John Scalzi has published The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, including a list of 50 most significant films. Here it is in alphabetical order, with titles I’ve seen marked in bold.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!, Akira, Alien, Aliens, Alphaville, Back to the Future, Blade Runner, Brazil, Bride of Frankenstein, Brother From Another Planet, A Clockwork Orange, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact, The Damned, Destination Moon, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Delicatessen, Escape From New York, ET: The Extraterrestrial, Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial), The Fly (1985), Forbidden Planet, Ghost in the Shell, Gojira/Godzilla, The Incredibles, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Jurassic Park, Mad Max 2, The Matrix, Metropolis, On the Beach, Planet of the Apes (1968), Robocop, Sleeper, Solaris (1972), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, The Stepford Wives, Superman, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Thing From Another World, Things to Come, Tron, 12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 2001: A Space Odyssey, La Voyage Dans la Lune, War of the Worlds (1953)

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Apologies for not blogging more about the new job etc— I promise once I’m there and starting to settle in I’ll have loads to tell.

Mementos of the everyday, found while clearing out my desk drawers in preparation for my big move— which of course I’m shitting bricks about now that it’s nearly here!

(Five days to go)

My first notebook computer in almost 10 years! The Twinhead 12KT may not be the most exciting machine in the world, but it is fairly cheap (AU$1280), has a 3 hour battery life and weighs in at less than 2 kilograms. After spending a few hours looking at the various monstrosities that call themselves notebooks these days, I decided this was about the closest I could get to an iBook¹ without buying a Mac or spending more than 2 grand.

(link to surprisingly erroneous product page)

I’m pleased to note that it’s actually more powerful than I expected, running Drivey quite nicely and even having a decent stab at Half-Life 2, running it about as well as my 1995 Daewoo notebook ran Quake (~7 FPS).

Speaking of my old machine, here it is, now defunct (kept for posterity), sitting alongside my shiny new one (bad photo). After all this time it’s still the cutest, with a delightful Fisher-Price look about it.

	Daewoo 1995	Twinhead 2004
Processor	Intel 486DX4-100 (33MHz)	AMD Sempron 2600+ (1600MHz)
Memory	20MB	512MB
Hard Drive	512MB	40GB
Video	640 x 480 x 256	1024 x 768 x 16M
Screen	8 inch Dual Scan	12 inch TFT
Wifi	Wha…?	built-in (b/g)
Infrared	built-in	Buh…?
Optical Drive	Guh…?	Internal DVD/CDRW
Floppy	External	Bwahaha!
IO Ports	Parallel, Serial, VGA, PCMCIA, headphone (mono!)	3 x USB2.0, VGA, LAN, Modem, PC Card, headphone, mic
Price	AU$1900~	AU$1280

Ah… they don’t make ‘em like that anymore…²

BTW The reason I decided it was time to get a notebook again is that I don’t really fancy lugging my large, heavy PC to New Zealand, where I probably won’t much be needing it, at least in the short term.

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1. Actually I like it more than an iBook but less than a PowerBook… and much as I would like to I can’t just go buy a Mac instead, because it would be almost useless to me… I’ll be living in Windowsland for a while yet. And hey, it fits in an iBook sized foofbag!

2. Richard was the one who first discovered the Daewoo, and had no trouble convincing me that I should buy one as well. Lovely machines for their time!

Based on a physics-based 2D platformer I started fiddling with ages ago… not sure if it will come to anything, but thought I might as well post them here since I went to the trouble of making them.

(The backgrounds and trees are photoshopped in— the wheelchair guy and curvy ground are all the engine currently outputs)