https://x.com/geerlingguy/status/2022105811955462631/photo/1
A better photo of the original Finder interface being emulated on a pico pi intrigued lions. The best images lions have of their own were from a few seconds of camcorder footage.
That was a purely graphical interface. There was no command line. Macs didn't have a command line until they moved to UNIX, as far as lions know. Lions didn't use a Mac from 1997-2013. By 2014, the MacOS command line was essential in most everything. None of that generation had any clue what it was like just 20 years earlier.
The Phintage Collector said Macs 1st got a command line in 2001 with Mac OS X. There were various UNIX emulators & BASIC interpreters which provided a command line on top of System 7. Lions played with Minix & chipmunk BASIC but they were all toys. Actually did connect a terminal program on the Mac to Linux briefly, using a long lost serial port adapter.
It's no longer possible to see what that display looked like. We only have white balanced approximations from cameras. All modern displays have RGB triplets & the screen door pattern resulting from the blue pixels. That vintage display was 1 of the last pure B&W displays. They have all degraded. It had a very appealing soft white & slow refresh.
It's not possible to configure any modern LG monitor to emulate a vintage display. They don't allow direct gain control of the components, synthetic ghosting, color bleeding, blurring, bobbing, or slowing down the refresh. Lions have pondered intercepting the HDMI signal. It would require a commercial HDMI FPGA board or dedicated capture board with delay.
The trick is it's no longer possible to make an ASIC just for doing that. 40 years ago, you could make an ASIC which fudged a raw video signal. Today, it would be too expensive.
The trick with HDMI is it's scrambled in order to balance the average voltage. You don't want to access the raw signal but combine an expensive capture board with GPU. Maybe an FPGA could ingest the decoded RGB from an HDMI chip & delay it by just a few lines or 1 frame.
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Lions took 2g of vitamin C every day from 2019-2025. After going to 1g, having a bought of glute soreness & hamstring tendinitis, the decision was made to go back 2g at least occasionally.
Hamstring tendinitis after the last HIIT resulted in only 40 miles. It's the latest in pretty much continuous difficulties since 49.
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The next movie that got away was Phantasm. Lions were always intrigued by the flying ball of death. It did indeed feature the View to a kill house. The Dunsmuir mansion was also in Burnt Offerings, The Money Pit. As of 2023, it was abandoned. After 40 years of believing it was next to Crystal Springs reservoir, it was really in south Oakland next to the EBRPD building.
Once the ball gets you, it's over. So the tall old man from another planet kills & harvests bodies from the nearby town & reanimates them into an army of elf slaves who are then shipped back to his home planet.
That was a downright germane livelihood for someone as imposing as the tall man. Obviously, any alien species able to reach Earth from beyond the fermi paradox is going to be vastly smarter than humans & just abduct the humans for slave labor without thinking about it.
Also germane was for all the terror of the ball, the big brother just shot the damn thing within 3 seconds of seeing it. You'd think it was invincible.
He transforms into a blond hottie who brings unsuspecting kids to the cemetery & stabs them. They actually didn't decide the tall man transmutated into killer blondie until the end of the movie.
There are funny references to the pain box in Dune, Clint Howard in Ice cream man. Lions imagine Phantasm copied the Dune book from 1964 & Ice cream man in 1995 copied Phantasm.
It reminds lions of Dreamscape, a gathering of every teenager's worst nightmares. The characters have all the quirks from those nightmares, the little brother who stalks his big brother, the creepy fortune teller, the ice cream man who worries about a dead body leaking on his ice cream, the big brother who sits around a lot & has nightmares. Only in the end do we realize the big brother sits around a lot because he's imagined.
Lots of artifacts from the lion kingdom's distant past. An incandescent work light from 1979 revived a memory of that long lost time.
Lions surmised the kid was alternating in & out of nightmares. The director confirmed it was all dreamed. The big brother & the parents were dead. Only the ice cream man was really alive. His death was imagined.
The kid would not have been able to live in that house alone, though a life insurance policy in those days could probably pay for it.
Angus Scrimm was a great fake name for the tall man actor. It was obviously a variation of Alastair Sim.
That was a lot more low budget than lions ever guessed in the preceeding 40 years. It always looked pretty high class in the trailers.
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Skimmed through the director's preceding work at 2x, Kenny & Company. That was quite a piece of 70's sauce featuring the same gang. The granddaughter was similarly as cocky.
The prices, the terra cotta roofs, the volkswagon beetles, the station wagons, toy guns that looked like real guns, pay phones. Its high rating on IMDB reflects the modern nostalgia for the 70's.
It was a time when all the classic cars from the high point of the 60's were continuing to live on amidst a rising tide of imports & trash of the 70's.
Lions wouldn't know if they really had to put money in a pay phone to call 911. Certainly remember not wanting to touch a pay phone. Pay phones were all we had until the late 90's.
IMDB has this in Long Beach. Those neighborhoods really were working class & owner occupied back then. Now all renter entrepreneurs renting from landlord entrepreneurs.
Funny how they depicted the residents who cared about halloween giving out candy & the residents who didn't care giving out popcorn. Nowadays, the guy who spent the time wrapping popcorn would be considered the hero & the manufactured candy giver would be considered lazy. Time is the consumable now. Money was the consumable in 1975.
They captured the 1 scary house quite well. There always was 1 scary house in our neighborhood.
It was shot in the months after the lion kingdom was born, but was visually very similar to when the lion kingdom became aware in 1978. It might have represented the lack of economic progress. None of the distinctly negative aspects of the 70's were shown, like the gas lines or the inflation. The school bully & the 1st encounters with death were common negatives for all generations.
Lions didn't know how old they were until at least 1979. Until then, they had always been around, just had a case of amnesia, & their present state was how it always would be. All the other animals were just created to be very tall.
The world is now very different from 5 years ago. Most retail stores have disappeared. Rental housing has replaced most offices & retail complexes. All the neighbors are renters.
The biggest change is most art has been replaced by generated art. Original human voices, music, movies, drawings have mostly disappeared. It is now automatically assumed that any creative work was not made by a human, even if it is the rare instance that was. Generated art has become accepted & praised. Most of the economy is now generated bot accounts engaging with generated bot accounts, paying dividends to human spectators through their index funds.
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