I’ve had enough of the Spam Lords. Chris pointed me to the auto-close comments wordpress plugin, which will mean that – automatically – any post over 3 weeks old will have discussion disabled.
Sorry – if you wanted old chat, it’s going to have to happen elsewhere. Although WP‘s Akisment plugin brilliantly catches all my comment spam, I do get emailed about it and that’s been annoying – so now, spam no more.
Every now and then they remind you that they’re the parents and you’re the children. Today that happened with my Mum unexpectedly quoting Dickens at me, and my completely failing to get the reference.
Life is like a box of chocolates…
When I was about three or four years old, my Dad came back from a trip to the US with four Superman t-shirts for me. The were little white t-shirts with pictures from the comics on them, and a little red, polyester cape hanging off the back. Tacky as anything.
But I didn’t wear any other t-shirt for the next three years.
I have some idea why I’ve always empathised strongly with the character of Superman; isolated but much loved, wanting to save the world but frustrated by personal limitations, raised by a supportive family. Oh, and the powers of flight, invulnerability, super speed and heat and x-ray vision. Those would all have been good, too.
For whatever reason, the emotional attachment stuck. When I was 17, I rediscovered comic books and now have a couple of crates of graphic novels lying around my house. I have most of the Superhero movies on DVD – even the really, really bad ones. And so expectations for the new Superman movie – as they were for Batman Begins last year – were high.
And they were met. The new film is emotionally poignant, visually spectacular and, for me, pretty damn enjoyable. It’s not perfect – it doesn’t come close to matching the narrative pace of Batman Begins. But Bryan Singer’s eye for sweeping, glorious visual imagery is… artistic, all the set pieces work, the dialogue – whilst limited – conveys what it needs to about the characters. And even though I didn’t particularly like Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, the trials of their relationship… were engaging. And moving.
Although the Spielberg-esque happy ending was faintly tedious (“Hello, beastie” is a much better way to set up a sequel ;)) and did drag on for about 20 minutes longer than it had to, I left the cinema – very moved. It played on the myth without being too derivative, and whilst daring to try new things.
And wouldn’t it be cool to fly?
I’m loving YouTube at the moment. Here’s the trailer, for the uninitiated. Go see… now.
…thank, erm, heavens for the rain! For those of you elsewhere in the world (and who care about the weather), London has roasting for the last week or so and today has brought some much needed rain. *Phew*.
Where’ve I been? It’s been a bit of a busy social one – Gareth took us to the Blue Man Group show, which was wonderful, surreal, hysterical, energetic and fun in every way — recommended to anyone. Also a couple of drinks parties and general summer goodness.
This afternoon I’ve been fiddling about writing music and recording, with some help from Pob – he’s got a gig happening in two weeks, which I’ll be at – do come along if you’re keen on great live music! Over the next week or so, though, I’ll probably get around to actually laying down the tracks of this song and we’ll see how it sounds… if its not completely rubbish I’ll think about uploading it.
Tonight: off to celebrate Chris‘ new job in far-east London. Should be fun – expect me to finally deliver on the promise of catching up on a few blog topics of more substance and power tomorrow.
Sorry for relative sparseness of posts of late, this weekend in particular. There’s load of stuff I’ve been meaning to blog on but have been spread fairly thin and have a pretty busy week ahead, so things are likely to continue to be quiet.
A very rapid update on what’s been keeping me out of commission:
I’ve been treating my addiction to Lost, and am getting onto the second season now. It’s v. exciting, and there’s some fantastic storytelling in there. Character-driven fiction; simply wonderful, and something that the big screen really doesn’t seem to do as well (on the whole) than the little screen.
I’ve been getting my “studio” in order. Those of you who know me know that I at least like to pretend to be musical, and have, erm, well, some equipment. And have just finished hooking it all back up for recording – so may bash out some song-attempts, now that I have a drum machine in place to deal with my own rhythmic inadequacies… Now where did I put those MIDI cables? And where’s Pob when you need him?
I’ve been shoe-shopping: I’ve had quite bad shin splints for a while so am finally getting the physio I need for them. Good new shoes are going to be a cornerstone of that treatment process, and a very tedious visit to Oxford Street today is sending me straight to Run and Become (conveniently near the office) to get some proper recommendations. I’m almost glad they have a completely inadequate e-commerce facility, as the in-person-ness is crucial for this.
My cousin David has come to stay for the next few weeks; he’s a media engineer, essentially, interning at a post-production studio for the next month or so. More on that later; David’s a mac-fan and a geek in lots of the same ways I am (comic books, Lost, technology, etc) — so we’ll probably have a few good chats at least ;). I’m not a mac-fan, you may have noticed, so… Mac vs PC… FIGHT.
I’ve installed Office 2007 beta. Yes, yes, I know I’m crazy – further destablising my PC and slowing it all down… but I do like the new MS toys and having spent months reading about it and the last two months trying to implement a version of Sharepoint that really, really does not support blogging (the new version, according to a Scoble interview I watched bits of on Channel 9, supports blogging and Wikis natively)… well, I thought I’d give it a whirl. Initial thoughts? It sure is purty… and of course I decided against installing Sharepoint on my home machine anyway!
We went to the Comedy Store last night for the midnight showing, too. 5 acts, 5 accents (Indian, Welsh, Irish, American, ‘London’, and a geordie compere) — one entertaining evening. Although was knackered by the time it wrapped up at 2.30am…
And, of course, the most exciting thing this weekend was… SUPERMAN RETURNS. But I really need to spend some time crafting that post. It will have some feeling put into it.
Signing out for now… The Arminator.
…it will be deleted shortly. Enjoy it while it lasts!
If a lot of the new, cool, social software out there survives, and I eventually get around to using it, I’ll probably want a consistent digital identity – division6… and was pleasantly surprised to find that I could have that username on both Digg and Reddit today. Now I’m thinking I need to go and register for every other service I might possibly use with my digital identity before I lose it to a bot…
Why not use my real identity? Not because I really really love to give fake names, but rather because invariably, after years of forgetting if I’d registered as armand, armand.david, adavid, adavid01, davidfly, ard30, jard30, etc etc, I’d had enough. And division6 is sufficiently obscure that I’ve been able to capture it on most of the systems I need to thus far :).
Arvind’s company officially launched this week, to a chunky piece in the Guardian, amongst others (loads of peeps I know seem to have been in the guardian this week).
I’ve mentioned before that Slingshot Studios is specialising in all-digital film production – and Arvind’s working with some cool folks, on some interesting looking projects (from the little I’ve seen). I imagine more will go up at the Slingshot blog (in due course).
I’ll be speaking to them at some point soon about blogging and movie making — will need to look into quite how successfully people have used blogs to market films of late — but the if the paridigmata that are the King Kong and Superman Returns blogs is anything to go by, I suspect film-goers do want to hear things straight from the movie makers mouths (although those examples are arguably atypical ;)).
The relative quiet is due, in part, to the fact that I seem to have developed hayfever (£$(“$&*!&*$(*!!!!). It’s very annoying and have been feeling pretty rotten for a couple of weeks (thought I had a cold, and may have done for a few days…). Now I’m dosed on on prescription strength anti-allergy gear some sort of normality may resume. But… I have fallen asleep at 8.30pm for the last two nights and not sure how immediately I’ll have the time, energy or inspiration to blog. But hopefully over the weekend…
So, I’ve been classified has having ‘teenage boy’ taste in music. Which seems harsh, but is probably a fair reflection – all my fave West coast rock has its origins in sunshine, skateboards, teenage angst, girl problems, punk culture and, well, crazy melodic guitaring.
Happy to be enjoying an East coast band at the moment, and if anyone has any recommendations for music that someone who likes the Offspring, Blink 182, Green Day and Bowling for Soup (as well as RHCP, Foo Fighters, Collective Soul, BNL and lots of less straightforwardly happy rock) — please let me know.
Oh, and I seem to like some Canadian music, too. Where does that place me?