I haven’t raved about Sluggy for eons, and I’m not going to today.
Just gotta say:
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Category Archives: review
Best. Toy. Ever.
E bought me a toy. 🙂
I told her about my oldest obsession, my first obsession, and she fulfilled it to the greatest extent physically possible: She got me The 8421.
This thing is like the god of lego sets. Sure, you can spend more on Mindstorms if you want the ultimate in sophisticated geekery, and there are doubtless exotic and ancient themed lego kits out there worth much, much more to collectors. I don’t care.
There’s no lego quite as powerful and awesome as real Technic, and as far as real Technic goes, this is it, the larget, most sophisticated (heaviest!) lego kit there is now, or ever was.
It:
- Has pseudo hydraulics (pneumatics).
- Has one of the new 9v electric motors.
- Has the complete six-cylinder piston-engine block.
- Has a working differential.
- Has proportional eight-wheel steering.
- Has two independent safety-clutches.
- Took me about twelve hours to build.
- Weighs about three kilos.
It’s a kind of Lego nirvana. 🙂 Thank you love!
They’re The Ghosts Inside My Head And They Control Me…
Warning: meandering content beyond this point. May contain traces of blather.
I have raved here about the marvel that is SkullCandy before. Alas, my Smokin’ Buds finally packed it in the other day due to excessive mechanical abuse, and became suddenly monaural.
I have come to depend on their supernatural powers of noise-removal in my office, since the nature of cubicle-farms leads to a workplace which is never quiet, where there’s always someone talking, often more than one someone.
It is not entirely coincidence that I bought myself a new pair of SkullCandy Full Metal Jacket ear-buds at roughly the same time I bought Nine Inch Nails Ghosts. It is wonderful though.
Ghosts is a lyrics-free album. That should be stated up front for those of you who were hoping that Trent still wants to fsck you like an animal. 🙂
It’s also not especially danceable, a trait which much of their previous work is valued for.
I have heard it said that the album is an accoustic one. This is not the case. In fact, there’s so much of NIN’s trademark distortion and static that you can get seriously alarmed if Ghosts is the first thing you listen to on your new earphones.
I’m not going to rave here about the way this album is being distributed, or licensed, except to say that both are rather cool.
As music to fill the silence inside your head while you work, I have yet to find better.
As mechanisms for doing so, the SkullCandy Full Metal Jacket buds are well worth five times the $70 I paid for them: crisp, clean and packing more base than any speaker stack. They also seem, if possible, better than the Smokin’ Buds at obliterating the sounds of my office.
With this in my ears, I can work, no matter how much it all falls apart around me.
Guts!
I seem to specialise in blogging from odd places under odd circumstances…
Today I’m in hospital with (probably) an incarcerated hernia
This is, I am assured, nothing to be worried about, but I notice I’m not being sent home or anything. There is very little to do here, unless one brings it; the TV is diminished from its traditional brain-sucking power by the absence of cable. They screen the occasional DVD, but have put Stranger than fiction (which I quite anted to see) at the same time I’m scheduled for surgery. The food here (Valley Private) is so bad that I am frankly looking forward to being put back on the drip and told to fast again. E (who should be canonized!) brought me fast food, Red Meat comics and my laptop, so all is well.
That’s all really. I have little to say, because I have little to do. In the absence of stimulus I become a potato. Ho hum.
Transformers
Last night I was privileged to participate in a sacred pilgrimage for a faith which is not my own.
Along with a secretive band known as Oftam (among them many True Believers) E and I went and saw the new Transformer movie last night, and enjoyed it immensely.
Although this will be written up to death in every corner of the Interlink, I can’t help but want to write about it. I will try to keep it spoiler-free and minimally foamy though. 🙂
The film starts with what fans may feel to be its greatest heresy: it introduces a clear, clean reason for the transformers to come to earth. There’s a certain amount of this kind of streamlining given to a pot which really evolved fairly randomly in the original animated series. It took nothing away from the experience for me, and felt entirely true to the original spirit.
The other big change is how the transformers themselves look and feel. Gone aer many of the familiar shapes and forms in favour of a very complex, organic esthetic. See Bumblebee here, for example. Transformations still feel right though: pieces move, and there’s the same sense that everything goes somewhere; nothing is added or taken away. This is not a coincidence: The effects for this film were given a lot of thought, and it is claimed that the animations really do take account of every part you see in the humanoid form in the vehicle form.
The director, Michael Bay, of whom many fans were extremely wary was aparrently not at all interested in the film at first, calling it a “stupid toy move”, but he seems to have come around: The film is littered with references to the original series, both dignified and humourous. The four leading cast members were all Transformers fans before they were hired. There was even a last-minute change made to the way Megatron looked (to the alleged horror of Hasbro) at the behest of the fan-base.
I enjoyed the hell out of this movie, actually: It manages to fit engaging characterization, a moderately complex plot and plenty of eye-candy, while still giving a generous amount of robot-on-robot action, so to speak. 🙂
The soundtrack also merits mention: in keeping with the likes of 300 and the first Matrix movie, action sequences are allowed to rock, rather than being limited to the traditional orchestral risings and fallings.
This is a good film to catch on the big screen. Failing that, this is a good film to watch while sitting much too close to a huge plasma screen with a hefty sub-woofer delivering the earth-shaking tread directly to your nether regions. I will most assuredly be obtaining the DVD, but I am very glad to have seen it on an appropriately vast screen, with cinematic sound and a company of die-hard fans.
There are many memorable lines. Right at the moment I am stuck on:
“Bumblebee! Stop lubricating the man!”
The film is relentlessly true to what little a half-baked fan like I can remember. It excites and it satisfies, and I am extremely happy with it. I look forward to the inevitable sequels with more than the usual degree of hope.
300 litres of red paint
I don’t know the works of Frank Miller first-hand. Never seen any. I know Sin City though, and now I know 300.
I have to admit, I am in awe. I can’t speak for the film as an adaptation of Frank Miller’s work, but to me the film reads like this:
You take a simple story idea, namely the story of a heroic battle. You take a director who, as near as I can see, has mastered the art of making simple stories even simpler, yet more compelling.
You give him a very large tub of red paint (or CG equivalent) and a bunch of the buffest bearded men you can find.
The result is incredibly graphic. I can keenly recall the furore over Kill Bill (vol 1) and it’s ‘graphic beheading’. Graphic beheading? It is to laugh. 300 is not for the weak of stomach. If you think you’re not as desensitized as most of the people you know, 300 is not for you.
If you’re Greek, and at all patriotic (like the guy over the partition from me at work) then 300 is made for you. Enjoy!
Ultraviolet
It would be terribly easy to write a whine this afternoon. Days like this make it terribly hard to think positive thoughts of any kind, let alone write anything cheerful. That would be a terrible watse of time: everyone has bad days at work, it’s not news, and generally nobody needs to hear about anyone else’s day. I will save it up for the after work mutual rant session with E tonight. 🙂
Instead, I want to write about a nitfy TV series which I mentioned once a long time ago on this blog: Ultraviolet. That’s this TV series, by the way, not this (aparrently mediocre) movie.
I first heard about UV from Polly and Damien. I will attempt to do justice here to the eloquent wind-up that Damien gave it when he described it to me:
There’s this british cop whose friend goes missing just before his wedding. The cop does his best to find his friend, but is hampered by this wierd secret branch of the police who are also lookng fo his friend and won’t say why. They seem to be very odd secret police; they have these weird guns with a mirror on them and they use these odd graphite bullets. The kinds of people they’re interested in are odd too: they only come out at night, and they seem to be very long-lived.
The plot moves quickly, but not clumsily, handled with the deftness and class we’ve come to expect from good BBC dramas. The ‘V’ word is never mentioned, throughout the entire series.
The tone is bleak in the extreme, but the series holds ones hope and interest through depth of characterization and a gritty british-crimefighting motif that somehow resembles The Bill.
It helps that the core cast are mesmerisingly good: The cop is played by the most excellently laconic Jack Davenport who you might know better as Norrington from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. There’s also the icy Susannah Harker, who I knew best as Mattie Storin from the House of Cards series, and the awesome Philip Quast, disconcertingly memorable either as Javert in Les Miserables or as himself in Play School (1981-1996).
There’s a catch though: Only six episodes of this series were ever made. It sems quite likely that this is all that will ever be made. The plot is not abruptly cut short, but it aches for a second season…
Discussing it after watching the sixth episode, E suggested that they might have failed to convince their producers that there was enough material in the, uh, leach-slaying genre. After all, Buffy the … Slayer took a heroic crack at it, but even with the introduction of inumerable demons, witches, cyborg monsters, mad scientists and even a god, the series was dogged by repetition.
BBC worshipping fanboy that I am, I would like to imagine that Joe Ahearne, the series creator might have overcome this kind of thing, but I can’t really make myself believe. In the end I have to suspect that E is right. Ultraviolet ended with the flame of creativity still brilliantly alight. Better that than tiredly exhausting every last drop, ending when the flame guttered out.
Caffiene, Bluetooth, Time management, and Chinese food.
I can drink Caffiene again! It has been roughly twelve years since I stopped drinking caffienated beverages because they were clearly doing me harm. In that time I have checked every couple of years to see if I could handle the Sleepsbane without headaches and muscle spasms, always finding that I could not, but always wondering if the problem was really more psychosomatic these days.
Now, with help from E, we did some rather more scientific tests, and I can confirm that it is largely psychological. I can handle at least one big cup of full-strength coffee per day without any ill effects beyond a slight tendency to talk too fast. 🙂
Speaking of E, she gave me my final birthday present yesterday: a bluetooth headset. It is most nifty. Now I can indeed walk around talking to myself and gesticularing like a wanker.
I got my shiny new book from Amazon just a week or so ago, and I have been reading it on the train when brain-function allows: Time Management for Systems Administrators by Tom Limoncelli. It’s an advice book, with all that that entails; you will find the rules in it obvious, even if you don’t use them already, and sustained effort will be required in order to implement any of them. It’s terribly specific… he says that the book isn’t for programmers – they should have their own book. In fact, it is often so specific that one has to read between the lines to see that a specific (and inapplicable) example needs the reader to use their imagination and generalise it. Still, it has already given me a couple of answers thatI would never have reached on my own, e.g. Q: How important is it for me to get my various calendars and task lists consolidated? A: Very.
A full review will follow when I get to the end of it, along with some discussion of what impact it has had on my actual time management.
Last night I took E to the Rock Kung restaurant in Glen Waverley and we ate gloriously: san choi bao, roast duck, roast pork and hokkien noodles among other things. It was impressively cheap, and very tasty.
Solipsism, Uniqueness and Purpose
Sitting here listening to the elaborate, baroque, beautiful madness of Jethro Tull’s “Baker Street Muse”, an epic track that is so metaphorical and cryptic as to make “Thick as a Brick” seem banal and explicit.In a solipsist world, if I go to a different school and never see you again, have I therefore deleted you from existence? Is that murder? What about meeting a new friend for the first time? Is that conception, birth?
Think of the people one meets at conventions, for example, how fleeting their lives, like clouds of unique, complex mayflies. Wow. Solipsism sucks. :-/
For the solipsist, choosing one’s friends is an evolutionary process, much more directly than for the rest of us.
The most obvious intuitive argument against solipsism, to me at any rate, is to observe that I’m just not that imaginative or creative, and neither is anyone else I can think of.
This line of reasoning is weakened however if I consider the question: how unique am I? To what extent does my life resemble a purposeful act of creation, and to what extent is it just generically random? What features have I that are so singular that my creator could not have arrived at this particular combination by simply rolling enough dice?
It makes me think that far from being demoralized and soulless, an intelligent android might find limitless joy in its mass-produced form: it knows it is a product of Design, made to fulfill a Purpose by one or more Creators. It can meet with these Creators, ask them to clarify the details of its Purpose, and be answered unambiguously. Lucky robot.
The themes in this post have come to me over several days, BTW: I was listening to Tull on Monday, thinking about the evolution of choosing your friends yesterday on my way home, and having strange broodings about purpose and uniqueness this morning on the train.
Blogging Under the Influence
Aparrently (so my Palm Pilot tells me) I wrote the following on Saturday night. I have only the faintest recollection of doing so. Warning: Absurd drunken pomposity follows…
This may or may not be a good time to attempt a blog post. Especially due to the defecits in technology under which I now labor, I am unable to compellingly demonstrate that as I write this I am utterly inebriated (to the extent of some two or three magnificent dozen standard drinks in the past five hours, and imbibed in excellent company) so I will write anyway and be damned if anyone believes that I did write this while aboard the nightrider bus, at 2am.
This night I have learnt what all the fuss is about Jamaican Rum, I have renewed my deep-seated belief that the trendiest and most visible restaurants are often the worst, and I have regained the confidence I once had that getting sloshed with good friends in the wee-small hours can be a profoundly relaxing and entertaining experience. As the bus I am aboard heels hard a-starboard into blackburn road and I finally begin to fall victim to the sleep regulatory chemicals in my bloodstream, The Scissor Sisters play “don’t feel like dancin'”, and I am somehow profoundly content. I wish young Joshua the best on that fair road down which he has stepped boldly so much further than I.
Good night.