Somewhat. More or less. If you want to call it that. Well we held an opening ceremony at least.

And now is the part where I say, "When all other acts of attempting to marshall brainpower fail, type junk into the web page and see what comes out."

The phest yesterday progressed onward, with Bitscape being tutored in how to play Starcraft, and acquiring a very rough idea of how to play Protoss. A challenging and intriguing game, ya.

Last night, to select which movies to watch (available choices included the large subset of my collection that I had carted to Nebraska, and the discs Jaeger's brought -- his collection minus the discs which intersect with ones Bitscape also owns), we came up with a convoluted voting system of points which narrowed down to the top picks with each round, until we were finally down to 2 movies which would be watched. (Only a roomful of geeks would devise such insanity.) Would the Florida election commission be proud? Yes, they would.

Anya kindly baked two pans full of salsa-soaked burritos for supper, which the group devoured before the movie viewing would begin.

For the viewing itself, we decided to go over to Humblik's because his house features an actual tv to view movies on (a larger viewing area than our monitors), and Bitscape was curious to see the interior of Humblik's house. We loaded DVD player, chosen movies, and 5 human life forms into Tobias, and made the brief journey to the memorable South 48th street, where Humblik's house is but blocks away from the legendary ucollege.edu.

Once there, the eager media freaks set about attempting to get things connected, and immediately encountered difficulties. The DVD player (Bitscape's) features just about every output type imaginable except the old coax w/ rf signal. (I guess they figure if people are buying dvd players, they will want to be using a higher grade transfer medium than that used as a conduit for broadcast tv, and have the hardware to match.) The only input supported by Humblik's tv was... you guessed it. Coax. Humblik's VCR had a coax output and RCA inputs. Therefore, the plan was to route DVD through the VCR into the tv.

Unfortunately, although the VCR had plugs for RCA inputs, there appeared to be no way to set the silly thing to use auxilliary inputs using the controls on the unit. We suspected the VCR's remote would have the appropriate button to switch input source. Luck being what it was, the remote had long been lost in the winds of time, space, piles of clutter, or who knows what else. Stonewalled.

Neelix did have a VCR back and his place, however, and he was quite certain that it would perform the appropriate function. (Bitscape expressed concern that even if this were the case, there may be an additional roadblock; the evil that is Macrovision. Net horror stories of people who had tried to do just what we were attempting, and gotten nothing but horribly garbled pictures in exchange for spending their hard earned dollars on MPAA-crippled media sources.)

But we were optimistic, and we were vigilant. One problem at a time. With that in mind, the five of us piled back into Tobias, returned to Neelix's place, and retrieved his VCR (which did feature RCA in, coax out, easily switchable via... Tada!... The remote) along with some beverages and the forgotten-the-first-time-out DVD remote. Back to Humblik's.

The new VCR was swapped in as the intermediary device, and things worked immediately. In a manner of speaking.

To start the fun, we put in the top voted feature of the evening, the DVD release of made-for-tv movie Hercules and the Amazon Women. Although watchable, the picture quality was degraded significantly, the color tints fluctuated, and every few minutes, the video would blank momentarily to a blue screen for a few seconds, and then return to normal. Annoying, but not bad enough to keep the movie from still being a highly entertaining experience.

I suspected, but wasn't certain, that the occassional blips were due to Macrovision nastiness (war on the customers! war on the customers!). After the first movie ended, Humblik dug out his video stabilization box which lacked an appropriate AC adaptor. He and Jaeger disappeared into the depths of the basement (land of black magic, voodoo, hacking wizardry, and Humblik's sleeping location) while I discussed the movie with Neelix and Anya.

(Another amusing sidenote: On more than one occassion during viewing, the show was stolen by one or more of the common-but-exotic household animals (canine and feline variety) roaming the premises. The most attention grabbing of all was the ridiculously cute teeeensy tinsy little kitten (named "Baby") which would prowl around, crouch on armchairs, and perform great feats of daredevil stuntwork as it lept long distances from one piece of furniture to the next.)

After a few minutes, I couldn't resist the urge to find out what in Redmond was going on, so I ventured down the dark stairway. What I found was Jaeger cutting and stripping the wires on Zhaan's old power supply as Humblik looked on. He shortly returned to the upstairs with mutilated power supply in hand, individually asked each person present if they had a volt meter he could use (all responses were negative), and proceeded to... do something. With the wires. Into Humblik's counter-Macrovision video signal repair device.

After Jaeger deemed this hack of a contraption ready to test, he plugged it in, rerouted the DVD signal through it to the VCR, and wonder of wonders, the Sony logo appeared onscreen. Good sign. Next question... was Macrovision actually the problem, and did this solve it? I started the other Herc movie on the disc.

The picture was clean and crisp as could be expected, given the number of hops, and the hardware it was being displayed on. No color fluctuations. No annoying blips of the video. Just crisp, clean DVD picture all the way. Ahhhhhh! Breath of fresh air.

Jaeger said, "Now, see, this is perfectly legal." I pointed out that in fact it could reasonably be said that he had just committed a class something-or-other felony under the DMCA (with all the fines and potential jail time it entails), but he would not admit to being the unrepentant criminal outlaw that he is.

With that matter settled, we proceeded to watch Crouching Tiger; Hidden Dragon (English dub audio, also with English subtitles turned on; this proved interesting because they obviously had different translators working on spoken English dialog, versus the wording printed below the frame.) I think I enjoyed it even more this time than I did on my first two vewings (one theaticral and one at the Compound of L). Maybe the movie gets better with age. Maybe after seeing the director's commentary, one notices more. Maybe watching with a similarly appreciative group of people assembled enhances the experience. Whatever the case, I keep liking it better with each viewing.

After that viewing, post-0400, we gathered up the stuff and returned to Neelix and Anya's. Just as the clock struck 0500, we held the opening ceremony with bottles of Bawls (lucky for this town, they're readily available at a nearby supermarket, and cheap to), which set the record for latest-at-night opening ceremony of a fest ever. With that act, the phest ended, and the fest began. (Readers may attempt to derive their own definitions of non-words used here and elsewhere. Does every last bit need to be spelled out? I'd rather we all just learn to see things foneticly.)

With the fest underway, Jaeger, his ego now out of control due to recent feats of volt-meter-less hackery (Insert typical Kevin Smith-esqe insult hurled at Ben Affleck's overblown ego, but s/Ben Affleck/Jaeger/. Wait, I think I just did that.), cavalierly proceeded to commoadeer Argo's processor power and certain i/o subsystems for his own nefarious Farscape-addicted purposes. (What's next? Robbing convenience stores to get the next Peacekeeper fix?)

Neelix and Humblik played an online web-based strategy game which appears to be way too addictive and time consuming to those involved for me to even want to get close to it.

Bitscape started to do something with the Content Collective code, which involved mangling the contents of some patch, which had been submitted a few months ago by some random egomaniac, who shall hereby remain nameless. (Har har har! Is it obvious I haven't slept for a while?) The intent was to get it finished and into production before going down for sleep, but as higher brain functions (along with a few lower ones) started to fail, it became obvious this was not going to happen.

Now the only thing that's left is the lowest brain function of all: Typing in pseudo-witty nonsense in an attempt to sadistically numb the brains of all who happen to read this. And now, even that is starting to fail.

I too shall now regenerate with the hope that I will wake up... somewhere. Here, I suppose. (Duh!) These sorts of weekends really ought to have more days in them. Like 20. And each day ought to have lots more hours. Like twice as many. Yeah, that would do it.

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