At the Boulder Compound, fans were flocking from miles around to get a glimpse of the long-awaited final installment of the mighty trilogy. The most ambitions undertaking the Logan Brothers had yet attempted: The Worst Scifi Trilogy Conclusion Ever. The premiere turned out to be a disaster befitting the project's title.

Even as Bitscape entered the Boulder Compound around 1930 on Saturday night, the mishaps had begun, but these unfortunate occurrances could not even begin to foreshadow the tragedy ahead. Jaeger and Zan Lynx were hard at work on Gladiator, desperately scrambling to get things ready in time for the premiere. There were problems with exporting the material to NTSC. Apparently, some insane time consuming file format conversion was required before the software would allow output to /dev/tv.

It was decided that the delay was acceptable, but that Gladiator would need to be transported up to the screening room to eliminate the extra step (and time) of transferring to VHS or 8mm. During the wait, food was served to the attendees.

After the format conversion was complete, Gladiator was transferred to the screening room, everything was wired up, and the crowd gathered to witness the event. It began with a reshowing of original The Worst Scifi Movie Ever, so that those who had not seen it could catch up on the plot (hah). That part seemed to go well enough.

The real trouble began when the Worst Scifi Sequel, also a re-showing, began its first live action scenes. There was no dialog! Highly skilled on-site technicians quickly concluded that there was no audio because file it was playing from simply had nothing but silence on the soundtrack. Doh!

Investigation revealed that the problem went back a couple steps in the editing process, where sound had apparently been lost due to inability of the editing software to handle some audio source format inconsistencies.

Long story made less long: Jagere spent most of the night converting, testing, experimenting, finding more problems, recutting, reconverting, recording, and swearing at the "piece of Microsoft". Local inhabitants went to bed. Zan Lynx and I hung out, taking catnaps on the couch and occassionally mumbling incoherently.

Finally, at around 0300, the screening of the premiere finally began. (Although Zan Lynx remained fast asleep throughout the duration, echoing the behavior of Captain Logan's character in a few of the scenes.) We must've been really tired, because Jaeger and I were actually rolling on the floor laughing at half the scenes.

More technical difficulties occurred during the grand finale scene. The video cut out, requiring Jaeger to reinitialize some stuff, and then reconvert the end of the movie.

After 0400, the whole disaster was finally ready to be called "done" (or be abandoned). Jaeger removed the write protect flag on the VHS tape which had been recording the output (therefore setting the copy-over protect flag, which now makes me wonder if it could somehow becoma a DMCA violation to use scotch tape to override this flag).

The premiere finally complete, Bitscape left the Compound, taking his "thou shalt not watch when thou art married" movies with him. At the time of departure, Zan Lynx was still slumbering peacefully.

And Jaeger is going to have a fun time at the airport tomorrow^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hoday. Does airport security screen for sleep-deprived lunatic passengers? I don't know, because I will be slumbering peacefully myself, in about... 10 seconds.