Eddie and the Cruisers
This review is a two-fer. Eddie and the Cruisers and Eddie and the Cruisers 2: Eddie Lives!
I haven't watched this movies since the second one came out in 1989, and the first one is a bit older than I remembered it being. I thought it had come out closer to the second, but 1983? Wow! And both movies hold up pretty well.
The first movie, I loved. It follows the rise of the band until the death of two of its members, with the body of the second, Eddie, never being found. It's a bit formulaic, but the formula works and the soundtrack is excellent, though it repeats snippets of its signature song a little more than necessary, I think. Also, seeing as the second movie is all about Eddie being alive - it's in the movie's titles - there's no spoiler when I say that the final shot of the movie is a very-obviously-Eddie watching a broadcast about his band from a sidewalk. I think they should have maybe left that more ambigous, and maybe hid Eddie in the gathered crowd a little better and had him better disguised. But that in no way detracts from the movie. I've just surprised it took so long to get the sequel since his fate was obvious.
I remember completely hating Eddie Lives! when I originally saw it, but it has grown on my quite a bit since 1989. It just seemed to be missing something compared to the first one, and I can't put my finger on it. It's good, and I enjoyed it, though. It follows Eddie in his new life, under an assumed name, getting sucked into music again and forming a new band, all while the studio is promoting the unreleased album, which were a major plot point of the first movie, alongside some mystery tapes which were also recovered. I just don't see the tapes having getting handed over to the same studio who shafted the band in the first movie after the events of the first movie. I think that may be part of what bothered me about the movie. The soundtrack is still good, though not quite as good as the first, and there is still a signature song that gets slightly overused.
Overall, I enjoyed both movies but the first far exceeded the sequel. I will probably add the first to the list of movies that I occassionally rewatch, but I don't think the second was quite good enough to make that cut.
Tags: movies, reviews, eddie-and-the-cruisers, eddie-lives
Joseph "Lew" Green
I am posting this here on the off chance that someone stumbles across it and has further information about my second great-grandfather.
Joseph "Lew" Green was born to Viana Marlow before she married James Pike. He was born in Bell Co, KY and married Phebe (also spelled Pheobe and other variations) Jones. He had two brothers, James and John Green, both likely sons of James Pike. Viana remarried and had a daughter named Millie Waggoner. His maternal grandmother's maiden name was Sarah Green, which is potentially where his surname comes from.
Please contact me if you are able to help.
Early-mid 2010s Gaming Machine
Some years ago, I picked up a couple of CRTs and an old turntable stereo from one of my old co-workers to save them from a dumpster, and while I was there, he offered me a gaming rig from the early 2010s which didn't boot for pretty cheap. It was in a Raidmax ATX case, and the case itself was worth more than the $20 he was asking.
Once I got it home, I pulled system apart, and it is fairly impressive for the time. It has external knobs for controlling some of the fans and their LED lighting, and at some point, a capacitor blew up and once of the wires started to melt, which caused a short. Also, one of the four 6GB RAM chips had apparently gone bad, and the hard drive had been removed as some point. It also had some random, period-correct, i7 CPU in it. Also, an NVIDIA Geforce GTX970 GPU, which actually caused a class-action suit against NVIDIA for intentionally designing it with 3.5GB of fast VRAM and .5GB of slower memory, causing performance issues. It had a clock rate of 1050Mhz and a boost rate of somewhere around 1170Mhz, if memory serves. The RAM situation was a serious bottleneck.
Recently, I've decided it take it out of storage and upgrade this to a somewhat period-correct gaming beast. I had a spare 8TB hard drive, so I decided to install it. I also had an NVIDIA Quadro M4000, which was basically the workstation version of the GTX970, but with 8GB of vRAM and a clock rate of something around 770Mhz. After some work, I managed to modify the video BIOS to set the clock rate to 1000Mhz and the boost rate to 1050Mhz. Not quite as fast as an actual GTX970, but as close as I could get without playing with power and voltage settings. A simple boost of the max power from 120W to 130W stablized the framerate, as it would hit 120W every now and then and throttle the speed down. It never goes above 120W, but giving that slight overhead stablized the speed.
The motherboard used is an Intel DX79SI, with 8 DDR3 RAM slots which support quad-channel memory. So, I have ordered 5 used sticks of 8GB G.SKILL Ripjaws PC3-14900 RAM to match the 3 sticks already in it to max out the motherboard to 64GB of quad-channel RAM. I also flashed the bios to support the fastest CPU available, a 2nd-gen i7, a 4GHz i7-3960X Extreme, with 6 cores and 12 threads. I have one of those on order as well.
I ID'ed the Raidmax case as a Raidmax Augusta. It has five internal 5.25" drive bays, plus a separate chamber for six 3.5" internal hard drives, on easily removable trays.
I installed the latest release of the Devuan Linux distro, which is basically Debian without systemd. I installed MATE as my desktop to keep it as light as possible, and will be running most of my games throught Lutris and other emulator front-ends.
Nitemare Cafe
Reset my family tree
Due to a number of errors, I made my old family tree private and started a new one to share on Ancestry.com. I am being more methodical in my approach, using a vertical tree and going top-to-bottom on the current generation that I am working. I am typically not researching any siblings which show up, but I am not adding any from another tree unless they also appear in other records. I may eventually do that research as well, but for now I am concentrating on direct ancestors: parents, grandparents, great- grandparents, etc. I thought I would share a quick snapshot of where I am:
Tags: genealogy
Slight update
You may have noticed a slight change to the way the site renders. I updated the .css to be lighter weight, as I discovered it did not display well for some extremely old browsers. The new .css is nearly the same, but not quite, and should fix those issues.
Tags: updates
Review: The Invention of Lying (2009)
Somehow, 2009's The Invention of Lying managed to fly under my radar when it came out, so this is my original viewing and not a rewatch.
In it, humanity is unable to lie. There isn't even a word for telling a falsehood. Movies are documentaries, advertising is honest, and your date tells you upfront the they're not attacted to you so you're probably not getting lucky. Suddenly, a character played by Ricky Gervais discovered that he has the ability to lie, and his bank just trusts him and assumes their system is in error when he withdraws more than what is in his account in order to pay his rent.
The brutal honesty up until that point, and leading up to it, is absolutely both messed up and hilarious as the same time. And the movie is great until sometime around this point.
When his mother is dying, and is afraid, he basically invents religion, the afterlife, and all that. He becomes wealthy as a result, and the movie slowly slides into the "money can't buy happiness" trope, but I don't think it ever actually made it all the way there. It seems more of a critisism of religion by that point, and while some of the jabs at apologetics are humorous, it's no longer nearly as laugh-out-loud funny. And there are some touching moments as well because, despite their continued inability to lie, the other characters do manage to show some growth.
This one is worth the watch, espcially the first half or so. I'm not sure I am likely to revisit it, though, unless I forget I've seen it and decide to check it out again at a future date. It's just kind of the sort of movie that is enjoyable enough but forgettable at the same time.
Tags: reviews, movies, the-invention-of-lyinng
Rewatch: Hiding Out (1987)
I just finished another 80's movie rewatch that I remember watching as a teen. This is the first time I've Hiding Out in decades. The quick summary is that a stockbroker is a whitness in a case against a mobster and has to go into hiding. He winds up at a highschool, where the administration mistakes him as a student, so he enrolls. Hilarily ensues.
It's a simple premise (actually, both... Person hiding from mobster and adult in high school) but it still works. It's funny, and it has touching parts as well. Overall, worth rewatching.
Tags: rewatch, movies, hiding-out
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