Nathan Strum

I was having issues seeing it in my browser too (on a 32" monitor!) I re-uploaded it at half-size, and put a link to the full-sized one beneath it.

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True - but it's no weirder or more pointless than memes and viral videos are today. Just a different medium.

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In case you weren't around in the 70's, this was a thing:

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Artie's index has been updated. I guess I'm making up for lost time - I've posted more strips since September than the previous three years combined!

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Warned ya'.

Yep. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/698159145/atari-2600-star-castle Yep. https://champ.games/downloads

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Nice update - thanks for doing that! Cosmic Avenger never made it past the early proof-of-concept stage, as the project turned into the Champ Games ports of Scramble and Super Cobra. I don't think a ROM was ever publicly released - there was little more than a scrolling background.

Funny you should mention that... https://forums.atariage.com/blogs/entry/18768-43-or-get-out/

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There are definitely influences from other films. There was even a little in there. Maybe even some I think it would be difficult (if not impossible) to make a movie like this today without their being echoes of other films present. But I think being inspired (like this filmmaker was) is one thing, and that's fine. That's why people become filmmakers. What happens all-too-often with other films, is that they lift ideas because of laziness or a lack of ability to come up with something fresh. That's not the case here at all.

Wow... the last Spoiler-free review I posted was waaaaay back in October 2020! Of course 2020 was during the pandemic, so the only movies I was watching then were on home video. I have been back to the theater to see movies since then, but frankly, none of them were really worth reviewing. Actually, I don't even remember most of what I saw now. Maybe I'll do a Spoiler-free catch-up edition, with just short one or two sentence reviews and a score for each movie. (More to warn people away from seeing them, than anything else.) I had intended to write up reviews for some of them, but just wasn't inclined to do so. I'm not all that inclined to write much about Godzilla Minus One, either. Except this: Go see it. It's awesome. This movie isn't part of the recent slog of Legendary Pictures' "Monsterverse" films featuring Godzilla, King Kong and so on. This is by Toho - the company that originated Godzilla in the first place. It was filmed in Japan, the dialogue is Japanese with English subtitles, it takes place in a devastated, war-torn Japan just after World War II, had a budget of less than $15 million, and is awesome. No, I didn't drop a zero there. $15 million. Not $150 million. And even though at times the visual effects belie the film's incredibly tiny budget, it just doesn't matter. The story and the characters are deeply compelling. Everything else is secondary. This is how movies should be. If you're engrossed in the story and care about the characters, the trappings of the film itself don't matter. You're far more likely to just enjoy the film for what it is. And this isn't a knock against the movie's visual effects at all. They serve the story perfectly. I think many big budget films (or TV series) get knocked for subpar special effects because the audiences get so bored, there's nothing left to do but look at the effects and pick them apart. The best blockbuster films were great not because of their effects, but because of their characters. Movie studios have totally lost sight of that, and have turned movies into just being excuses for spectacle. That said, Godzilla Minus One certainly has the requisite scenes of Godzilla wreaking havoc. But the stakes are personal. They're emotional. You care about the people in his path of destruction and what happens to them. The theater I went to last night was pretty packed, and at times the entire audience was absolutely silent, because they were completely captivated by the human story playing out on the screen in front of them. Godzilla Minus One has heart. The actors, notably Ryunosuke Kamiki as Kōichi Shikishima, are wonderfully cast and a joy to watch. I was rooting for them throughout this film. Not to just defeat Godzilla, but to triumph over their own personal wars as well. To just live. Go see it. It's awesome. Godzilla Minus One gets a 10/10.

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To paraphrase someone else (I forget the origin of the quote): "If you've had even half as much fun watching this as we've had making it, then we've had twice as much fun as you."

No - I just choose to spend what little I have doing stupid things like this. Going through all of the episodes though served a twofold purpose: Making the "50% off" joke work for anyone who actually checked any of the previous 399 episodes. Because there was no way I was *not* going to do that. Although about 200 strips in, I was beginning to regret it. Fixing all of the links so they are now https rather than http. The forum no longer supports http links, so anytime you edit a blog (or forum post) that has a non-secure link and don't correct it, it will no longer show that link. So this helps future-proof things a bit. I was able to fix some inconsistent formatting in the entries and a few other things that annoyed me. Okay... that's threefold. As a side-benefit, the strips are now renamed and organized in such a way that working with them in the future is going to be much easier. Fourfold... Sure, we'll go with that.