Perpetual personal uncertainty about “Rifftrax” didn’t block out all thought of contributing to their Kickstarter to return to Mystery Science Theater 3000 for four episodes, but I didn’t rush to make that contribution. Announcements to keep up interest piqued my interest with the news Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff would contribute to one episode; my introduction to Mystery Science Theater having been through MSTings that had “Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank experimenting on Mike” had something to do with that, although I suppose I have to balance “maybe the ‘riffing’ got a bit meaner afterwards” against “the characters could be ‘casually cruel’ to each other in the ‘host segments’ then.” However, my uneasy caution kicked in again when the second announcement of a movie to be “riffed” involved a “Star Wars ripoff” (which, like “Space Mutiny,” just happened to recycle special effects from an earlier ripoff...)
( What helped in the end, and beyond the end was a beginning... )

As “MARCHintosh” has continued I suppose I’ve been thinking more about the actual antique hardware I set up than doing things with it. One item discovered via mere emulation before the month began did at least provoke an idea, though. Going through a giant disk image of selected software, I happened on a “2020Patch” extension. After a while, I started to think about how the Control Panel only offers two digits for setting the year. Emulators appear to draw their clock setting from the host system such that I never look at files I’ve made in them and realise there’s something off about their date stamps, but that would of course be different with my SE/30. Once I’d examined some recent date stamps on it I realised they’d indeed wound up back in the early years of the twentieth century.
( Shifting systems and times )