Post-weekend update
A walk in the park
Saturday was a nice day, so after lunch I suggested a walk in Cedar Creek Park. This park is not a small park in a city. Instead it is a large park at the edge of town. It's big enough to seem "out in the country" to me. We probably should have just walked a the short loop up near the parking lot, but didn't. Instead we took a trail and went around and down to Amber Lake for a little while. It was a nice walk and a nice relaxing few moments by the lake. Then back. Not all that long a walk, but it was felt.
ELF
The first computer my family had at home was the ELF II kit by Netronics. It started as a single board thing that today would be considered a trainer, at best. It grew to include an ASCII keyboard, 8K of RAM, and a monitor ROM & I/O board which allowed storage on cassette tape. Today, most of it could probably be replaced with a single programmable gate array chip.
The ELF was brought to Fairmont a while ago. Yesterday, when it was too hot for me upstairs (Jay didn't notice the heat, of course) I went into the basement for a while and set about seeing what I could do. First was cleaning the layers of dust off the thing. Then running an extension cord to it (the basement is not yet fully wired, alas) and... it lit right up. Yes, without catching fire. I keyed in a very, very simple program with the hex pad and sure enough, it worked as expected.
I didn't do all that much, having forgotten much. But I did have the booklets for everything and at least saw the monitor board working. Getting video out of it was a bit tricky - it never was all that good with video, as I recall, and it's an RF modulator setup to a TV... I suspect part of the problem is that it hasn't been used in years. Alas, I didn't get the the signature program of ELF video to run: the scrolling Enterprise, done in under 256 bytes. Maybe another time.
Not sure what exactly I'll do with it, but it is interesting to see how things have changed. I could get a cassette recorder to go with it, I suppose. Now if I, or my folks, could just find the tape with Tiny Basic. I can find the listings for the ELF's Tiny Basic on the net, but I really don't want to key it all in by hand.
It is a bit odd. The ELF is old, sorely limited, mostly forgotten, and frustrating as some of the hex pad keys don't work quite as they should and much is poorly, if at all, remembered. And yet it was somehow... relaxing.
COLT
I'm really glad that Looney Tunes doesn't do every issue like #100. While it only one story, as such, each page is a different work as can be seen by the production codes. And there only a few pages that have the same penciller and inker as other pages. Most are unique. So that's a lot of penciller and inker files to update. Since most are not normal Looney Tunes artists, many of those file had to be created. And to be properly thorough, some research done on just who those folks were and what they've done.
The good news is that all that should be done, finally, and I can now start on dealing with the actual story. The story is simple enough: it's a Looney Tunes alphabet ("A is for..."). The work, other than the credits, will be in getting all the references. I expect about two or three per page.
The bad news is that while the unusual artists have generally done well, a couple managed to get things rather "off" and I don't normally notice "off-model" problems unless they're very bad. Also, the Looney Tunes characters have changed over the years and have a few different looks in the original shorts, so I also give a lot of leeway even when I do notice something. There is early Bugs (the nasty Bugs who just causes trouble and *is* a stinker) and later Bugs (the Bugs who would can be a stinker, but has to be provoked into it). There is the early, zany, Daffy and the later, second-banana, Daffy. Those are two examples of why I don't worry about on-model vs. off-model very much. Which model?
But there were a few examples of "that's just not right." Some can be expected, after all, these artists don't normally work with these characters. The result is a bunch of first tries. Good for first tries, perhaps, but certainly nothing like could be done with more familiarity and practice.
One thing struck me last night as I was researching who all these artists were. Many do work for Cartoon Network, which is no surprise. But I think I see why so much Cartoon Network stuff is junk. A good many of these folks got their start with Ren & Stimpy, or Cool World, a couple examples of a look that is Broken As Designed. It seems some have not overcome that kind of a start. Blech.