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MyrdemInggalaArchiveMayJunJulAugSep2004

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20 September 2004

I saw Hellboy. It was awesomely cool. It was the best movie ever ever ever ever ever since the last movie I saw which was the best movie ever, which was too long ago for me to remember what it was. I am totally seeing it again at the cinema.

It had some teensy weensy moments of dodginess, but they were swept away by the tide of the movie's overwhelming coolness. The casting, costuming and set design were awesome - everything looks just like it does in the comic book (cough I speak from my limited personal experience). The characterisation was cool. In the entire movie there was not one tedious, predictable fight scene, and not one sentence of trite, sappy Hollywood dialogue.

Mmmm, tentacled goodness. And kittens.

I can't wait until my book arrives.

Also, Colleen organised a surprise birthday party for Jo on Saturday night. Jo was surprised. It was cool. We made sure that ElfBoy? hid the extremely incriminating beetle.

16 August^h^h^h^h^h^hSeptember 2004

Movies I have recently seen:

• Supersize Me - interesting, but not really revelational. If you eat nothing but greasy processed fast food for a month, you will get a) fatter and b) horribly sick. Well, duh, dude. Lots of footage of mind-bogglingly obese Americans.
• King Arthur - flawed, but enjoyable. Dialogue stilted in patches, but Keira Knightley v. pretty. Also, Clive Owen v. cute. Mmmm, woad.
• Chronicles of Riddick - eh. It was kind of like one of those outrageously improbable 2000AD sci-fi fantasy stories, but not as good. I found it jarring that they kept the connection to Pitch Black, since that movie was in a completely different genre - whenever they emphasised one of the tenuous links, my suspension of disbelief blew. It was like reading a fanfiction story in which the writer has made the setting and genre wildly different. I'm not saying that this can't be done well, but I don't think this was, particularly. It would have been immensely better had they ditched all the links and made this a completely separate movie, with original characters. Also, Riddick is such a Mary Sue. He's right all the time, everything goes his way, everyone thinks he's brilliant (or at least fears and respects him), he has a mysterious special heritage, and he even has wacky funny-coloured eyes! Fortunately he doesn't have shiny long purple hair.
• Bubba Ho-Tep - an excellent B-Grade movie in which a heavily made-up Bruce Campbell stars as an aging Elvis Presley who must save his retirement home from an evil mummy.
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - pretty cool, I thought.
• Spiderman 2 - the special effects were cool, but the telegraphed-for-a-kilometre Meaningful Hollywood Dialogue really irritated me. You know, the way the hero is Told Something Meaningful by a beloved mentor, only to be able to tell somebody else the same thing, verbatim, at the end of the movie, to show that they've Grown, and Come To Understand. It's like the writers think the audience will be too dumb to realise it's the same Meaningful Thing if it's paraphrased, or made any less blatantly obvious. Rgh.

I may be forgetting movies. It's been a while.

I have ordered the first Hellboy trade paperback from Outer Limits. Now it's a (very slow) race to see which will occur first: the arrival of the book in my hands, or the arrival of the movie in South African cinemas.

The trailer worries me slightly - the movie looks very nice, but some of the dialogue sounds flat and stilted. I hope it's just weird trailer cutting.

All the Hellboy I've read is a couple of chapters of the first book which were published in the Judge Dredd megazine a while back. It looks really, really good. It's my very favourite comic genre - Lovecraft-esque occult conspiracy. There's a lot of cool stuff in that genre in 200AD which never gets reprinted anywhere else.

Speaking of which, I raided OL for old 2000AD issues, and I have about half of a complete Zenith collection (unfortunately missing the all-important middle, which is located in the 600s, which were snapped up by an earlier customer). Hooray!

02 August 2004

The previous update only actually went up today, because after I spent an hour painstakingly writing it up I discovered that fucking Telkom had disconnected me and wouldn't connect me again (every now and then their server gets bOrked and forgets how to authorise people). Grrrrr.

Anyway, the library catalogue is proceeding nicely. Also, I looked through my old crap on the old family Mac and found lots of cool stuff I had forgotten about, like my Great Unfinished Module, Whispers. Which I'm actually going to finish any day now. No, really, I swear.

Who's got my copy of CLAWmarks21?? I lent it to someone for OCRing? purposes, and now I have no idea where it is. On the other hand, I still have the CLAWs copy of CLAWmarks1?, which I borrowed in order to scan and clean up the cover, which I've done, and to OCR the text, which I haven't done yet, because I haven't looked for the software yet. But I will. It's the one with the red cover.

I also have a html version of CLAWmarks2? and a text version of CLAWmarks25? (Noir). We should, like, put those up or something. I have put up the summary for now.

31 July 2004

Hmm. A recap of everything I can remember since last update:

• ElfBoy? has been sent to the UK for two weeks by his work. He is going on a Cray training course and to a bioinformatics conference. ElfBoy? has my academic dream job. Am v. jealous.
• Still Not Fired.
• Went to ICON.
  • The smoking was again a prominent annoyance.
  • The drive back was much longer than was absolutely necessary, 100km/h limit notwithstanding.
  • The Seventh Sea LARP got cancelled, owing to massive dropout and insufficient signup.
  • Played in non-competitive Discworld module (??? Miles North of the River Ankh) on Friday morning. Transferred out of Gas Chamber Tent. Module was really cool, alhough it was cut short having (shockingly and surprisingly) started a couple of hours late. Mike was the DM. Yay!
  • Played in non-competitive UA module (League of Remarkable Scoundrels) on Friday afternoon. Again transferred out of Darth Tent. Module was really cool. John Bromberger was the DM. Yay!
  • Watched a lot of anime on Saturday. Yay!
  • Played in replacement LARP (whose name I can't recall) run by Katie from Durban on Saturday. Hooray! The LARP wasn't very intense, but it was a fun evening.
  • The mugs were very nice, except for the ones which were mustard-coloured inside. Got both a mug and a somewhat oversized long-sleeved shirt.
  • The anime people were selling imported instant noodles. They were very good.
  • There was a lady selling doughnuts with sauces and sprinkles. They were very, very good.
  • There was Chip 'n Dip outside as usual. It was really terrible, but I got a packet anyway because I had managed to forget how terrible it always is. Somebody please remind me next time.
  • Ogled pretty alien toys. I'm definitely going to get them from Outer Limits.
• Conspired with others to get ElfBoy? two Trigun toys for his birthday. He was very pleased.
• Sigil campaign finally getting off the ground. We are minus a Dave and plus a Colleen. Test character sheets have been partially generated.
• Dave's Cyberpunk campaign has lifted off just in time to fill the gap left by Waynne's recently ended Ars Magica campaign. It's cool to be in a near-future campaign after years of Faerun and Mythic Europe. Also, last session there were kittens. Mmm, kittens.
• Library catalogue also getting off the ground. Mmm, awk and sed.

I'm sure that I'm completely forgetting something terribly important, but that's what happens when you update your blog monthly. Anyway, the reason I have been inspired to update is that I have just found out that there is a new China Mieville book!!!!!!!!11111one. I think I will fork out the cash for a trade paperback. It will go with my other two trade paperbacks. And it's not quite as extortionate as a hardcover.

Hmm. Now that I have money, perhaps I will also buy Quicksilver and its sequel - I really, really liked Cryptonomicon.

17 June 2004

I have discovered that my Slashdot login issues are due to form bugs in Galeon. This also explains other wacky web experiences. Imagine my delight. The latest update had better fix this. :P

Later...

No, actually, Mozilla is fucked up too. And I think it's exactly the same version as I have at work, which works fine. If I find out tomorrow that it is the same version, my head will explode.

(I am trying to log in to Slashdot from home, using the brand spanking new account that I made two days ago, with the password that I distinctly remember this time.)

There are vague mutterings on the web about possibly the same problem, but nothing coherent. Arrrrrgh. Mozilla se ma se #%&*. :|

Off to bed now. Tomorrow I will update everything to the latest version and see if it's still broken.

Shortly afterwards...

OK, It does not work in w3m. All I can say is WTF????!!!! What the hell, man?

I am sure that there is a sensible explanation for this. I think that it may involve fierce space monkeys.

The next morning...

OK, it doesn't work in the new Galeon at work. I didn't dare log out of Mozilla to check if I could log back in. Fortunately, in my logged-in session I located the Handy Insecure Slashdot Login Shortcut Link and pasted it into Galeon, and that logged me in. I have carefully saved the link, and am never, ever logging out again. :|

I still have absolutely no idea what the problem is. Perhaps it is Slashdot, and not me. At least I know that my home machine is not horribly broken in some way.

Months later...

In case someone with the same problem comes across this and wonders what the heck the cause was, it's using the redhat gui controls for the language settings to change from the default US English to British English (and possibly other languages) - whether it's the session setting before you log in, or the global setting, or the default setting at installation time. I don't know why. The people at the RedHat? bug tracker don't know why. If you change your locale manually, the problem does not occur. I was going to do more experimentation to determine what it is that the gui interface changes that it shouldn't, but then I started doing real work at work and lost the inclination to keep restarting my session.

16 June 2004

Today ElfBoy? and I had a games day with Kevin and Neil. We played a Ninja Burger RPG which ElfBoy? DMed?, and also several rounds of a card game called Brawl, which was great fun.

Yesterday we went to see Harry Potter and Kill Bill: Vol 2. Hooray! They are both very cool movies, and were a welcome antidote to the recent spate of utterly crap movies we've seen.

The new HP was paced much better than the first two, and was generally a better stand-alone movie (except for the inexplicable absence of a more thorough explanation of who the Marauders were, which must have confused the hell out of people who hadn't read the book). The change of director has been good for the franchise. Gary Oldman made a great Sirius (as I expected). David Thewlis made a kind of weird Lupin, but he grew on me. Emma Thompson is brilliant as Trelawney. Michael Gambon is a good Dumbledore. Emma Watson is much less annoying and stilted. Go see this movie; it rocks. Now I can't wait for the fourth one.

KB was as good as the first. I wouldn't say that it is a deep, profound or lifechanging film, and since I am not a connoisseur of old westerns and kung-fu movies, all of Tarantino's clever references (which everyone keeps telling me about) went right over my head, but I found it to be very enjoyable and entertaining. Go see this movie. If you haven't seen the first one yet, it is still showing at the Labia, and they are apparently doing some kind of two-in-one special.

Went shopping with ElfBoy? on Saturday. He got me the Coolest Shirt Ever. It will be part of my pirate costume at the Icon LARP.

I still have a job. I haven't actually done any programming yet, as in the time-honoured tradition of IT companies everywhere I am first installing everything on my new l33t m4ch1n3. My workmates are all nice. The five-minute walk between my house and my workplace is also nice. Feeling that I have arrested and begun to reverse the slow atrophy of my skills is even more nice.

I have been engaging in educational wabbing while waiting for stuff to install and download. I gave up on ever remembering my Slashdot password (and I can't ever get it mailed to me, because my Light address is deleted!!!!! forever!!!!!), so I made a new account. And discovered that the comment submission form disagrees with my current version of Mozilla on certain points. But I'm updating Mozilla and installing Galeon, so hopefully it will all sort itself out.

You only realise how handy certain software features are when you don't have them anymore. I miss having Galeon at work - there are a million little things I want to use that Mozilla doesn't have.

10 June 2004

I am employed!!!!!

Theoretically. As of Monday. Doing Java development on Linux extremely close to where I live.

Today I discovered that when you walk through town smiling, people act as if you're some kind of nutcase. And dodgy vagrants and workmen, obviously projecting their own habits onto you, assume that you are leering at them provocatively. It was a very eventful walk.

In other news:

• The Magic cards are (almost entirely) sorted.
• Have blown Outer Limits store credit on first three Sandman paperbacks. Mmmm, Sandman.
• A complete stranger gave me issue 1/6 of World Without End on Monday, in an unexpected random act of niceness. Also, the Joburg OL branch has 4/6, which they are sending down. So I will soon have parts 1, 2 and 4. Hooray!
• Have been productive in writing stuff down for the Sigil system. Must finish off the magic, and then it'll all be setting stuff.

29 May 2004

Ahahaha! 52.38095238095238% of me is a huge nerd! How about you?

Curse] those damn computer game questions.

27 May 2004

Brief reviews of recently seen movies:

Troy: Yuck. A horribly butchered adaptation of the mythology. No gods; pointlessly inserted love story (no, not the one that was already there) (OK, not so much inserted as enormously inflated and distorted); an average-looking Helen who can't act; no justification for Helen's elopement; people who are supposed to die don't die; people who aren't supposed to die die; Agamemnon and Menelaus are caricatured hollywood villains; Achilles is a pouting philosophical anti-hero; Patroclus is Achilles' young cousin and protege; the soundtrack is absolutely craptastic; the ten-year siege is compressed to what appears to be a couple of days; Troy (the city) is a dull, lifeless CGI husk; all in all the movie is arbitrary and slightly boring. On the bright side, you get Sean Bean (Odysseus) and Eric Bana (Hector), who are cute. But they have few good lines.

Helen Of Troy (that other Troy movie you can get on video): A less polished, but infinitely superior adaptation. Helen is actually beautiful, has presence and can act. The movie actually includes the gods, and explains that Paris and Helen's relationship was Fated By The Gods. Helen is actually important to the Greeks, rather than being a contrived excuse for the war. A lot more of the mythology is included (although some elements that were in Troy are missing). There is some fiddling with the mythological chronology, but it is generally justified and makes sense in terms of the plot. I didn't notice any egregious mangling. Troy (the city) is a bustling metropolis filled with people (who don't all wear identical colour-coded robes). Also, you get Rufus Sewell, who is cute, and has a bazillion good scenes because he plays Agamemnon and is thus the main Bad (or at least Much Less Nice Than Everyone Else) Guy. Hooray!

Japanese Story: I like Australian movies. I find Japanese culture interesting. I like quirky cinema nouveau films. So I thought I would like Japanese story. I didn't. It is long, tedious and pretentious. It has nothing to say that hasn't been said before by much, much better movies. You can count the significant plot events on the fingers of one hand - other than that absolutely nothing whatsoever happens. The emotional scenes are gratuitously overdone. The soundtrack is as bad as Troy's. I spent the last half-hour of the film wishing that it would end soon.

That's it. No more movies for me until something I actively want to see comes out.

I am currently a "civillian contractor" at Outer Limits (21st Magic Card Decontamination and Categorisation Division). The pictures are so pretty. I'm going to get ElfBoy? to teach me how to play Magic, and then I'm going to buy a bunch of old cards and play retro games for fun. Hooray!

13 May 2004

Went to see Van Helsing with ElfBoy? on Tuesday. Ugh. So bad. The scriptwriters should be shot, and the director has obviously still not learned that ( unexciting fight scenes + bad cgi + god-awful dialogue != movie ).

This film is yet another testament to the fact that more budget means more rope to hang oneself with. The blatantly fake cgi sets got very boring very soon ("Oh, it's an even more enormous cgi castle where gravity doesn't work properly. Yawn.").

How is it possible that out of all the people involved in this production, all of whom must have seen how it was coming along, not one appeared to think to themselves "this dialogue is really terrible; I don't know what the fuck we were smoking when we wrote it, but it has to go"?

And the frickin' accents. No movie actor should be allowed to put on a fake Slavic accent without a licence. Since none of the people in this movie are actually supposed to be speaking English (perhaps German, which was apparently the lingua franca of Europe in the 19th century, or perhaps Latin, since they all have wacky church connections, or perhaps Magyar, since they're all in Transylvania, but wtf would they be speaking English?), there is no point in making the actors put on stupid accents. People seem to perpetrate this evil in movies all the time. Why? Whyyyy?

(Hmm. Judging from how well the rest of the movie was thought out, it's entirely possible that they are actually supposed to be speaking English.)

I have had .]] These ]] by ]] ]] cover just about everything else I think is wrong with this movie.

Rating: 0.7 Severs

(Sever, n. from Ecks vs Sever (2002). The SI unit of movie unwatchability. One Sever is the theoretical maximum. )

On the bright side, we got to see the Harry Potter trailer (mmmmm, so shiny) and the trailer for the weird Pitch Black prequel, which looks like the only thing it shares with Pitch Black is Vin Diesel, and thus will suck, although it also looked very shiny.

And next week we are going to see Troy, which will hopefully be better.

And the giant mutant ruby grapefruit currently available in our supermarkets are very good; I heartily recommend them.

02 May 2004

OK. First of all, I've been meaning to send out a change of email address notification for some time now, but first Gluon stopped mailing out and then Tiscali decided that the number of people in my addressbook (which is by no means astronomically large) was Too Many Recipients for a single email. So screw it, I'm putting this up on the wiki, and I hope it will reach everyone who wants to know. My new email address is...

Today ElfBoy? and I watched some Enterprise, courtesy of NurmRas? via InfernalRabbi?. It is not as bad as I've been told. So far, I don't like it nearly as much as DS9? or TNG, but it's at least as watchable as Voyager. I will reserve further judgement until I have seen the rest of the first season.

Star Trek is the Great Equaliser. Yesterday I was at a gathering with lots of people I didn't know, and was feeling kind of awkward. Fortunately, somebody brought up Star Trek. And then it was fine. Yay for universal geeky obsessions.

Those wiggly economy lightbulbs are the bomb. I've always hated the dismal yellowness of normal artificial lighting, and the bulbs in my room were old and crappy, so I replaced them. My room feels pleasantly daylit now.

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