I made a supercut of button pushing scenes from 80s(ish) sci-fi and action movies. I’ve always like those scenes where characters are pushing a bunch of important-looking buttons in a futuristic spaceship, so I taught myself video editing in DaVinci Resolve and put together this montage. Editing the clips together was fun but finding the clips was tedious cause a lot of these clips are only a few seconds long, so I had to slowly scrub through movies to find these.
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I recently visited the Neon Museum in Las Vegas. As a lover of neon art this place was amazing. Located just north of Fremont St, the museum’s collection features vintage signs from casinos, hotels, and other businesses from around Las Vegas. 27 signs were restored to their former glory, their neon glowing once again.
The visitor center is housed inside the shell-shaped former lobby of the La Concha motel. The motel was demolished in 2005 but the lobby was saved and moved to its current location, where it was restored to become the visitor center.
The guided tour was really informative, my guide had lots of stories of the history of the signs and the casinos they came from, as well as general stories about the early history of Las Vegas.
The Chief Hotel Court is the oldest functional sign in the collection, dating from 1940 
One of my favorite things about the Neon Museum is that the signs are at ground level, so you can see them up close and really appreciate the craftsmanship that went into bending the neon tubes and arranging the light bulbs.
The fiberglass skull from the old Treasure Island sign 
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You know you’re getting old when they remaster movies you saw in the theater. 20th Century Studios is releasing Fight Club for the first time on 4K Blu-ray on May 12. It’s a brand new 4K HDR remaster approved by David Fincher and includes actor and director commentaries, behind-the-scenes features, etc. I believe these are all new features, different from the ones on the original DVD release way back in 2000. The movie will also return to theaters for 1 night only on April 22.
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The Casio F-91W is famous for being a minimalist, durable, and incredibly cheap digital watch (I got mine for $10 a few years ago). It’s very simple, it only has an alarm and a stopwatch in addition to an infamously weak backlight. The Ollee watch is a drop-in upgrade that gives it some modern smart watch features. On the outside the watch looks the same, even the display is the same, but the module adds world time, fitness tracking, Bluetooth synchronization with your phone, customizable face colors, temperature, games, a flashlight, and an upgraded backlight. I love that one person can make what probably took a team of Casio engineers to do back in the 80s.
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Good article about Japanese Magazines and how there’s almost a cult-like following in the US. I’ve been “reading” Japanese magazines for a while (I can’t read Japanese so I just look at the pictures) and they seem much different from Western magazines. The article makes the point that Western magazines usually have to keep their advertisers in mind when writing their content, whereas the Japanese magazines are written from passion and love of their subject matter. I love that the magazines are hyper-specific too. I visited Tokyo a few years ago and they still seem to be really into physical media; there’s still lots of bookstores, magazine stands, news racks, record stores, etc, so it seems like their magazines still have high readership that allows this hyper-specificity.
A couple of my favorites:
- Lightning and Clutch – Focus on Americana, i.e. vintage denim, leather jackets, boots, 70s band tees.
- Popeye – Men’s lifestyle and fashion
- Free and Easy – Now defunct but focused on 60s Ivy League fashion
- Garage Life – Solely focused on garages, no cars
I was just in San Francisco and visited the Kinokinuya store in Japantown, where I picked up the latest Tokyo City Guide issues of Brutus and Popeye. They’re actually English editions so I can read them for the first time.
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Apple released a short teaser for their upcoming Neuromancer adaptation. A movie/tv show has been in the works for so long that it’s hard to believe it’s actually finally happening. I’m cautiously optimistic cause Apple TV seems to be the place for good sci-fi, with shows like For All Mankind, Foundation, Silo, Severance, and Dark Matter.