I'm not even going to attempt to play catch-up, and write some kind of summary of the events over the couple of months since I last wrote anything here. Way too much has been happening, both at home and at work. I'm really kicking myself for not even writing up the movies I've seen recently, so here's a brief summary:
I actually liked Batman v Superman far more than I'd expected to, given the travesty that was Man of Steel (even assuming that movie was made purely to set up BvS, it's still exceptionally poor) not least because BvS is basically the first time we've seen, on film, Batman-as-Detective, and some more serious discussions between Bruce and Alfred about the 'need' for Batman. Sure, he kills a bunch of people along the way, but Hollywood has always had trouble with Batman's 'no killing' policy, and always plays fast and loose with it. Granted, the means of pitching the two against each other is tenuous at best, but it worked in the context of the movie. The biggest problems, from my point of view, were Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor (or Lex Jr., I'm led to believe) who never managed to be the sinister, threatening mastermind he needed to be (although the "Grandma's Peach Tea" bit was awesome!), and the superfluous monster in the climactic battle. It wasn't perfect, by any means, but I actually enjoyed it.
Meanwhile, Captain America: Civil War suffered from the same malady as Avengers: Age of Ultron, in that it tried to cram far too much story into a single movie. What needed to be a deep insight into the difference of philosophy between Rogers and Stark, with far-reaching consequences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was boiled down to a family argument that led to fisticuffs in an airport. Yes, there were consequences... but this was a story that needed to unfold over time, whereas the threat - the division amongst the costumed heroes, much like the rise of Ultron and his clones in AoU - deserved time to grow before being solved with a few all-star punch-ups. This situation is less 'solved' than Ultron, granted, with the Cap basically in hiding and Tony Stark still kind of seething about everything, but it's the kind of story that either needed to be split across a couple of movies, or to be turned into a TV series. Plus, is it just me, or was it more of an Avengers movie than a 'true' Captain America flick? Sure, there was some focus on the Cap and his attempts to rekindle his bromance with Bucky, but too much else was going on... Perhaps, what they should have done was have Civil War movies devoted to the key characters (surely there's another Iron Man movie coming along soon?), rather than one movie for the whole event...
In other news, the weird dreams still come along now and then. I had one where my computer went very seriously wrong to the point where I switched it off intending never to turn it on again, then another which involved a kidnapping in the Star Trek universe - am I right in thinking there was an episode of The Next Generation where someone was beamed away from a planet/ship the moment they were beamed there, giving people the impression that there had been a transporter malfunction, and the person had been 'lost'? This was a lot like that... I don't recall who was kidnapped, but the investigation was pretty exciting.
Other big stuff: There was a plan for my girlfriend and I to take my niece for her first visit to the Science Museum (other uncle got the Natural History Museum, last year), which didn't go according to plan for several reasons. We arrived a good 15-30 minutes later than niece and family, and the day was already so rigorously timetabled that she started getting flustered when she wanted to keep playing on some of their edutainment games when we were supposed to be heading off for a guided walk around the space section. We left quite early in the afternoon, and she was pretty uppity - due to being tired, mainly - for the remainder of the day.
On the subject of the NHM, though, my girlfriend and I recently went to the Otherworlds exhibition - photographs of (and, in some cases, from) other planets in our solar system - and were thoroughly impressed... Though the day got off to an interesting start because we were in the cue behind a certain Hollywood star and his family...
Weird thing about this blog. I'm very conscious of the fact that it will have been going for ten years, come October. I'm also very conscious of the fact that I repeatedly neglect it for ages on end. I tend to find that, living with my girlfriend, I'm not so prone to the sort of introspection this blog has embodied for the last ten years. For the most part, I can't even be bothered to write about movies, TV shows, even books that I used to enjoy writing about. One of my other blogs is getting most of my attention, so I'm not stopping... I just kind of feel that the portion of my life that brought this blog into being is pretty much over, and that either I need to start something new, or just take a break from personal blogging (which I've basically been doing, intermittently, for the last couple of years).
Watch this space...
...Or, more likely, don't...
Monday, 16 May 2016
Saturday, 27 February 2016
A Bit of a Nightmare
It's very rare, these days, that I have something that I can honestly describe as a nightmare. I have weird dreams, sure, and I occasionally have zombie dreams, but it's not often that a dream plays out like a horror movie... Which is probably a good thing, all told.
One dream I had last week was quite interesting, in that it was rather graphic in places, but included certain recognisable elements. I am, however, kicking myself for not making a few notes about it on my way to work the following morning, because I'm sure I'm not going to do it justice now...
It all seemed to revolve around the house from the TV show Being Human (that's the original one, in Bristol, in the BBC version), which was all boarded up following some horrific events - ritualistic murders, I gathered - at some point in the past. Two men seemed to be involved, one apparently a local vicar of Indian descent, the other I don't remember anything about in particular - he was just 'some guy'. The story seemed to go that some kind of TV journalist was looking into the story, and broke into the house, but ended up getting caught when the vicar and his partner somehow returned.
The graphic part involved the journalist getting tortured while tied down to some kind of makeshift altar. The main implement of torture was some kind of long fork - a cross between the sort of thing you'd use to keep a joint of meat still for carving, and the large spork-type thing you might use to serve a salad - the flat of which was applied to the journalist's eyeballs. It was about this point that, mercifully, I woke up.
Weirdly, though, this wasn't the most disturbing dream I've had lately, as there have been two separate instances - days apart - of dreams involving a former colleague (notable at the time for his somewhat aberrant behaviour - everything from deliberately cocking things up to ensure people came back to him to ask for his help in fixing it to outright threatening behaviour - and a creepy obsession with me, briefly alluded to in my very first post). In the first, sometime during the week before last, he boarded a (thankfully crowded) tube train I was already on, forcing me to hide behind my book and the crowds of people to avoid being seen, only for a mutual acquaintance to attempt to draw attention to me. In the most recent one, I think on Wednesday night, he decided to tag along - basically stalking me - while I was having a day out with my best mate, my sister and, for no readily apparent reason, Richard Branson. Bad enough that my mate was upset about Branson's presence... for my erstwhile stalker to have returned made it all distinctly uncomfortable.
The weirdest part is how and why these dreams have occurred at all - I've not seen or even heard of this guy in something approaching a decade, and he hasn't crossed my mind in years, so I'm a little freaked out by his appearance in two dreams within about a week of each other.
The first busy period of the year at work is now out of the way, and we're now in to a complete lull ahead of one of our bigger annual projects. On the upside, this means I can get in a bit of training with my colleagues. That's the idea, at least... we'll have to see how it goes...
One dream I had last week was quite interesting, in that it was rather graphic in places, but included certain recognisable elements. I am, however, kicking myself for not making a few notes about it on my way to work the following morning, because I'm sure I'm not going to do it justice now...
It all seemed to revolve around the house from the TV show Being Human (that's the original one, in Bristol, in the BBC version), which was all boarded up following some horrific events - ritualistic murders, I gathered - at some point in the past. Two men seemed to be involved, one apparently a local vicar of Indian descent, the other I don't remember anything about in particular - he was just 'some guy'. The story seemed to go that some kind of TV journalist was looking into the story, and broke into the house, but ended up getting caught when the vicar and his partner somehow returned.
The graphic part involved the journalist getting tortured while tied down to some kind of makeshift altar. The main implement of torture was some kind of long fork - a cross between the sort of thing you'd use to keep a joint of meat still for carving, and the large spork-type thing you might use to serve a salad - the flat of which was applied to the journalist's eyeballs. It was about this point that, mercifully, I woke up.
Weirdly, though, this wasn't the most disturbing dream I've had lately, as there have been two separate instances - days apart - of dreams involving a former colleague (notable at the time for his somewhat aberrant behaviour - everything from deliberately cocking things up to ensure people came back to him to ask for his help in fixing it to outright threatening behaviour - and a creepy obsession with me, briefly alluded to in my very first post). In the first, sometime during the week before last, he boarded a (thankfully crowded) tube train I was already on, forcing me to hide behind my book and the crowds of people to avoid being seen, only for a mutual acquaintance to attempt to draw attention to me. In the most recent one, I think on Wednesday night, he decided to tag along - basically stalking me - while I was having a day out with my best mate, my sister and, for no readily apparent reason, Richard Branson. Bad enough that my mate was upset about Branson's presence... for my erstwhile stalker to have returned made it all distinctly uncomfortable.
The weirdest part is how and why these dreams have occurred at all - I've not seen or even heard of this guy in something approaching a decade, and he hasn't crossed my mind in years, so I'm a little freaked out by his appearance in two dreams within about a week of each other.
The first busy period of the year at work is now out of the way, and we're now in to a complete lull ahead of one of our bigger annual projects. On the upside, this means I can get in a bit of training with my colleagues. That's the idea, at least... we'll have to see how it goes...
Sunday, 7 February 2016
Playing Politics
Even these days, having had a variety of office jobs over a period of a little over 20 years (when did my job become a career?!), I harbour a small disquiet that, sooner or later, office politics will be my downfall. It happened in my early 20s - where a misunderstanding of the dynamic between me (essentially a newbie in the office) and a (senior) colleague led to some poor decisions that made my position untenable (and led to me seeing a shrink for a while). Nothing like it has ever happened since - I've made mistakes, certainly, but never the same ones - yet there is still a nagging sensation that I'm bound to fuck up again sooner or later, which has me almost constantly on my guard and not very trusting in an office environment. So when one of my colleagues recently fell foul of office politics (or, in a way, someone else's misunderstanding thereof), I started feeling quite uneasy.
The situation is this: the structure of the company changed recently, with our bon vivant boss departing (ousted, I suspect, due to other, unrelated office politics), with the void filled by the head bean-counter. Having an accountant officially in charge of a company is, in my humble opinion, never a good idea because their only concern is keeping the company solvent, at the expense of keeping the employees happy, and the client/provider relationships healthy. Running an entire company requires that a balance be found - generally in favour of the finances, but a balance nonetheless - and I really don't think he's going to manage that. The problems experienced by my colleague are both evidence and symptoms of this.
Part of the problem is that the guy who now runs the company has a certain manner about him - abrasive, but generally humourously so - and, with my colleague being still quite a recent addition to the company, this has led him to believe that a certain amount of backchat/banter is permissable. Of course, if that were true, that was before the restructuring. Now the guy is running the company, he clearly feels he's entitled to everyone's respect and deference. That's all well and good but, as the head of the company, he has to be equally cautious about how he treats everyone else. Or he would, if it weren't for the fact that he's also the closest we have to Human Resources.
But I digress...
A few months back, my colleague (and I, as I can hardly claim to be blameless in this particular matter) failed to check a certain element of a job, which made it rather more costly than it needed to be. He decided - off his own back - to personally apologise for his slip-up, and was met with rather childish scorn. It's possible - due to his perception of the level of banter between them - that he said something unwise in response. Based on the conversation I had with my head of department last week, I strongly suspect that all the complaints that have arisen about my colleague stem partly from there. Nothing in that meeting was new, and the fact that his somewhat costly cock-up came up at all, along with another, only slightly more recent cock-up where he didn't think to double-check the quantities provided for an order, tends to suggest that the company's newly promoted head holds grudges.
Another side to the issue is that our head of department isn't in anyone's good books. While my own promotion is ostensibly intended to take certain pressures off our boss, there are other factors at play. Just one of those factors is a sustained, harsh, and only partially deserved campaign of criticism. But when our boss is criticised, that invariably gets passed on to the rest of us.
There was also some discussion on the subject of 'common sense' - which some feel my colleague is lacking - but, these days (evidence of a certain mellowing of my attitudes in my old age), I tend to say that 'common sense' is common only to a specific individual, and that it comes from their background and experience, so expecting someone else to display the same 'common sense' is ridiculous.
Needless to say, I have advised my colleague to be on his guard, and not engage in any further office banter, while also assuring him that I am hearing good things about his work as well (strange that it doesn't seem to get communicated to him directly, but hey...). I've also restated to our boss that he feels he has been assigned some tasks which are outside his current skill set, and that they are passed to him with insufficient instruction. Our boss acknowledged this, at least.
There's probably more I could write about, but this has been a bit of a struggle - I don't much like writing about office politics, and it all gave me a couple of sleepless nights last week.
Instead, I shall start writing about telly.
The new series of Gotham, for example, which started to lose me from the outset. Gordon becoming just as corrupt as the city he had originally vowed to clean up (it comes to something when Bullock is less tainted by misdeeds than Gordon!), Bruce being pretty stupid (blowing up a secret door rather than figuring out the password, which was his own name!), and a new villain, intent on taking over the city by means of some ridiculously theatrical, staged criminal activities, starting with the breaking out of a bunch of Arkham Asylum residents, then setting them loose on the city. They were so clearly setting up one of the escapees to be The Joker, but then killed him off in a manner than suggests that the eventual true Joker will effectively be the result of a gypsy curse. Another of the escapees is Gordon's former girlfriend, who now wants nothing more than to get back together with him... I was all set to switch off permanently recently, when a new Police Captain was introduced to the Gordon's GCPD precinct, played by none other than Michael Chiklis... So now I'm slightly more keen to keep watching. Albeit reluctantly. That one event did highlight a huge cock-up on the part of the writers, though: Gordon was sacked at the end of the last series, and only got his job back by doing a favour for the Penguin, who then 'encouraged' the incumbent Police Commissioner to retire, resulting in the promotion of Gordon's erstwhile Captain to that coveted role. She was Commissioner long enough to reinstate Gordon, then got killed by the escaped lunatics on something like her second day in the new job. But why, given that the former Police Commissioner worked elsewhere, was she even still at Gordon's precinct, evidently functioning as Captain and Commissioner? And now there's no living Police Commissioner, why is the new arrival only a Captain?
Agents of SHIELD returned without much fanfare but, in its opening episode, introduced a character that looked so much like Blackheart, I'm sorely disappointed to find that it's (probably) not. It's always watchable as a show, thanks to a very charismatic cast, but I frequently wonder about the direction of the show.
Other than that, most of what I'm watching is First Dates (which may feature someone I used to work with) and Bridezillas (which constantly has me wondering why the couples it features even stay together, let alone attempt to get married and, sadly, we've had only one acrimonious on-camera split on the big day... So far), and wasting the rest of my time on the interwebs, doing very little of any import.
But this week sees the return of The X-Files, and what I hear so far isn't good. Like many people, I do wonder why they felt the need to bring it back (not least because I have the boxed set of the original series on DVD, so I'm not exactly missing the show or feeling unduly nostalgic), but it's only a short series, so hopefully it can't stray too far from the old, successful formula.
The situation is this: the structure of the company changed recently, with our bon vivant boss departing (ousted, I suspect, due to other, unrelated office politics), with the void filled by the head bean-counter. Having an accountant officially in charge of a company is, in my humble opinion, never a good idea because their only concern is keeping the company solvent, at the expense of keeping the employees happy, and the client/provider relationships healthy. Running an entire company requires that a balance be found - generally in favour of the finances, but a balance nonetheless - and I really don't think he's going to manage that. The problems experienced by my colleague are both evidence and symptoms of this.
Part of the problem is that the guy who now runs the company has a certain manner about him - abrasive, but generally humourously so - and, with my colleague being still quite a recent addition to the company, this has led him to believe that a certain amount of backchat/banter is permissable. Of course, if that were true, that was before the restructuring. Now the guy is running the company, he clearly feels he's entitled to everyone's respect and deference. That's all well and good but, as the head of the company, he has to be equally cautious about how he treats everyone else. Or he would, if it weren't for the fact that he's also the closest we have to Human Resources.
But I digress...
A few months back, my colleague (and I, as I can hardly claim to be blameless in this particular matter) failed to check a certain element of a job, which made it rather more costly than it needed to be. He decided - off his own back - to personally apologise for his slip-up, and was met with rather childish scorn. It's possible - due to his perception of the level of banter between them - that he said something unwise in response. Based on the conversation I had with my head of department last week, I strongly suspect that all the complaints that have arisen about my colleague stem partly from there. Nothing in that meeting was new, and the fact that his somewhat costly cock-up came up at all, along with another, only slightly more recent cock-up where he didn't think to double-check the quantities provided for an order, tends to suggest that the company's newly promoted head holds grudges.
Another side to the issue is that our head of department isn't in anyone's good books. While my own promotion is ostensibly intended to take certain pressures off our boss, there are other factors at play. Just one of those factors is a sustained, harsh, and only partially deserved campaign of criticism. But when our boss is criticised, that invariably gets passed on to the rest of us.
There was also some discussion on the subject of 'common sense' - which some feel my colleague is lacking - but, these days (evidence of a certain mellowing of my attitudes in my old age), I tend to say that 'common sense' is common only to a specific individual, and that it comes from their background and experience, so expecting someone else to display the same 'common sense' is ridiculous.
Needless to say, I have advised my colleague to be on his guard, and not engage in any further office banter, while also assuring him that I am hearing good things about his work as well (strange that it doesn't seem to get communicated to him directly, but hey...). I've also restated to our boss that he feels he has been assigned some tasks which are outside his current skill set, and that they are passed to him with insufficient instruction. Our boss acknowledged this, at least.
There's probably more I could write about, but this has been a bit of a struggle - I don't much like writing about office politics, and it all gave me a couple of sleepless nights last week.
Instead, I shall start writing about telly.
The new series of Gotham, for example, which started to lose me from the outset. Gordon becoming just as corrupt as the city he had originally vowed to clean up (it comes to something when Bullock is less tainted by misdeeds than Gordon!), Bruce being pretty stupid (blowing up a secret door rather than figuring out the password, which was his own name!), and a new villain, intent on taking over the city by means of some ridiculously theatrical, staged criminal activities, starting with the breaking out of a bunch of Arkham Asylum residents, then setting them loose on the city. They were so clearly setting up one of the escapees to be The Joker, but then killed him off in a manner than suggests that the eventual true Joker will effectively be the result of a gypsy curse. Another of the escapees is Gordon's former girlfriend, who now wants nothing more than to get back together with him... I was all set to switch off permanently recently, when a new Police Captain was introduced to the Gordon's GCPD precinct, played by none other than Michael Chiklis... So now I'm slightly more keen to keep watching. Albeit reluctantly. That one event did highlight a huge cock-up on the part of the writers, though: Gordon was sacked at the end of the last series, and only got his job back by doing a favour for the Penguin, who then 'encouraged' the incumbent Police Commissioner to retire, resulting in the promotion of Gordon's erstwhile Captain to that coveted role. She was Commissioner long enough to reinstate Gordon, then got killed by the escaped lunatics on something like her second day in the new job. But why, given that the former Police Commissioner worked elsewhere, was she even still at Gordon's precinct, evidently functioning as Captain and Commissioner? And now there's no living Police Commissioner, why is the new arrival only a Captain?
Agents of SHIELD returned without much fanfare but, in its opening episode, introduced a character that looked so much like Blackheart, I'm sorely disappointed to find that it's (probably) not. It's always watchable as a show, thanks to a very charismatic cast, but I frequently wonder about the direction of the show.
Other than that, most of what I'm watching is First Dates (which may feature someone I used to work with) and Bridezillas (which constantly has me wondering why the couples it features even stay together, let alone attempt to get married and, sadly, we've had only one acrimonious on-camera split on the big day... So far), and wasting the rest of my time on the interwebs, doing very little of any import.
But this week sees the return of The X-Files, and what I hear so far isn't good. Like many people, I do wonder why they felt the need to bring it back (not least because I have the boxed set of the original series on DVD, so I'm not exactly missing the show or feeling unduly nostalgic), but it's only a short series, so hopefully it can't stray too far from the old, successful formula.
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