Atomictumor

Saw the coolest freakin movie last night.

Well, lemme back up a little…

I woke up sick yesterday, totally sick as a dog. So, stayed home from work and slept, which is my magic fix all for being sick, and woke up with MastaG rattling around, entirely bored, in the living room. He came in and we watched a movie on the big fancy LCD tv in my room (its doing nicely, thanks), and relaxed until it was time to get Pigpen from school.

I was feeling a bit more on my feet, so we swung by the video store on the way home from work to get 300, TMNT, and hopefully the Bourne Supremacy (MastaG and I have a Daddy/son day scheduled for tomorrow, the last day of his summer break, and wanted to see the third Bourne movie sometime soon). They didn’t have Bourne in, the bastards, but did have Hot Fuzz and Renaissance.

And man, Renaissance kicked my ass.

Animated entirely in black and white, it was a futuristic-y film noir thing, looking for the kidnapped girl, with people shooting, and whatnot, but the plot took a backseat in my eye to the amazingly freakin awesome animation.

Good stuff, good stuff.  I also bought me a $40 HDMI DVD player to hook up to the TV for the bitchinest visual, at like the 1080i or whatever the thing is.

Woot.

Because copyright laws are continously being changed to provide copyright owners with ever broadening and restricting definitions of what exactly you can do with the movies, music, and electronics that you plunked your money down, today we all celebrate Fair Use Day!

Its easy to sit back and say that these laws are helping artists, engineers, and creators be safe from the evil pirates (arr), but the truth is that you should be able to exercise the same priviledges with modern technology that you did with your old Betamax, which means that if a damn good episode of Golden Girls is coming on, man, you should be able to fire up that DVR recorder and save it without restrictions.  You should be able to pop that episode into any TV set (even at your friend Lenny’s house), and watch it.

Can’t do that with Tivo.  Can’t do that with your cable DVR.  But the thing is, they fool you into thinking that because its digital, or because its the latest and greatest, that giving up these things is the price of having the cutting edge.

Bollocks.

So, the options are suck it up and let Big Media have their way with you, put on your eyepatch and risk getting a call from Blondie at the lawyer’s office, or to make some noise and let those losers you elected know that you’re tired of taking it from Big Media.

Oak Ridge is a great town.  Its a hell of a town.

Even if it can’t get its firecrackers shot off, or get its act together for a retail development, its an awesome town.  One thing I like in particular about it is the burgeoning online community we have.  Off the top of my head, I can come up with a half dozen blogs, easy, of folks who live in the ridge.  They don’t always talk about the ridge, but the fact that their opinions are being broadcast from this weird little town is enough.

One thing this place lacks, tho, is a decent forum.  Knoxville has KnoxBlab, and probably several more that I don’t know about, chock full of different people popping through.  Some funny, some intelligent, some serious, some trolling, some all types at once, but its a dynamic community, a loud one, and one that Knoxville should be proud of.

We have, well, the Oak Ridger forums, run by one of the local newspapers, and for the past several years falling to disuse and disrepair because theres one or two people intent on making no sense at all and shouting down (sometimes even insulting or damn near threatening) people who have tried to steer the thing back into the good.  I cut my teeth on the internet, as Shamusthedog, on those forums, and loved em until they went south.  We had maybe 70 people popping up, so you’d know when you brought something up, it’d get bounced around quite a bit, and that was awesome.

Blogs are great, but blogs, well, they’re one person.  You can comment, but a blog is a dictatorship (except the tumor, where Bos and Eaves have a little bit of say, but they’re afraid of me, so it doesn’t count).  A blog is a soapbox, while a forum is a roundtable.

Well, after the last few weeks, seeing the kinda stuff going on in the Oak Ridger forums, a few people and I put our heads together, found some moderators, and started an independent forum page, Atomic City Talk!

I’m kinda psyched about it. It might take some time to take off, but I think, in this intelligent town, an online round table will be a huge asset.  The fact that this thing is non-profit, independent, and community moderated is even better.

Come on by, locals and non-locals alike, and see what you think.  It may take a little bit of time to get off the ground, but it’ll kick an ass or two once it happens.

Last night, about 3 AM, I woke up completely wide awake for various reasons:

1. My foot was itching like a son of a bitch.
2. You people were getting me all stressed out about MastaG and his freaky tattoo scar (gee, thanks)
3. I was excited about something, like a Christmas morning excited, but couldn’t remember what.

I thought maybe the excitement stemmed from a dream I had that BJ wasn’t really dead, that it was all some sort of mistake, and she was back home. Sounds harsh, but I have that dream a lot, and it doesn’t bother me anymore. I wake up happy for the opportunity to have spent a little bit more time with her, and thankful for the time I had with her. The days of me painfully missing her are over, for the past month or so, and hopefully for good, but thats not what this post is about.

No, I was thinking. I couldn’t remember what it is about today that I was excited about. It wasn’t a Friday, so I had to work. I had to figure out when to get G to the doc, which is never something I look forward to, but still, there was something I couldn’t get my fingers around.

I finally figured it out. I had bought tickets for me, the kids (along with Realtorchick’s youngest, who’s been kinda living at my house lately), and Jimmy from the Time Out Deli, to go see Transformers at 4:35 PM today.

Now, I wasn’t excited about it, other than seeing the boys’ wide eyed enthusiasm, because I kinda think I’m going to be disappointed about the movie. I mean, Michael Bay, c’mon. He can’t do Transformers.

But still, there was something deeply ingrained in me about the Autobots and Decepticons, something thats been with me longer than my wife, my kids, and some of my siblings, and I realized that I was kid-in-a-candy-store thrilled about seeing this stupid movie.

—

I was Pigpens age, five years old, when I first saw the Transformers. I remember sitting in the Den of our old house in Chattanooga, the one I grew up in, before I moved out and the folks bought the Blueberry Farm, watching cartoons as was my early morning wont, when I saw the commercial. I don’t remember much about it, just sitting transfixed, with my bowl of cereal, looking at this big massive red truck turning into a bigger, massiver robot, with these sweet jet planes turning into robots and shooting at him.

Now, I loved trucks, planes, and robots. I was the target market.

I was hooked.

That Christmas, I got my first Transformers, Cliffjumper and Thundercracker. The Biscuit (Dad) and I worked for 30 minutes to get Thundercracker, one of those sweet planes, transformed into its robot mode, and man, lemme tell you, it was 30 of the best minutes of my life.

The Transformers cartoon show started around that time, and I was absorbed into the stark desert landscape that the Autobots rolled around in, protecting power plants and whatnot from Megatron and the Decepticons and their evil schemes to transform all this stuff into glittery energon cubes so they could do something with them that I didn’t really comprehend (world conquest, or something, hell, I dunno… they were freakin Transformers man, who cares!)

The next Christmas, about all I wanted were Transformers. I was the target market.

I prayed, begged, whined, cajoled, whimpered, and schemed to get Omega Supreme. As the name implies, he was the end all/be all of Transformery excess in the winter of 1985 (or was it 84?). He cost $50. I went to K-mart frequently to look at the massive box, drooling at the awesome mural image of Transformers in space, blasting each other. I read the little stats for him printed on the box, with the maxed out firepower and strength rating, and hyperventilated on the few occasions Omega Supreme appeared on the cartoon.

Problem was, there wasn’t a whole lot of money going around growing up, and I knew he was too expensive. Still, I prayed, and hoped, and begged.

I opened my presents that Christmas Eve, and he wasn’t there. That night tho, I snuck over to see what Santa dropped off (again, as is my childhood wont), and damned if Omega wasn’t sitting there, out of the box, in robot mode, big massive gun hand pointing right at me.

It was the happiest day of my young life.

Time went on, and in the summer of 1986 the Transformers animated movie came out. The ads would come on TV, and I’d be transfixed, taking in all the awesome. The colors were brighter than the show, the explosions were more explody, the robots were shiner. There were new robots, and rumors of huge changes to the Transformers pantheon!

I never saw that movie in the theaters. I heard, tho, as time went on, that Optimus Prime, that mighty red truck, the leader of the Autobots, the savior of little boys, died that summer.

Man, I tell you what, that hit me hard. I was afraid to admit it, because who wants to admit that they’re crying over a cartoon, but I had a hard time. That summer, my favorite teacher moved away (she taught the gifted class at Mountain Creek Elementary), and my cousins friend, who I had met a time or two in South Carolina, died in an automobile accident. The three things combined, and weighted my little 3rd grade heart down.

But I really think it was Optimus that did it. He was a hero to the target market. He was a massive truck, who turned into a massiver robot, who’d get down and play basketball with orphan kids. He cared about all of these little puny creatures on Earth, and died defending them. Wired called him the father to a generation of latchkey kids. I don’t think I’d go quite that far, but then I had a Dad, and wasn’t necessarily a latchkey kid.

I was just in the target market, and he was the hero.

So, today, at 29, in 2007, 21 years after he died the first time, I’m excited about seeing him. Bay may well screw it up, but I’m not expecting much, except to maybe see my boys have the enthusiasm and happiness that I had at their age, with a bowl of cereal, and a badass robot.

Google knows whats going on.