh no), the new guy is awful and hostile, and there's no Arthur Hastings at all, so too many scenes are literally Malko-Poirot sitting alone silently waiting for the mail, instead of explaining his reasoning. No mention of his little grey cells, and even his background as gendarme is questioned with a ludicrously melodramatic new backstory which adds nothing to the plot. ABC is quite well played by Eamon Farren, the rest of the cast is forgettable.

I like the original story, and wish I'd just reread it instead of seeing this farcical reimagining.
★★☆☆☆

Ordeal By Innocence (2018, Amazon): A non-detective murder mystery. First it has to get over a big hurdle with me: It's about a rich English family, and I loathe everything about that. The father's the epitome of what most disgusts me about Humans, but there's also the thug son, the asshole son-in-law, the simpering daughter, the utterly forgettable daughter, the meek black daughter (for they are all adopted, it turns out), the gold-digging secretary, and the maid (who is apparently also an orphan, but not adopted? Well, English need someone to do the dirty work; and what you expect in an English manor is what goes on in an English manor), and the mother who was a harpy, until someone killed her.

Jack, the son accused of murder, seems like the only half decent one, but he's not around. And then an alibi shows up to distress everyone. Casting's pretty generic, tho they had to reshoot every scene of the original thug son with a new actor after the first was accused of sexual assault; but that doesn't matter much since almost every scene is two assholes leaning in doors or sitting straight in uncomfortable chairs sniping at each other.

The dead mother is increasingly shown to be worse than a harpy. You know Harry Harlow's monkey experiments with the wire mother and terrycloth mother? This woman's a wire mother. Functional but unloveable. I know the feeling.

There's a theme of fear of nuclear war, but until quite late it's never discussed, only mentioned in passing. This would've greatly enhanced the show if it was. And John Wyndham's book The Chrysalids, which is of course about nuclear war, family secrets and betrayal, rejection of the outsider and mutant.

This presentation has the awful habit of showing spoilers for the next episode over the credits, so skip forward as soon as one ends.

I don't recall this book at all, so it's somewhat of a mystery to me, but I also don't feel sympathy for any living character so don't care if they all did it.

The final scene's a little ridiculous, out of character, and unnecessary after the actual finale a minute before. Some producer had to piss in the soup to say he contributed, I expect.
★★★½☆ — I complain a lot, but I watched it in one sitting. Still hate everyone except dead Jack.

SwiftUI, SceneKit, AR, and Facebook's React are the new JavaFX

That is all.

OK, will clarify for those who don't know about JavaFX: It was a new UI metaphor/declarative model on top of Java Swing, which is a giant bloated mess on top of Java AWT, which was a thin, minimally-functional shim on top of native platform UI, usually just CPU-bound drawing in a canvas. It came out just as Java applets became the most common virus vector, and Java on the desktop was dying off (aside from Minecraft, which uses LWJGL). JavaFX was not inherently bad, but limited by its underlying tech stack. Only a few people used it seriously, and their software is now broken because it's EOL by an uncaring corporate owner.

Don't tie yourself to hot marketing garbage APIs pushed by evil mega-corporations.

What I'm Watching: Goliath S3

S1 and S2 were great scrappy lawyers vs giant foe shows, with some treachery and Billy's shitty personal life (and incidentally, he should very obviously have been named "David" instead, the writers really dropped the sling stone there). Fantastic work. Billy Bob Thornton and Nina Arianda are fantastic in these seasons.

S3 has Billy, inexplicably scruffy despite the millions he must've made in S1-S2, wandering in a daze through a shitty Indian casino, drinking and talking to a barfly, occasional hookups with "Applebees" from last season, vague yet menacing subplots that go nowhere. See, the California drought is being taken advantage of by a nefarious almond farmer Wade Blackwood (so the writers are on point with that naming; played by Dennis Quaid), borderline incestuous sister Diane, her two adopted black sons who are cuckoo, Littlecrow (Graham Greene, aka Malachi from Longmire) the casino operator, Stephanie Littlecrow (Julia Jones) as a stuntwoman who is one of the few competent, interesting characters, and "Roy" (Beau Bridges) as the sorta sympathetic conspirator.

And why not, they bring back Cooperman (William Hurt) and Marisol Silva (Ana de la Reguera) from past seasons even though they have nothing to do with the plot. The daughter and the hooker are in college, and at least they have some hope of escaping from this clusterfuck of a show. Patty just gets dicked around and keeps forgetting to bring comfortable shoes for wilderness treks.

Sherilyn Fenn shows up in flashbacks as the cause of this case, and… she does not look good. Like, she's a couple years older than me, and she looks 20 years older. Props for showing adult women on TV, but jeers for letting her on camera looking like this.

Nothing happens for hours, days of basically b-roll pickup shooting pushed onto the screen. Once in a while you catch a glimpse of a plot. Finally they do a flashback which explains most of the start of the story, and the actors/writers/director all sober up enough to film some court scenes, get through some depositions—WOO! Most exciting thing in this very very slow season. And then in the last 1.5 eps they finally have everyone do crimes to cover up their previous crimes, and happy or sad endings are distributed like drunk, diarrhetic Bad Santa showed up on the set.

To say this was a pointless waste of time is an insult to pointless wastes of time. I would've been more rewarded by watching Real Horny Housewives of East LA or whatever the fuck is on broadcast TV.

★☆☆☆☆ pretty much solely for Julia Jones' couple of fight and chase scenes, which are literally from a movie within the show.

Programming the Atari 8-bit

My programming started in 1979 with the TRS-80 Model I, but in late 1981? early 1982?, I got my Atari 800, and later a 1200XL, then Atari ST. Those are what I consider "my computers".

Last few weeks for hobby time, I've taken up playing with an Atari 8-bit emulator, and may soon buy an old machine (130XE? I guess?) and a modern SD-card reader, and HDMI adapter unless I want to set up my old CRT… Yes, this is "pointless", but it's the most emotionally rewarding programming I've done in some time.

Had to do a lot of setup to get to this point, though. Follows are my excessive notes, which will hopefully be useful to others.

The keyboard mapping in AtariMacX is weird, I finally figured out:

Mac Key Atari Key
` Break
F2 Option
F3 Select
F4 Start
F5 Reset
Sh-F5 Cold Boot
Opt-F5 Insert Char (be REAL DAMN CAREFUL not to miss the Opt key!)
Sh-Opt-F5 Insert Line (same, DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER)
Home / Opt-F7 Clear
End Atari/Inverse
PgDn / Opt-F10 Help (XL/XE)
Opt-F1 F1 (1200XL)
Opt-F2 F2 (1200XL)
Opt-F3 F3 (1200XL)
Opt-F4 F4 (1200XL)
Capslock Cycle caps, may take several tries of caps A backspace repeat until you get lowercase, not graphics or uppercase.
Sh-Capslock Uppercase, almost always works

Typing on a real Atari keyboard is probably the #1 reason to get real hardware instead of emulation.

Immediately it comes rushing back, how much I didn't like the default environment of blue screen, clicky keyboard, inset margins. Easy to fix with a few pokes, but I don't want to do that every time I reboot, so I need a startup program.

  • First, configure Atari800MacX with the subdirectories next to it. It comes with all these folders in user space, but it's actually mapped to somewhere in /var, which is awful.
  • Make a boot disk. Media -> Disk Image Conversions -> XFD to ATR, pick the DOS25.XFD image in OSRoms, and call that boot.atr, store it in Disks, Load it in D1 Cmd-1 and pick boot.atr.
  • Reboot into DOS, by Control -> Disable BASIC. Bask in the glory of Atari DOS 2.5.
  • Make a data disk, Media -> New Floppy Image, I went with Medium Density (130K) since almost everything can read that, assign to Drive 2, and call that disk2.atr or whatever.
    • From Atari DOS, Format: I <return> D2: <return> Y <return>
    • Preferences -> Boot Media -> Set to Current Media, Save Configuration
  • My Atari BASIC project on Gitlab
    • Based on what I remember of my old main menu, I had a ton more stuff but I'm slowly adding routines as I need them. This can also be a shell for new programs, delete 11-9998 and use the subroutines. I wrote Draw to test joystick & function key scanning, not to be a good paint program, typed in a Music demo to make sure I had sound working.
      • Digression: This is not an efficient structure, because high line numbers take longer to find; an optimizing Poindexter would put the subroutines tightly packed at 1-999 and the program at 1000+, but it's massively easier to read & work with this way. I won't be in BASIC that much anyway, it's just for utility work.
    • Download AUTO.LST, convert Unix newlines (char 10) to the ATASCII newline (char 155 õ), and drop it in the HardDrive1 folder.
    • % LANG=C tr '\233' '\n' <AUTO.LST.TXT >AUTO.LST
    • Or you can just Media -> Edit an .ATR disk image, import file, and that has a newline conversion.
    • From BASIC, E."H1:AUTO.LST" <return> RUN <return>, pick Y. (Script AUTORUN.SYS), and enter:
      • ?"MAINMENU"
      • E."H1:AUTO.LST"
      • RUN
      • .
    • Change H1 to D1 if you saved it in your boot.atr.
    • Now it'll do that on every bootup from that floppy. Reboot to be sure it works.
    • If you make changes to your main menu, remember to LIST "H1:AUTO.LST". I use LIST/ENTER (text LST format) instead of SAVE/LOAD (tokenized BAS format) so I can read it from the Mac; BAS is slightly smaller and much faster to load/save, but it doesn't matter with emulation or an SD-card.

    • Atari-autorunsys

  • BASIC set up and tested, and it's a convenient place for little utilities, but now for real programming.

  • Atari Macro Assembler and Program Text Editor

    • Download this, read the fine manuals; more for MEDIT than the assembler unless you're really hardcore. I will probably do little or no assembly, even tho back in the '80s I could hand-assemble short programs directly into ATASCII codes to run from BASIC; bug-eating freak that I was.
    • Read the MEDIT manual. It's quite a respectable full-screen editor with command mode for search/replace, block editing, etc.
    • Open the Atari Macro Assembler and Program Text Editor.atx (ATX is write-protected or encrypted or something; you can't use them directly, and have to disable the SIO speedup hack in emulator) disk in drive 2 of your Atari (Cmd-2), Control -> Disable BASIC (which will reboot to DOS). So you want the program files off that:
      • DOS: C <return> D2:MEDIT,D1:MEDIT <return>
      • DOS: C <return> D2:MEDITCM.BAS,D1:MEDITCM.BAS <return>
      • DOS: C <return> D2:AMAC,D1:AMAC <return> (skip if you'll never write ASM)
      • DOS: C <return> D2:SYSTEXT,D1:SYSTEXT <return> (I think only needed for AMAC?)
      • Eject: Ctrl-Cmd-2
      • Reload your data disk, Cmd-1, disk2.atr.
    • Control -> Enable BASIC, LOAD "D1:MEDITCM.BAS" <return> RUN <return> and configure MEDIT however you like.
      • Language: PAS
      • Tabstops: Set at 5 and +4 after the existing ones, because 8-wide tabs are crazy in a 40-column screen. Yes, I'm a tabs not spaces guy, OBVIOUSLY.
      • Margins: 1,40
      • Colors: 12,4,14 (sadly can't be 0 or 2 background luminance, because the cursor is black)
      • Flags: Tabs: Expand, Shift-Lock: No (starts in lowercase).
      • Save & Return to DOS.
      • You can just copy the MEDITPAS.ECF to MEDITTXT.ECF, etc., you don't need to run the tool for each language, but it doesn't have a default mode. Note you also have to copy these to each disk you're editing on, or it switches back to the stupid defaults:
      • DOS: C <return> D1:*.ECF,D2: <return>
      • DOS: L <return> MEDIT <return>, filename D2:HELLO.PAS, and enter: 
        program hello;
var c: char;
begin
  writeln('Hello, Atari!');
  read(c);
end.
      • <option> exit <start> to save & exit. Note return doesn't execute commands in MEDIT, start does. Kids Today™ have some meme about how hard it is to exit vi? Ha ha, they have no idea. RTFM.

  • Finally ready to program in Action! or Pascal, which is what I mainly did back in the day.

    • Deep Blue C: Tragically underpowered version of Small-C. I loved it as an intro to C, but didn't use C for real until the Atari ST. It did produce standalone binaries and the compiler was easy to use, IIRC. 
      UNSUPPORTED FEATURES
  Features in C not supported in DEEP BLUE C are:
  1) structures, unions
  2) multidimension arrays
  3) Floating point numbers
  4) Functions returning anything but int
  5) Unary operators: sizeof
  6) Binary operators: typecasting
DIFFERENCES FROM STANDARD C
  THE DEEP BLUE C language has the  following nonstandard features:
  1. The last clause of a "switch" statement, either "case" or "default", must
be terminated with a "break", a "continue" or a "return" statement.
  2. The ancient =<op> construct has been removed. Use <op>= instead.
  3. Characters are unsigned. Chars range in value from 0 to 255.
  4. Strings can not be continued on the next logical line.
  5. C source code lines can be a maximum of 79 characters long.
  6. Functions can have a maximum of 126 arguments.
SPECIAL SYNTAX
  C uses several ASCII characters not available on the ATARI computer's
keyboard. In particular the braces have been replaced by to two-letter
combinations $( and $), and the tilde has been replaced by $-.  The $ character
is not used in C, so your editor's find and replace command can be used to
convert standard c programs into a format acceptable to DEEP BLUE C.
    • Action!: Custom language on cart for Atari, fantastic built-in editor (later the basis for the Paperclip word processor!), had a disk runtime system so you could distribute programs (also on AtariMania). But it came out a little later than my Pascal adventures, and it's a weird super-low-level language, and I think I'm in no mood to relearn it right now. Super goddamned fast, tho. May get into this if I'm frustrated later.

    • APX Pascal: Excessively complex process with a disk swap for every compile, compiles & links into PCode, no explanation of how to boot it. This is a very user-hostile compiler.
    • Kyan Pascal: Maze of command line tools. Doesn't work, at least for me, on emulation. It cycles through the tools, but never actually builds anything, eventually crashes and corrupts video. Makes a big deal of being usable from RAMDisk, but that doesn't matter on modern hardware.
    • Draper Pascal: Which I used in the '80s. Hilariously bad editor (but I can use MEDIT, so fuck that), compiler just fucking works, but only produces PCode (.PCD), so has to start from bootdisk or run Draper's menu then your program, ick. But this was no trouble to get running, so it wins.
      • Insert drpascal.atr in drive 1, reboot, boots into a menu.
      • 3 Compile program: D2:HELLO.PAS
      • 1 Run program: D2:HELLO
      • Total success! \o/ Hit any key to exit the program.
      • Drive 1, boot.atr, Drive 2, drpascal.atr, reboot
      • DOS: C <return> D2:AUTORUN.SYS,D1:PASCAL.COM <return>
      • DOS: C <return> D2:INIT.PCD,D1:INIT.PCD <return>
      • Cmd-2, disk2.atr
      • So now I can: DOS: L <return> PASCAL.COM <return>
      • And run Pascal programs. I could make a more focused runtime menu for it, maybe dir & list all the PCD files, the INIT.PAS source is included. If I ask it to compile, it prompts to insert drpascal.atr, and then I can switch back, which is reasonable.
      • Standard library is small but effective, seems like it has all the BASIC equivalent commands, and enough POKE/PEEK/ADDR stuff to let me do everything, including Player-Missile Graphics.
      • I can presumably now move all my source and disk2.atr contents to H1, so they can be managed & edited on the Mac, but I just wanted to get things running first.
      • Probably make another gitlab project (and actually sync it from git) when I get somewhere with that.

This took quite a lot of my hobby time doing something harder than actual work, to be honest. But I'm in a good place with it now.

Where Did Music Go?

Listening to these performances from 1979, when I was a kid, and they sound so much better than anything new.

"A lot of you might not've heard it, because we've only just become fashionable."
—Lemmy, 1979, throwing all the shade at new-fans

It is very weird to me that there's been basically no new music made in the last 20 years. Some '80s-'90s bands keep truckin' along, Reznor, TOOL, and Mustaine still rock. We get some last-gasp geriatrics from Black Sabbath and Van Halen. There's like a half-dozen good new retro bands like Raveonettes, Within Temptation, Zeal & Ardour, BABYMETAL. A very few good new bands like Anamanaguchi; most chiptune is shit, but the 'guch are half rock 'n roll. I liked Slime Girls a few years ago, but that's trashy pop. Rock ain't dead but it's on life support. All the hardcore bands are gone. Rap is in a sad state when Snoop Dogg, bad joke of the '90s, is a top star of the present.

What are the kids listening to? Literally muzak, neutered Madonna imitators like Spears, Swift, and Gaga, and sucker MCs like Drake.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a cliché: Unfrozen caveman John Spartan doesn't like "mini-tunes" the kids listen to, put him back in the fridge. Middle-aged man wears black leather and wants the kids to scream into their speakers and mosh in a pit, and they dress like yuppies and want an early bedtime and quiet background noise.

Halloween Countdown Sunday Music

Odd film, but I love it. Halloween I & II completed the Michael Myers story. Then III was a totally new thing. The intent was to make an anthology series, but no, dumb people just wanted more of Michael; I think all subsequent "Halloween" films are irrelevant and stupid (OK, I do like the Rob Zombie movies). I was a spooky monster kid, but still wasn't allowed to watch the first two at the time of their release, but somehow H3 at 12 was OK. The soundtrack is one of Carpenter's better mood pieces, not as iconic or repetitive as the first two; people sometimes forget Carpenter's as much a musician as a filmmaker.

Plot & characters of the film remind me strongly of The Stuff, Phantasm (especially II-III), and Killer Klowns From Outer Space; losers struggling to expose some terrible danger to Humanity, mostly failing and running. That's what Lovecraft was on about, and how every Call of Cthulhu game should be, not gangsters throwing dynamite at Shoggoths, but truck drivers and kids running for their lives and coming across as crazy people to the useless pigs.

"And don't forget to wear your masks. The clock is ticking, it's almost time! Happy happy Halloween, Silver Shamrock!"

Bonus: