I'd booked the day off work today because my gas supplier was sending an engineer out to fit me a new meter - credit rather than pre-pay - 'sometime between 8am and 8pm', and my mother had arranged for the damp people to pay the flat a visit at 8am.
The damp guy was nice and prompt... unfortunately it hadn't occurred to me that, to fit the vent to the kitchen, he'd have to make a new hole in the wall... using very loud tools... at eight in the morning.
Did I mention the tools were loud? My neighbours probably hate me already.
Once made, the hole was quickly filled with a vent, and the gaps around the edges were filled in to make it nice and snug. All in all, the process took about two hours. And while he was doing that, I was marking out the lounge with masking tape, to see where I could put display cabinets, TV, etc.
I then started to settle in to wait for the gas engineer, half expecting him to turn up at 8pm. As it happens, though, he arrived not that long after the damp guy left. I'd basically had time to determine that my laptop was working better at the flat than it tends to at home (how long will it take for me to refer to the flat as "home" and my parents' place as "my parents' place"?), and I'm thinking it's because I had less plugged in.
More specifically, no USB hub running a couple of other peripherals.
So it looks like it's a power drain issue. See, for whatever reason, I've got this USB hub with its own power supply... which I never plug in. Silly really. Letting a laptop power a whole bunch of USB peripherals is a sure fire way to put too much load on the laptop and thereby reduce and eventually ruin its performance.
Anyway... The engineer came, fitted the new meter (pointing out that there was just under £15 on the meter, which should be credited to me - not the story I got from the gas people when I phoned asking for a new meter!), then checked that the boiler was properly up and running (which took a few attempts). That done, he hurried on to the next job.
I headed out for lunch (KFC, just down the road, as I wasn't in the mood for anything fancy), then did a bit of extra shopping - now the power is on and the fridge is running, I might as well have it refridgerating things - before deciding what to do with the rest of my day off.
I started out on Plan A: Writing... but that didn't work out (my brain wouldn't settle), so then I switched to Plan B: Taking a Bus Trip to Toys'R'Us Watford. In brief (because I'm tired, and want to go to bed now), the trip out there was simple enough, the store was disappointingly short of anything new (Brent Cross seems to have a better selection), and the trip back was complicated by the revelation that I needed to take a different bus for the second part of the journey.
Monday, 4 August 2008
Saturday, 2 August 2008
Sequels
Having just sat through Alien vs Predator Requiem, it occurs to me that I've seen a couple of sequels lately.
The Dark Knight, seen at London's IMAX cinema, turned out to be a film which, while undoubtedly excellent, pretty much fell into the same trap as the Tim Burton and Joel Schumaker entries. Too many villains, too much going on, not enough Batman.
It does better than any of the earlier films but, upon reflection, it's nowhere near as good as Batman Begins. Heath Ledger played this version of The Joker very well... but I'm not sure I liked what they did with the character. It's good that they didn't kill him off (shame about what happened to the actor, of course) but, towards the end, it becomes clear that The Joker was just a means to an end - that end being the introduction (and possibly elimination - his fate is ambiguous at best) of another villain.
I read a complaint somewhere that, of the three female roles with speaking parts, all exist merely to get into peril. This is not true.
Two are eyecandy (admittedly, one presents an interesting philosophical argument in favour of the masked vigilante), one exists largely to get into peril.
The theme of the film, in a nutshell, was 'the difference between the heroes we need, and the heroes we deserve'. New crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent is 'The Hero Gotham Needs/White Knight', Batman is 'The Hero Gotham Deserves/Dark Knight', and the film wastes no opportunity to remind the audience of that. Honestly, it was all very laboured and had me grinding my teeth by the end.
So it's sad that I'm less disappointed by AvPR.
True, it could be described as Alien vs Predator vs Dawson's Creek (not that I ever watched that, but I understand it's some kind of 'teen' drama), and it is populated entirely by TV actors (the woman who plays Dale Arden in the Flash Gordon - Stargate rip-off - TV series has a brief and messy role, several staff from 24's CTU crop up, as does the new mortician from CSI:NY), but it's actually reasonably well done.
The problem is what it does to the franchises involved. While the Aliens are certainly amoral enough to use children and pregnant women as hosts (which they do - very gorily), the Predator has been shown to have a strange kind of code of honor - don't attack the unarmed, don't kill children, that kind of thing. The Predator in this one - obviously a veteran of many encounters with the Alien - manages to shrug off 'accidentally' slicing a girl in half with one of its razor-star things, and basically goes round slaughtering everything it can. Perhaps this is the Predator race's idea of 'containment procedure'.
There's basically too much of everything. Too many Aliens, too many gory deaths, too many gadgets in the Predator's arsenal (though he still strips them away to go hand-to-hand with the hybrid), it's just an overload of special effects and gore, with a very dull towny backdrop and too many two-dimensional characters introduced purely to get killed in a variety of colourful ways.
And when I say 'colourful', I mean red.
Blood red.
The everyday, small-town America thing only serves to make the situation even less believeable.
What really bugged me was the end, though. It seems to be clumsily setting up an even more far-fetched third AvP movie... where, having reverse-engineered the Predator's weaponry, the newly-amalgamated 'Weyland-Yutani Corporation' goes after either the Alien or the Predator... or both... in space.
Oh well... In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream That They've Ruined The Continuity Of The Franchise.
I thought for a moment that AvPR was trying to present the Predator as the Pilot from the very first Alien movie... the 'navigation chair' thing looks very similar... but that may have been either coincidence or intentional misdirection (or perhaps just an ill-advised reference).
But how, pray tell, does an Alien/Predator hybrid suddenly develop the ability to use its telescopic inner jaw to impregnate its victims with multiple baby Aliens?
Seriously, the writers needed to think about this stuff more seriously before they stick it in a movie.
Gotham Knight is quite a strange collection. The differences in art style between each 'chapter' are quite jarring. More so than the similarly-presented Animatrix collection, where one would expect things to look a little odd. It's even more jarring because Batman's voice remains the same all the way through (mixed blessing - Kevin Conroy is pretty good, but to have that same voice coming out of six very different Batmen is very distracting). Still, David McCallum does a decent turn as Alfred (more traditional that Michael Cane's approach), and Gary Dourdan is excellent with what little he does (basically going from "I don't trust the Batman" to "Yo, Bats, my man... You're the only one who can protect Gordon").
Time to go now... and put an end to this terrible day.
The Dark Knight, seen at London's IMAX cinema, turned out to be a film which, while undoubtedly excellent, pretty much fell into the same trap as the Tim Burton and Joel Schumaker entries. Too many villains, too much going on, not enough Batman.
It does better than any of the earlier films but, upon reflection, it's nowhere near as good as Batman Begins. Heath Ledger played this version of The Joker very well... but I'm not sure I liked what they did with the character. It's good that they didn't kill him off (shame about what happened to the actor, of course) but, towards the end, it becomes clear that The Joker was just a means to an end - that end being the introduction (and possibly elimination - his fate is ambiguous at best) of another villain.
I read a complaint somewhere that, of the three female roles with speaking parts, all exist merely to get into peril. This is not true.
Two are eyecandy (admittedly, one presents an interesting philosophical argument in favour of the masked vigilante), one exists largely to get into peril.
The theme of the film, in a nutshell, was 'the difference between the heroes we need, and the heroes we deserve'. New crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent is 'The Hero Gotham Needs/White Knight', Batman is 'The Hero Gotham Deserves/Dark Knight', and the film wastes no opportunity to remind the audience of that. Honestly, it was all very laboured and had me grinding my teeth by the end.
So it's sad that I'm less disappointed by AvPR.
True, it could be described as Alien vs Predator vs Dawson's Creek (not that I ever watched that, but I understand it's some kind of 'teen' drama), and it is populated entirely by TV actors (the woman who plays Dale Arden in the Flash Gordon - Stargate rip-off - TV series has a brief and messy role, several staff from 24's CTU crop up, as does the new mortician from CSI:NY), but it's actually reasonably well done.
The problem is what it does to the franchises involved. While the Aliens are certainly amoral enough to use children and pregnant women as hosts (which they do - very gorily), the Predator has been shown to have a strange kind of code of honor - don't attack the unarmed, don't kill children, that kind of thing. The Predator in this one - obviously a veteran of many encounters with the Alien - manages to shrug off 'accidentally' slicing a girl in half with one of its razor-star things, and basically goes round slaughtering everything it can. Perhaps this is the Predator race's idea of 'containment procedure'.
There's basically too much of everything. Too many Aliens, too many gory deaths, too many gadgets in the Predator's arsenal (though he still strips them away to go hand-to-hand with the hybrid), it's just an overload of special effects and gore, with a very dull towny backdrop and too many two-dimensional characters introduced purely to get killed in a variety of colourful ways.
And when I say 'colourful', I mean red.
Blood red.
The everyday, small-town America thing only serves to make the situation even less believeable.
What really bugged me was the end, though. It seems to be clumsily setting up an even more far-fetched third AvP movie... where, having reverse-engineered the Predator's weaponry, the newly-amalgamated 'Weyland-Yutani Corporation' goes after either the Alien or the Predator... or both... in space.
Oh well... In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream That They've Ruined The Continuity Of The Franchise.
I thought for a moment that AvPR was trying to present the Predator as the Pilot from the very first Alien movie... the 'navigation chair' thing looks very similar... but that may have been either coincidence or intentional misdirection (or perhaps just an ill-advised reference).
But how, pray tell, does an Alien/Predator hybrid suddenly develop the ability to use its telescopic inner jaw to impregnate its victims with multiple baby Aliens?
Seriously, the writers needed to think about this stuff more seriously before they stick it in a movie.
Gotham Knight is quite a strange collection. The differences in art style between each 'chapter' are quite jarring. More so than the similarly-presented Animatrix collection, where one would expect things to look a little odd. It's even more jarring because Batman's voice remains the same all the way through (mixed blessing - Kevin Conroy is pretty good, but to have that same voice coming out of six very different Batmen is very distracting). Still, David McCallum does a decent turn as Alfred (more traditional that Michael Cane's approach), and Gary Dourdan is excellent with what little he does (basically going from "I don't trust the Batman" to "Yo, Bats, my man... You're the only one who can protect Gordon").
Time to go now... and put an end to this terrible day.
417
http://phlog.net/user/the-hub
And now it appears to be working.
Not so much 'as it happens' as 'after it's all over, but kinda in chronological order'.
Assuming the attendance number is correct, it's beaten the previous European record by 10 people (or is it 8? Must fact-check). Well done, Sven and Simon.
Looks like it must have gone pretty well, and Hasbro's display was actually quite interesting. Maybe next year, they'll be able to present hand-made resin models of something that hasn't been all over the interwebs for, like, six months :P
I'm kidding, Hasbro. Showing an interest is a Good Thing. Shame it took you so long.
Definitely looking forward to AA2009.
And now it appears to be working.
Not so much 'as it happens' as 'after it's all over, but kinda in chronological order'.
Assuming the attendance number is correct, it's beaten the previous European record by 10 people (or is it 8? Must fact-check). Well done, Sven and Simon.
Looks like it must have gone pretty well, and Hasbro's display was actually quite interesting. Maybe next year, they'll be able to present hand-made resin models of something that hasn't been all over the interwebs for, like, six months :P
I'm kidding, Hasbro. Showing an interest is a Good Thing. Shame it took you so long.
Definitely looking forward to AA2009.
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