13 thoughts on “More Sands, More Hourglasses”

    • Sorry, Ashley.

      The clip was from the great 1989 cultural milestone, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

      I haven’t used it to solve your problem, I have a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service that I use primarily for enhancement of privacy and confidentiality for client matters. In addition to highly-secure encrypted communications, it allows me to log into communication nodes located all over the world.

      I just logged into a local internet access point in Mumbai, even though I’m located half-way around the world from that city.

      There are a variety of VPN services, many of which are available at reasonable prices. You install a small program on your computer, sign up for a subscription and geo-fencing systems to restrict access to online material for most anything on the internet become meaningless.

      I’ll let those visitors to TPV who are more knowledgeable about the subject than I am comment further if they like, but if I want to see what the internet world looks like in Paris or Tokyo, it’s a pretty simple process for me. If I’m really paranoid, I use a secure browser like Brave or Tor, which doesn’t keep any information about what I’ve been looking at online.

      (Disclosure for those who may be worried about me – I don’t view pornographic material of any sort online or off.)

      • A VPN was the first thing I tried when I got the “Video Unavailable” message, but no luck. However, a quick search on “bill and ted socrates” gave a appropriate selection of videos suggesting we do not really live in a wasteland. In fact the normal access problems I run into are USA websites saying they don’t want to comply with GDPR, mostly newspaper sites – though those hiding old articles behind a paywall are more of a problem (I’m not going to subscribe to read an article from years ago).

        • I’m very sorry to hear that, Mike.

          Evidently, my VPN trick has been foiled by advanced technology of some sort.

          I’ll so some experiments to see if I can figure out the problem.

          • No need to worry. I was probably trying to do things on the cheap and ended up using a known “in the USA” VPN URL which is being blocked by someone trying to enforce geolocation rules.

  1. If you do a search on the youtube site you’ll find clips of all the significant scenes of tbe movie, playable everywhere. On a given day you might even find tbe whole movie because tbat’s how Youtube works.
    As is, the movie was released by ORION PICTURES which now belongs to MGM so it likely belongs to AMAZON as of yesterday. If its not on PRIME it soon will.

    I was actually happy to see AMAZON get MGM but only because of STARGATE. The idiots at MGM (and SyFy) failed to appreciate the jewel tbat is STARGATE UNIVERSE. (The wrong guys in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they have to figure out how to survive.) Almost as bad as FOX with FIREFLY and SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND.

    I trust the guys that rescued THE EXPANSE will know what to do with tbe franchise.

    • My first thought when I heard about the proposed deal was “all that old IP will be on Prime”, which made the day seem a little brighter.

      Given the normal management idiocy when it comes to SFF shows I thought that Stargate did pretty well with its original run, but yes, UNIVERSE got shafted. This is pretty much par for the course, though crimes against humanity like the treatment of FIREFLY are comparatively rare. My two favourite TV shows from the last 20+ years were Buffy and Farscape and the former actually got to run its natural course. The latter had some plotting screwed up by ignorant suits and then was cut off just after the hero and heroine had been pixilated. I always assumed that the “To be continued” on the last episode was the showrunners giving the finger to management.

    • Here in Santa Fe we get two channels over the air that come from Albuquerque, “This” and “Comet”. They show movies and TV series from the MGM catalog. “This” is movies, and “Comet” is mostly TV series with movies.

      I haven’t been able to find out if the Amazon purchase will shut down those channels.

      So many things are going streaming and we don’t have the bandwidth here in Santa Fe to make it worth while getting a large screen. The fastest I get with DSL is 1mps. Friends in Albuquerque get 100mps to a Gig depending on the age of the neighborhood infrastructure.

      • Is your service at least cheap?
        If not you might want to look into STARLINK. It is in the BETTER THAN NOTHING™ beta right now but at the rate they’re launching satellites they’ll be fully operational in a few months. Not cheap (yet?) but it looks to be able to deliver 50-150Mbps with latency low enough for pro gaming. And NO DATA CAPS.

        As for PRIME-MGM two things to remember:
        1- Ted Turner bought the entire MGM library in 1986. All that belongs to WB, soon to be WB-Discovery. Because they’re merging and spinning off ATT. (That merger didn’t last.) So if your locals are showing Classic MGM the merger won’t affect anything.

        2- What AMAZON bought is post 1986 MGM. And existing contracts will be honored. So, since most are non-exclusive, PRIME will get the right to add the mini stash to their service but they can’t and won’t claw back anything into exclusivity. They will, however, get to pocket the revenue from those contracts which is decent enough. Just not enough for MGM to survive in the age of silos.

        Other mergers are still coming.
        Somebody will be taking LIONSGATE and somebody will swallow VIACOMCBS.
        Discovery already figured out that they were too late, too small to the silo war and ATT discovered even their pockets aren’t deep enough for that and the 5G bandwidth war; both fights will continue, one driving the other.

        And broadband service will improve for all.

        (Btw, check out the VIZIO D65 TVs. I got one for my mom and they’re surprisingly adequate. And cheap for that size. Even suited for the latest gaming consoles, which are very demanding.)

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