It is time for me to go, mother; I am going. When in the paling darkness of the lonely dawn you stretch your arms for your baby in the bed, I shall say, "Baby is not there!" - mother, I am going. I shall become a delicate draught of air and caress you; and I shall be ripples in the water when you bathe; and kiss you and kiss you again. In the gusty night when the rain patters on the leaves you will hear my whisper in your bed, and my laughter will flash with the lightning through the open window into your room. If you lie awake, thinking of your baby till late into the night, I shall sing to you form the stars, "Sleep, mother, sleep." On the straying moonbeams I shall steal over your bed, and lie upon your bosom while you sleep. I shall become a dream, and through the little opening of your eyelids I shall slip into the depths of your sleep; and when you wake up and look round startled, like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out into the darkness. When, on the great festival of PUJA, the neighbours' children come and play about the house, I shall melt into the music of the flute and throb in your heart all day. Dear suntie will come with your PUJA presents and will ask, "Where is our baby, sister? Mother you tell her softly, "He is in the pupils of my eyes, he is my body and my soul."
Oh yeah, all right Are you going to be in my dreams Tonight? And in the end The love you take Is equal to the love you make
The End Red Dwarf - Series 1 - Episode 1
The first ever episode of Red Dwarf focuses on setting up the premise of the show, and does little else.
On a spaceship named Red Dwarf, a few dozen months from Earth, there is a mining operation being carried out in and around Jupiter. The two lowest ranking crew members, David Lister and Arnold Rimmer, just won't get on with each other. Rimmer is meticulous and pedantic, and Lister is a scuzzy slob who never buys any soap. Today Rimmer is trying to become promoted so that he no longer has to share a room with Lister. But before that can happen, he has to pass his astroengineering exam. Rimmer knows that he knows little about astroengineering, so he tries to cheat by copying his textbooks onto his body.
While Rimmer is elsewhere failing his exam, Lister is feeding the pregnant cat he smuggled aboard the ship. Soon, he is called into Captain Hollister's office and questioned about his cat. The captain gives him a choice - hand in the cat to be cut up and tested, or spend 18 months in suspended animation with no pay as punishment. Lister chooses to be put into stasis for 18 months, and on the way to the stasis booth, he sees Rimmer being led away on a stretcher. Lister goes into the booth and is frozen, but instead of coming out in a year and a half, he comes out 3 million years later.
After he leaves stasis, Lister walks into a surprisingly empty drive room. The ship's computer, Holly, informs him that a badly repaired drive plate exploded, exposing everyone to a lethal dose of "cadmium II". This reduced everyone but Lister to white dust. Lister is, surprisingly, not excessively unhappy about this. He is more unhappy when Holly tells him how long he has been in stasis so that the radiation had time to decay to a safe level.
In addition to that, Holly has shot Red Dwarf out of the Solar System at top speed in order to stop the radiation reaching Earth. Not only has Red Dwarf been away from Earth for three million years, but it is also three million years of travelling away from Earth. After Lister sits down for a few moments to think about this, a hologram of his dead roommate Rimmer walks into the room. They argue for a while and suddenly a large humanoid cat-like creature bursts onto the scene by jumping out of a ventilation duct and scaring the hell out of Lister and Rimmer. Holly informs the pair that the creature is merely an evolved descendant of Lister's cat, Frankenstein. As he feeds Frankenstein, Lister has a good idea: why not go back to Earth? Rimmer mocks him, but Lister has made his mind up and shouts jubilantly, "Look out, Earth! The slime's coming home!"
Thus concludes our introduction to Red Dwarf; three losers and a senile computer lost in space on a ship the size of a city.
→ Future Echoes (episode 2)
"The End" was a classic early 80s arcade shooter. This title was originally programmed by Konami back in 1980, but they licensed it to Stern. North and South American gamers got the Stern version of the game, while the rest of the world got the Konami version. There were a few minor differences between the two versions, which I will detail below.
The late 70s to early 80s was a time when a peculiar genre of shooter was popular, the "bugs in space" genre. There were a lot of these games. You are probably most familiar with Galaxian and Galaga, but there were many other good ones as well, like Stern's "The End".
In "The End" you control a ship whose mission is to zap as many bug-ships as possible, before you run out of lives, or the bugs manage to spell out the word "END" with little chunks of brick. You can move left and right, and the bugs attack from the top of the screen, coming out of a large mothership. But the bugs have another mission besides just blindly attacking you. That other mission is to systematically steal the bricks from your three bases, and use them to spell out the word "END" up near the top of the screen.
Lets talk about your three bases, because they are very important, and they are completely different between the two versions of this game. In the Konami version, the bases are above you and you can use them as cover, but they block out a lot of your potential shooting area. In the Stern version, the bases are below you, which gives you a free path to shoot everything in sight, but also means that you have nowhere to hide. I personally prefer the Stern version, as it is much easier to shoot the bugs before they manage to grab a piece of yr base, even though it is also a lot easier to get blasted.
That is basically all there is to this game, just shoot the bugs, and keep them from spelling out "END". You would do well to attempt to target bugs that have already grabbed a piece of your base, as the piece will be returned if you manage to blast them.
"The End" was available in both upright and cocktail formats. I am only going to be discussing the Stern cabinets, and not the Konami ones, as I have never seen a Konami one.
The upright version came in the standard Stern cabinet, which was the same cabinet that most Stern games came in. The only real difference between different Stern cabinets was the Berzerk and Frenzy cabinets had an access door in front, and other Stern cabinets did not.
The game was black with black t-molding. The sideart consisted of a really awesome looking painted rendition of some sort of blue blasting machine shooting at a pair of bugs. The marquee and monitor bezel are covered with a great scene showing evil looking bugs assaulting a wall, drawn in classic Marvel Comics style. Stern really had some great artists back then, the only manufacturer who was even close to them in this department was Atari.
The control panel was aluminum, and had some game instructions and a basic design painted onto most of its surface area. The controls consisted entirely of pushbuttons, with the same layout as the panel on Space Invaders.
Internally the game used a standard 19" arcade monitor for display purposes. The game's code ran on the Scramble platform, which consisted of 2 Z80 processors and a pair of AY-8910 sound chips Several other games run on this exact same mainboard, and can be swapped in with an EPROM swap.
Their were two different cocktail versions of "The End", a small one with a 13" monitor, and a larger "Deluxe" one with a 19" monitor. They were similar in design to the Midway Cocktail (Pac-Man/Galaga/et cetera), but with control panels that sloped slightly upwards. You probably won't ever see one of these, they didn't even make a lot of them back then, and it is doubtful if more than one or two have survived to the present day intact.
This game was never ported to any home systems, at least not that I am aware of. But it is supported by two emulators, MAME and Vantage.
You are probably going to have a hard time finding a real "The End" machine to play on. They are out there, but they are few and far between. Despite the scarcity of these machines, they are still relatively inexpensive, usually selling for only a few hundred dollars.
A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS number thirteen is the last in this series, as would be imagined by the title. In this one, the Baudelaire orphans pick up where they left off in The Penultimate Peril: In the same boat as their enemy Count Olaf in more ways than one. Basic outline of the book and plot spoilers ahead.
The book begins with the Baudelaires and Count Olaf in a boat together. Olaf orders the Baudelaires around and clutches a harpoon gun and a helmet full of poisonous fungus. The Baudelaires wonder whether to push Olaf overboard as he leans over the side of the boat to pull off the "Carmelita" label to reveal a "Count Olaf" label. A storm hits.
The boat washes up on a coastal shelf. Everyone has survived, and Olaf continues to order the orphans around as they walk around the shelf. A young girl named Friday greets them, and since the Baudelaires are polite, they are invited to the island which is her home, but since Olaf keeps claiming to be their king and threatens Friday with the harpoon gun, she tells him to go away.
The orphans get led to the island and are offered coconut cordial, which tastes strange and sweet. They meet Ishmael, the island's facilitator, and then they are told to put on white robes like everyone else and give away all their possessions. Klaus is allowed to keep his glasses, but otherwise they have to hide what they're each keeping: Violet hides her ribbon, Klaus hides his commonplace book, and Sunny hides her egg whisk.
The islanders go through the usual custom of sorting through anything that had washed up on the beach during the storm. Ishmael rejects just about everything except nets and blankets, and has some sheep drag the items away. During this, many islanders are named, and they all have one thing in common: Their names have been used in some story or myth about the sea or islands. After that, the orphans are given food they don't like and their own seashell canteens full of coconut cordial, and the islanders drink a toast to the children. But Ishmael refers to them as orphans even though they haven't told him their story . . . which makes them very suspicious about how much this man knows.
The Baudelaires find their places on the island: Violet helps with the laundry, Klaus helps pile clay on Ishmael's ailing feet and refills his cordial canteen, and Sunny helps with the cooking. They discuss their past and what they miss, and decide they both like and dislike living on the island. Their peace comes to an end when a weird craft made out of strapped-together books arrives, carrying Kit Snicket . . . and Count Olaf, who is disguised as usual.
Olaf, in a seaweed wig pretending to be the pregnant Kit Snicket, tries to fool the islanders, but unlike every other time in the books, every single person sees through his disguise. They decide to put him in a cage that washed up in the last storm, and they abandon him with the books he rode in on and Kit Snicket. But because Olaf announced that Sunny was hiding a whisk in her robe, Ishmael found out what each of them hid, and decided to abandon THEM as well.
Abandoned, the kids sit with only a snake (the Incredibly Deadly Viper from book 2), an unconscious friend, and Count Olaf to keep them company. They discover that Ishmael had been eating apples (as evidenced by an apple core that fell out of his robe), and thus realize he's being selfish and untruthful about his feet being hurt. Olaf offers to share a plan and information if they will let him out of the cage, but they go out of his sight and think about their choices.
Olaf falls asleep and the Baudelaires keep thinking. Soon enough, Kit Snicket wakes up and is happy to see them (and their snake), but is disappointed to hear that Dewey is not with them. (The Baudelaires decide not to tell her that he was harpooned i
