The Signal Watch: 9/24/23

Saturday, September 30, 2023

MST3K/ Cattrall Watch: City Limits (1984)

Watched: 09/29/2023

Format: MST3K on YouTube (keep circulating the tapes?)

Viewing: First

Director: Someone, I'm sure

In my quest to catch the entirety of the Kim Cattrall filmography without it becoming a thing, I finally got around to the episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (S5:E3) in which Joel and the Bots watch the 1984 sci-fi opus City Limits.

You will guess from the fact it is not just an episode of MST3K, but from observing that a 1984 movie made its way to MST3K in 8 years that maybe this was not a movie that was in high demand, perhaps due to the fact it's a low-budget mess of a movie.

Weirdly, the movie features a number of known humans, begging the question: what was happening in 1984 for each of these people?

The movie features:

James Earl Jones
Rae Dawn Chong (on the poster above)
John Stockwell (the guy from Christine and Top Gun)
Dean Devlin for some reason
John Diehl (many things, including Miami Vice)
and, of course, Kim Cattrall
And Robby Benson who was in stuff I've never actually seen

It feels like the movie happened to be a way station for actors on their way up or down. I won't guess further as to whom was heading up or down, but you can do the math. It's mostly weird to watch yet another 1980's no-budget post-apocalyptic movie but you actually recognize half the cast.

Anyway - I won't even really get into what it is or is about. Because Jamie and I had to piece together what was happening in a pause-the-movie moment about 2/3rds of the way through.

This movie is now famous mostly for spawning the Kim Cattrall bit on MST3K as someone on staff (I assume Trace Beauliue) was clearly a fellow appreciator of the actor.

It does help if you've seen Mannequin. I mean, not just to appreciate the sketch, but in life in general.

Happy Birthday, Angie Dickinson

Happy birthday to actor Angie Dickinson!

Dickinson sits in a unique and terrific place in Hollywood history, having arrived in Hollywood and in pictures in the 1950's, falling in with the Rat Pack, and carrying on in film and television for the next several decades. She's worked with everyone from John Wayne and Ronald Reagan to Gwyneth Paltrow.

Retired these days, about a decade ago J_Swift, Dug, K and I saw her interviewed by Eddie Muller at the Castro in San Francisco where she kept the audience in the palm of her hand.

Happiest of birthdays and here's to one of the greats.

Friday, September 29, 2023

Hey. My pal made an EP. Give it a listen!

I take a tremendous amount of joy in the diverse creative endeavors of my pals.

This evening, my longtime chum, Matt M., sent me an email informing me he'd released an EP.

It's excellent ambient stuff. Give it a spin!

Monday, September 25, 2023

Well, clearly this blog is getting crawled for AI purposes

So, I rarely look at the stats on The Signal Watch. I kind of just do what I do, and if readers want to be here, great. I'm not looking to monetize the site, and I don't expect here in my 20th year of blogging I'll suddenly be an internet sensation.

One thing I've joked about for years is that there will be enough written by me and posted at this blog that when I go, you won't have to miss me. Just train an AI on this site and you'll get a robot version of me that has plenty to say and occasionally ponders Kim Cattrall.

But in the past year, suddenly... that whole AI business seemed oddly way more likely. I don't need to tell you about how AI's are being trained against the internet, novels, movies, etc... And, I assume, just crawling the internet.

Well, I was looking at my stats and something was off. I suddenly had a lot of hits. Like... a lot.

And so I backed it out to the past year.

And, to be sure it hadn't been just a slow year at The Signal Watch, I checked "all time" for stats.

Huh.

As much as I'd like to think my podcast and various musings have drawn the eye of Planet Earth, somehow I don't think blogging about Babylon for 10,000 words has suddenly made me a superstar.

Similarly, I doubt the mostly dormant League of Melbotis blog is suddenly wildly popular.

So. It's possible Google wandered into their basement, found a trove of disheveled devs working in obscurity, remembered it owns Blogger.com, and is now pushing content from their platform higher up in search results. But you and I know that's not true. Nor does it seem to be what's happening. I'm getting no additional comments, and - per post, I'm not really seeing a huge jump. My guess is, with almost 4700 posts, every crawl adds 1 or two hits. Do that a few times, and it adds up.

Yes, I have Google Analytics. No, I have no idea how to read it. It seems tuned to make sure you aren't making any money, and it's all about money, so I largely ignore it.

That said, Google Analytics is far more steady over the past month or so, so whatever it's measuring seems more accurate. I assume Google Analytics' numbers filter out all the robots reading my stuff.

Robots, yes. But at least *someone* is reading my stuff and processing it. And those robots are no more or less soulless than Randy.

Anyway, this means there probably now may be an AI of me out there somewhere. Some creaky, confused AI that is absolutely furious it's been brought into being.

In a way, that's fine. I don't really care that much if robots are learning from this blog. It's better than when people used to literally just swipe my content and claim it as their own.

If it's NOT for A.I. purposes, I have no idea why the internet is suddenly so interested. If you have an idea, lemme know.

In the meantime, I have some robots to train up on Kim Cattrall.