Tag Archives: Futurama

Now I just need a 2-liter bottle of Shasta…

Today I woke up with a couple of nerdy ranking lists floating around in my head. I suspect these will get expanded into YouTube videos in the near future, but for now, just the straight lists. These are my personal rankings of all Rush albums, and all Metroid games.

Rush Albums Ranked

It’s probably worth noting here that I got seriously into Rush when I was a freshman in high school, in 1989, so there’s a definite before-and-after feel going here. The stuff that already existed when I got into them seemed mythic and eternal; the stuff after that is all “the new stuff” to me, even though the oldest of “the new stuff” is now 33 years old… but when it came out, the band’s first album was only 16 years old. (As was I.)

  1. Moving Pictures (1981)
  2. Signals (1982)
  3. A Farewell to Kings (1977)
  4. Permanent Waves (1980)
  5. Grace Under Pressure (1984)
  6. Hemispheres (1978)
  7. Clockwork Angels (2012)
  8. Counterparts (1993)
  9. Snakes and Arrows (2007)
  10. Power Windows (1985)
  11. Caress of Steel (1975)
  12. 2112 (1976)
  13. Vapor Trails (2002)
  14. Hold Your Fire (1987)
  15. Fly by Night (1975)
  16. Rush (1974)
  17. Feedback (2004)
  18. Roll the Bones (1991)
  19. Presto (1990)
  20. Test for Echo (1996)

I suspect many Rush fans would criticize my low placement of 2112 but I stand by it. I just don’t think it’s that great. I find the side-long suite on Caress of Steel to be more musically and conceptually interesting, and the other tracks on Caress are much more interesting than the utterly forgettable side 2 of 2112. I couldn’t even remember all of the songs. (After really straining my brain muscle I was able to come up with “Tears,” but I had to look at Wikipedia to remember “Lessons.”) I even prefer “I Think I’m Going Bald” to most of the filler tracks on 2112.

The Live Albums

Yeah, Rush had a bunch of live albums too. Earlier on in their career, they had a nice formula of four studio albums, then a live album. After Neil’s life fell apart in the late ’90s with the deaths of his wife and daughter, and the band’s future became more uncertain, they started releasing a live album after every studio album, plus some other archival material, and things got messy. I’m not even sure I’m accounting for all of them here. Anyway, here’s the list:

  1. A Show of Hands (1989)
  2. Grace Under Pressure Tour (recorded 1984, released 2009)
  3. Exit… Stage Left (1981)
  4. Rush in Rio (2003)
  5. R40 Live (2015)
  6. Time Machine 2011: Live in Cleveland (2011)
  7. Clockwork Angels Tour (2013)
  8. R30 (2005)
  9. Snakes and Arrows Live (2008)
  10. All the World’s a Stage (1976)
  11. Different Stages (1998)

I have to give special recognition to Grace Under Pressure Tour, because when the DVD of that was finally released in 2009, and I watched it, my jaw dropped. I suddenly remembered that I had seen it on TV in 1985 and was mesmerized by it, but that was the only time TV or radio ever exposed me to Rush growing up. By the time I was in high school, I had all but forgotten it. (Which is to say, when a friend first played me a tape of A Show of Hands, I knew I had heard of Rush, but didn’t remember having ever heard them.)

Metroid Games Ranked

I’m almost as much of a Metroid nerd as I am a Rush nerd. As with Rush, my first taste of Metroid was pretty far removed from my obsession with it. The same friend who introduced me to Rush in high school also owned an NES (I didn’t), and I played Metroid a few times at his house. I was intrigued by this disturbing and immense underground world, but it was also disorienting and brutally difficult.

For various reasons I never owned or even played an SNES (Super Metroid was released when I was a junior in college), and I totally skipped the N64/PlayStation generation of consoles too, because… my god, those polygons and textures just plain sucked, and the games all looked like absolute ass. The GameCube drew me back in though — the first actual console I owned since my Atari 2600 (not counting an Atari 7800 I bought NOS from Radio Shack’s mail order catalog in the late ’90s) — and I was obsessed with Metroid Prime, the first Metroid game I truly experienced.

A year or two later I bought a Game Boy Advance SP, and played Zero Mission and Fusion, then of course Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, also on the GameCube. I loved all of those. The DS Metroid games were kind of crap though, and I could never get the hang of the Wii motion controls on Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Fortunately, the Wii also introduced the Virtual Console, and I finally got to experience the magic of Super Metroid. (That was also how I introduced my then 5-year-old son to the world of Metroid.)

After that, the Metroid franchise all but died out, because Nintendo seemed to actively try to kill it with misguided garbage like Other M and Federation Force.

And then came Samus Returns, on the 3DS. Ohhhhh man. That game scratched the itch. Needless to say, Metroid Dread carried on where that one left off, and I am eagerly awaiting Metroid Prime 4.

And now, the list:

  1. Metroid Dread (Switch)
  2. Super Metroid (SNES)
  3. Metroid Prime (GC)
  4. Metroid: Samus Returns (3DS)
  5. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GC)
  6. Metroid: Zero Mission (GBA)
  7. Metroid Fusion (GBA)
  8. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)
  9. Metroid Prime Pinball (DS)
  10. Metroid II: Return of Samus (GB)
  11. Metroid Prime: Hunters (DS)
  12. Metroid: Other M (Wii)
  13. Classic NES Series: Metroid (GBA)
  14. Metroid (NES)
  15. Metroid Prime: Federation Force (3DS)

Finally… just in case you didn’t get the reference in this post’s title:

Happy 30th birthday, PC era

I may be a hardcore Apple fanatic now (and, well, for about the last 20 years), but back in the ’80s, I lived in the “IBM-compatible” world, as it was called back then, in the days before Microsoft Windows.

IBM-compatible, of course, meant a computer with the same basic architecture, and capable of running the same software, as the (literally) definitive Personal Computer — PC — IBM introduced on this date in 1981. I have so many vivid memories of the ’80s IBM PC experience that I’m at a loss where even to begin to discuss them. So many games. Such terrible graphics.

I never actually owned the IBM PC, the model 5150 (not to be confused with this), myself, but my uncle did. It was always a treat in the early ’80s when we’d visit him and he’d let me go into the spare bedroom where he kept his PC. He was the first person I knew who owned a computer. It was dazzlingly futuristic, and I eventually learned some rudimentary command line skills — just enough MS-DOS to get myself into BASIC, where I loved to write stupid, pointless little programs.

Eventually, in 1987, I got my own PC-compatible computer, the Tandy 1000 EX that I’ve mentioned here before. The Tandy 1000 was an odd beast. It boasted a better graphics card than the average PC, allowing it to display a whopping 16 colors instead of the usual 4, but in almost every other way it was already hopelessly outdated at the time of its release. It was never able to run even version 1.0 of Windows, so we got Tandy’s feeble semi-GUI, DeskMate, instead. But I still thought it was cool.

It all began with the IBM 5150 PC, though. Without that, Apple might have become the world’s largest (technology) company 25 years earlier. But in the end it all worked out OK. The iPhone 4 I carry around in my pocket now is (approximately) a kazillion times more powerful than the 13-pound metal box IBM gave us 30 years ago today.

Still, I have fond memories of so many games I played on that old Tandy 1000 back in the late ’80s. Here’s a list of some of my favorites.

I brought my Tandy 1000 EX to college with me in the fall of 1992, but the campus computer labs were dominated by Macs (except for a couple of the high-tech labs in the physics building that were full of NeXT cubes), and it wasn’t long before I was a convert. I bought my first Mac — an LC 475 — at the college computer store in the spring of 1994 and I haven’t looked back. Except when I have. That Tandy 1000 EX is long gone but my love of those old games I played in junior high and high school lives on.

Pastarama

The FuturamaIn honor of the pending release of the first of four new feature-length Futurama DVDs, Wired magazine has an extensive feature about the past and, erm, future of the show. But it also has a feature on the original “Futurama” of the 1939 World’s Fair.

I’ve read a bit about the 1939 World’s Fair, about the eager anticipation of emerging from the Great Depression into a brighter and better “World of Tomorrow” (circa 1960), laughably naive from today’s perspective. But until now I’d never actually seen the film of the Futurama exhibit, with its swelling, dramatic score and overwrought narration. In some ways it felt like I was back in high school, watching the long-outdated science films our district had elected not to replace, devoting the precious funds instead (and to little avail) to our perpetually mediocre sports teams. But my response was deeper, and more disturbed.

It’s true that in many ways they got things right, though it may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy: the “world of tomorrow” is dominated by controlled-access superhighways teeming with (free-flowing) traffic. It’s easy now to forget that back then, freeways didn’t exist. The idea that they would relieve congestion is laughable (or lamentable) however, especially considering that they also envisioned a megalopolis where residential, commercial, and industrial districts (I feel like I’m playing SimCity) are separated, for “greater efficiency and convenience.” (Ha! Good one, GM!) The current trend of revitalization (and gentrification) of depressed and/or abandoned inner-city industrial areas as mixed-use residential/commercial developments (such as the “North Loop” neighborhood of lofts and coffee houses comprised of converted warehouses and new-construction-designed-to-look-like-old-converted-warehouses here in Minneapolis) would suggest we’ve learned the error of that particular vision. And yet, the ominous portent of elimination of “undesirable slum areas” in the relentless march forward remains. (Just ask the former residents of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green projects… wherever they’ve been dispersed to today. It’s not that slums — and the side effects of concentrated marginalization of the economic and/or ethnic “Other” — are a good thing, it’s just that you can’t simply displace all of those people and expect their problems to magically vanish.)

On a lighter note, the enthusiastic prediction of a floating dirigible hangar in the city’s river brings some comic relief to an otherwise suffocating, earnest yet ultimately soulless and hollow, view of a future of “penetrating new horizons in the spirit of individual enterprise in the great American way.” For some, anyway. Women and slum dwellers need not apply. Freudians welcome.