TIMtheTOON

I’d written before about the man who died and left his wife with a garage full of boxes of Mac junk he had collected over the years. I like collecting this old, hard-to-find memorabilia, and found myself the owner of three more boxes of old Mac parts my friends had dropped off, after helping the departed’s wife clear his junk out of their house (evidently she wasn’t as sentimental). I think it’s a cute hobby, getting hardware and software twenty years past its prime humming again, even trying to get it to work with modern computers, like waking up a cryogenically frozen time traveler to the distant and bewildering future after the year 2001.

But there’s a point where all this collecting becomes pathological, and I felt a little sad digging through the deceased’s box of various manuals and peripherals. Well, not the peripherals themselves; they were long gone — I was looking at just their boxes. A box of boxes. Each one neatly preserved, flattened in a display of efficiency and economy of space, oblivious to the sad fact that these things weren’t worth keeping in the first place. What would drive a person to save just the boxes? I thought, fighting back the awareness of the various LEGO boxes squirreled away in the nooks of my apartment.

It seemed to me an inability to separate priceless from worthless; should one ever need to know the uplink speed, the version number, or how to reset some archaic device’s password, that data would be neatly shelved away, on the off-chance of that scrap of cardboard one day becoming invaluable.

Rather than learn what information was important about each device, and in the process separate the signal from the noise, the pack rat simply files it all away: dictated, not read. I believe this is the behavior of a person who prefers to catalog their experiences, rather than allow the ephemera of life to pass through them, and in that way they’re really cataloging their life rather than experiencing it.

Getting these boxes made me take a long look at myself, and raised some difficult questions. Questions like why do I have five modems when I don’t have a phone line? How many SE/30s is enough? And more importantly: how do I get rid of this stuff? And which of these things should I keep?

Thanks to CafePress, I have two new buttons.

I’m sure any geek can guess the first one, but with all those weird comics you read, are you going to tell me you don’t know what the second one means…?

It’s written all over your frontal lobes, love.

I knew any exhibit as obtuse as the one I saw at Comic-Con this weekend had to be about The Prisoner! I visited the address on the card I was handed: 70.87.154.219. After staring at an unhelpful splash screen for an awkwardly long time, eventually the site loaded: six screens of 6 x 6 images apiece. All I had to do to unlock their hidden meaning was to click on images with six of something in them. I’m starting to detect a theme here…

Anyway, here are some of the images I found which worked for me.

• six red locks on teal wooden door
• 6 sign on green brick wall
• black stadium seats among red seats
• roulette wheel on 6
• six-fingered hand
• rotary phone face all 6’s
• six stacked stones against blue sky
• digital stock chart
• six diamonds
• Q-bert blocks

Pictures with six things in them, easy enough. This list can also be described as “things they already know at kotaku, io9 or toplessrobot”, but I thought I’d list it here anyway. After you solve this little puzzle, it takes you to a place to enter your email address, then dumps you out on an already available blog following the remake of The Prisoner. The number they gave me is 590875… but I refuse to answer to it.

And thus my viral marketing role is fulfilled. Enjoy!

File under: impotent nerd rage, big-time important stuff

I’m sorry to report that “Home Is Where The Hate Is” has been the first lame episode of The Venture Bros.

*DISAPPOINTING SPOILER ALERT*

The hilarious and edgy aside about Sergeant Hatred’s pedophilia problem alluded to in season two was blandly dragged out only in service of a couple of toothless gags. The bomb in Dr. Venture’s back, sure to unravel Sgt. Hatred’s career and also the endgame in The Monarch’s henching plans? Ends in a fizzle. Literally. I was on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what Dr. Girlfriend’s murderous moppets would do once they caught 24 and 21, or what plan the henchman would form to escape the tiny terrors, only to have the episode proper end with them still on the run. Again, no ending. It’s like the writers simply gave up 2/3rds of the way through. You’ll notice even Brock is disinterested in the episode’s proceedings.

I can accept the episodes that are light on action because they usually advance the characters, but this takes two minor footnotes (The Monarch moves into Phantom Limb’s place, Sgt. Hatred runs a by-the-book henching arching of Dr. Venture) and stretches them out into a mediocre 22 minutes. After last week’s episode — or the exceptional, mind-blowing season three opener — I know what the writers are capable of. This isn’t even close.

*END OF DISAPPOINTING SPOILERS, I HOPE*

You can buy a tee-shirt commemorating the worst episode yet of Venture Bros, but why?

After the last week or so you’d think I’m just using timtoon.com as a mirror of Topless Robot or something, but no. I’m just so excited to share the site’s breaking news, Lawrence Kasdan to Write Robotech Movie. And TR is dead-on about what makes Robotech such nerd catnip. It’s not the transforming jets or the giant alien invaders — it’s the love story.

Frankly, Macross is the greatest love story ever told (Lolita is #2). Specifically: Lisa Hayes, the captain of the most powerful spaceship in the Universe, is so infatuated with pilot Rick Hunter she washes his underwear, while Rick chases after 15-year-old Chinese tease and pop star Lynn Minmei, who pines after her cousin Lynn Kyle, who angril throws empty gin bottles at Minmei. Oh, and Kyle is the spitting image of Lisa’s dead fiancé.

The pinnacle of this is episode 28, Reconstruction Blues. You ache for Lisa diligently cleaning up Rick’s apartment on her day off while he’s out getting stood up by Minmei. How can one man be so stupid? Dude, she does your frikkin’ laundry.

*epic facepalm*