Fall of Pixar

One of the movies that I watched over Thanksgiving break was Cars 2, the only Pixar movie I didn't see in theaters and easily the worst Pixar movie. Granted, it wasn't as bad as any direct-to-DVD Disney film, but it sucked in a lot of ways. Granted, there were some funny moments (especially concerning the first part of the film, which takes place in Japan) and all sorts of funny euphemisms, such as the antagonists showing what remains of a car (in a "crushed car cube" form) and Mater's "oil leak", and of course the whole plot revolves around a race around a converted SUV promoting a non-oil alternative fuel which turns out to be a ruse, and he's just trying to discredit alternative fuels, although Sarge won't switch to alternative fuels.

The whole thing looks like it was made solely for the merchandise: unless you've been living in a hole all summer, you know that they've been promoting the heck out of Cars 2, and the executives at Disney knew that for kids, Mater (the main character in Cars 2, another reason why people don't like it so much) IS popular with the kids.

Is it good? Not really, no. It's less than half as good as Cars was (and given how weak Cars was, that's saying something).
Is it bad? Not really, either. There are many recent animation films worse than Cars 2, and it's not nearly as bad as most Dreamworks Animations films, and you know that there are some awful ones in their back catalog.

The Season for Classic Mac Gaming

My iMac currently sits dormant underneath a nearby desk. It won't play Yoot Tower right anyway, one of my favorite games around this time, as old memories bubble back up from those glorious weeks in 2003. Short, but glorious. And that's pretty much the last key to that sort of thing. Basilisk II is on the Mac side of the computer (I'm posting this from the Windows side), but it has all sorts of quirks, and based on my experience trying to run SheepShaver (I tried twice, yet still no dice), I really don't want to attempt to put Basilisk II on the Windows side (it might work, since BasiII was meant for Windows), even then, it won't be synced to the Mac side unless I do some complex replacing of the disks that were updated. I might end up trying it though. Yoot Tower won't run on Basilisk (I believe Yoot Tower requires PPC)

Macintosh Garden is down again, with the Drupal "Site off-line" page up again, which means I can't contact my fellow classic Mac aficionados either.

Meanwhile, even IIGS gaming on the Mac side is limited (mono sound means it only comes out one speaker, apparently) and I can't use joysticks (which is admittedly OS X's fault).

I'd like to continue my iMac project, which I'd like to talk about and pick up, which I can't do because Mac Garden's offline. Basically: I'm a bit depressed that I can't continue what I consider to be a tradition, and all I have is a shadow of what I did.

Ah well. At least there's still Nintendo.

Carbonizer's vacation

I did take the Houston Travel Guide offline until I have all of it done. Still don't know what else I'm going to do.

Schizo Kroger

I love the Kroger logo. Well, one of the Kroger logos anyway, what I affectionately call the "Loopy K" (it would be "Big K", but Big K is a nickname for Big Kmart, a defunct discounter, and of course, the Kroger soft drink name. The Loopy K, something like this is what appeared on all stores save the really old Krogers from the early 1970s (and before). It was iconic, bold, and different.

But ever since about 10 years ago or so, I'd say 2000 since that's when I first saw it, they switched to a non "Loopy K" logo. My local Kroger dumped the "Loopy K" for a bland KROGER in block letters. An example that I could find on Flickr is this. They renovated my local Kroger in circa 2001-2002 to include that logo, and later in the 2000s, changed some of the older Krogers that still had the Loopy K (even in slightly different hues, I think I remember white-on-brown) to the block letter KROGER.

This specimen is what my local Kroger used to look like, and they changed the lettering in the mid-2000s, though the Greenhouse exterior stays (Huntsville, Texas).


But the reason I call this schizophrenic is the way they do logos. The Loopy K remains as the corporate logo, and in 2006, they renovated Tanglewood Mall's Kroger (no, it's not connected, don't get too excited there) and kept Loopy K intact. In Houston, the notorious Montrose "Disco" Kroger had the block letter Kroger (with the Signature tagline, even though it was older and missing niceties) and gave it a rehab, including yet another logo which is narrower than the block letter Kroger (now, if they could only give something like that to my local "Krappy Kroger". I guess we don't have enough yuppies). Elsewhere in Houston (well, Hedwig Village, anyway), the lovely "Kroger of the Villages" was built/remodeled in the 1990s, and has an awesome front, even in 2011. It looks like it even tailors to the local tastes. In Conroe, north of Houston, a former Albertsons (must have gone out in the 2000s, as records on the Internet obviously show it exists, plus it has the old Food/Drug logos of Albertsons) had the Loopy K, but discarded it later in the 2000s, leaving a possibility that it was put up in the late 1990s or early 2000s and lasted less than 10 years. In southwest Houston, two Kroger Marketplaces opened up, reportedly nice stores on par with H-E-B Plus, which do have Loopy K, sort of, but it's not the same and I just can't get over how cheap the "Marketplace" logo looks.

Or was it always, in fact, just a twist of fate that had the Loopy K get on stores themselves? Kroger had the logo since 1961 and a similar logo (thinner) since the mid-1940s, but even by the 1970s, the Kroger logo remained on a lighted box by the street, but not on the storefronts themselves.

It should be noted that I did beat VVVVVV

November 5th at 8:48 PM. And the "Time Taken" is wrong (took much longer time out of my life)

The sad elephant

In a way, playing music from VVVVVV, especially Pressure Cooker, makes me think of Bastrop and the Lost Pines (as I listened to VVVVVV tunes through that area weeks before it burned).

It makes me sad.

Supersized?

Apparently McDonald's, at least the local ones, have Supersizing as an option again. I'm pretty indifferent to that: I was getting my annual McRib but wanted to keep things at a medium. Now, wake me up if they have Holiday Pies this year.