Words On Wednesday

One of my favorite pastimes with my family is watching old VHS home videos. I want to generate that same experience for my kids, but today's media doesn't really seem to have the same sensation. These videos of my childhood all have a sort of specific feel to them. Long form movies, these typically took up the entirety of a VHS tape, about 80 minutes or so if I recall. Scenes might run for several minutes of us just doing household things. Maybe it was a birthday party, or it could be the one time my cousin tried to make a documentary about trees. In any case, it was a live action glimpse into that period of time. I still need to digitize those videos. We have tons of them somewhere or another, and I know that tape media will most definitely degrade over time. If I can convert those to mp4 now and properly store them, they’ll be preserved for years into the future. I might just burn them to DVD and watch that instead of the original VHS. Who has a VCR nowadays anyway? Fast forw...

Roughnecks was a television series came out about 20 years ago that nobody seems to remember, but was my absolute jam back when I was a kid. Source: http://starshiptroopers.wikia.com/wiki/Roughnecks:_Starship_Troopers_Chronicles Fully titled “ Roughnecks: Starship Trooper Chronicles ," the show was based on a movie , based on a book . I didn’t know anything of the book or the film until recently. When the show was airing, I just knew it was about military guys shooting aliens with big guns, and that was awesome. As one can assume, CGI animation from the late 1990s and early 2000s was not very good. The creators reused a lot of scenes, especially one particular explosion sequence that seemed to be in every episode. I only know this because I watched through the series again during my freshman year in college with my roommate, the only person I know who also watched this show and remembered it. We wanted to love the show the same way we did as kids, but it did not age well ...

Long theorized by television and film, “Smell-O-Vision” is the idea that digital media could produce a scent to more thoroughly immerse the viewer. While there have been attempts and partially successful examples in the past, I do not believe we will ever achieve true Smell-O-Vision. And I’m not just being a doubting naysayer, I have genuine reason behind this proposition. This theory began from a discussion with my wife about purchasing Bath & Body Works  items for Mother’s Day gifts. We both prefer shopping online instead of visiting brick and mortar stores, but scents are one thing that will always require a store front. Without physically smelling the products, you can never know exactly what you’re getting unless it is an item that you’ve purchased before. We mused about how it would be nice if they could use Smell-O-Vision on their website to let you smell the scents from the comfort of your home. Before long, we started musing about exactly how this would work. To re...