I’m sorry, the temperatures in London have been absurd – it’s 33 degrees in the office today and not having air conditioning – either here or at home – has reduced the amount of time I’m physically able to be writing… anything.
Normal service will resume as soon as I work out a cure for this global warming thing that lasts slightly longer than the ice lollies our bosses have very kindly provided the last couple of days…
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.
Tom pointed out to me last night that a few people have been comparing Pirates II to ‘Empire Strikes Back’ – apparently it has exactly the same story structure – which, on initial discussions and reading, I can see. Mackenzie Crook and his parter in crime as R2 D2 and C3PO, I suspect the Black Pearl was the Millennium Falcon, Jack Sparrow as Hans, Norrington as Lando Calrissian etc… Makes a weird kind of sense.
Three things I wanted to say about it, though…
(1) I did not think ‘Why has the rum always gone’ was the best line. I thought ‘Hello, beastie’, was the funniest line in the film. Don’t ask me why, I probably couldn’t explain it.
(2) I maintain that it was a good film, in spite of everyone’s naysaying – didn’t mind the fact that it was long, loved the ridiculous and fantastic action sequences, coped with the convoluted plot.
(3) Am I the only one to see the massive parallels between these films and the brilliant Monkey Island games? [[Guybrush Threepwood]] and the dread pirate [[LeChuck]] had almost exactly the same counterpoint that Jack Sparrow and Barbossa have (the third film will be great).
Here’s a reminder for you, courtesy of YouTube.
…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.
I thought I’d avoided the ‘5 favourite social media’ meme, but Danny kindly tagged me, so I’ll give it ago. The reason for avoidance? Erm, I’m not sure there’s anything particularly clever or interesting about my favourite five (I don’t rip, script, furl OR curl anything at all)… but here we go.
I love WordPress. Unsurprisingly. It powers this blog, and allows integration with all sorts of other cool things – including del.icio.us, Flickr, Last.fm, Amazon and more, thanks to some cool plugins.
I love Wikipedia. I’m one of those people who likes to know a little about a lot of things, most of the time, and occasionally a lot about a few, and the articles on Wikipedia invariably provide a useful starting point.
I love RSS. I love my RSS readers slightly less: Feedreader is good and is my desktop client of choice. What I really want is something that syncs with an online service so that threads I’ve marked as read on one are marked as read on the other, and so that I don’t have to subscribe to the same feed more than once. Does Newsgator do this? I’ll look into it at some point. Oh, my online RSS reader of choice is Bloglines, and I do like the way that public blogrolls can be shared on there. I should get into all this OPML stuff too…
I like del.icio.us a lot — currently more for my own edification than its social nature (I only have two people in my network) — but as someone who’s (1) never bothered to use bookmarks and (2) who likes to blog one-liners, it gives me good scope to find links I want to again and be pithy about amusing websites. The linklog on the right, btw, is powered by del.icio.us.
And for number 5? I guess Skype might win that one; admittedly it’s a long way from perfect, and arguable to what extent it constitutes ‘media’ as its output isn’t necessarily public… but its a great bit of social software, and there’s potential there (I read some good tips on Simon’s blog on how to record Skype conversations – something which may come in handy…!).
So there you have it. Tags? Don’t think Chris, Tom, Gareth, Ben or, erm, Neil Gaiman have done this (why not ask?). Share and enjoy, folks, share and enjoy.
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.
I was feeling slightly under the weather yesterday so came home an collapsed in front of the TV – to find that, as we’re out of season for most of my favourite programming (with the notable exception of the new series of Scrubs…) that there wasn’t much on.
So I finally got around to checking out the on-demand experience that is Lovefilm. Now, I really don’t like the Sky on-demand experience – and renting the film off Lovefilm cost exactly the same amount but was in a format that I – as an ubergeek, I guess – was comfortable with, and with a payment method I was happy with. £3.49 on my credit card and 20 minutes later (how long it takes for 1 gig of hi-res DRMmed video content to come down an 8 meg pipe), I had my movie.
An altogether painless experience.
Of course, rather too many stumbling blocks for the average user – I have TV-out, am unintimidated by the need to enter a password into Windows Media Player, erm, have the latest version of Windows Media Player… etc.
So just a little bit pre-mass market. But do recommend it to anyone with the tech-savvy to make it work.
Oh – the film, btw, was the Dukes of Hazzard (2005 remake). And I don’t recommend that, really, for any reason other than the pretty people in it. Which isn’t a recommendation. Don’t see this film. Under any circumstances.
If you’re bored and want to freak out some people, hit CTRL-ALT-and a direction key. It’ll re-orient your screen (if you’re using Windows XP, anyway) and can be quite disconcerting!
The things you learn when falling unconscious on your keyb… I mean, helping out colleagues with their IT issues…
Cheers to Davo/Bruce the wandering Canadian/Australian for enlightening me about this.
Update: it doesn’t seem to work on every machine. :(