The $1 Five-Day Tape Rental

 

Early 90's, local video store jank. The best.

We're not talking about Blockbuster, Family Video, or Hollywood Video here- we are hailing the dingy and cluttered neighborhood video rental stores of the 80's and 90's. Where the family enslaved their kid to work behind the counter; where the rentals for video games were always around 2 years old and the snacks around the same age. Posters peeling off the walls. This was the age of the Five-Day Rental. 

The Labyrinth poster in the bottom left makes it work.

What exactly is a Five-Day Rental, and what would constitute a Five-Day Rental movie? Well, I'm glad you asked. In my neck of the woods it was typically limited to Horror, Sword and Sandal, and cheesy martial arts or Sci-Fi. Admittedly, some of the movies in this section would not deserve to be there, but that was half the fun. Scooping up 6-7 movies on the cheap, and lucking out on a few, or discovering an actor or series you didn't know you liked. To qualify I think there has to be the following things: violence, nudity, camp/jank, and sometimes a low budget. Below would 5 good examples of movies I had in rotation, and would be an easy pick up for my brother and I. 

Arena is Babylon 5 Fight Club

     Arena made it to Cinemax back in the day, and later on the Sci-fi channel's late night lineup. Before that it was 100% early 90's sci-fi straight to VHS gold. Gritty, questionable special effects, and a story you really had to suspend disbelief to make sense. There was a little bit of nudity, fight scenes, and a dude with four arms. 

The best of the worst, Deathstalker delivers

    If my brother or friend sleeping over had some level of disagreement on what to rent, these were always a certified hit. Top class nudity, comedy, extreme levels of camp and terrible acting, and gritty death scenes. I would call this genre "Guts and Sluts", which of course my step-mom did not like. Like the movie Conan but $3.50 is too much to rent it? Get all four of these and enjoy over the top sex scenes and shitty special effects for a quarter of the price. Sure, they have recycled scenes, special effects, and sets.. but that's what makes it special. I think. I would include all the other shitty italian Sword and Sandal movies of the day in this as well: Barbarians, Sorceress, Beastmaster (one of the better ones), Hawk The Slayer, Krull.. the list goes on. 

Chopping Mall is worth a buck, for sure.

     For whatever reason, all the horror movies outside of the newly released were always in the $1 bin. Chopping mall was about a Johnny-5 style robot that goes around killing the teenagers that thought it would be cool to spend the night in the mall. These bots slice and dice all the way to the end and it's worth every bit of that $1 to watch it at last twice. Good levels of nudity, terrible acting, and a premise that seems more like fact than fiction these days, this movie is like Mallrats and Valley Girl meet Friday the 13th. Bargain bin horror was never hit or miss. Troma movies were bottom of the barrel, but they don't suffer any kind of identity crisis and you know what you were getting into. 

All Jackie, all the time. 

     Any Jackie Chan movies qualify, but some of them should not be in there at all. The old stuff from the early 80's is pure low budget cheese, and should only be taken in case of emergencies. The stuff from the late 80's and early 90's absolutely destroys all expectations. I would call this section of the rental store the area where you would easily get the most bang for the buck. Rumble in the Bronx is fucking insane. First Strike? Pure class. Meals on Wheels? A master class in martial arts, and his fight scene with Benny the Jet is still considered one to be the best ever filmed.  Don't sleep on Jackie Chan.

Straight to VHS, Robot Jox is peak

     I'm a huge sci-fi nerd, so not to be outclassed by Arena, Robot Jox and it's sequel were always a go-to for me. In that same section you could find the first two Cyborg movies, both of which have A-class nudity and a story you can barley follow, on a shoestring budget as well as a smattering of Billy Blanks movies where he is a black terminator. I'm really surprised at what studios pulled off for the time with the budget available; it seemed like an episode of Babylon 5 sometimes with the sets and acting.. sometimes even the same actors looking exactly the same. Looking at you Arena! 

My Elite Coffee Shop Battlestation

 

Getting things done, on a small scale. 

     About a month ago I had to attend a promo out of market, at a Publix Pours location in Wellington Florida, in West Palm. I'm from there, so signed up right away to visit my old stomping ground. After about a 4 hour drive, I arrived and found myself in quite the situation- I had to park about 2 miles away, and the place I was going, they don't exactly let people with backpacks with laptops in. I ended up in my car for about an hour with my laptop perched on the steering wheel, uncomfortable, power cables running all over the interior of my truck. It was a small stressor, but it had me thinking how I could get ahead of it.

It's as good as you think it is. 

    After getting home I found a very large 10,000mAh battery pack that is solar, waterproof, and has the ports I need on it, with a stand. Charge 3 devices at once! What a coincidence, I happen to daily two phones and a smart watch, so this comes in clutch. The second piece of kit I added is something I've seen on reddit- a foldable pocket keyboard and touchpad that syncs to bluetooth. Leather wrapped, thin and sleek with a surprisingly large keyboard with full Num-pad, this foldable was far better than it should be for the price, and I rarely charge it. The touchpad is large and works well, and there is nothing needed to install- the phone picks up on it right away and the cursor appears. I added this to my already bad-fucking-ass Z Fold 6 with it's screen with built in stand and stylus holder, and we're off to the races.

Power stack.

     I live in a major metropolitan area, where I often have to park my car, pay like $20-$50 to do so, and walk or take my electric scooter to my destination. Typically this is in downtown Tampa, Ybor City, or Clearwater Beach. Recently during game days, this has been pretty common in the St. Pete Area. I finally had a real world application where I would not be able to have my whole backpack of tech with me, and I had work to do in St. Pete two weeks ago. I put my stack of 3 devices in my left pocket, hopped on my scooter and took off down to Fergs when they were just opening about 5 blocks away. I had about two hours until my event started, so I used this chance to open my cool micro-battlestation and hammered out several emails, designed a facebook post, and edited several spreadsheets. After about 30 minutes, it felt like any other laptop, just small in stature. I got more than my share of strange looks, and even a waitress who asked me what that hell is going on and was very fascinated. All in all, I love my little cheap portable setup and will be using it several times a month to increase productivity going forward. 

Dell XPS 15 9510 Laptop review - TLDR; I like it.

 

I'm not a laptop guy. Well, maybe I am now. 

     Recently I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Dell XPX 15, 9510. A 15 inch laptop with a 4k OLED screen, an i9 11900k, RTX 3060ti, 32gb of decent ram, and a 1tb hard drive complete with charger and docking system for the low low price of $225 from a place called OCM Recycling in Oldsmar Florida. I've always wanted one of these laptops after meeting with someone at a tradeshow who had one, and how well made it was. Literally a wolf in sleek sheep's clothing of business class PC's. How did I get such a good deal you ask? Keep reading.

This is how it was waiting for me. Dirty. Tempting.

     Short version, I know someone who works there and he gave me a deal. OCM Recycling has multiple warehouses full of decommissioned medical and office equipment, and I happen to be there on a day when they were processing 200 + laptops. The man that was going through them, said, "Can you believe someone would want to throw out an i9?!" I was like, how much that? Name your price. Out the door for $225. It came with a fresh install of Windows 11, a charger, and a WD19TBS Dell Performance Dock which adds a ton of functionality to the 2x thunderbolt 4 ports. The 3060ti on board is more than enough to push 4k out to the new 3 video ports added with the dock.

I've actually always wanted one of these. 

Initial thoughts:

• Build quality is amazing. Feels very very solid, has a good weight to it. Macbook feel is the best description I can come up with. Sleek, very thin, and heavy for the size coming in at 4.5 pounds without the charger and docking station. Full CNC'd aluminium chassis, carbon fiber keyboard deck. Feels like a well oiled machine when opening it. Zero flex at all. Hinges on the monitor feel amazing and strong, even when laying the laptop flat and opening gently on a flat surface. It looks cool. I feel like a bad ass using it.
• Monitor is bezel free, crisp, with accurate color. Very bright with inky dark blacks. I'm not use to this level of color outside of the newer Mac Book Pros and desktop PC monitors over $200. I can't tell the difference between 4k and 1080p because of the size, but that's not a bad thing, and I'm not much of a resolution whore anyways.
• Touch pad is huge, or maybe just bigger than I'm use to. Again, more like the size of the Macbook pro, but just slightly smaller when I put them side by side. Not finicky. Zero issues and I actually like using it. My daily driver work mouse is an MX Master 4, and I found myself not using it as much and enjoying the touchpad. Multi touch features work without issues.
• Keyboard is gently lighted from below, and has a really premium feel to it. Soft touch keys. I find myself altering my typing style over the right, which is mildly infuriating. The capslock key is huge for no reason, moving everything over to the right. I wrote this blog post on the laptop to just get acclimated to the new position of the keys, then emailed it to myself.
• Audio is crazy. 4 Speakers total, two tweeters and two woofers give it a little thump and it's plenty loud. Speakers are on the sides of the keyboard. I was listening to a movie at medium volume and it felt like there was some level of surround sound software being used. Stereo music was way better than I thought. Second best sound I've ever heard on a laptop. 
• Performance in desktop tasks is great, marginally better than my other laptop with similar specs I've reviewed previously. That laptop went to my wife, and has been her daily driver for over 2 years without any issues. MSI makes a great quality product at the high end, but this is on a different level. The price for that aforementioned laptop was almost $3000 USD, and this was almost $4000 new, not sure it would be worth that extra money just for superior build quality.
• The only game I played was Overwatch, and It easily maxed everything out on Epic settings at 60hz, when hooked up to an external monitor 2k at 120hz was available at high settings, with everything turned up. Overall, color me impressed. Thermals drastically increased, as outlined below.
• Heat-wise, the thermals are.. meh. The dock is louder than the laptop with two fans in it, so that's positive. I never experienced thermal throttling, (close!) but the keyboard area warms up quite a bit. My hands are always cold, so maybe this is a blessing. The laptop does have some internal heat piping that is impressive, but a hot chip like the 11900h, there is only so much you can do to cool it off under load. I have not been using a lap top cooling pad, but if it thermal throttles, I'll add that to the kit. *Edit* - Flying a little close to the sun with light gaming on a hard surface has verified what others said in reviews; it runs hot. 85c watching 4k youtube videos with a bunch of Chrome tab open on High performance mode in the worst case is enough for me to invest in a high quality, silent, metal, cooling solution for office work which will arrive tomorrow and I will report on that then. 
• Charging is adequate, but you can't use a 90 watt charger to the thunderbolt port without warnings of slow charging. You need at least a 130 watt charger, or the dock to keep you topped off while working. I noticed if you plug the dock and the charger in at the same time, neither will charge, but you will have the functions of the laptop while it steadily decreases in power. I had no idea the dock charged the PC, so that's my fault, and I corrected that. I did order a new charger, as the one at the recycling center was 90 watt. It's worth mentioning the WD19tb docking station delivers over 200 watts of power delivery, so no extra charger needed. 
• Battery life is really good if you keep the settings optimized for longer use. I just attended a meeting where I was using a large screen as a second monitor to give a presentation for about 45 minutes, then a one hour zoom. Still had 1.5 hours of battery left. Not sure what all the reviews talking about terrible battery life were talking about because this is right about what I expected. If you are gaming on this laptop, your battery will not last which is obvious. 
• I had to disable the on-board Intel Iris graphics to get the RTX video card to stay on for Overwatch, then strangely, I had to enable it again when framerate dropped. When the onboard video is disabled in favor of the 3050ti, both disappear from the control panel as a selectable device. The sweet spot is to touch nothing and just hope for the best, and let the application decide what is going on.
• Bloatware was intense upon clean install. All the Dell garbage had to go right away, freeing up tons of resources and open programs. 
• Killer Wifi so far is fine, but I'm experiencing the same problem as other people, when resuming from sleep or closed lid, around 10% of the time the WiFi does not seem like it's going as fast as it should, restarting the WiFi fixes it, or restarting the PC.
• When plugging into the dock when cold booting from the first start of the day, there is a VERY small chance that the secondary monitor will not come on and stay black for over 30 seconds. Unplugging and plugging it back in seems to fix this, but I should not have to do that. It's not that big of a deal, and I wondered if I should event mention it here. 
• Cost at launch was close to $4000 for the model that I have, and a used model runs around $1500 with the dock in the condition and spec I purchased mine for, so cost is a little high for what you get as far as specs are concerned... in today's technology universe. An Intel 14500hx or similar performing laptop new from Bestbuy runs around $1300-$1500 new, so for what I paid, the value is there. Now that I own one and daily drive it, I can see where the cost comes from.. it's all in the build quality. 
• IO kind of sucks. I'm fine with using dongles and carry a bag with me almost anywhere, but this is a little lacking. You get 2x Thunderbolt 4 ports, one Type C gen 3, a headphone port, SD card reader, and a headphone jack. My external monitor, phone chargers, almost everything I use is of a Type C variant style plug, so I suppose for me, it's not a big deal at all unless I'm visiting an office and they hand you an HDMI cable.. and you forgot your dongle. The WD19TBS dock cures all these issues with it's crazy amount of extra features, but it weighs about as much as the laptop itself and really does not lend itself to realistic travel. I wish it just had a displayport or HDMI port. A small con, but still a con when I use laptops for work almost exclusively. 

Overall thoughts

     I've only had this PC about a a month, and I'm phasing out my old laptop currently, which an HP Walmart special with the fake 11th gen garbage i7 ( I could go on forever about this one), on board graphics, and 16gb ram that has been sat on in key West, run over by a golf cart, and generally just treated like total shit for 4 years of loyal service. For a $500 laptop I could not really ask for more, except now I know I can definitely ask for more. I feel lucky when I take this out of my bag to begin my work day, it really makes me day easier in terms of functional quality of life. I run around 12 Chrome tabs of different windows, of varying complexity, and this PC does exactly what I need. Speaking of: Life is too short to not have a premium laptop that feels like cold steel machinery when opening, has the durability of a 1980's Toyota pickup, and looks like a modern device from a sci-fi movie. As mentioned previously, this is my dream laptop. I recently had the option to take a used Mac Book Pro from 2019, which is a good machine, and has tons of features I like, but nothing like this in terms of overall performance. I want a Windows machine with specs that are not hindered and turned down. I don't want a 17 inch, I want this one specifically with these exact specs or similar, and it does not hurt that it is like new and was so damn cheap. The dock was this insane added bonus that would normally be $179.99 on Amazon, and I use multiple monitors (Acer Predator XB32u) at work, so this is perfect for me. Mileage may vary obviously. 

8.7/10

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen - Full movie!

 

This movie is 100% 1980's rental store elite. Total nightmare fuel and flew under the radar with it's inclusion of strange violence, nudity, and Robin Williams in space. Must watch; no bullshit. 

Armitage III - Full OST (1996)

 

Back in the mid 90's, when Japan was obsessed with early cyberpunk fiction, and the idea that there was something more to humanity than being "human", Armitage III shined above most other OST's of the time as a great example of the genre. 

The Miller Collection - Huge Arcade Picture Treasure Trove Discovered

Large detailed collection of mid 70's Arcade photos found

     I'll be clear: In no way did I discover this, it was uploaded by u/doodlebuuggg on reddit from the r/DHExchange community. The blog post on how these photos was discovered is located here. For those not familiar, this is a data hording sub that is very interesting and making sure things don't disappear. All the pictures are scans of candids from an employee of the company, and have the look and the feel of someone just snapping pictures that is hanging out. Nothing professional, just lifestyle pics of someone who seems like or work in arcades. 

TLDR;

• 1024 High resolution photos and negatives were found
• Contain pictures of Time Out, Station Break, and other related arcade chains
• Includes concept sketches
• Pictures of all known locations storefronts
• Arcade images- tons of little known machines
• Pictures of people working, playing, hanging out at the arcades
• Documented signage, logos, etc
• ...and so much more.

I'll post a few of the pics below I thought were interesting or different, but if you want to download the whole archive from Dropbox in HD TIFF files, or JPEG, click those links. I'm attempting to archive them on other platforms so they don't just vanish. Here is a google drive link, Imgur link, and Google Photos link, just in case. 

Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (Full Series!)

It's better than you think.

     Obscure 90's and 2000's cartoons is where it's at. Sherlock Holmes and the 22nd Century existed right in between Mummies Alive and Princess Guinevere and the Jewel Riders in order of relative obscurity. Mummies Alive being the better show, but only marginally. Mighty Max was another show that is not talked about enough, but saw a little more airtime and had a superior intro rock soundtrack that still blows most 35 year old men's vasectomies off, even today. 

A modern whodunnit. 

   Sherlock Holmes, preserved in honey for 200 years is brought back to life, and is joined by a cast of characters to include a fully android Watson who is OP and can hack the planet. The soundtrack was a banger, and animation was better than average for the time. I watched this at 5am when getting ready for high school, waiting for the bus to arrive. This was the only time you could catch these unknown cartoons in Florida, so I would wake up early just for that. 

Click here to watch the full series now!

My first REAL Gaming Rig - Playing Wow in 2005

 

This was a beast back then, and I'll explain why.

     In 2005 I was already over a year into playing World of Warcraft with my wife. I use to own a small but well known PC Repair Business, which I sold my controlling stake to a friend, so I had no shortage of old and aging PC parts, monitors, keyboards, etc. Really common in the business sector at the time was Pentium 3 Coppermine gateway computers, so I had tons of them laying around. There was a well known FAQ how to get an extra 200-300mhz out of them, and really get them screaming for zero dollars spent. I had an entire box of used Geforce 2-4 video cards, so this was the PC's we rocked at the time for many, many years:

• Gateway Moo-moo box
• Pentium 3 Coppermine T, Overclocked to the tits
• Geforce 4 MMX (or shittier 2/3)
• 512mb ram
• Random sound card
• Random junk monitor

This would be an exact example of what my wife and I gamed on for a loooong time

     We had just moved into our first real house, and we wanted a baby, so money was super tight. I started taking computer jobs again out of the house. Replacing broken modems, selling parts, replacing hard drivers, easy stuff. Our Pentium 3's just screaming away in the office room in the front of the house, still playing WoW on 17 inch monitors. A big job got dumped in my lap from someone I use to get a lot of work from, these huge Dell Dimension Business Class PC's from 2005, brand new, four of them total. They needed to be set up, office installed.. nothing crazy. He dropped the PC's off to me, then came back to grab them about a week later, but with no payment. He promised to pay me in a month, next week, you name it. Needed it right now, and how important it was. We talked over a beer, and next thing you know, in lieu of payment, he offered me one of these brand new PC's. The specs:

• Dell Dimension Business E500 series?
• Pentium D (early Dual Core!) 3ghz
• 1.5GB Ram
• Dual AMD 1900XT Video Cards (why!?)
• Two hard drives
• Random Tape backup drive under DVD rom

    Insane luck. I needed the money, but I wanted this so much more. Instantly went from everything on Low settings and taking minutes to boot, to having the best of everything. This PC got me all the way to playing Skyrim in 2011, and beyond. A friend hooked me up with an old viewsonic 21 inch CRT as he was going the LCD route, and I took it in trade for some work. I was all of a sudden a high-end gamer, and it forever changed my outlook on having a high end gaming PC. For it's day, I did not know many people that even had performance video cards, the market was so small. PC gamers were the huge minority, and many games were just not available, or hard to get. I would later sell this PC, and use a free Core 2 Quad, which I bought two of from the State Library Auction, but that's a story for another day. 

Note: Before you say a Pentium 3 was not good enough, here is a picture from the original manual. We played on dialup by the way!

Vampire Hunter D - Full Movie!

 

Watch it for free on youtube now!

     Vampire Hunter D was on of those movies that I heard about in middle school, in the early 90's. "Hey, have you seen that crazy R Rated japan cartoon with the Vampires?" Suncoast Motion Picture Company had the goods, but holy hell did you have to pay. $39.99 for a VHS tape on the worst quality that you would pass around to all your friends, watch at sleepovers, and introduce tons of other people to the genre. I lump this movie up with Wicked City and Ninja Scroll- I watched them around the same time and felt like this was the more tame of the three. I was really into Vampire shit at the time, reading tons of Anne Rice, so this was icing on the cake.

NEC PC Engine LT - An interesting and very rare console way ahead of its time.

 

It's expensive and rare so I don't own one.

The NEC PC Engine LT was released in 1991, and it was an expensive Japanese only release then, so did not do well. For less money you could get the Turbo Express which had a way to connect to an external monitor and used batteries, where the LT needs an AC adapter to fully work. The trade off? Better quality backlit screen and compatibility with all your old gadgets and gizmos that hook up to the PC engine already. This console fits the same cradle as the Core Grafx, so could slot the Super CD Rom adapter, audio enhancer, different card readers for the three different kinds of CD roms you need, and the myriad of other add-ons that you don't really need, but want.

Interface unit! Super CDRom2! It's like a transformer. 

     Long before the release of the Gameboy Advance SP, you could play 16 bit (well, not quite) games on a backlit screen, play modern titles available on the SNES, and look much cooler doing it. 

People need to stop being so hard on the Sega Tower of Power.

     Sega did not have an original idea with adding more consoles and adds on to current systems, it was being done for a while. While NEC and Sega were building higher and more elaborate, Nintendo was adding full blown RISC processors, math co-processors, ram, DMA, flash memory, and custom sound chips to it's game carts and wrapping it up in the price of the game, as opposed to making cheap add ons as a requirement to play games. No surprise, if the game is more accessible, more people will purchase it, and so Nintendo won this war in a big way. Not to be outdone, it got way worse than just the tower of power; they even made a Laserdisc console system, PC computer combo units.. the list goes on and on and on. Even if you had your NEC Turbo DUO-R SuperGrafx with an Arcade Card, you would not be able to play any of the Fatal Fury games, or any of the rare titles, because they require the Arcade Card PRO. Don't forget a special controller that does not come with the console as well. You see where I'm going here. 

     I could go on forever about this, and I just might in another post. For now, enjoy more pictures of this unique handheld that inspired a whole marketing angle years later. 

r/bindingofisaac - We're taking over.

Hold R and pray. 

    I noticed a fun trend on r/bindingofisaac where people took increasingly shitty pictures of what was happening on the screen, and then asking a question of the community on how to solve said question. People are breaking out the worst possible flip phones and digital cameras from 20 years ago.. so I decided to grab some of my son's camera equipment that is already set up, and take a few pictures:

     Nothing is shittier and more deserving than actual VHS camcorder from JCPenny in the early 1980's. Beat that Isaac fans!

PS: I actually still play Isaac very often, and I'm a huge fan.