All posts by Armand

Film, Personal

A scanner, darkly

I’ve just had a bunch of great experiences.

First, Makan, a Malaysian restaraunt on Portobello Road. They have ROTI CANAI. Any Malaysians reading this blog will know how significant that is. And they had Nasi Lemak with real sambal. Taste-tastic.

Next, The Electric Cinema. On the bigass red sofas at the back. Awesome. Eveyone looked at me and Arvind and thought we were bling. It was fun to pretend to be famous for a while.

DSC02049 And then – the scanner darkly. I won’t pretend to know a lot about Phillip K Dick. But I can say this is the most empathy I’ve had with Keanu Reaves character in a movie since he played Ted “Theodore” Logan in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in the early 90s. The animation is *awesome* – weird overlays on conventional action cinematography. Functional dystopia. Drug-ridden conspiracy theory.

Real pain.

It was awesome, twisted, frustrating, unfinished, dark. Mostly dark. But everything about it is good, if you’re in the right state of mind.

Of course, the actual big speech?

What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly?

Complete, meaningless drivel. No more drugs for that man.

Miscellany

I hate Edgeware road

…at least, the circle line bit of it. Sometimes you win and the train doesn’t stop at the station indefinitely on its way (East or West) but mostly – you lose. Tonight, I lost.

Victory will be mine.

Personal

Veni, vide, vici

Last night’s dream was a doozy (I believe that’s the term).

First, I was a doctor, and I got to use such choice phrases as:

“I’m a doctor, damnit!”

Then, inexplicably, I was amongst the legions of Rome – all of whom sleep outdoors in bunks very similar to the bed I had at school. Who knew? As I pulled my imperial toga from the suiter case I had hanging in my cupboard at the end of the bed (I wasn’t a soldier, no kilts for me, only manly togas with teal trim) — I received the summons. Julius wanted to see me.

“Crap,” thought my dream-self, “now I’m in for it.”

See! I told you it was a doozy! Bet you wish you had dreams this interesting. You do? I’m crazy? Shut up!

Internet, Miscellany, Technology

The Moodatron ® 1000™

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A miracle of modern invention, the Moodatron ® 1000™ is a bluetooth-enabled mood-broadcasting presence enabled device, capable of detecting your current state of mind and providing that information directly to your favourite instant messaging application or even Livejournal! An online community site, www.mood.ron can even aggregate your mood, plot it by time of day and compare it to other people with similar moods to you! Find your fellow mooded friends, and date them!

On the move? The Moodatron ® 1000™ is compatible with your bluetooth enabled mobile phone!

Invented by geniuses with white coats and electrodes, the Moodatron ® 1000â„¢ has been decribed by fuzzy dolts around the world as “the greatest invention since ‘what I’m listening to’ plugins” and “a must have for all people with no need for personal space!”

The Moodatron ® 1000™ will hit the streets shortly after the first order has been placed. The R.R.P. is £20m. It is not Mac compatible.

Feeling pissed off? Tell the world: get the Moodatron ® 1000™ today.

(so that’s my crazy web 2.0-ified purposeless invention; inspiration struck after about a week of thinking of amusing things to do with the presence information options in Google Talk and MSN Messenger. No, no, I’m not a complete geek. Why would you say that? Shut up, or I’ll shoot you with this phantom zone gun!)

Personal

Too many projects

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Suffering slightly from too many projects at the moment. Simultaneously trying to manage:

    novel (woeful progress)
    birthday planning (some progress)
    songwriting (woeful progress – although I know how I’m going to start writing the next one)
    weekend planning (woeful progress)
    health programme (some progress)
    rejuvenation of music collection (some progress)
    secret project (some limited progress)
    blogging here (some trivial posts)
    house-hunting x2 (no progress)
    spontaneous, 24×7 punning (limited progress)
    fantasy football (teams doing badly)
    reading (stack of books piled high, unread)
    global domination (woeful progress)

Durn. I need a holiday from myself. Oh oh yes – forgot the main one:

    job (busy)
Culture

Spurs 2: Sheffield Utd 0

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OK ok, probably just n00b excitedment, but got well into last night’s match. Never mind that Spurs 2nd half performance (until Dafoe came on) was mediocre at best, or that it was against a promoted side… it was just plain fun. I need to watch more of these matches…

Planning on watching every Spurs game I can this season. I even know the names of some of the players! Although spelling will take a while to follow…

Film

Snakes on a Plane (i)

Awesome.

Entirely conventional in everything but its premise and its spectacular pre-launch hype, it is nonetheless an enormously entertaining film. More to follow… but in the meantime, if you can take some gore and fright, don’t listen to the critics – go watch.

Culture, Current affairs

Emotional hit

Spurs took a hit losing to Bolton this weekend. Read about it here. I didn’t watch the match and am not following the season that closely, but the decision to support Spurs a little more actively this season has been enough; I felt/feel duly sad. And then I felt appropriately amused by reading Martin Jol’s comments about the game:

“The only positive for us is the new players now know the Premiership is different.”

There was doubt?

Still, I’ll be watching with interest. I understand that we’ve lost the last 5 matches against Bolton away and that it was more or less a foregone conclusion, so hopefully we’ll have more luck in the next game.

Culture, Miscellany, Observational

Ladbroke’s

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A new Ladbroke’s has opened near me, and a couple of people have already moved into permanent seating positions. I don’t know what it is about betting shops that they need to generate such depressing environments for themselves; the windows have all been blocked (in what was quite an attractive, well lit storefront) and white mountingboard seals every wall. It looks like it must feel like being on the inside of a coffin.

Matt seemed to think that they shut out external sources of light so betters in residence wouldn’t notice the passage of time in the outside world, which seems rational enough in that respect… but if these guys are watching races/football matches, etc, they’ll know exactly what time it is…

Ah, ’tis a wonderful and variegated world we live in. The best I can hope for is that the Ladbroke’s faces the same end that the three preceding coffee shops that inhabited that space did: lack of custom.