the pod bay door

:: Picked up the widescreen edition of the Star Wars DVD set today. Costco is charging $55.59Cdn, undercutting Amazon.ca by $1.30, so I deleted it from my wonderful wishlist. I’ll watch them sometime, don’t know when. Mike sent a note today, reminding me of the time in 1977, when we were a group of sf geeks, and went to see Star Wars (it wasn’t titled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, until 1981) in Winnipeg:

I was thinking about you and the guys watching SW; when we saw it back in the Grant Park theatre (was it Cinerama?) and went back to your place to debate whether the movie meant the end of sci-fi as we know it.

Amazing how seriously we took that shyte back then. It certainly wasn’t the end of “sci-fi”, but it did have a lasting impact on the movie industry. BTW, in case you missed it, Chewbacca is touring Italy these days.

As for DVDs, their days are numbered. In the Edmonton Journal today, I read about MODS: Multiplexed Optical Data Storage discs, able to hold a terrabyte of information, or 1,024 gigabytes, roughly the equivalent of 472 hours of broadcast film. Research to develop MODS was led by Peter Torok, a photonics researcher at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, which he describes as “the replacement for the replacement technology for DVDs.” Oh, joy. The Edmonton Journal article did have a piece of good news for those of us slow to replace our rapidly outdating home entertainment equipment:

And MODS players would be backwards-compatible with existing optical formats, meaning it could also play CDs and DVDs, said Torok, who conceived the technology with colleagues from the Institute of Microtechnology, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

The final line of the EJ article reads, “The first MODS products could be ready for sale by 2010.” Er, won’t that give all the other researchers a six-year start to build the technology to replace the the replacement for the replacement technology for DVDs?

:: This month, I will not do something I have not not done before. Did you follow that? What will I not do? I will not see a movie inside a movie theatre in September 2004. This will be the first month I will have not seen a film inside a theatre since, oh, probably the late 1970s. The only two movies I watched this month were on DVD and/or VHS. I’m still dealing with a cough that is annoyingly persistent, and slow to embark on its departure from my lungs and environs. I don’t want to sit in a theatre and cough 300 times during a movie, annoying both myself and everyone near me.

The world, as I know it, will continue, despite the end of the I-saw-at-least-one-movie-in-a-movie-theatre-every-month-since-the-late-1970s streak. Now I know how Cal felt when he sat out that game.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 at 18:01 and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.