Floppies no more?
They're killing the floppy diskette! Sony announced it'll end production of the square plastic media wafers in 2011. They had 70% of the market share, which does raise the question of how any other company could survive with only 30% without some kind of charitable fund. While it's been eons since I ever even used my computer's 3.5" floppy drive (for the kids out there, it's that rectangular cavity on the front of your school PCs that grows a furry gray coating of despair commonly mistaken for dust), I have fond memories of this rewritable media in several forms:
- I once used the larger floppy discs in a computer at the college where my parents work. And by large, I mean eight inches. I still have one in my office that I use to convince people I once had a working "En-Large-O" raygun prototype. Computer science schools could have used these things for their graduates' mortarboard hats. Anyway, these disks contained old ASCII-based games like the classic "Star Trek" one where you had to destroy X number of Klingons by Y stardate. These games ran on a Cromemco computer (which took its name from the Cro-Magnon technology it was based on), a dishwasher-sized box of circuit boards, assembled by students, featuring 16k of memory. This machine no doubt set me on the downward spiral I enjoy today.
- Commodore 64 floppies were great. Not only could you, if needed, perform "brain surgery" on them by slitting open one disk to swap out the brown magnetic plastic from another (which happened when part of the casing got caught on part of your drive when you were gleefully swapping disks for the original "Might and Magic"), you could also double your disk space with a holepunch. Just by notching the un-notched side of the disk, you could use the back of your floppies as well! Try that with a memory card, and... well, watch out for shrapnel if you get the holepunch to actually do anything. Oh, sure, you could buy one of those fancy disk notchers which made a nice, square hole, but the true computer pioneers, who no doubt inspired MacGyver, stuck with honest, rounded half-holes.
- The 3.5" floppy and me don't have too much history that was unusual, save for one thing: For some reason, probably under the influence of cold medication, I once did some fantasy paintings in acrylic on a few old discs I had lying around (as you can see above. A more detailed image can be had here. I believe I even had the hubris to exhibit them at Gen Con one year. I'm amazed they let me back in the convention after that...
So while we're looking at ancient relics, I don't know what it is about seeing something that looks like our present day world in peaceful decay, but these concept art pieces from the upcoming Fallout: New Vegas would look great over the couch, I think. Not that getting to see them in person would be a picnic, as this article about surviving a nuclear attack demonstrates. So since this paragraph has become post-apocalyptic, it gives me an excuse to expose everyone to some of the darker comedy of Mitchell and Webb in the form of Remain Indoors: The Quiz Broadcast. There's a second and third segment as well. I hope everyone reading survived "The Event." :)
Good news on the store-front. Thanks to some tinkering by my wife and her sister, we've hopefully solved several problems were were alerted to regarding how we'd set up the interface with PayPal (thanks to everyone who wrote in; we never would have realized there was a glitch). We've also set up some drop-down menus to make the page less cluttered. For individual issue sales, I've only got images the most recent eight of any title up at the moment (though all that we have are available via the drop-downs). I'll be either putting more cover images on the page or constructing some kind of cover gallery so everyone can make sure they're getting what they think they're ordering (very important for commerce, I'm told).
We'll end on some comic-book related news of a traveling Batman show. Sadly(?), it's not a Batman theatrical production, but more like some kind of mobile stunt performance from what we can gather. It's not completely earth-shattering, but it does give me another excuse to post a clip I enjoy of an animated Batman musical (though not the more recent one from "The Brave and the Bold"). Comic book schtuff continues with:
- Alan Moore fans (and fans of comic deconstruction) might want to check out this interview with him (part two, part three) from the BBC radio show, "Chain Reaction." Oddly, I don't think there's any profanity present. Sadly, I couldn't find a clip of the follow-up show where Alan interviewed Brian Eno.
- Staying in the UK and touching on this week's FFN, here's a clip of Peter Cushing and his toy soldier collection. Why can't modern celebrity news be as nifty as this?
- Following a similar concept as a previous game, Cy-Clone is a shooter where you take on the aspects of enemy ships to destroy them as well as give them a sense of ironic defeat.
- Someone needs to perfect this prototype and start selling it at sci-fi conventions with mustard and ketchup.
- Scott Adams did a few "Dilbert" strips about the recent lost 4G iPhone prototype, felt they would run too late to be relevant, and then posted 'em to his blog instead.
- ThinkGeek is offering a TARDIS cookie jar, but I'd be more impressed if it was the size of, say, two packages of Oreos but was able to hold five. :)
- GeoCities may be an internet memory, but now you can relive it by GeoCities-izing any site you choose. Dancing gif files for everyone!
- Alert Reader John sends us this little film from a friend of his, Albion 1849, which should appeal to fans of Steampunk as well as those of a certain "Alpha Moonbase." :)
- I can't remember the last "Breakout" variant I've enjoyed, so here's Pixel Basher to set a new milestone.