Anyone else feel that changing your background makes your Mac feel "faster"? 
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Post your desktop background (PowerPC)
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Maybe that's why my PowerBook seems to be so slow now!Anyone else feel that changing your background makes your Mac feel "faster"?
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Haven't changed the background since about 2016 or so.
I was thinking of maybe posting a background of a toilet plunger on my Mac…kind of get things going again maybe…
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If you’re short of RAM, not using a multi-megabyte wallpaper might get you somewhere. (It did on Windows 3.x.)
Turn off color and run grayscale…save a little ram there.
Greyscale rules anyway.Turn off color and run grayscale…save a little ram there.
Yay for Diablo II! I just started Diablo I again from GOG. Great games ...Anyone else feel that changing your background makes your Mac feel "faster"?
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Star Trek I right? Looks great!
This is from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, isn’t it?
Yes - I still get goosebumps watching that sequence today
Yes - I still get goosebumps watching that sequence today
The Special Longer Version was a regular fixture in our VCR during the 80s thanks to my mum very thoughtfully recording the ITV premiere.
Star Trek: TMP is an underrated entry in the filmography of Robert Wise and whilst I understand why he disliked the expanded version that Paramount made available for home video and telecasts, the additional scenes flesh out the storyline in so many areas and create the aura of an epic adventure. In contrast, the theatrical release is a pretty cold affair that lacks heart due to its shorter running time and loss of important expositions. I understand why he wasn't keen on that version either.
Yes - I still get goosebumps watching that sequence today
If memory serves, that was Douglas Trumbull’s handiwork. He was the titan of slit-scan effects.
I didn't know that. I knew that both he and fellow legend John Dykstra handled different areas of the visual effects but I was unawares that Trumbull was responsible for the warp speed sequence. Amazing work all round.
STTMP has a huge significance for me - it was the first film I saw at the cinema and to see a favourite tv show transformed from something previously watched on a fuzzy black & white tv to this spectacle on the big screen was truly incredible.
Turns out I’m wrong (I think there may be citations elsewhere which credit him as being involved). Paramount offered Trumbull the job of visual effects for the film, but Trumbull refused, due to other projects and obligations. From the extremely unreliable Wikipedia:
Damb. Ice cold.
The first three films I think I saw in cinema, as I remember, and in this order: For the Love of Benji, Star Wars, and Superman. I didn’t get to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture until a few years later. (My memory of Benji was that it was the first film, not the sequel, but I simply would have been too young to see it during its first run, unless it was brought back to cinema in subsequent years. I remember it well enough to recall how I saw it with my grandmother in a matinée showing.)
I think the impact of a big screen viewing that Star Trek: The Motion Picture had on you was what Star Wars had on me.
TMP holds a similar significance for me in terms of exposure to intelligent and serious Sci-Fi during my formative years and in comparison the JJ Abrams helmed ST trilogy feels absolutely mindless.
You're not wrong and this is another example of why Wikipedia is problematic as a source of information. Here's Wise in his own words from 2012 on the matter:
I've heavily summarised portions from this interview which is worth reading in general.
Tying together Star Trek and PPC Macs it's fascinating to discover that 16 Mac Cubes were used to handle the display screens for the NX-01's set on Star Trek Enterprise.
Ha ha - that's unearthed a forgotten memory - a primary school trip to a tiny provincial cinema to watch that very film - that may well have been my first experience of cinema after all - although the film had zero interest for me.
As a nine year old on first watching much of the plot went over my head - although I recognised Voyager instantly being a bit of a space cadet then..seeing the film a few years later, the splendour of the story was not wasted on me.
J.J. Abrams needed to stick to television and direct-to-video films (i.e., Cloverfield). With exception to maybe Star Wars: Episode VII, his motion picture track record is abysmally bad, sloppy, and hurried. I laud his work when it’s due (Fringe is the big stand-out), but good lordt his touching Star Trek was and is unforgivable.
!!!
Speaking of additional, unspoken talent contributing to Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Bob Peak illustrating the poster (along with doing the same for The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, and The Voyage Home). He also illustrated this for the film, which I’d never seen before now:
This could make for a fantastic desktop background.
I recall having known this before, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen a picture of it.
As a kid, it probably kept me attentive whilse letting my grandmum spend time with me. I was never a Benji fan; the scrappy-stringy-haired dog aesthetic never has done it for me.
Yah. By the time I saw the film, probably around 1982, I was already very familiar with NASA and JPL’s planetary missions (part of being raised around NASA people and being driven regularly by the then-exposed spare Saturn V rocket assembly outside the JSC, I guess, idk). I remember thinking, “There’s no way NASA’s going to send out four more Voyagers! WTH?” It’s sort of like other science fiction which makes mention of NASA having actually used Apollo spares for actual missions, such as Apollo 18, 19, or 20 — and even more so with the series, For All Mankind. But when I was little, stories which did that would mess with my head.
I enjoyed the first couple of minutes until Kylo took his helmet off and had a perfect haircut after fighting with this tight helmet on … 🙄😆
Then it went downhill fast with Kylo being a whining baby instead of a serious thread, the Falcon just standing conveniently around, Rey being able to instantly fly it and generally being able to do anything instantly without training or any obstacles, the destruction of some star system without any emotional attachment (unlike Leia and Alderaan in Episode IV) ... and that's just what quickly comes to my mind. There is just so much wrong with the sequels.
In 2015, when it premiered, I let logical gaps in the The Force Awakens slide along two suspension-of-disbelief vectors — one of which goes back to having to do the same with A New Hope.
The first, of course, was approaching The Force Awakens as a parable on how history doesn’t necessarily repeat, but it sure does rhyme. Which was fine until Abrams threw the kitchen sink into a dumpster b-b-b-bonfire which became The Rise of Skywalker.
The other, with respect to Rey somehow knowing how to pilot space-faring ships despite spending most of her life as a scavenger on a forgotten planet, is up there with Luke Skywalker being able to somehow pilot a space fighter craft flawlessly — and take down a space station with one shot — in spite of never before having piloted anything better than moisture farm vaporators and using an old land speeder to potter about the dunes with his old childhood pal, Biggs (pour one out for Biggs, who’d been doing the space piloting thing for a lot longer and with academy training).
For these reasons, I gave The Force Awakens a pass, but even so, there remain logical holes in it which are cavernous enough to pilot a Corellian destroyer through. I have both the theatrical version and another version put together by fans of the franchise which works to mend some of those chasms. I will pretty much only pull up the latter if I choose to watch it again.
But but but he shot down Womp-Rats with his T-16! 😄
I get your arguments though. When I left the cinema after Episode VII I felt like it was somehow ok but now great. After lusting for new Star Wars stuff I also desperately wanted to like it. I watched it two more times at home and it got worse everytime. With Epsiodes I-III it was the other way around, I like them more everytime I watch them, especially III. They have one thing that VII-IX lack and that is decent world-building. Before Disney you always had the feeling that the plot you watch is only a tiny part of a huge galaxy with endless stuff going on. But Disney Star Wars lacks this feeling for me. With the exception of Rogue One Star Wars never felt so small.
Sorry for derailing the thread - I guess it's a reason to fire up my PPCs in the next couple of days to make dekstop screenshots!
JJ Abrams knew what he'd inherited and being a SW fan I guess he didn't want to be the guy who screwed up the sequels. So he played it safe and did his own thing, mirroring the plot of the original, only 'bigger'. With the lack of any plan on Disney/Lucasfilm's part Abrams became the guy who screwed up the sequels. I am ignoring Rian Johnson at the moment.
My biggest issue with the sequels was a complete disregard for sentimentality. Luke loses his lightsaber in Empire, fine. As a Jedi he builds a new one. Jedi do that and it shows their training and growth. We saw that in RotJ.
So, when that lightsaber, which has history mind you, reappears you wonder what the story is. And them you get told 'that's for another day'. Rey's interaction with it implies it's got some power of it's own, so you're expecting that when she hands it to Luke there's some emotional drama going on here. No, he tosses it away in the first moments of Rian Johnson's turn.
You wonder about Rey's backstory. Why is she important? Well, she isn't. She's a nobody, the daughter of a clone of the Emperor. The idea being 'anybody can use the Force'. Yeah, the Force is important - we all know that. What about the characters and the story? I guess they aren't important and neither is your sentimentality as a fan.
I don't want and do not care for fan service. That's patronizing to me, an attempt to sell me something (plot, storyline, characters, etc) based on my like for SW. But stomping on my sentimentality in an attempt to be different or creative or whatever is the other extreme.
It's Star Wars so there's a certain suspension of disbelief required, but the characters are what drive the story and if you've made them two-dimensional no one cares and thus suspension of disbelief goes as well.
Andor, did it right. So did Rogue One. Both put characters and their journeys above everything else and that's what draws you in.
Great summary, I couldn't have said it any better. The loss of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, the destruction of Alderaan in front of Leias eyes, the death of Owi Wan, the devastating defeat at Hoth, Lukes Training, Hans freezing, the loss of Lukes hand, the reuniting of Han and Leia, the turn to the light side and death of Vader and the turn to the dark side of Anakin were emotional on a level that the sequels never reached.
I don't know if any of you know the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn from the Mid 90ies. In my opinion these books did everything right in terms of proper Star Wars sequels. They brought enough new to the table to stand their own ground, yet remained incredibly faithful to the lore. The new characters like Thrawn and Mara Jade were deep and interesing, as were the new locations. For example Landos new mining project was a moving city atop of dozens of old AT-ATs on the dark side of a planet close to a sun. What a followup to Cloud City. Imagine that on the big screen. Zahn also came up with Coruscant as the capital planet.
With Disney Star Wars pretty much all we get are the next desert, ice and forest planets. Like there's nothing else in this galaxy.
I often think, why oh why didn't they turn the Thrawn Books into sequels back in the late 90ies or early 2000s, when the original Cast was still young enough to pull it off. Well, in a couple of years some tech savvy nerd can probably create this using deep fakes and AI generated images in his celar.