Remember This?

I was thinking about nostalgia. Well, more over, I was hit by some. Something kinda oddly simple too.

People know I'm into eighties stuff. Love eighties TV. But it's not nostalgia. I don't remember that time (except for the shows, which were reruns, and pretty much all worth watching in the 90s). Instead I was thinking about the early nineties. Kinda hard to remember. I guess it didn't have an overall feel, but when you think back, I do feel kinda nostalgic. The thing that strikes me about it is the technology, oddly. The Super Nintendo specifically. We'd had an old Commodore 64 beforehand, but that was old even when we owned it. When we got the Super Nintendo it was like the cutting edge. Like owning an X-Box 360 now, I imagine. At least, it was to a four year old. It's funny. The rest of the time I can't remember any real feel to it. Except obvious things like the atrocious pop music we got. But I remember just the pure fun behind playing a SNES. It didn't even make any sense. I can't remember caring about graphics back then. But we just had a SNES, and we could play Mario, and that's about all that mattered.

But what actually reminded me was something I saw in an odd place; on a Doctor Who DVD giving you the announcments before each episode played (in reruns too). And I saw something that I really remember clearly, but is gone now. And I bet all of you do too (except Azar, who's Norwegian). I saw these:




Bizzare, because, as you may have realised, these are just the old shots that played before a television episode on BBC2, telling you what you were watching. But as a child, I remember waiting for that to come on, and for them to tell you the program you had been waiting all day to see was finally playing. They'd always make an awful pun out of it too, instead of just telling you straight up. That was annoying.

But yes, that made me feel nostaligic. Just seeing those. Odd, huh?

Oh, and before you write me off for a complete loser, I said nostaligic, not that it reminded me entirely of childhood. A lot of my childhood memories are based on more than video games than TV, but they're old memories of climbing trees to pick apples, going to the beach, or splashing around in a paddling pool. Not very nineties stuff, so not quite just plain nostalgia like I reckon these are.

Wonder if anybody else smiles as they remember them...

Luigi Syndrome

Sometimes I can't help but feel sorry for entire races of alien killing machines. Okay, not the most normal sentance to start a blog with, that I will admit. But you see, after my last long blog on the Daleks, and their general incompitance, I decided it's time to look at the aliens they completely overshadow, these fellas.

It's not hard to see why, really, that these aliens don't quite live up to the look-out-I-have-a-sink-plunger Daleks, but I figured it's only fair all made up alien species get mocked equally. Now, here, we have the good ol' Cybermen (nice thing to name your race that, really, isn't it? It's informative, yet catchy...we should have a name for our race like that). Who try, god bless 'em they try, but keep failing, to be the other significant alien race in the galaxy. But nobody gives a crap, and they just want to see Daleks. Poor blighters.

However, this race also suffers from staggering Dalek like issues. And if the Daleks managed to conquer the Earth with their combiantion of baby alligators and men in bin liners, not to mention with their fashion accesorries they give humans, what these guys do? Well, apprently, sleep. You see, it seems they're extinct. Kind of. They live in icy tombs until they get woken up and come to life in horrifying fashion, emerging from their frozen prisons and returning to reign terror!!!

Well, except this guy, who seems to have got his head stuck in the cellophane that apparently makes up these tombs:

But, apparently the Cybermen aren't interested in going into the using-cellophane-to-freeze things buisness, and, after some head caught issues, and immense difficulty in getting through the cellophane that does in fact resemble a student prank (you know, the one where you cover the door frame with cellophane so somebody stumbles bleary eyed out into it in the morning?) they escape and begin their deadly rampage!!!

Or they would, only they're locked in their tomb (you know, if you're gonna freeze yourself, don't call it a 'tomb', you're just asking for it that way) from the outside. Apparently the race advanced enough to make themselves mostly robot forgot to put a way of opening it from the INSIDE. Oops.

But never fear! For they have a new lethal creature to send up and out to... urm, in fact, I'm not sure what they were planning to do with it. Make the enemy laugh so much they fall on the "open tomb door" lever, I imagine.

It's the deadly Cybermats! I imagine that the Cybermen put "Cyber" on the front of everything, kind of like Batman (TO THE CYBERMOBILE!). Although why this is a mat I don't know. In fact, I just can't justify it in general. Unless it's the make-them-laugh-into-submission plan, at which point it makes a lot of sense.

But I mean, not only are the Cybermen overshadowed by the Daleks, they also go about trying to convert humans into half robot half men creatures, assimilate, of you will, while at one point even shouting "resistance is futile!". Of course, a different (and much shitter) sci-fi program has a race that do this as well. Except they did it later. But does anybody remember the poor Cybermen here as that particular pioneer? Heck no!

Although I guess when cybermats are part of your weapondry it's easy to see WHY nobody would remember them.

But to top it off, we need a moment where you just look. Just sit back and look. Like you look at a Dalek, and suddenly realise how absurd it is. To fully understand the problems behind this race, where better to look than their leader? You know, how you can look at George Bush and suddenly see all of America's problems? Well, same goes here. This is what leads them:

That says it all, really.

Me In Picture Form

A long time ago Cooper decided to post a picture of an Ostrich to sum himself up to people.

Today I do a similar trick. I present this picture, which I feel pretty much sums me up: