Archive for February, 2004
Watched three and a half movies last weekend - thanks to my visitor from out-of-town, Ralph. Ralph managed to get me down to see Rasmus & Becky again, and even managed to convince them to come up to the big city for dinner and a movie. Had a great time chatting and sharing the gossip.
Lost in Translation: the perfect date movie. All I need now is a date. This movie is sublime. Saw this for the second time - I watched it a week ago with Eva & Colin on a whim.
Memento: on dvd later that night (it was only midnight, and Ralph hadn’t seen it). I’d forgotten how sneaky this movie is. Lots of bits had been edited out of my recollection.
American Splendour: superbly done. Not quite a documentary, more like a docu-drama. Really well done. The way the movie comments on itself is really good. The protagonist — Harvey Pekar — is a cranky depressive who writes comics, but the whole thing comes off as strangely charming. His great opening line on a date “I’ve had a vasectomy.” Her comeback: “We should just skip the courtship and get married immediately.” The real Pekar shows up in the movie a couple of times, sometimes to play himself, and occasionally to comment on the movie and the guy who plays him in the movie. A strange but happy man.
The last half movie was Flesh Gordon - a burlesque 70s soft-pr0n version of Flash Gordon that is (all things considered) not all that different from the version with Queen singing on it. Flesh is also worth seeing if you’re into special effects — Phil Tippet and some of the guys who went on to start ILM did their (afaik) earliest work on this. The claymation and stop-motion bug soldier animation is fantastic - not too different from Ray Harryhausen’s masterpieces. Of course, Harryhausen’s black-and-white monsters didn’t say “oh shit” when they died…
February 26th, 2004
My 8 hour class went well. A mixup had them thinking I would be there at 9, while in actual fact my flight got in at 9, so from their perspective I was half an hour late. It all worked out - the laptop behaved and their projector didn’t flake out. The biggest problem was that the old portable can’t really do much more than one thing at a time. Switching back and forth got to be a real problem. Powerpoint would freeze up and I’d have to do a little song and dance while we waited for the screen to re-paint. Other downside - talking for eight hours straight does a number on your voice…
Good thing: we got into some meaty discussions about how to implement and solve specific problems, and why some solutions were better than others, even without a working NetServer system. It turned out some of the people there hadn’t seen SuperOffice after all, so having a live client to show them really helped.
Bad thing: I had to say “we can’t do that” a couple of times when they asked about simple things (”can I build a selection of my prospects who I haven’t talked to yet?”). Gotta fix those issues…
February 25th, 2004
Nobody does Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails like Johnny Cash!
Continue Reading February 24th, 2004
My nightly guilty pleasure for the past few weeks has been Freedom Fighters by IO Interactive - a Danish game developer. Guilty pleasure? Why? Well, it has a B-movie jingoistic plotline about the Soviets invading the US. You are the saviour plumber. The story leaves no cliché unturned. But: it is fun to play - the controls are easy to master (basically “follow me”, “attack there”, “guard there”) in addition to the usual run-and-gun stuff. The camera sometimes flips (only happened on one particular mission for me really), and occasionally you point the camera where you don’t want it while trying to get a bead on someone.
For a run-and-gun game it really punishes running headfirst into combat. Cover and overwatch are key to fighting in manhatten. Lucky for you there’s plenty of boxes to hide behind. Cars explode if shot too hard, so you want to be careful where you hide. This is the first game I’ve seen that uses pie menus. It works really well. You use the d-pad to select a weapon by moving the d-pad in the right direction and releasing it. This becomes important because when the bullets are flying thick and heavy you need to re-charge health, lob a grenade and switch to the machinegun without mucking around in a linear menu.
Also part of the fun are your team-mates. The soldiers you recruit along the way follow you around like a beefy kindergarten group until you tell them to charge the guns while you sneak around the side to take out the machine-gun emplacement with a grenade or two. The areas you get to play around in are large, with lots of levels to them (elevated tracks, walkways, bridges and tunnels make exploring the environment rewarding and exciting).
I picked this up cheap - half-price. It’s short but meaty and lots of fun to play.
February 23rd, 2004
My mouth loves me and my stomach thanks me. Just finished off a nice beef filet with peppersauce, boild ‘taters and a bottle of wine. Slipping into a food coma…
February 16th, 2004
Bought two brown cord trousers last week, but apparently it is not profitable for the large chains to stock anything except the most standard of sizes, so the legs are too long (I’m a 34/30, which is too irregular — the closest I could find at H&M was 34/32).
So I had begged to borrow my brother’s sewing machine so I could shorten the trouser legs. After I had broken the needle on the machine once, they took over the sewing work…
It took a while before we got it all sorted out - it turns out even sewing machines have configuration options and user manuals these days - but the end result is pretty smart.
February 9th, 2004
Well, Oslo didn’t quite exceed its previous snow record. The month of January missed the mark by a few inches, but there is still plenty of the damn stuff to go around. The snow isn’t so bad. It’s the thick sheet of steel ice underneath that bugs me. Slippery and disguised by the sprinkling of snow on top, these bastards lie in wait, ready to pull your feet out from under you when you least expect it.
February 1st, 2004