Anotherblog

Sun & Moon

I was looking up at the sky the other day, and I saw the moon. But for a moment, I thought it was the sun - it was still daylight and it was smoky (though not *right* at that spot). I’ve been looking at the sun for the last couple of evenings, and it hasn’t even hurt my eyes - you can see a perfectly crisp-edged red glowing sphere, and it’s hard to take your eyes away. What hit me the other day was that the sun and the moon are the same apparent size. I mean, yeah, of course they are, otherwise eclipses wouldn’t be so spectacular - but still, to actually see it…

Hangi
We’re trying another hangi tonight. I’ve vastly overcatered, considering the number of people who have RSVPed, but what the hell, we can always freeze what we don’t eat. The only people who I’m sure will be coming are Jon & Kate and their friends Stephen and Steven. Some of Anna’s friends will be coming, and I *think* Chris and Amanda will show.

It has been hard work preparing, but the hangi is in the ground right now, just quietly cooking. In another three hours, we’ll see.

Happy new year
On a world-wide scale, of course, the year has been a disaster. On a personal level it has been wonderful, and I hope yours was the same, and next year is even better. I’m hopeful. Even on the world-wide scale.

Favorite films

I’ve been mulling over which films *would* make my top ten. Here are my first thoughts, in no particular order - these are some of the films that I enjoy the most, and would rewatch in an instant. I don’t know if I can formalise this and turn it into a top ten, though.

The General
Brazil
The Princess Bride
Trust
Groundhog Day
Delicatessen
Red Squirrel
Fargo
The Iron Giant
Rushmore
Run, Lola, Run
Being John Malcovich
Memento

Holidays

A nice lot of holidays. I’d write more, but I’m still - several days later - feeling bloated and lazy. For christmas I scored a great-big-bookcase, a PS2 game (Jak and Dexter), multiple books, videos, and CDs. No boring presents! Yay! Christmas dinner was at some friends of Anna’s parents. We ate a bunch of cows and I impressed the women by doing - this is really pathetic - a bit of the drying up. The men now hate me.

On the weekend we hit a thrilling climax for the Guards game with Amanda, Andrea and Chris, and immediately moved on to another game with the same characters that raised the stakes even further. We’re playing again tonight. The rest of the time was spent doing bugger all - I wrote a script (he tossed off, casually) that Anna and I had been meaning to do for a long time, started thinking about doing a New Years party, and slept a lot.

The script
I may have mentioned this project before - it’s a short script based on Anna’s experience at Energetic Healing, and it’ll be Anna’s first tropfest entry if we get it done by then. Anna and I talked about it, then I wrote it up and we sent it around for comment. Andrea read it, and immediately wrote a rather better version which sorts out some of the problems in the original (especially the rather lame conclusion). So we had two drafts in as many days. We’re hoping to do the filming next week - we’ll see how it goes when Jon & I have a production meeting tomorrow.

We’re getting closer to the 24 hour short film (writing, filming, editing, and showing a film of at least 4 minutes, all within 24 hours). Scott McCloud has a list of 24 hour projects on his website, but hasn’t listed any 24 hour films yet. Who’s up for it? The way I see it, Kate can write the script, Jon can direct, I’ll edit, Evan can write the soundtrack from Brisbane, Amanda can do the poster, and we’ll get whoever we can to act.

LOTR
I don’t care what Ted says, I’m going with the sheep-like response to say that this was an incredible film that caught me up for three hours and it’s brilliant and deserved academy awards, at least a lot more than Gladiator, and I’m seeing it again tomorrow. On the other hand - and this in no way detracts from just how great the film is - it isn’t in my all-time top ten yet. And some of the fight scenes were a bit dodgy, in that the enemies seemed far too numerous for the escapes that occured.

Monsters, Inc.
Anna and I also saw this on Saturday afternoon. It was fun and short and had lots of amusing touches but was a bit slight. I can barely remember it now, though that may be more due to LOTR.

Fires
The sun has been red and dim behind the smoke, these past few evenings. I’ve been unable to keep my eyes off it, despite nagging feelings that it will make me go blind. The smoke is everywhere in Sydney.

LOTR

The reviews are just pouring in for Lord Of The Rings now, and I’ve been completely unable to prevent myself from reading them, in exactly the same way as I’ve been unable to stop from reading everything else about it. Is it too late to worry about whether this will ruin the enjoyment for me? Actually, I’m fairly confident that I’ll really enjoy it anyway - Elanor, now in Dublin, sent a one-line review (WOW!) and Donncha is seeing it tonight. I’m in a frenzy of anticipation.

Tired
As far as I’m concerned, C++ coding is now finished. Those code changes from the weekend finally made the last difference, and the testbed now all works - I could do a lot more tests in it next, but frankly there isn’t time between now and January 12th to do the bonus testing as well as the example code and doco. So, tough. Now, the last of the Java coding.

Pool
I got knocked off the #1 position in the pool challenge ladder, by John F. Fair enough.

Alistair
I only found out on Friday that Alistair has been in hospital. He took a holiday in Fiji recently, just coming back to Sydney in time for the work sailing day, and enthused about how great it was even though he hurt his foot a tiny bit on some coral. Quite a few people at work have been to Fiji recently. It’s all the rage.
Anyway, the next day, the bacteria from the coral decided to try and kill Alistair. He got blood poisoning and was rushed to hospital and put on antibiotics and drips and oxygen and a heart monitor and all those wonderful things that they connect you to when your internal temperature hits 40 degrees. He was there for three days, then the fever broke and he’s been stuck at home since then, being feeble and week and visited by nurses twice a day with antibiotics.

comics
I dropped over to Alistair’s place last night, and loaned him a whole box of comics - the entire run of Preacher, all of Transmetropolitan so far, the collected Swamp Thing, and a couple of miscellaneous others. And as soon as I got the comics out of the car, the bottom fell out of the box and the comics spread evenly over the wet road. Yay! I hastily packed everything back up, dropped my palm pilot on the road too, and it started raining again. Here, Alistair! A big box of very slightly dampened comics, to spread over your living room carpet. Oh, and why don’t I forget to recover the palm pilot and leave it in the box too, thus making it impossible to post off my sister Claire’s package for the Czech Republic? (It’s just the coat, CB - I’m sending a separate present later). Oh, and only discover when I get home so that I suddenly realise it’s going to be difficult to call up Alistair, too, since that’s the only place where I have the number.

Except, I realised later in the evening, for the backup on the computer. So it’s all sorted out. Sudeep, Al’s flatmate, will bring the palm pilot to work some day when he remembers.

sigh…

They might forget Ted

Oh… how embarassing. I forgot to mention Ted in that list of excellent company for the “They Might Be Giants” concert. It’s cause you were over the other end of our group, Ted. Also, we took off like a bat out of hell from the train station *just* catching a train, which in retrospect was pretty silly. Would waiting around for twenty to thirty minutes having a chat, been such a bad idea? Bugger. Um, anyway, Ted’s company was particularly delightful, because he had his “extremely humorous” mode toggled up to eleven which makes him funnier than Peter Cook.

Fully sick mate
Well, it was going to be a weekend of work, but I woke up on Saturday feeling very, very poorly. I went into work, couldn’t do anything, went home, and Anna and I watched a bunch of movies while taking headache tablets and complaining. As usual, Anna got hardly sick at all, and was over it by Saturday afternoon. But I’m still feeling it now. Yuck. I managed to get into work on Sunday anyway, and did a fair bit of work though I suspect it will be of rather dubious quality. Most frustrating - I ended up changing a lot of code, something from almost every class, in order to make this tiny, tiny fix.

Swordfish
First up in the movie marathon was swordfish, a very, very dubious film that has dated horribly since the WTC attack. Its premise is that the bad guys are the lesser of two evils - all those people they kill to get the billion dollars they are after, are collateral damage. Their true mission is to take horrible revenge on terrorists so that terrorism becomes impossible.

Like I said, rather dated. The morals behind the thing was fairly objectionable to begin with, and it does the usual bunch of car chases and explosions and implausable plans and twists that make no sense so that by the end of it Anna and I were booing and throwing popcorn at the screen. Luckily, microwaved, unbuttered popcorn.

Stickmen
Somewhat better but still disappointing was Stickmen, a New Zealand film about pool. I got very excited about this, as I want to shoot some pool footage too, and thought it’d give some nice tips. Looks like I’ll have to rent out “The Hustler” or (ugh) “The Colour Of Money”, ’cause they are shamefully lacking interesting shots. It is the pool equivalent of battle sequences in the various starwars films - a rather tiring series of balls being slammed into pockets, with no context about the game, or indication of how well they are setting up shots, or snookers, or any of the things that would make it interesting. I guess pub pool is like that at high levels, but I really think there’s more they could show. A choice between two shots, for goodness sake! Is that too much to ask for?
Anyway, as they said in the director/writer’s commentry, they wanted to concentrate on making the film as much like “Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels” as possible, which didn’t feature any pool at all. Um, actually, I make have hallucinated that bit - I’m pretty sure they just said that they were trying to do relationships a bit more, and that the audience would be bored by the pool. Well, they sure as hell were, with they way you did it, mate!
I’m being a bit harsh. It was enjoyable enough, went through all the buddy sports movie hoops, tried for a surprise plot twist that was visible from the moon, had a couple of nice performances and some very well drawn characters, and one or two genuinely well shot tense bits of cinema. The script wasn’t too bad, though I think it was trying a bit too hard to play against audience expectations, so that it lead to the occasional bit of nonsense. For example, one guy splits up with his girlfriend, takes a picture of them together out of its frame, then dumps the picture and puts the frame in his bag. Cute. But why take the frame? What’s so special about it? There’s a terribly clever tactical “meta-game” play by two of the characters, intended to throw some other people off their game, that really makes no sense at all (though it seems to work well enough)… and now I’m quibbling again. I enjoyed it. It was professional enough for people to enjoy, while amateurish enough to see bits that worked and didn’t work, and try and learn from them.

The Spanish Prisoner
I saw the end of this on TV (after watching the end of a truly amazing ballet on ABC, something that was alternately bizarre, stupid, and breathtaking, but always compelling. No idea what it was called.) And once again, the end makes no sense. How did all those people get on the boat at the end? Were they playing him *that well*? No, I think it was just a gratuitous twist with no real sense of how it might have been set up. I’d appreciate any sensible alternatives from Mamet fans.

Bring It On
Cute, well written characters, well acted, and with perv-value set to “creepy as hell”. Like stickmen - settle down - it didn’t concentrate so much on the “sport” as the characters, and “Bring It On” did it better. The brother-sister interactions rang wonderfully true. I could take or leave the cheerleading itself. The story was rather more interesting that I had expected, not the old sport-buddy-movie, but rather the failure-redemption ploy.

Lord Of The Rings
Woo-hoo! I did it! 7 tickets at La Premiere, Fox Studios, for the 26 December 8:00pm session of Lord Of The Rings. Allocated seating, so no need to queue for ages, and it comes with luxury seating, free drinks & popcorn, etc. My joy is complete. Now… who to invite. Lets see (counts on fingers) - me, Anna, Ted, Keri, Chris, Amanda, Andrea… yup, that sounds about right! And it saves mightily on Christmas presents too.

Once again - woo hoo! The joy is only alloyed by the knowledge that Donncha has gotten into the advanced premiere on Wednesday, ’cause his girlfriend works at a publicity company of some description. Buggah! On the other hand - www.rottentomatoes.com now has 19 reviews of which only one is negative, making it - FRESH!

Pool

Well - I’m now number 1 on the challenge ladder. It’s been a while coming, and will no doubt be brief, but I did it. Donncha beat John F. for the spot, then I beat him.

Weekend
I’m not having much of a weekend - work, work, work. I’m skipping roleplaying in order to get this stupid thing finished. On the bright side, we found out that the company miscalculated my redundency payout - it should be 14 weeks pay, not 12 weeks. Happy! On the other hand, the contract work that I was considering (also through the company) is problematic. Although it would only be two days a week, there are tax implications. My redundency payout has a big tax-free threshold that disappears if I take contract work with the same company within 6 months. So if I do take the work, I’ll require them to make an up-front payment to cover this loss, ’cause otherwise there’s not a lot of point.

Lord Of The Rings
It’s possible to book tickets right now - but the “La Premiere” cinema at Fox studios doesn’t take bookings until Monday, so I’ll book then after trying to get a group together. La Premiere offer allocated seating (so no rush for the best seats), free drinks & popcorn, and extra-comfy seats. I reckon I’ll go for it.

Evolution
So bland and unfunny that it took me a couple of minutes to remember what I’d seen last night. Blah.

Thoughts
I’ve had all sorts of thoughts that I was going to share, but they’ve just vanished now…

Retrenched!

I’m not going to give this the space that it deserves, but I got retrenched this afternoon, with the rest of the development group at work… about time. I was beginning to worry it wouldn’t happen, ’cause I was pacing myself along the lines of “work like a dog now, rest lots later”. So I’ve got the guaranteed rest, at last, at last. Official last day is 12 Jan, but I’m still hoping to finish up before christmas.

They
Again, not the space they deserve… it was terrific, great, amazing, energising. The company was lovely (Dave, Simon, Linda) though I wish Anna could have made it.

And now, off home to celebrate…

Still not

feeling too coherent at the moment. A long night of work last night, then a lot of frustration today - all work related - and now I’m off to relax and watch They Might Be Giants do their performing thang! I saw them about six or seven years ago in Adelaide, and really enjoyed it then… memories of a great big conga line.

Blug.

Hard at work

I worked on Saturday, then went to Ryan, Edwin and Ben’s housewarming thing with Anna - unfortunately it was nerd-talk all evening, so she got bored silly despite our best efforts. Still, we agreed to make lots of short films and submit them for the tropfest and our very own film festival, to be held in either their back yard (which has a nice big white wall for projecting, if we can get a video projector) or at our place on our big TV. I think I’ve pretty much booked my entire holidays now…

Pool
You thought I’d got bored of it, hadn’t you? Nuh-uh. I’m up to second place on the challenge ladder, and just lost a challenge for first place *sob*. On the other hand, I broke my practice record: 15 balls in 15 shots. All due to a remarkable break - the first shot didn’t break up the pack very well (but did sink a ball), I potted a ball on the second shot, which left the white right next to the pack. So I smacked it straight into the thick of things, and watched as four balls just fell into pockets. The rest of the game was very tense, as I tried not to blow this amazing lead - and I (just) held on! I don’t think *this* record will be broken in a hurry! Still, I might experiment with feeble breaks then power shots for the second hit…

John Sladek

One of my favorite writers, and via Neil Gaiman’s journal, I found one of his short stories on the web. I read his “Tik-tok”, hated it, then went back to it a year later and loved it. Packed with jokes, allusions, and sharp satire.

Not coherent yet
…off to get a hot chocolate.