So, I wanted to get out and go somewhere and I normally return to the darkness of the film theatre as an easy escape. There isn’t really a lot of films on at the moment because all the major studios have delayed release of all their films due to the SARS-Cov-2 issues. So, in a sensible move, the cinemas around here are showing classic films to get us to visit. Today, as of writing, the following films are available to watch with my comments after each:
Back To The Future (35th etc) – seen
Back To The Future II (2020 reissue) – will watch at home
Dark Waters – seen
Dreambuilders – don’t want to see
Goodfellas: 30th Anniversary – maybe
Harry Potter II RE – don’t care for these movies
My Spy – already seen on Amazon Prime
Onward – absolutely not
Proxima – seen
Sonic The Hedgehog – seen
The Dark Knight (2020 reissue) – can’t stand Batman films
The Empire Strikes Back: 40th Anniversary – maybe
The Greatest Showman – kill me now
The Shawshank Redemption (2020 reissue) – maybe
Unhinged – really not sure about this isn’t it just Falling Down?
So, there is plenty to see and that’s just today. Tomorrow there’s a different selection of films going on. I might go again at some point. I’ve been going to early showings assuming that the cinema is cleaner than after a few crowds have been in. I’m not sure about the whole opening doors to the toilets thing but I guess if everyone uses hand sanitiser that shouldn’t be too bad. To be honest in the film yesterday there were only five people in that particular screen and I think we all pretty much enjoyed the film.
Earlier in the day I had been down to the river at Peters Village and seen that the tide was quite low. When I checked the tide charts supplied by Wolfram Alpha I could see that the tide was turning and by the time I went to the cinema it would have been around 75% of high water for that day. Sure enough on the way in to the cinema as I drove along the esplanade I could see that the tide was indeed getting towards its highest. There were no mudbanks to be seen.
After watching the film I rated it on IMDB because that is a thing I do for cinema films and there is a previous communication detailing the ratings process here. I then tweet the result on my rarely used (for now) twitter account.
I thoroughly enjoyed seeing this film again. It was great fun. There are so many aspects of the film that are well thought out and delightful little touches that it was as if I hadn’t seen the film ever before. I couldn’t tell you when I last watched this whole thing, but I can tell you that it was still excellent and it did make me wonder why films weren’t made like this anymore. Maybe they are and I just haven’t found them, or maybe they are and I’m struggling with confirmation bias, but this was a well scripted, well made film where every little bit of it just seems to work really well.
I’ve already bought the box set on Blu-Ray along with the Indiana Jones trilogy and Star Wars (1-6). I will be watching the next few films in this particular series over the next week or so and I can’t wait. I honestly can’t remember much and am pretty sure that the last time I watched the third film would have been in the cinema when it originally came out. We’ll see what I think of it!
I recently had to upload a photograph to a website for a photographic ID pass thing. I had already cropped the digital image to upload and then I noticed the website’s insistence that the photograph be <=40kB. Now, that’s not very big at all, especially when you consider that my cropped photo was about 150kB. So I resized the picture until it was just below 40kB. Then I uploaded it.
But.
Nope. The dimensions were incorrect! The photo had to be between 3.5 and 4.5 cm tall. Now, I ask you what does this mean? I’d already got the photograph to be within the correct size with respect to data but now I had to make sure it was the correct size in terms of cm. But, it depends how many dots per inch you are using. There was no information about the dpi the photocard people were using. It just had to be guessed!
Who does that these days? Who specifies a “paper size” for an image when you upload it? This was a classically terrible piece of web design made for bureaucrats who don’t understand what your average person understands about images and sizes. It was crazy. Do they not have an algorithm to just print the image to a particular size depending on the largest dimension? It was a frustrating ten minutes messing around with uploading files and cropping images along with resizing the image. What started off as a good detail photograph ended up almost pixelated.
This most definitely is not a Harry Beck type map but maybe I should produce one. This map goes with the previous communication about the Minecraft world that I inhabit and the underground system that I made. Apparently we are now working on an infinity room in the server, whatever that is. I hope I have enough RAM to cope with that!
This map shows an aerial view of the meadow area of the server world. The straight lines represent different sections of the underground system.
Meadow Underground System
RED – from Meadow Station to Harbour 1
WHITE – from Harbour 1 to Main House
ORANGE – Meadow House to Harbour 2
YELLOW – Harbour 2 to Mountain Base
Do these colours match the colours of the lights in each tunnel? Of course they do! Below is an overview of most of the world so far. We have discovered some deserts and a cold region but have yet to find a jungle biome which is a little annoying.
It’s been interesting removing oneself from the shit-show that is 2020 and enjoying my Minecraft server world. In the server world things aren’t perfect. I die sometimes, normally from entering the Nether, creepers seem to blow up my most treasured aspects of the world and occasionally I get lost and spend days walking back home. All of this still makes Minecraft better than 2020 or almost any of the last four years. My favourite time is when it rains in Minecraft. I love it. The sounds, the smell, the not getting wet. Now, I’m a little gutted as this is the second draft of this I’ve had to do. My first draft disappeared into the ether[net] and I don’t know what I wrote. I know I was happy with my prose but something will be lost this time around and you won’t get the chance to read my brilliance.
So, here we are, another video which is a screen clipping from the PS4. I looked into doing this properly with a voice over and all that jazz. I downloaded some software and recorded some screen clips on my computer and then starting meshing all that stuff together and having a go at a voice over. What did I learn? I learnt that I hated speaking out loud. I can just about do it for work stuff when I record lessons but I did not enjoy trying this out. Then, I also learnt that I spoke too many “ums” as I tried to commentate on a five minute clip. So I decided that I wouldn’t do it. Now, I do know that learning a new skill takes time and practice. I am giving it neither at the moment but I think that might change in the future and maybe I’ll give this another go over my summer break. What follows is a written description of the sort of stuff I was going to say.
This video takes about a Minecraft day. In fact I go to sleep at the beginning and the end so it is pretty much a day. We travel from one end of the Empire to the other but there are still aspects that are missed and maybe I will cover those one day.
So, we open at night and I am atop the Mountain Base. I sleep in the mountain top hall that I built and then head down the stairs to the internal secret hall. I think I want to make all the walls by the steps the same as I feel it’s a little messy at the moment. It was meant to be a secret staircase and so didn’t matter but every time I use it I think it needs smartening up. At the bottom of the ugly steps I look in a chest and take a rail – I’m not sure why because I didn’t even put it in its rightful place in the basement later, then I head out into the main hall and get a minecart from that chest. Then the journey starts! We get a tour of the underground railway I built.
Mountain to Harbour 2
The journey from mountain to harbour 2 station has smooth stone blocks and the railway lays on wooden planks. The lights start out as yellow stained glass and all the torches are placed one block rearwards from the track and with smoothstone surrounds. The emergency doors into the mountain base open and close automatically keeping the different areas secure. Once the yellow accented lights run out we get shroomlights. The whole idea of this was to give each branch of the underground from the main Meadow House a certain look and feel so you always kinda know where you are in the system. At Harbour 2 station we can see it has a purple concrete and smooth stone design to it. The way to the surface is a long ladder. The station at the top is designed to be similar to the platform area. We get a short look at the mountain base. Then, there is the harbour with the flip-flop switches that are operated by buttons and open and close the water exit to the harbour.
Harbour 2 to House
This section of the journey doesn’t take too long and we head to the main house and store room. House station is designed in white concrete with a light blue concrete ceiling to match the store room. The floor is glass and most of the lighting is torches under the glass. It costs a fortune to keep the glass clean of soot and dirt! Then we head up stairs to the Basement Storage Area which I built. It’s all nicely labelled and everything has a place. Every now and then I have a tidy up because other players on the server leave things all over the place. There is an enchantment room and a portal to the Nether. The doors to the station look hidden but are a bit obvious if you are the type of player who likes to go around pressing every button that you find. I do like the flip-flop circuit.
House to Harbour 1
Harbour 1 was the first harbour I built. I spent quite a while rowing around the rivers trying to map out the land. I have stairs places on all explored rivers which point back to the main house so if you come across a river you can find your way home. These walls on this line are a snazzy stone effect that I can’t remember the name of. The lights are white on this stretch of track. I think my favourite part of all the railways is the bit on this section where we go through a cave. I think it just looks nice considering every other part of the journey all looks the same. Harbour 1 station is red glass and wood accented. I think there’s even a tree growing up through the middle of the ground level building. We also see the first harbour and a glance at Meadow House. When looking at Meadow House you can see two platforms that were designed to give an overview of the meadow. The top one is called The Top and it’s just slightly too high for all the animals to be rendered when you get up there so you can’t actually see a great deal of detail. It’s nice up there though.
Harbour 1 to Meadow Station
Meadow station was originally the start of the railway line to the beach because it meant I didn’t have to have so many resources to build the line. Over time I wanted to be able to avoid walking and now I have achieved that. The underground line heading that way has the same snazzy stone things and pink accented lights. All turns in the system have signs on them in case you get lost. Meadow Station is a glass topped glorious sweet design that makes me happy. It was my first ever use of sea lanterns. There’s not really anything else there now but the station. It looks so nice I don’t think I’ll get rid of it but I rarely use the station for anything other than passing through.
Meadow Station to Beach
This is boring and takes around three real minutes. It’s quite good if you need a comfort break while playing as you can just get on the railway and head off to somewhere nice and do stuff. I’ve spent a while adjusting the redstone torches from the last video and putting them under the track to make it all a little neater. The purple concrete blocks allow you to find your way if you get lost. The side with the torch points to the direction of Meadow Station. The monolithic spikes every now and then were waypoints for when I used to walk to the beach. They also have torches on them which point towards the meadow. Getting back home has been quite important to me. The railway heads due west and as we approach Beach Station you can see my mob farm off to the right towering up over the land. Beach station is a glory of green and glass. I like the design of it. Once off the railcart we head to the beach, the house there, the small farm and the beach bar.
The Beach
The beach has an area nearby where I practise my redstone skills. It has the mob farm which kinda works ok ish. I also have an extensive mine which I have used to gather lots of lovely resources and the underground railway to that is in the next video. At the beach we gaze at the monolith which was a suggestion of a friend and I really like it. I think it adds a certain something to the whole area. The ratios of the edges of the monolith are 1:4:9, although I made this one 2:8:18, which is the same ratio. Then we head to the beach bar and dive into the sea pool I made. From there we are able to swim underwater to my ocean viewing platform. The lower opening to this was open to the sea but waterzombie things kept getting in my house so I used trapdoors to block it off. Finally there’s my storage basement at the beach and a short journey up to the surface and another flip-flop for the doors to my summer house. We have once last glance at the monolith and then head to bed, the end of a busy day in this Minecraft world.
This was an omission I had to correct. So, I did. I went and built a monolith at the Beach House but it looked too small. 1 x 4 x 9 didn’t really work that well so I doubled it. You have to keep the correct ratios and here it is:
Monolith and Portal
It’s a 2 x 8 x 18 which is a lot of obsidian that I had to make down in one of my mines. I have perfected my lava quenching techniques though! I think it looks good just floating in the air and although I touched it while building the thing I won’t be going near it, just in case.
TMA 2, Portal and the Beach House
This view has all the important bits of this end of the world. My beach house, the portal and the monolith. There’s also the remains of a tower showing top centre which was to indicate the way back – I’ve since got rid of most of it!
Monolith and Portal
I’m currently working on a *secret project* and there will be another video released soon showing the Empire. I’m not expanding the area but I’m tidying up some of the impact of building in the meadow area. Ultimately I would like to continue the *secret project* to the rest of the Empire but I think that would be too tedious. I have other things I want to do, like learn redstone and also get a shulker box and beacon.
While out for a walk yesterday this monster of a beetle was seen and then photographed.
Stag Beetle
The body and horns must’ve been 5cm in total. It was the first time I had seen anything like this and once I was home I looked it up. It was a stag beetle. It’d be good to see another one in the wild one day. Also while walking across the middle of the field I noticed a few house martins eating insects over flying over the field. It was a lovely sight and something I’ve not seen for a long time. I can remember martins and swallows from my childhood but I don’t recall any since then. Maybe I just wasn’t looking.
I’ve been building my Minecraft empire bit by bit. The last few days have had me experimenting with redstone and what that can do. I’m now upgrading different bases that I “own” to have automatic doors and security systems. Once I get quite good at the basics I’ll try to make bigger and better things. I have an area near my beach house where I practice certain builds and I have even gone to sleep realising I could have made things much simpler but, hey ho.
Here’s a video of the journey from one end of my empire to the other. You will move from my “secret” mountain base to the beach house. It’s changed a little since I made this video as I’m trying to add more stations to the system but this still represents most of “my” land.
Once I’ve got the railway system working well I’ll try and post another video to show what I’ve done.
Out walking the other day I spotted a lovely looking flower and so I used Google Lens to see what it was. To use Google Lens have the phone camera pointing at something in the Google App. Google will then do it’s best to figure out what you are looking at. It could be a bar code and Google tell you what the product is or it could be a leaf or flower. It’s how I found out what the plants growing in my garden were.
Don’t Use Them Up
When I got Google to tell me what this flower was it said Opium Poppy. I was rather startled and so did a proper search back at home and this is one variety of opium poppy. Now, whether it has any opium in the eventual seeds I do not know. I’m curious but not that curious. It amuses me a lot to know that opium is growing near my house.
Contrast
Last night the sky was quite dramatic with large clouds and the sun at a low angle making the dark portion of the cloud on the right hand side. It looked a lot better than this picture shows.
Lockdown has led me to have the chance to learn how to play Minecraft. I know it’s not that hard, but I’ve found it interesting and fun. I’ve also had the chance to explore parts of the world that I can’t do in real life. I had started thinking that I would write today about systemic racism and privilege in our modern society but I’m not going to, yet. I think there’s been enough said over the last while and if you read these communications you will see what side I’m on. What I will say is that if you deny systemic racism then you either a purposely not reading or learning anything about our modern society or you are racist. I think my favourite thing I’ve seen written recently was – We hate Trump because he is racist, you hate Obama because you are racist – and don’t you go thinking this is just an American problem, it is rife in this little island over here too.
Minecraft World
This is how much of the current world I have explored. It is approximately 5km across its furthest points. The base is somewhere in the middle of all that! This is the second Minecraft world I have generated, the first had me on an island in an ocean and I spent quite a while on that world but I have to say that being spawned in the woods and on a land of large area is much easier. It’s much easier to find resources. I find that I tend to separate my playing sessions into three main types.
Building Structures
Off Adventuring
Mining for Materials
The loop top right is one that I spent a few “days” exploring. When exploring I always have a bed, food and compass in my inventory. The bed is to be able to skip the night so that I encounter as few monsters as possible. Food is a requirement and then the compass I use to find my way back to the world spawn point. My main base is close to the world spawn point and I think that’s important along with a compass. I haven’t yet figured out how to use the Minecraft maps properly I need to do some reading on them. Each session I play is between one and two hours. I find the mining good fun and I think I try to see too much logic in the placement of blocks but also need to understand that while it’s random it is also procedurally generated. Building structure is excellent and my plans are slowly getting larger. I haven’t really figured out the aesthetics of it all yet and I need to practise my use of materials cleverly to look good but I’m getting the hang of it slowly.
My Buildings – Minecraft
My main structures are marked with red blotches in the above picture. Starting far left they are:
Beach House
Beach Station
Meadow Station
Main Base
First Harbour
Secret Mountain Base
I found the beach while I was off on a wander and I decided eventually to build a pathway from the main base to it as easy access to the sea is helpful in this game. Once I had a pathway in place with lit towers marking the route I then decided that the “day” it takes to walk was rather annoying and I chose to make a railway from the main base to my beach house. I knew I would have to gather a lot of resources and that I did. I needed plenty of railway and powered rails along with lots of blocks to make the whole line one straight section of railway. I chose to do this as it’s easier to head in a single direction through mountains and over rivers than winding your way, it also requires less material. The resulting railing is just under 1,6 kilometres long.
It’s a long way to the beach
To travel this far in the minecart takes about three real minutes. From main base to the beach house is about five real minutes of travel. At least it gives you time to sort out the inventory and make sure everything is placed neatly. Once the main railway was in place I built stations at each end and I don’t have any screen shots of those at the moment. I then wanted to build two decent looking bridges over two rivers and a future job is to build a nice viaduct where the railway passes over the swamp biome.
My Suspension Railway Bridge
My Standard Railway Bridge
Ill try and get some screen shots of my stations and secret mountain base and put them on here sometime soon. I wanted my stations to be fun and represent the areas they headed to. So the station near the main base is fun colours and looks like a sweet while the station near the beach is green and looks like the forests the line heads towards. I have really done any Redstone constructions yet apart from the railway. I think I will need to start these soon as I would like to have a switch which turns railway points so you can pick your destination in the station and the correct railway line is chosen automatically. While I don’t know if this can be done I am sure I could find a guide if I wanted but I will learn bit by bit.
Because I’m classically on the left of politics I’m going to mention some problems with this game. Is this important? It’s just a game you say. Well, yes this is important because all of this adds to culture and what people think is acceptable. What do the Marvel films teach us? That the world will be saved by gods and masked superheroes with immense damage and that all arguments can be solved through violence. This is partly why I don’t really enjoy these movies, that and they aren’t that good. So, Minecraft. Let’s look at the overall themes. I mine coal to power my cooking and smelting processes. I harvest trees for the wood but at least I can regrow the trees or even plant more than I have destroyed. Animals roam the land and I can use them for my own purposes. I get points for killing them and also for breeding them. If I’m trapped in a village overnight I can kick a villager out of their bed and sleep in it. I can destroy the villagers’ homes with no repercussions, I can steal their food and their possessions with no repercussions. I can kill them with no repercussions. I can take their lands and use their goods for my own purposes.
This game teaches you that there are no repercussions to stealing land, taking food, killing natives, destroying the planet, building whatever you want. I know this game is played a lot by younger children who love it. They love the creativity of it. They love challenging each other and it is a massive online arena with YouTubers careers made on explaining it to the world. But, when you break it down, what does it teach you? If there’s a better metaphor for historical and current European descent white supremacy then I’m not sure I know what it is. Where was this game created? Stockholm. Who owns it now? Microsoft. This world is biased and people claim they can’t see how! There, I managed to end this communication on a depressing note.
This area of Kent in which I reside has some decent human history going on. When mostly forested the island of Great Britain [it amuses me immensely that this place is named after a part of France, must make those racists really angry, especially singing Rule Britannia] had many locals doing their thing and trying to survive. Once people died they were buried in long barrows. These constructions had large stones, megaliths, placed at their entrances. There are a number of these in the Medway area and yesterday I used my exercise to go and complete my total of the East Medway Megaliths. These beasts were placed around 5000 years and and that is pretty darn impressive as far as I am concerned.
Kits Coty
In the past I’ve seen the coffin stone and I’ve also seen Kits Coty before as it’s on a running route I take. Here’s the view from Kits Coty, the weather was lovely but I am concerned that it’s been too warm for too long and the upcoming catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change is accelerating:
Kent from Kits Coty
I’ve just discovered Scheduled Monuments which is a list of important stuff as agreed by the Secretary Of State for that stuff. There’s a lovely interactive map on the Historic England website. You can also download a PDF version of the map and it is gorgeous. So, Kits Coty is scheduled monument 1012939 and according to that website:
This example has a particularly well-preserved burial chamber and is also of high archaeological potential due to the survival of the remains of the burial mound and the flanking ditches. The burial chamber having been taken into guardianship, the monument is also of high amenity value.
Historic England
Little Kits Coty
Just down the Downs is a collection of stones called Little Kits Coty or the “countless stones”. I think I’ve written about them before but they are still just as pretty and nestled in a corner of a field. There is no path to them so you have to take on the traffic!
Countless Stones
These boulders are also a scheduled monument as recognised by the Secretary Of State. These are number 1013673 and part of their description reads:
The atypical example of Little Kit’s Coty House represents an unusual variant of this class of monument but nevertheless forms part of the group of Neolithic burial monuments known as the Medway Megaliths. Being held in Guardianship, the monument is of high amenity value.
Historic England
The White Horse Stone
A small distance away is the White Horse Stone. It’s a single megalith but not quite as mega as the others in this area. According to Wikipedia there were other constructions here but they were destroyed in the 19th century.
White Horse Stone
This is monument number 1005181 and according to Historic England, again:
The White Horse Stone is a good example of its type, which survives well. The area immediately surrounding the stone is likely to contain archaeological and environmental information relating to the stone and the landscape in which it was erected.
Historic England
I would encourage you to look over the Historic England website as the maps, provided by OS, are absolutely gorgeous and the information there is pretty good. It also has listed buildings on the site and these are indicated on the map with little triangles.
Roman Villa, Eccles
Just south-west of my house lie buried remains of a Roman villa. It was in position from 65CE through to around 400CE which is pretty impressive. While it lies under farmland now it was excavated in the 1960s and it was quite an impressive size. Given how close it is to the site of the Battle Of Medway along with ease of access to the river and lying not far from where the Romans invaded it would have had prominent visitors and been of some importance. It is scheduled monument 1011770 and there are details if you follow that link. Wikipedia has improved over the last few years and there’s quite a bit of information there along with links to the original papers.
The walking route that is safest to travel from Little Kits Coty to the White Horse Stone involves using and underpass to get to the other side of the A229 Bluebell Hill dual carriage way. This underpass is quite pretty in shape and looks exactly like the launch tubes from Battlestar Galactica [imo].
I spent part of yesterday setting up the final parts of the new PC. I’m very happy with the result. The new things are the PC itself and some peripherals like the keyboard, mouse and mat. Because the mousemat thing was too big for the old desk I bought a new desk for the PC. I was stuck with the sizes that the desk could be because of the tiny size of my dining room which is where it all lives. I guess I could have put the system somewhere else but I wanted this position for the easy access to a wired LAN.
Terrible Picture Of New PC
I guess apart from tidying up cables I am done. It was very satisfying to wire in the whole system in its home for the next few years.
Yesterday while out for my allowance of daily exercise I noticed how lovely and green everywhere was looking. The sun and warmth over the last month – not a good thing by the way – has really helped the flora develop. Every path I walked on seemed lush and vert. Here’s a photograph I took while at one of the river Medway inlets, the old brickworks wharf.
Gorgeous and Green
Here’s a very nondescript satellite view of where the photograph was taken.
This morning I was watching my MagicMirror and up popped a RRR callsign on the aircraft near me section. Well, it wasn’t near me but it was close because there aren’t really any aircraft out there at the moment as the world has gone to shit. I checked with 360 Radar and it looked as though this RAF Cargo flight would pass quite close. So I got the camera and headed out to the garden to see what I could get.
Contrails
Here’s a cropped view, which looks a little better.
RAF C17 passing over Kent
Also, because the weather’s been nice here’s a photo of one of the plants in the garden. It was taken by son #1 and is a pretty good shot.
I love Gran Turismo. I have done since I lived in Chicago Avenue in Gillingham. My landlord borrowed a PlayStation from his brother and it had Gran Turismo. He and I would play this game and slowly over time I have gotten more and more into this particular game. I’ve owned every version.
The last few versions have had online gaming and I have a love hate relationship with the online version. Gran Turismo Sport has a vibrant online gaming community and I suspect there are people who race online all the time. I don’t get to see them often because my qualifying times aren’t that great.
Online racing is frustrating at times because I could get knocked off at a corner (or straight) and then I am pretty much in last place. The person who did the knocking will probably get a time penalty but my race is pretty much over. Also, there are times when I get knocked or hit into but then I receive the time penalty. This is what happened in the following clip. I was on the outside of the last corner of the Blue Moon Speedway when a black car rammed the car on the outside of him, then that second car rammed into me and I got a 1 second penalty. On a fast track like this 1s is a disaster and I can only pray for the whole front pack to take each other out to get any decent level of points.
In this clip my car is the dirty orange looking colour. I was racing closely with 9th place “YOUR-INFERIOR”, spelling please, I gave him room in the penultimate corner and then feathered the throttle going into the last corner. You will see 11th place “Golf_RalleyG60” come up the inside too fast and “lean” on “YOUR-INFERIOR” causing them to drift outwards and smack into me. In the second view you can see things from ” Golf_RalleyG60″‘s point of view with a reverse look to see me get my penalty.
Sometimes the racing is really good and there’s an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement as people race. Sometimes the race is full of assholes.
Yesterday I took a half term trip out to see Sonic The Hedgehog. I know Sony spent a ton of money [or someone did] to change the look of the creature and I was curious to see what the film ended up like. Sonic The Hedgehog forms a massive part of my history, I played it a lot in 1991/2. I was in my first year at university and Big Jim had just moved into halls. He owned a Megadrive AND a television which seemed impressive, none of the rest of us had such stuff. Jase had a TV and I remember watching Rumpole with him on a tiny screen but everyone else relied on the communal television.
Big Jim never locked his door and he was happy enough for us to play his Megadrive when he wasn’t around. There were quite a few nights when I would get a bottle of wine, a few CDs, and head down across to Jim’s room to finish Sonic The Hedgehog. This was in the days before save-games on consoles and so every game was a fresh start. I can’t remember which level of Sonic it was now, but there was one where you would gain four or five lives every time you did it [100 rings]. This meant that the aim was to die before the end of the level and go back and get more lives. It was the only way to ensure you had enough lives to finish the whole game.
It would normally take about three hours, a few CDs and a bottle of wine to get the game done. It was good fun. It was also the start of my downfall I guess? I bought a Megadrive in my second year of university and that probably had the effect of ruining at least two of the educations being paid for by the state. It’s OK though. I realised my mistakes and have been paying it back to society for the last thirty twenty five years or so. It was worth it and without the Megadrive this site wouldn’t exist in this state.
The weather wasn’t great on the drive to the cinema but I did remember to look at the river to gauge the state of the tide. It was pretty low as all the mud bank was visible. Upon leaving the cinema the tide was lower as a boat that was floating earlier was then resting on the bottom of the river. So I left the cinema pretty much at lowest tide [not checked online].
After seeing the film I rated it on IMDB using a system I developed many years ago. This rating will probably cause some consternation amongst readers of this site, but I don’t care. I then tweet the result and here is that tweet:
You know what? I quite enjoyed this film. Yes, it was a kids’ movie, no, there wasn’t really enough adult humour, but overall it was quite good fun. You could watch any kind of kids/alien/monster film and it would be the same as this. Pretty sure I saw Monster Trucks a while back and it’s exactly the same. Alien thing befriends humans and then solves some puzzle or problem while being chased by the evil government. I think there was the possibility of more “Sonic” specific ideas that could have been placed within the film but I still enjoyed it.
I need to talk for a short while about Dr Robotnik. I wasn’t really aware of who was in the film before I went to see it and after a short while I recognised the facial contractions of Jim Carey being Jim Carey and I thought it was him but at the same time I didn’t recognise him. While watching the credits I had to wait quite some time before Jim Carey’s name came up and I was starting to worry that maybe it wasn’t him. It was. This film has Jim Carey being Jim Carey and it was glorious.
It’s nice to collect whole sets of things. It completes the series, finishes the story. A long term aim of mine is to bag all the Wainwrights in the Lake District. It’s going to take a while as I live in the exact opposite corner of the country and it pretty much takes a day to get there. I’m trying to complete Gran Turismo Sport but I don’t think I’ll ever do it or if I do it will be after they bring out the edition for the PS5 [which I’ll buy obviously].
A recent trip to the Science Museum in London to meet up with the Fulham 5 meant another chance to see one of the Apollo Command Modules. There are twelve command modules around the world [USA + London]. I’ve seen three of them and I doubt I’ll ever get to see more than another two or three of them but it’s worth a try to see them all.
I’ve seen the Apollo 11 Command Module in Washington DC. The Apollo 10 Command Module in London and the Apollo 14 Module at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. I reckon there’s a chance I’ll see a couple more of them.
Apollo 14 Command Module
Above is the interior of the Apollo 14 Command Module. Just enough space for three humans to survive take off and re-entry. This conical cocoon sat atop the supply and Service Module that kept the astronauts alive. There was also the Lunar Module which they docked with in Earth orbit before performing a burn to take them out of the large gravity well.
If you think there’s not a lot of room in the CM then I suggest you go and take a look at one of the Soyuz capsules. They are much smaller and contain the same number of people. Those pesky Russians sure know how to make hard-working dependable technology!
Drove the short distance to Rochester cinema earlier today to see the second (third) Jumanji film. I really enjoyed the first one and reviewed it in this communication. I’ve since watched the first (second) on TV and so this was a no brainer.
On the way to the cinema I generally try and keep track of what the tide is doing. The river Medway is alongside the cinema and it is the tidal part of the river, being downstream from Allington Lock. The tide was high and the river was looking pretty dirty from all the rain that has hit the county over the last week. There was quite a breeze too which means there were plenty of little waves. Also, on the river, there was a ship carrying a boat [or however you choose to define ships and boats].
Boat on a ship. The boat is being fixed.
This brings me onto what I thought about the film. I rated it on IMDB and there’s a communication here dealing with the rating system. I then share the result on Twitter:
This is simple. I enjoyed this film and thought it funny. It was good fun and looked great. A lovely story, perhaps very cliched, and some decent slapstick. It was all great.
Went to a watch a celebration of the maintaining of our style of parliament by exploding things as though the parliament had actually been changed.
Fireworks
We didn’t also celebrate the capture, torture and state sponsored murder of the team who didn’t manage to change the foundations of this country by not having a bonfire.
Sparkler? It isn’t but looks cool, it’s the smoothness of it.
It’s time we had a massive change to our system of society. Only radical change will save us.
On the one sunny day this week I went to Chatham Dockyard because I’ve got an annual ticket and I’m going to use it. I was hoping to see the rope gallery but all the tickets for the tour were gone and I’m a bit gutted because it’s not often you find yourself in a room a quarter of a mile long. So this communication is going to cover some other aspects I saw.
The Big Space
The above panoramic photograph was taken in the loft space which was built after the slipway was filled in and the floor was used for storing boats for ships. This room has been used in a Bond film but I can’t remember which one.
Cranes Are Lovely
Dockyard cranes are quite spectacular and I do love the sheer utility of them. I don’t have anything else to say about them.
40 mm Bofors AA Gun
This AA gun is one of two on HMS Cavalier and it’s an impressive piece of kit. I’d love to have a go. The whole C Class Destroyer is so amazing. I still think that humans are so good at creating machines of death that we don’t deserve to be here.
Another warm day means another period of time spent in the cinema watching glorious films. Well, they aren’t all glorious but some are. The tide was high on the way in and lower on the way out of the cinema in Rochester, UK. It’s a thing.
I then rated this film on IMDB and there is a discussion of the method for scoring films in this communication. You should read it to see why I would rate a Tarantino film lower than this one! I then sent a tweet.
I sat watching this movie thinking how lovely it was and laughing at the jokes. I’ve got a feeling that I will watch it again just because I enjoyed it that much. I suspect there are many layers to the jokes and the more I watch it the more I’ll see. It was good fun.
Having read about Boudica on the interwebs I like the idea that we have no idea where her final battle was. It was somewhere between London and Wroxeter which is a pretty large area to cover. Also, when you read about how the Romans treated her family it makes perfect sense that she became this fearsome leader of the tribes inhabiting Great Britain at the time.
This was a good fun movie with an excellent cast and great writing. It’s a who’s who of comedy.
