The Week In A Bad Education Towers #54

Hello you! The weather has changed, the rain is coming down and the car is being MOTed tomorrow. Its going to be a rough week.

So yesterday was, apparently, Batman Day which is nice but also meant that they were showing various Batmans at the cinema, including Batman by which I’m referring to the 1989 variant. I mean, The Adam West Batman movie would have been chef’s kiss but we can’t have everything.

Now, I was very excited to see this mainly because I didn’t see it in the cinema back in the day Despite it being laser focussed at my age group I wasn’t 12 and this was the first 12 being released in the cinema. So I had to wait and read the novelisation until it came out on home video.

The 1989 Batman was a game changer, a huge movie that re-ignited the comic book movie genre showing the potential behind these kind of characters to create huge money making franchises. That Bat symbol was everywhere for months, the influence of this films over the genre lasted a good decade if not longer.

It does, of course, still hold up. There are several threads to why this is; the art design, reaching back to the gothic origins of Batman all shadows and tall buildings is inspired. The score by Danny Elfman is a game changer, one of the most iconic themes in a decade full of iconic themes. And then there’s the casting of the twin leads; Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as the Joker.

Keaton nails it by nailing Bruce Wayne realising thats the key to the character. And the opposite him you have Nicholson, having the time of his life delivering zinger after zinger and leaving not one inch of scenery unchewed.

Its a belter, a film that was only really topped by its sequel.

Of course, when we were sat there and the opening Warner Bros logo popped up I heard a sigh from my youngest then “this is going to be an old film, isn’t it?”

Sigh.

So ages ago I got a GPi Case for a Raspberry Pi Zero, which was awesome, The Pi Zero can handle pretty much every old system up to the 16 bits and maybe a little beyond, so pairing it with the Game Boy stylings of the GPi case was great. There were some niggles though mainly with the Pi Zero not having any wifi so getting stuff onto it was always a faff; you couldn’t SSH into it, the SD card would be in a linux file format that was always a pain to read, you’d need to take the Pi out of the case to get access to the USB ports, just a bit annoying.

The Pi Zero 2 however, has built in wifi and bluetooth which bypasses those issues. Great! Shame about the global chip shortage that massacred the supply of all the Raspberry Pi for literal years.

But now! Things are better and the Pi Zero 2 was back in stock so boy did I order one and then sorted it out. It was a bit of a faff to sort out the new image for the new Pi; I fancied putting Batocera on it as enjoyed that on my Pi 3, and there was a specific image for the GPi case on their website but it just kept booting to a black screen. So, bit of googling and found this image on Reddit that works a treat.

Yes, I do have pretty much the same emulation on my Steam Deck only with a much bigger screen and better ergonomics but the size of the GPi is much nicer, bit easier to carry around.

Just need to sort out a better battery for it now.

Here’s a video!

A full blown existential crisis about the spelling of Mega Drive in a daft video about a Tennis game.

And also recorded the new Conquistabores this week; going to try and edit it in Davinci Resolve rather than Audition; been meaning to try for a while now as Audition can be flakey as hell and been wanting to move away from it for a while. We’ll see how that goes!

That’ll do for now, if you fancy anything else here’s a great long read about the mess at Disney which makes for fun reading as the various movie strikes wear on.

Might not be a full newsletter next week as next weekend my eldest is off to University, so there’s another existential crisis right there.

Anyways, bye!