Last week I watched Turbo Kid. It was a bit slow, and the story makes sure to let you know well in advance what’s going to happen next. There’s a revelation about the girl about halfway through which retroactively plugs a whole bunch of plot holes, and the premise is neat: in a post-apocalyptic world, water is extracted from corpses, and the supply is controlled by a villain with his own little army. The whole thing seems small, in that only 20-30 people ever appear in the vast wasteland, and the wasteland is obviously an abandoned quarry. It’s hard to tell whether some things are just the result of a small budget, or whether they’re done deliberately in order to mimic a low-budget style. That’s the main thing to pay attention to though, the style. This is the opening sequence:

Run through that, what does it give the audience? BMX bike, quarry/wasteland, thumping 80s pop soundtrack (taken from a film about BMX racing, not a coincidence), twinkling neon title. It’s grounded in the icons of ’80s America Canada, as seen through the eyes of a teenage boy, so what comes out in the film is comic books, robots, lasers, girls with faded pink hair, and comedy violence, see this during a fight scene:

It’s gory, but we all know that it’s a dummy, they don’t even try to hide it, they laugh at how absurd it is. His ‘Turbo Glove’ bears some resemblance to a Nintendo power glove, and the button to enter the Turbo Rider ship is a straight-up plasma globe, it’s remarkable how much stuff they get away with. Just look at these costumes:

turbo_kid_costumes

Hockey gloves, American football pads, tyres? bits of rope?

These are the good guys in the final battle:

turbo_kid_good

And these are the bad guys:

turbo_kid_evil

Not only does the villain wear an eyepatch and carry a cane (upside-down golf club) but his right-hand man wears a metal skull mask. An actual skull on his face. It’s goofy without being insincere, not easy to pull off.

This post is sort of proof that I can put videos here. It’s been a while since I last used the HTML5 video tag and in that time browser support has gotten a lot better.

Another ongoing concern is that rsync keeps file permissions when it copies files over to the server, which means that in some cases files aren’t readable for ‘everyone’ - ie. random internet users like you. There’s an ‘S’ flag which I can apply to a directory to indicate that all files in that directory will inherit their permissions from the directory… have I understood that correctly? In any case it hasn’t worked and I fixed it manually yesterday by just resetting all permissions to 774 in the www directory, but I don’t want to do that every time I upload a new post, so I’m going to have to find a permanent solution. This stuff makes me nervous because yesterday I accidentally deleted all the file permissions and user/group ownership and locked myself out of the www directory. It’s like playing with fire, so don’t worry if the site becomes periodically inaccessible over the next week or so.

Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day listening to this and this on a loop, and probably catch up on some reading for tomorrow.