PageListTemplatesYou are on the archive wiki. The new wiki is here. MyShinyNewSiteHello, Simon got me web hosting for my birthday, and I finally put stuff up. Comment: site feedback (by d@vid on 2005-02-22 11:39:18)more roundrecs... rss feed for your RecentChanges... other than that, it are teh 733+ :-) Comment: Re: site feedback (by ElfBoy? on 2005-02-23 00:16:31)http://www.confluence.za.net/vorgwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RecentChanges?action=rss SkyCaptainOn Tuesday Simon and I went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. And I really, really liked it. Which was a pleasant surprise. It's a well-made and entertaining pastiche of 30s and 40s science fiction about The Future. The characters are likeable and interesting, the dialogue is engaging and funny, and the giant robots are pretty. Simon didn't like it as much as I did. He is reading over my shoulder and complaining. Now he is complaining that I'm writing about him. He just said "This is getting horribly post-modern." Anyway, I recommend the movie. It is cool. Edit: Oh, and we saw I, Robot on DVD. Eh. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Overall I enjoyed it, although the dialogue was a bit dodgy in patches, and the "Logic is overrated! You need feeeeelings!" moral (as Simon put it) was irritating. Comment: Sky (by DrunkLove? on 2005-01-20 02:41:13)Didn't see Sky Captain when it came out over here - Roger was keen, but we never got around to it. Mind you, it has Gwyneth, who's usually not too bad. Oh, and say hi to Simon for me... Dunc Comment: Annoying female love interest (by FirstFallen? on 2005-01-20 08:50:24)The plot was good, the SFX soooo shiny, but the female characters sucked. Well, Gwyneth Paltrow's at least. She was useless, and irritating, and like "Oh, no, I broke a nail" kinda "heroine". Angelina Jolie, on the other hand, was her usual awesome kick-ass self. Mmmm, eyepatch. And Jude Law was, as usual, just delicious. There's a feast of Jude on at the moment, with Closer showing at Nouveau and another one on the commercial side that I forget. Yippee! :-D Comment: moohoohoovies (by d@vid on 2005-01-20 11:06:16)self-referentiality does not postmodernism make sky captain was a vastly superior pastiche to van helsing, which I loved, although that may be because VH was mostly an action movie with only a flavour of pastiche jo, I don't think gwyn was a break-a-nail heroine at all! she was certainly the protoganist, and a reporter who happened to be female (with a movie-long gag) I also saw I, Robot recently {eek} - crap CG, did you see the cars with no textures? {angry} (damn, no ill-looking smiley) nothing spectacularly original, but I thought it really did catch the spirit of the robot stories, see Dr Calvin's solution to a room full of potentially guilty robots, with the added twist of an actual homicide and associated wiseass detective I was surprised Will Smith didn't actually kiss Dr Calvin War of the Worlds! Hitchhiker's! Batman One! Serenity! AVPSpoilerReviewI somehow managed to post this in Andie Moore's blog and not mine. I don't know how. Well... the last 15 minutes of the movie are almost cool enough to make up for the rest. But not quite. The acting is wooden and uninspiring (except for Lance Hendriksen, who plays the only watchable character) and the dialogue is terrible ("The enemy of my enemy... is my friend!" Ooh, I can see a lot of effort went into this). Most of what is wrong with this movie is the Giant Silly Pyramid, with its Improbably Accurate And Well-Preserved Moving Parts. I really, really dislike movies in which the characters run around a stupidly large stone construction which keeps shifting around using some kind of ancient machinery. Which is so cunningly concealed that it looks like the giant rough-hewn slabs of stone are magically moving around and slotting into each other with extreme precision all by themselves. And which miraculously manages to operate flawlessly even though it has been lying idle and unmaintained for thousands of years. Apart from the complete technological implausibility of such a construction, its use as a setting irritates me because it is pointlessly uniform and unexciting. The characters are just running around in a featureless maze. There are no interesting things for them to use in interesting ways. And then there's the dodgy pseudo-scientific anthropology. If this pyramid is supposed to be a precursor to the Egyptian, Aztec and Cambodian pyramids, and to have been built by a precursor race, then why the hell is it covered in writing in the languages and alphabets of those three later cultures, which is conveniently perfectly understandable to the archaeologist in the party? And the frickin' exposition hieroglyphics! Yes, I completely buy that after randomly running around in a shifting maze the archaeologist will find The Writing That Explains The Entire Story, entirely by chance, engraved in the ceiling of some arbitrary corridor. And the "ten minutes" thing! Aaaarggh! OK, so the Aztecs had a metric calendar. Well done. I can believe that periods of, say, ten days, or ten years, would be significant to them. Because both days and years are intuitive and obvious units derived from the planet's natural cycles. But minutes and seconds are units derived from hours, which were traditionally calculated by dividing up the daytime into twelve portions! Different ancient cultures divided up the day into different numbers of portions, and the "hours" they ended up were of different length. Not to mention that since they were measured from sunrise to sunset, they were not actually a fixed-length unit. So why is stuff in the pyramid running on a cycle of precisely ten modern human minutes? Why? It's only a little thing, but it's so stupid that it completely blew my sense of disbelief (or what was left of it). The movie improves somewhat towards the end, because it moves out of the pyramid and into the whaling station, which is considerably more interesting. Also, we get to see the alien queen running around and kicking ass, and it's really difficult to make the alien queen not cool. Now if only there had been more of that and less of the crap. Comment: posting in other blogs (by d@vid on 2004-11-03 18:01:26)when you create (or modify) a blog you can set it so that others can post blog entries as well as comments (I've set up mine and the committee minutes like that) so if you were reading andie's, and his blog is set up like that, and then you posted without noticing it was his... all is explained otherwise, it must have been something else, and it would have been perfectly obvious to anyone who could have read tiki documentation written in egyptian, aztec or cambodian hieroglyphs... or indeed in english if there were any! ConfluenceBlogPost1There was a table crash on Friday. Data may be missing. Let us know if you've lost something. WikiMarkupFixerhttp://claws.uct.ac.za/wikifix.php Just fixes external link format for now; more features to come. Comment: spangtastic!!! (by GnomeThing? on 2004-10-10 02:17:44)There are a bunch of other things that weren't imported properly either. Comment: more things for the Decrapolizatron to fix (by GnomeThing? on 2004-10-11 17:22:54)tikiwiki markup for bold and italic is identical to old phpwiki markup, but there are a bunch of pages that used the new markup. darnit.
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