Going to the cinema within twenty four hours of a bender weekend in LA might not have been the best of ideas! But I went anyway. I’d like to convince myself that I watched a lot of this movie but, to be honest, you didn’t really have to, so there were definitely parts that I skipped through some voluntary eye shutting.
On the way to the cinema I took note of the tide and it was actually quite high. No mud bank to be seen. The water was a little choppy from the high winds being experienced. Driving over the Medway motorway bridge required more concentration as the car got blown around a little. I think there are storm warnings out for a few days this week. After the film I rated it on the IMDB website and there is a whole communication covering the grading system written here. I then tweeted the result from my PC as I’ve removed Twitter from my phone for mental health reasons [good ones].
I knew this film would be terrible but I didn’t really to be as bad as it was. It really struggled with the whole “I know something that everyone else thinks is stupid” thing. Most of the film was irritating. It looked great but that doesn’t really help when the story, plot and script are all pretty shit. At least I knew what I was getting myself into.
I did spend most of the movie wondering who the actress who looked like Halle Berry was and it turned out to be Halle Berry.
This is communication number 2010 and so here are some things that happened in that year:
Sometimes things turn out right. I remember at college often listening to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones and thinking – yeah, things seem to turn out ok in the end. Now, I know that for some people things are shit. I’ve had my shit times, I guess I’m just a glass-half-full type of person most of the time. This last weekend was one of those times where over the last year things seemed to work against me some of the time but I ended up being fortunate. Let’s just make one thing clear though – I do not believe in karma or any such “the universe owes me bullshit”. All of this is the result of random happenings and any other such thoughts are pure folly. For the last weekend to happen to me, my niece had to have some rough times, but things are looking good for her now and I’m glad.
On Saturday I flew from LHR to LAX. The flight left around 1000 hours and eleven hours later landed at around 1300 hours local. The reason for this long flight was to meet the rest of the Fulham Five as we were going to have the [almost] ultimate Superbowl party. You see the story starts thirty years ago with a bunch of students watching the 1992 Superbowl in university halls. There were drunk promises to do this sometime in the future at a real Superbowl. This was the year it happened. This year also happens to be close to the half century celebrations for us all too. It seemed fitting for us to travel to be together.
The Grand Canyon
I was collected from LAX by the guys in their Dodge Ram hired tanker and we headed to the LA Convention Center for the Superbowl experience. My fine for turning up to the party a day late was to wear a Britney Spears t-shirt, it could have been worse. At least I stood out among the NFL fans. Parking turns out to be reasonably tricky in the centre of LA, more so when you need half a block just to U-Turn the vehicle you are in! Beer. We wandered around the convention centre looking at the experience and taking photos. The shop was impressively big but, also at the same time, remarkably hard to find! There were lots of activities to take part in but queuing isn’t really the thing you want to do, so we chatted and wandered.
Beers In LA – The Theme Of The Weekend
We then headed to the apartments in Marina Del Rey. Dinner was booked for 2000 and so there were deadlines to try and make through the weekend. A quick freshen up and change of clothes and we headed via Uber to Santa Monica and Del Frisco’s Grill. Dinner was nice and we discussed three times over what actually makes sport – sport. I don’t think we decided on an answer but that doesn’t matter I’m sure there’ll be other times when we can try and get a decent definition completed. The pier was then calling but the answer was very much a -NO – as it closed about ten minutes before we finished our dinner. By this time I had been up for a day and a half so I was kinda glad it was time to head back to the apartments and sleep. A slight aside is that Santa Monica Pier is the start of Route 66 so maybe someday I’ll have to drive the lot? or at least visit the other end of the road.
Sunday, SUPERBOWL SUNDAY, started with being surprised I actually slept around five hours and didn’t wake at three in the morning. There was definitely sunlight outside when I finally decided it was time to wake. Jase went for a swim in the Pacific and I paddled. We had a nice walk along to the marina breakers and watched some impressive sky writing. I knew that as long as I kept my caffeine levels high enough I should be good for most of the weekend and so I just kept drinking coffee. Turns out there’s quite a bit of helicopter action along the beach, not sure why, I tried not to answer questions that seemed a lot of effort. Breakfast was somewhere on W Washington Blvd, I’m not sure where, I just spent most of the weekend following and not making decisions – it’s nice to have a break from all that grown up stuff – thanks Mazz for being Dad.
Marina Del Rey By Night
Ades and I took the other three to the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood and then returned to Venice to find somewhere for us to watch the match. I had previously decided I would cheer for the Rams because Jase supports the Bengals but I knew that secretly I wanted the Bengals to win. I honestly didn’t mind who, it was amazing and coincidental that it was two of our teams that had made it to the World Championships. Adrian and I found the Venice Whaler and queued for a short while to get into their Superbowl party. Honestly this is where things can become a little blurry so the order of the following things might not follow an increasing time reference.
The bar was definitely very full of Rams fans and so we decided to cheer everything for the Bengals. There’s no point trying to endear ourselves to our ex-colony. When the Bengals ran on to the stadium Ades and I cheered loudly. The rest of the bar went quiet and a big guy called us out for not knowing anything about NFL. He chilled shortly later but it was funny. We ate a little food but mostly we seemed to drink. We did tequila shots with some people over from Wales, called and Aussie a cunt quite a bit and generally had an amazing time. I think we chatted to an American woman who claimed to be a scouser but I’m reasonably convinced she was slightly crazy. After the match the three who could afford tickets to the real game arrived and we chatted and had a good time.
Pacific Paddling
I think Jase and I walked back to our apartment and slept, soundly. Monday started with another walk along the beach and a paddle. We saw dolphins from Venice Pier and I promised Jase that I wouldn’t propose to him. Happy Birthday Rich. Later we were picked up by Jase’s American dad and had lunch at Tony P’s dockside grill with his US family members. I had a quite large pasta dish. There’s never really the need to worry about a food order being enough to fill you in this country. After this it was time to head to LAX and think about the administration of the journey home. Jase blagged me into the business lounge and many chocolate brownies were eaten. We both avoided alcohol as there does come a point when you need to stop and start to get the liver and kidneys cleaning you out. The flight home was only nine hours and I managed to sleep for a fair bit of it.
This Bird Took Me Home
This trip has been thirty years in the making and was a weekend of such relaxed fun I can’t think of anything I’d rather do. The relaxation that comes with being with close friends who you’ve known for thirty years even if you haven’t seen them for a few years is impressive. It was like we were all mentally nineteen again and just having a great time. I was very obviously the oldest person in the Venice Whaler for most of Sunday though. Not that I care. I had a great time.
How It Started – The Early 90s
How It’s Going – 2022
This is communication number 2009. I should be writing stuff below this explaining some things that happened in that year. But, I shan’t sully this communication with irrelevant details.
It has been a huge length of time since I last wrote on here and I’m not really sure what it is that caused this hiatus. I’ve been busy, but no busier than previously. I wonder if it’s a cognitive load thing in that certain aspects of work have been quite high loading and there’s only so much cognition I have? Who knows. I do know that this is probably one of the longest gaps between communications. I’ve just checked and the last communication and it was published or last edited on 10th January which is almost a month ago! I am horrified.
So, the reason for this communication is that I’ve been supporting independent artists again with their creation of content. This time it’s Faderhead. I pledged some money on Kickstarter for him to complete an album and I got my name in the thank yous along with a hard copy of the CD. I did this a while back for a previous album he produced. I don’t know why I’ve decided to support him, I mean I like the music, I guess it’s nice to feel involved with something like this.
Faderhead – Years Of The Serpent
Above is a picture of the CD and the note I got along with it.
This is communication number 2008 and recently I’ve been adding information about that particular year at the end. I can’t remember when I started it but the point was to count down to my 2000th comm. So, in 2008:
Stock markets plunge, fuelled by the sub-prime housing crisis.
So I went to Cineworld at Rochester to see a film. It was actual daylight when the film started and the weather wasn’t that bland grey that we tend to have all the time, there was sun. It wasn’t a warm day but it was a pleasant day. So, to help with the records I took a picture of the river and mud banks so I can say that the tide was low. There are other pictures I think and I might even, one day, walk further along the bank to take a picture of the mud banks that I look for. I wouldn’t be surprised if a photograph like that already exists on this site, there’s a lot of stuff on this site that I’ve forgotten exists!
Down By The River
In the photograph you can see the mud banks on the opposite side of the river, clearly showing that the tide is low. Also, if you look at the bridge supports you can see the green slime where the river covers and then exposes the concrete. Hence, the tide was low. Looking at the shadows and area of light on the far bank it is clear the sun is directly to the right of the bridge. The shadows are long. Both of these facts indicate winter – low sun – and time of image – early afternoon – due to the direction of the bridge – a little bit below east.
I went to see the film The 355. I didn’t really know anything about it before going except that it was an action film with women in the main roles. After the film I thought for quite a while about how to rate this film, there’s a guide to the ratings in this communication. I settled on scoring this film an eight out of ten.
I think I might watch this film again one day. Mostly I will be watching it to figure out what the fuck the plot was and what was happening. There was a general consensus of which city each section of the film took place. There was some aim for each scene to achieve and I think the film got there. What I didn’t really understand was who owned the MacGuffin at various points through the film. I’d quite like to see a diagram of what the film makers thought was happening at each stage.
There’s also been some criticism of this film because the lead actors are women. Well, those so called critics can go fuck themselves. What a stupid world we live in at the moment where people can’t accept the breakdown of traditional gender roles. All the people who think like that can fuck off and die. Well, I guess they will die eventually and with luck those thoughts will die out at the same time. We should be progressing as a society not constantly striving to go backwards.
My suggestion to make the film a little better would be to say that the MacGuffin is a quantum computer. The little USB box that turns any device into a super cracking computer able to shut down aircraft or power stations is just a silly looking USB device. It’s explained at various times that it’s a collection of algorithms or ransomware etc. That isn’t how any of those things work. An easier, and more correct, explanation would be that it’s a quantum computer. Once those babies are made and work all current security protocols are screwed. Everything we think about internet security won’t work. It would have been a more realistic explanation of what the device is.
I found it curious that the film thinks you have to have an actual auction to cover the fact that you are also running an auction on the dark web. Nope. You can just run an auction on the dark web. You don’t even need the product to be nearby. It certainly doesn’t need to be linked to a physical object in a real auction. The people bidding on your MacGuffin clearly don’t need to be anywhere near the real auction. The two events can be divorced entirely. This part of the plot made zero sense. It was worse than terrible.
Now, here’s a little more of a justification for giving this film an eight out of ten. The last few Bond films I have watched I have spent quite a while trying to figure out “why is he going there”, “what is going on”, and more generally “why?”. Plenty of Bond films are just as terrible as this film is with respect to plot devices, MacGuffins, characters, killing random people, shooting up cities in far away places, having coffee in Paris. I couldn’t really see any difference between this film and a Bond film except that I don’t really like Bond anymore. I think I grew up.
This is communication number 2007 and so here are some things that happened in that year:
The first iPhone is released. It wasn’t actually that good in terms of technical specs.
Live Earth concerts are held to raise awareness of environmental issues. How’d that work out?
Start of the financial crisis 2007-2008. The effects are still being felt.
I actually managed to get out of the house just in time to return to work. However, I did get a short trip to the beach, well, when I say beach it was next to the sea, when I say sea it was an estuary, and by beach I mean a stone beach. There are some sandy beaches in Kent, they are just a little further to get to and sand is over rated.
Thames Estuary
This image has all the colour and style that was available that day. It was nicely calming to be here. The sea / estuary was pretty quiet and there wasn’t any wind. On the horizon line you can see a little but of Southend in Essex and I think there might be two ships in the frame too. One of the ships seemed to be anchored while the other was definitely underway.
The Homeland
Here’s a close up of Southend. Part of me thinks I should head over there and look back at Kent. I can see Southend from a couple of places down this side of the estuary and it’s been an absolute age since I was in Southend itself. I can vaguely remember being on the pier. But that’s it. I can’t remember much else.
My website UI is telling me there are four links within these communications that do not work and so I’ll have to spend some time going through them and trying to find new links. Just another thing to do in terms of website admin – does it never end? Just joking, it’s actually pretty simple to keep this site going, I mean, any old fool can do it.
This is communication number 2006 and just below there are some things that happened in that year. I really now need to start thinking what I’m going to do when I get beyond communication number 2022. I was going to just make up outrageous things that I think could happen in those years. Or, perhaps I should just stop. I’m not sure. I quite enjoy having a particular format to these notes. I’ll think about it.
I have decided to start a new film review service but don’t worry I’m not going to be adding these to this website. I’ve found that I often start watching the same film on Netflix or Amazon Prime but I only notice about fifteen minutes into the film. I get quite a few recommendations and neither service particularly remembers which films you have seen before and I don’t really go in for rating those films on those services.
Prime RecommendationsNetflix Recommendations
Now, I like space films which are clever or just space films which are well written. I’m not that fussed on how well made they are. I’ve even recently watched a spate of second world war films but not because I’m fascinated with the war but more because of the stories they hold and things I didn’t know about. Most war movies are utterly depressing and full to the brim of the definition of survivor bias.
Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of terrible films on both of these main streaming services so I have created a spreadsheet to start avoiding watching them again. I’ve only just started this so it’ll be interesting to see how long it takes before I’m referring to it before I watch something. I will also add to the list as I discover films I’ve already seen and try to write down what I think. I will not be adding the reviews of these films to this site. I’ve got plenty to write about here once I start heading back to the cinema and once things start happening again.
This is communication number 2005 and so here are some things that I note took place in that year:
The Airbus A380 makes its first flight.
The Provisional IRA downs all arms.
Hurricane Katrina
Drawings of Muhammad are printed in a Danish magazine.
It’s been just over a week that I’ve owned the PS5 and after the initial joy of cabling and getting it in place I have been messing with some of the settings to get the best experience. The good thing about modern appliances is that they can “see” what they are connected to and output the correct formats for whatever gear you have. So, the PS5 is outputting 7.2 sound into the amp. I did have a problem with the picture format though!
The Current Set Up
The above picture shows a real mix of technologies and brands. There’s a Logitech G29 steering wheel, an Nvidia Shield Pro, the Sony PS5, a Sony AV amp, a Sonos unit, some Bose speakers, the Philips TV, a Sony speaker and a Sony PS camera. I think it all works together pretty well and even if people freak out about it they should realise that audiophile types are rare and most people can’t hear or see the difference between many basic makes and low end cables! I used to think that expensive cables were a thing that could improve your experience, but the answer is “no” they do not. Most of my speakers are connected by quite think mains cable. There isn’t a need for expensive cables.
So, back to the picture output from the PS5. I tried selecting a 4K HDR output but the PS5 was adamant that the receiving device wouldn’t be able to handle this. The PS5 wanted to downgrade the signal to 1080P for HDR rather than 2160P. Well, if I have to choose resolution over HDR then it’s the resolution that’s going to win every time I reckon. Every couple of days over the last week I would remember this issue and I played with the TV settings trying to find the magic button that would clear the way for these signals. I was pretty sure that 4k HDR was possible on the television. I couldn’t find the correct combination of settings.
I once again tried messing around in the PS5 settings to see if there was a thing I could do to fix this. I even bypassed the PSVR thinking there might be a thing inside that unit that meant it couldn’t bypass a 4k HDR signal. I also tried plugging the PS5 directly into the television but this didn’t change anything – I am aware now that this is because only one of the HDMI inputs to the TV is really set up for the best quality signal. I tried googling again and found a Forbes page which looked promising. The page suggests setting an input device to “enhanced”. This seemed like some kind of BladeRunner reference but I decided to go ahead and see if I could find this setting. Then, I remembered the AV Amp.
Why an amp needs to have a HDMI throughput setting set to “enhanced” I am not sure. But there it was, in the amp settings. The option to allow the HDMI bypass to be set to “enhanced”. I switched this. Then I restarted all the devices, because it seemed sensible to do so. I headed over to the PS5 and it was in “screen set up” mode. It wanted me to set up screen size and some HDR settings. I was reasonably excited and once the settings were made the PS5 is now outputting 4k HDR. It took a week of not-really-worrying about it but also knowing in the back of my mind that I could improve the look of the games.
I will say that once I’m engrossed in playing a game I don’t really concentrate on what the graphics look like. I don’t really notice the little details. It’s something I’ve always been conscious of. It’s the gameplay that makes the difference for me as a player. I know there a people out there who quite like just watching games and I understand that the graphics can really make a difference to them, but, for me, if the game play is good enough then you don’t really notice the rest of it?
This is communication number 2003 and so here are some things that happened in that year:
Space Shuttle Columbia breaks up over Texas.
Massive protests against an illegal war in Iraq. Governments do not listen. This is the start of my realisation that governments do what they want, not what we want.
Two people [not Musk] start Telsa.
China launches people into space for the first time.
It’s been reasonably frustrating to see the current government be so utterly terrible at managing the country. I guess it makes sense in some ways, people who are good at being elected to represent the population of the country don’t really have to be good at project management. They just need to be good at getting elected. Mind you, in most constituencies they just need to be good at being selected to run in those areas. When you look at it you have to wonder why people vote for Jacob Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson. They don’t vote for those people do they? Otherwise I’m pretty sure they would have to agree that one is a puritanical prick and the other is a liar. People vote for selfish reasons and the tories seem to offer the best deal for selfish people. Politicians are the worst people to have in charge of the massive projects this country is running. We need project managers and people who understand risk.
The current policy of not worrying about the Omicron variant and letting it run wild through the country relies on a couple of massive WISHES. The government aren’t worried about taking precautions, they are a reactive group of people who don’t have the balls to enact what is right for the country. It’s almost as if being popular enough to get voted for doesn’t make you very good at the thing you’ve been voted to do, especially so with the current bunch. For the UK to succeed we need all of the following WISHES to come true:
Not too many people need to self-isolate due to virus.
Not too many people end up in hospital due to new variant.
The vaccination programme means people don’t end up in hospital.
I am horrified at this approach. This gamble based on WISHES. We aren’t being pro-active. We are reacting. The problem is that the reactions happen two fucking weeks too late, because that’s how viruses work. It appears that the government still do not understand any basic biology. If we are really fucking lucky then hospitalisations will remain low and this works. We are hoping for luck. Fucking luck. We are playing with people’s lives while hoping for luck. Precautions are not being taken.
Less Severe
It’s A Numbers Thing
So, Omicron might be less severe. But we didn’t know that until very recently. We kept everything open because we are reactive remember. Let’s go with the best possible number there, 70% less likely to be admitted to hospital. 70%. This seems good. But what this means is that if we were to have a massive peak in infections any gains would be wiped out as the total number of admissions returns to bad levels. This would be bad if the policy had been to keep everything open and say have a massive surge in infections.
Massive Increase In Daily Cases
Fuck. That’s what has happened.
Now, I’m not claiming to be correct and I’m not claiming that we are fucked. I’m not saying the NHS is going to be overwhelmed. I’m saying the risk of that has increased massively and the government are playing a numbers game. Hoping for the best outcome. They are playing dice with the lives of the vulnerable and the unlucky. They are placing bets on being lucky and making everything look like they were geniuses. Quite clearly they aren’t geniuses. It turns out that lots of MPs are just selfish twats who don’t care about anyone:
Oppose Tougher Covid Rules
We currently have a bunch of MPs who don’t understand science, are willing to play dice with the lives of the country and who maintain a liar in power. It’s a fucking depressing world we live in at the moment and I only have so much anger I can maintain. Very soon it’ll be my chance to ignore the news again for a while. I need to get away from being a realist and play my PlayStation and enter a world of happy aliens I can shoot.
This is communication number 2001. Here are some things that happened in that year:
I had been saving a few items for this communication and this is going to be a rambler rather than focussed on particular issues. I guess this could be considered my christmas newsletter to the world if you think I care enough about you – actually to the ten people who look at this site I do care. So, what sort of things have been happening?
I’ve recorded a couple of videos for YouTube showing me landing in two New Zealand airports. I’m currently there in my journey around the world and my biggest “problem” is deciding whether to island hop across the Pacific to South America or to head up the ring of fire to Japan and then cross the Bering Straits. I need to look into the range of my T-7 EFT and go from there.
I just had a look on YouTube and I hadn’t uploaded the second video, I shall attempt to do that a little later. I’ve got some music file management to do first because I had helped Kickstarter an album by the artist Faderhead. Their music hits my sweet spot and so I was happy to chuck some money towards his project. I get my name in the thanks in the CD notes.
I’ve reinstalled Twitter onto my phone, not sure why, but I think I have a slightly healthier relationship with that dark place than previously. It’s also nice to see what Cornish Pom is tweeting about.
Just over a week ago, Friday 17 December, I was chatting to one of my work colleagues and they said that they had a PS5. I don’t think I was aware of this and so I acted surprised. The person then told me that to get it they had just kept checking a couple of large UK suppliers websites a few times a week and one day there was stock, so he bought it, drove to a nearby town and owned a PS5. I was slightly surprised this method worked as I had envisioned having to keep checking stock level tweets and getting in long queues in different shops. Just for a giggle that evening I looked on the Currys PC World website and it said they had two bundles in stock! I clicked order and they confirmed that the devices would be delivered on the Thursday [23rd December]. This seemed nice as it would be a christmas present and also a 50th birthday present for me [it’s coming up].
I then keep getting emails from the delivery company saying the delivery date is being brought forward and eventually they deliver it on the Sunday! Just two days later. I was super pleased. I then spent about an hour organising AV corner in the lounge to make sure that it fit.
Early Christmas
I’ve finally decided to remove the Blu-Ray player from AV corner. It doesn’t get used and on the very odd occasion when I do want to watch a disc I can use the PS5. The PS4 is removed because the PS5 is backwards compatible, so the 4 isn’t needed. I haven’t decided what to do with it yet. I currently have in my possession a PS3 [at work], a PS4 in a cupboard and the PS5 being used. I thought about taking the PS4 into work but the steering wheel isn’t compatible and I’m not getting another one just so I can keep the RACE club going on better hardware.
PS5 in its new home
AV Corner has a 7.1 amp, Nvidia Shield Pro, PS5 and PSVR. There are a couple of cooling fans there to force the airflow as the corner is stuffy and doesn’t really allow for convection. The new system looks good and the PS5 is pretty darn amazing. I’m really impressed with the DualSense controllers. The force feedback on the L2 and R2 triggers is really impressive.
So we now arrive at the lovely xmas present the world decided to give me and that’s Covid. I tested positive the other day. Had a PCR and just waiting for those results. But, given the specificity of the LFD tests, there isn’t really any doubt. I had expected to get it at some point but I would have been happier if it was when I was meant to be at work and not during the holiday season. I felt like shit yesterday and today is better but every joint aches and I can’t regulate my body temperature. Guess I’ll just lie on the sofa and watch a load of shit all day.
I remembered going to see the Matrix reissue when it was released and in my head it was about a year ago that I did that. Well, according to my own communication on this site I went to watch it in July 2019. Fucking 2019. Do you remember that? This means I went to see this original film twenty years after its initial release before SARS-Cov-2. Let me just repeat that, BEFORE. I’m not even sure I can remember what it was like in the before-times. Can you remember walking around and doing whatever you want without having to wonder why some cunts aren’t wearing facemasks? Can you remember a time when we didn’t have 150,000 dead in this country from this pandemic. I would ask if you could remember a time before having an incompetent and corrupt government but, they’ve been in power for a long time now and BJ was still as shit then as he is now. All he had to fuck up then was the Brexit agreement and that is going to shit still so we knew how our politicians acted.
Sorry, where are my manners? There are things we need to discuss first. The tide was pretty low as I drove along the riverside road. There are currently road closures in the village and so anywhere over “cinema side” of the local area is actually a bit of a pain to get to. As far as I know the gas people are trying to fix a gas leak somewhere along the main road into the village but someone decided to close the road as the hole is a little big? I’m not sure why it was closed but it is quite an inconvenience to many in the village. After watching the film I rated the film on IMDB and there is a communication from years ago where I discuss how the rating system works.
There are going to be spoilers straight after this tweet:
I didn’t dislike this film. I’m not enough into the canon to worry about what the fuck is going on all the time and how it affects the original storylines. To be honest I liked the original Matrix but the two sequels were shit I think. I know they had loads of money to make the films they wanted to make and they did, but I think when you try to narrow down the storylines to the point of making it make sense you end up with something that doesn’t work. Let’s face it, the Matrix looked gorgeous and has been much imitated since 1999.
I quite liked the first bit of this film where nearly every line was taking the piss out of the fact that they were making a sequel to the original trilogy. I thought this part worked really well. Normally I try and remember key points as I go through the film and sometimes [rarely] I write a note on my phone. I’ve not yet resorted to taking pen and paper but that might be worth it in the future. I also interact with a film by wondering what I will write about it on these pages. I don’t think I did much thinking about that last night. I was more concerned about a lot of things that didn’t seem to make much sense in the film.
In the film they talked about how The Matrix [game] Trinity was inspired by how Tiffany looks as Thomas Andersson sees her everyday in the coffee shop. They also explain how the game was released twenty years ago which means that Tiffany wouldn’t have had kids and possibly wasn’t married so Thomas could have approached her. There were a couple of things like this that didn’t quite make sense but you can do whatever the fuck you want with this film.
A bigger issue for me, and this is extremely similar to my complaint with Spiderman, is that Neo is told that going to get Trinity will cause a war and lead to the destruction of Io, the new human settlement. But fuck it, he’s going to get her anyway because Love. No weighing up of the death of thousands in a war, just a straight up obvious decision to go and get his beau. I did not like this aspect of the film.
I will tell you that this film looked gorgeous. It was really well made along with many themes of accepting who you are. This isn’t a surprise given the background of Lana Wachowski, the joint-writer and director. I’ve read quite a bit on social media where the general consensus is that Lana Wachowski created a gorgeous rebuff to the right wing of politics who had co-opted themes from the original film. Good on her. Fuck those people.
This is communication number 1999 and so here are some things that happened in that year, which is a newish thing I’ve been doing:
A fire in the Mont Blanc Tunnel kills 39 people, closing the tunnel for nearly three years.
Columbine High School massacre.
British TV presenter Jill Dando, 37, is shot dead on the doorstep of her home in Fulham, London.
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is released.
The sovereignty of Macau is transferred from the Portuguese Republic to the People’s Republic of China after 442 years of Portuguese settlement.
Engineers and software people spend a lot of time and money fixing the millennium bug and because of the hard work the threat of mass computer failure fizzles out. But it was because we fixed it. Not because it wasn’t really a thing.
The Labour government spend a load of money creating the millennium dome. I think it was over a billion pounds. All to get ready for the celebrations of the end of the second millennium and the start of the third but because we have a stupid year numbering system most of the world gets this wrong.
Yesterday I went to see this film. Given the omicron variant is being a bitch I had to balance out all the variables. I booked the largest screen/auditorium and made the the seats were definitely spaced from other vectors, facemasks were worn. A group of young men were there not wearing facemasks and I don’t think they were all exempt but there’s no folly like the stupid invincibility of the young. Wearing a facemask actually show that you care about others, you are reducing your airborne vectors, you are being considerate. These young men, quite clearly, aren’t aware of that or just don’t care. It’s easy, I think, to want to think about others and do your best for them. I really should remind myself that the tories have one a majority the last few general elections when the alternative was a society trying to help people.
It was dark, cold and foggy on the drive to the cinema and with roads closed near the village the journey was a bit longer than hoped for. The tide looked low on entry to the cinema. I could see all the mud flats and they were covered in seabirds having a rest from attempting to fly with almost zero visibility. After watching the film I rated it on IMDB and there is a communication that covers all the rules for the ratings here. I then tweet my result and because I have re-installed twitter onto my phone I could do that straight after the rating rather than having to use the PC to send it.
I didn’t hate this film. But I didn’t really enjoy it. But I was happy to see how the story was resolved and how they would figure certain aspects out. I don’t like superhero films and stories because it always ends up – who has the bigger fists wins – and that’s a lazy trope. It’s toxic masculinity class 101. Anyway, this film was mostly dull. I don’t like Dr Strange as a character and I didn’t really like most of the plot. It felt as though they had run out of ideas and just needed to bring back all the baddies because being creative is too hard.
From here on there be spoilers.
This is a film about selfishness. Utter selfishness. Peter Parker could have fixed it right at the beginning by not changing the spell every few seconds. Dr Strange could have stopped the spell and then re-started it but apparently the rules in this universe don’t allow for that. Peter Parker was selfish at the beginning and then ruined many people’s lives and cost millions of dollars of damage. He could have fixed this at any point by hitting the button on the McGuffin. The problems created in this film are so easily stopped. Press the fucking button.
The reason he doesn’t press the button is this universe Peter Parker believes that people should be given a second chance, that they have the chance at redemption. What christian wank this is. Just accept christ on your deathbed and say you are sorry to the imaginary man in the sky and you are redeemed and accepted into heaven. Parker wanted to fix these terrible people without their consent. I’m not sure what was meant to happen after that? Were they going to live in his universe? If you had the amazing power of being a bad superhero do you think you could go back to living in the suburbs? I’m not sure that would end well. The reason these people become bad is that they are egotistical cunts.
What was the end game? It seems Parker came up with a plan but with no idea how to resolve then ensuing issues. This is another classic modern trope taken from the real world examples of Iraq and Afghanistan. If you look back at the end of WW2 there were plans put in place to rebuild Europe and Japan. There was never a plan for Iraq and Afghan. Right, ok. This has gone political. I probably need to stop. Look, the thing is, Peter could have hit the button at anytime and fixed it all. He didn’t. He’s a selfish prick.
I was hoping we could see some Miles Morales, but it didn’t happen. I feel that the script could have been loads better with the other spidermen. I felt stale and slow. It didn’t really work. Perhaps the writers need to watch some buddy movies, or some where they get the team together.
So, this is communication 1998 and I’ve been writing a few things that happened in each year as I get through the publishing of communications. The last few have been interesting as nothing of note has stuck out at me on the wikipedia page and I so there’s this blank area when I wasn’t really into news as such. I just didn’t take that stuff in. Anyway, here are some things that happened in 1998:
Andrew Wakefield’s lying study into MMR vaccines and the lies told by the media of the day launch the anti-vaccination movement.
The second Congo war starts, it will leave 5.4 million dead.
Google Inc is formed.
An oil pipeline in Nigeria explodes killing 1,082 people.
It’s been tough, this last term. There’s plenty to moan about and discuss. But I’ll leave that to private conversations rather than let everything be out in the open on this site. If you can believe it I have my limits. I’m typing this as my flight sim heads across the sea from Hobart, Tasmania to an airport in New Zealand. I’ve got about fifty minutes to go. This is the longest over sea flight I have done and I keep looking at fuel levels. I think I might travel the length of New Zealand and then island hop to Hawaii, after that I’m not so sure how to get to the Americas. Maybe I’ll head to Galapagos and the South America. I honestly don’t know. I’m not even sure what the maximum range of my aircraft is. I can tell you that the T7 that I’m flying seems remarkably “loose” in the sky and I’m not sure if that’s the updated aircraft or just my flight sim. I guess I’ll find out when I try and land.
Wynard to Hobart, Tasmania. Change of plane for the fun of it. Actually landed this beast [kind of]. X-Plane. #roundtheworldtrip am currently heading to NZ. pic.twitter.com/aLmiHczV86
I’ve been tweeting the flights for a while now and I’m looking forward to whatever I’ll do when I return to the start point. I’ll need a new challenge but I’m also hoping that X-Plane 12 will be out by then. If they could make a version that uses multi-core rather then a single core then that would make me very happy. I don’t know how complicated that is but I do know they use an Apple computer for writing everything. I get a reasonable performance at the moment except over very built up areas and so multi-core could sort that out for me.
I’ve been checking online every now and then for PlayStation 5 stock. I was curious but I didn’t think I’d actually end up with a decent result, but . . . the other day I checked Argos and then Currys/PCWorld and it turned out there was a bundle in stock at PCWorld. Well, what could I do? I didn’t think I would buy one but the dream of GT7 on a 4K TV with raytracing got me and I clicked the order button. It’s coming on Tuesday. I need to rationalise AV corner now and think about getting game saves etc over from one machine to another. It’s probably time for the DVD and Blu-Ray player to go. It’s very rare that we actually watch anything on disc and the PS5 can be called into use whenever that ability is needed. I’ve promised myself I’ll try and get into more games over the next year. I want to use the games I have in the library. I will possibly report back on if it’s good or not in about a week.
The kids play mostly PC games when they are here. One on a laptop and the other uses my beast of a machine. I use my own PC for flight sim mostly. My fingers don’t really operate at a ASWD level, they are too used to a PS5 type controller. I could learn but there are other things I’m going to try and learn to push my brain a little. I guess I might reveal those things sometime in the future.
I’ve recently actually paid for a couple of albums. I’ve had Children Of The Dark by Mono Inc. in my head for ages and decided it was time to try and purge the earworm. It turns out that didn’t work and I keep getting their songs going through my head. I’m looking forward to seeing them in concert at sometime in the future. I’ve been wondering about whether it is best to buy an album or to stream music and I’ve mentioned that before on this site. For me, I thought buying an album meant more of the money I’ve spent would go to the artist. If I don’t listen to the songs many times more of the money in terms of royalties goes to the artist than if I just streamed the songs. Now, Daniel Graves from Aesthetic Perfection has said that he makes more money from streaming that album sales because I guess some people play individual songs over and over. I don’t know if it would make my contribution more to the artists as I often only play a song a couple of times and not over and over. It’s something I’m going to think about over the next week or so.
Well, I arrive in New Zealand in about ten minutes so I need to head back to the flight simulator and get ready for landing. I’m really worried about the handling of the aircraft and I hope I don’t crash on the landing as by my own imposed rules I would have to start the flight again!! Keep an eye on Twitter for progress.
This is communication 1997. Here are some things that happened in the year 1997 ACE:
Hale-Bopp makes its closest approach to Earth.
The UK hands Hong Kong to China.
The country went Diana mad. I was left remarkably unfazed by the whole thing and didn’t really care.
I’ve been busy over the last while playing Minecraft now and then. This video is long overdue as it’s a walk through of the latest base area, which I think was finished a few months ago but I just hadn’t got around to recording the walk-around. Things have been quite busy. This last weekend gave me the opportunity to spend some time setting up the recording software again [it hadn’t been used really since the new screen was purchased]. It took a while to figure out how to create new scenes and get widescreen recording to work nicely. However, this Minecraft video is in standard 16:9. Why? Because I don’t think Minecraft looks good in ultra-widescreen. I’d rather put a decent product onto YouTube than one where I think I’ve compromised in video quality. I’ll be uploading some flight sim stuff soon and that will be in lovely widescreen.
There wasn’t much choice at the cinema when I looked to book a ticket. Eternals was on along with some films I had already seen but I am not going to bother with Eternals. I don’t like superhero films and if I want to watch them I’ll do it on a streaming service. Ghostbusters: Afterlife was all that was left, but that doesn’t mean it was a poor choice, I wanted to see this. It was dark and stormy so I couldn’t see where the river water was for a tide report, but there were some reflections of lights high up the mud bank and, more telling, there were sea birds just resting all over the place, floating around, and I think they were taking shelter from the storm.
After seeing this film I rated it on the IMBD website and there is a guide to the rating system within this communication. I flip-flopped between a six and an eight because as much as I enjoyed this film and it gave me the “feels” I wasn’t sure I was going to see it again. But, let’s face it, for a film to make me happy and smile thirty five years since I watched the first version, it deserves a decent score. I then tweeted my score.
I really enjoyed this film. It felt like it was paced quite slow to start with but I think that’s because modern films are paced too fast in case the audience decide they hate the film. Making people wait for the “action” is perfectly good. There doesn’t have to be loads and loads of action all the way through the film. We don’t need films to keep racing to the lowest denominator of the public. There should be room for improving society and not just destroying it all the time.
I smiled at many points in this film and laughed [inwardly – I’m not a freak] in the right places and sometimes in this wrong places. The person three seats along my row seemed to laugh too loud and too much, but you know what? Each to their own. It’s better than the narcolepsy person I was near for one of the Matrix fims. I’m going to try and give little away about the film but that also means I can’t really talk about the ending. I will say that I loved the effects of the big-baddie, I thought they looked really good. The voice was interesting and in the credits it mentioned that Shohreh Aghdashloo had been the voice and that didn’t surprise me. She has such a unique voice and accent it really works in this situation.
The touches of music that plinked away in the background were perfect and hinted at the original film enough that I’m considering getting the soundtrack in digital form. The Ghostbusters OST was the first album I ever bought with my own money. I can remember my mum asking me to make sure I wanted it as it was quite a bit of money. Clearly I wanted it. If I want something then I always want it. I think.
I enjoyed this film a lot. It is nostalgic. It is lovely. It is worth seeing.
Comms#1992 and we get closer to the millennium each week. I wonder what number 2000 will contain? I’m not going to plan this, I’m just going to let it happen. Now, I’m one of those who can count correctly and so in terms of years I recognise 2001 as the start of the third millennium because that is very clearly when it starts. Here are some things from the year 1992 C.E.
The Maastricht Treaty is signed.
263 die in a coal mine disaster in Turkey.
The LA riots following white cops being acquitted of beating a black man when a video clearly showed them doing so.
It feels like it’s been a busy month and also such a struggle to keep up with everything that has needed to happen. Basically I think I’m saying it’s been too busy and I want it to stop. This weekend I have been mostly fixing a laptop that kept moaning about files missing and therefore it was unable to perform some windows updates. Obviously it would only tell you this after it had spent about two hours looking promising with the update. It didn’t feel overly safe turning off windows updates so I tried to fix it.
I made it worse. I managed to mess it up so it would even boot to the windows login screen. I had been doing some DISM work within windows trying to get the windows image to fix itself so it would run the update. Oh well. After quite a bit of attempting to boot to safe mode I finally got the laptop to boot to command prompt and from there I was able to browse the various drives within DOS. I found a setup.exe file on a bootable USB stick and just thought I’d see if it runs. It did. It proceeded to reinstall a fresh copy of windows and slowly over the next twelve hours I got all the previous software and files reinstalled. Small items are still being loaded as I write this but mostly, the machine is back and running quite well.
No major files were lost because I have a very clear – save it in the cloud as well policy. Useful things are only saved in a OneDrive type situation so that things aren’t lost in exactly this kind of situation. Even my NAS Drive is triply redundant, although two of those are physically in my house, so if it burns, I lose those. I don’t know who else thinks like that but I do. There have been many times I’ve come home hoping that my house hasn’t caught fire and burnt down the entire row. No, I don’t leave naked lights on or anything like that, it’s just a thing.
I also resealed some of the outside rubber things on a window. I had removed it a while back with the aim of buying some more and then replacing it. I think it’s the source of a leak I have with rainwater appearing on the window cill. The old stuff looked “dried out” and cracked. I think it just being a south facing window did that with direct sunlight all the time. I ordered a variety pack because there are approximately thirty different types of window gasket and then I chose the one that fitted best. I don’t think it’s an exact match for what I removed but it did seem to fit snugly. Yesterday I spent an hour fitting less than a metre of this stuff to the window. The issue now is that the corners of the gasket don’t fit super tight so I have some duck tape there at the moment. I need a rain storm to hit so I can judge the effectiveness of this stuff.
The oven heating element blew again about a week ago. I know I’ve changed it in the past and when I searched this site for some information it turns out that was in 2016. I suppose five years for an oven element is OK? I’d prefer it if I didn’t have to change it but at least it’s something I can do with relative ease. I’ve pencilled that in for next weekend along with a busy Saturday. Once again I find myself wanting everything to just stop for a month or so.
This is communication number 1990. Here are some things that happened that year along with me becoming of legal voting age and taking my A-Levels.
The Pale Blue Dot photograph is taken and sent back to Earth.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep finding “content” to fill these gorgeous pages. Often this site requires me to go to the cinema or at least go somewhere so I can then write about the terrible/great experience. Recently it feels that I’ve not done much. I mean I have but it’s just the boring same old.
Last Sunday I helped supervise some of the cadets who are entering a national competition in a couple of weeks, nothing exciting there. This past week I had two days off work ill and actually slept for the entire day for the first one. Then yesterday I ran a weapon training session and range for some of our new recruits. Oh, today I’m heading into town this morning to take part in the Remembrance Parade which I guess is something important but not always something I’ll take photographs at or write about each year.
This week just gone I’ve either been too tired or ill to cope with opening up the editing software and writing stuff here. I’ve actually just reminded myself that I started the album reviews for this exact problem, if I don’t have anything to write about then I can write an album review and publish it easily. So, this week I’ll probably publish a few of those. It also means I get to listen to those albums to remind myself of the specifics.
I do know that I’ve felt ill since the return to work in September. My lungs don’t feel correct and if I go for a run in the cold it really knackers those air bags. Not sure what’s going on, it’s not SARS-Cov-2 as I’ve repeatedly tested with both LFT and PCR. There are big issues with the LFT but it’s the best thing we’ve got at the moment I guess. I don’t think the government should be pushing them so much but they are blinded with their “success” of just under 150,000 deaths so far. Fucking twats. I honestly will not understand why anyone would still vote for the tory party after everything that has happened. They are in over their heads and horrible. Some people I talk to seem to think that voting labour endorses complete socialism or communism and they can’t bring themselves to do it. Happy to trudge along with the stupid cunts we have now in charge instead of wanting to help people. Let’s be clear, the government response to this pandemic has been disgraceful.
I’ve been playing Minecraft a little recently and am trying to give myself little projects in that as time goes on. I’ve just built a bubble elevator for one of the kids so they can build a sky base and we’ve worked on somewhere to attempt to kill the Wither. We’ll see how that goes. The last time we tried it I had to reload the world from a back up as our entire base got destroyed. My next job is to build an underground area in a few chunks a long way away for us to attempt to kill that bastard. We want a beacon. I think we’d also like some elytra but we are working on that. I don’t think we’ve found an end portal yet.
I keep being tempted with buying a PS5 but I will only play one game on it and so I don’t think it’s worth getting for just that. Especially when that game is available on the PS4. I haven’t pre-ordered my copy yet but I will. It comes out around the time of my completion of half a century of rotations around the sun. I’m currently having a go on Assetto Corsa on the PC and it’s ok but I possibly need to connect the steering wheel to the PC and that means moving it from the front room which seems like effort at the moment. Using a PS4 controller works reasonably well given my extensive experience in racing sims.
There’s nothing currently on at the cinema which I can be arsed to see. The only film I could possibly go to is Eternals but I dislike superhero movies so much that I reckon it’s just not worth going. My biggest issue is that the resolution to these films is always who fights better and never a negotiation or discussion. It’s never a cerebral conclusion it’s always fists and I fucking hate that.
I guess it’s time to start doing things to get ready to parade through Maidstone. Maybe later I’ll complete some more album reviews. I know that the Use Your Illusions are coming up and it’ll be fun to see what I think of those albums thirty years later.
This is communication number 1986 and so here are some things that happened in that year of our lord:
Chernobyl disaster.
M25 motorway is opened.
2000 people die in a limnic eruption in Cameroon.
Top Gun is released.
Consensual sex between men is legalised from the age of 16 in NZ.
I went to meet a bunch of people in London. The congregation was meant to be part of a stag do. I mean, it was a stag celebration but I didn’t really attend most of it. The plan was brunch, a rugby match and then whatever followed. I knew that the brunch was going to be either outside or in a well distanced restaurant and so I was happy with that but as the time approached to attend a rugby match travelling via crowded trains and being in a stadium I felt unsure about the covid-ness of it all. Now, I had been to a gig where you had to show your vaccinated status to get in and there were quite a lot of people but it felt mostly safe. I didn’t want to be in an England crowd at Twickenham.
Belfast, London
Another things that’s been bothering me recently is the pay rises the government has paid teachers over the last ten years. I find this really interesting, partly as I’m a teacher and partly because I can’t believe teachers are not as angry as they really should be. Over the last ten years the government has deliberately followed a policy of austerity. This was their political choice. We now know it wasn’t necessary as when the covid pandemic hit they decided to spend a fuck-ton squared and even then the controls were so poor that BILLIONS was lost. Here’s a graph showing teacher pay over the last ten years compared to where it would be if we had JUST received pay rises in line with inflation.
Teacher Pay Rises Versus RPI
Back to the stag. We met at a place near Waterloo station but I walked in from London Bridge station which was about a twenty five minute walk along the South Bank. It was a really nice walk and I started on the river close to HMS Belfast and then walked past the City Of London, the Golden Hind, and a lot of eateries. Fortunately I didn’t have to walk past too many of those “people who stand still for money” as they annoy me intensely. The brunch was nice and the restaurant staff were very tolerant of the pranks played on the stag.
Cityscape, London
Here are some numbers for you wrt the pay. The pay rise over the last ten years amounts to around 13.2% total pay rise since 2010. Inflation in that time has caused an increased in prices of around 37%. For comparison the CPI, and clearly you are going to use whichever inflation measure works best for your argument, has increased 25% in that time period. I used the Office for National Statistics to get my data. If my pay had increased by the CPI it would be around 46,000 now which is still clearly above what I am actually paid. In essence I have had a real terms pay cut every year for the last [over] ten years.
MP Salary
There’s nothing like mixing up all your graph types when you are trying to make a point but I was curious how much MPs have awarded themselves over the same time period. They’ve had a pay rise of around 25% meaning that they are inline with the lower of the inflation measures. So, the people voting to not pay public servants according to the lower rate of inflation have awarded themselves that exact rate. We all know that’s not even the best of it. Over that time MPs have given themselves plenty of expenses to be able to pay for things that they would say are required as part of the job, and I would mostly agree, but I would also argue that many MPs play the system to enrich themselves. This pay doesn’t take into account any other jobs and directorships that MPs take on.
I think the problem is that too many of us do our job because we like being a teacher. We feel a “calling” or feel we should do the things that are considered normal of us. I personally don’t think that. I don’t feel the calling and I don’t feel this job is a vocation. This job is one that is bloody hard work and no one will be there to thank you at the end of it. That’s not how all this works. You don’t get a special seat in heaven. You just stop doing this shit one day and it leaves your life. Salaried jobs are bollocks. We should be paid for what we do and in a specific time frame otherwise the organisation is stealing from you.
Comms#1985 and so here are some things that happened in that year:
“Neighbours” starts on Australian television.
First mobile phone network in UK.
South Africa ends its ban on interracial marriage.
So, I used my last night of freedom in this mini-break we have from work to go to the cinema to watch Last Night In Soho. It was directed by Edgar Wright who also directed Baby Driver which I reviewed here. Driving along the south run towards the cinema I noticed that the tide was very low, I couldn’t see the mudbanks because it was dark but I could see the white of the seagulls standing on top of the mud all the way to the centre channel of the Medway. I don’t recall checking what was going on with the river levels when I left I was puzzling out what I thought about this film.
After watching the film I rated it on IMDB, there’s a whole thing about the rating system and that’s covered in this communication. Then, eventually, I tweet the result to my fans but not from my phone as I’ve had Twitter removed from my phone for a long time now. The only “scoial media” type app I have installed is Reddit and that’s only for times when I need distraction from the happenings around me because I’ll get too annoyed if I actually pay attention to anything.
I’ll try not to give too much away about this film but for the first 75% of the film it was heading for an EIGHT out of ten. I really enjoyed it and thought I might watch it again to see all the subtleties between each decade of happenings. Essentially a girl moves to London and experiences visions from the 1960s. I thought this premise worked really well and I liked the whole [first 75%] of the film. The music was great, the look and feel of London in the 60s was fantastic and the experiences of a Cornish girl heading to London were reasonably accurate but I’m not sure the “big city” is that much of a “thing to worry about”. Maybe I’m wrong because I grew up near London and regularly went there in my teens, I guess I also have to factor in that I am a male and places feel different to us depending on what sex we look like.
When people talk about the swinging sixties I tend to remember what my mum once said and that was “it was still a bit shit everywhere”. While there might have been an amazing scene in some cities most of the world was still a bit shit. The image of Carnaby Street and the Kings Road garnered feelings of freedom and liberation and I suppose while that’s true the men in charge were still assholes. I did like the fact that many of the male characters in this film were creepy as fuck. I guess that is what the world is like even now and the experiences of women were shown to be generally quite awful.
My problem with this film started in the last 25% of the run time. I had positively enjoyed the film until then, wondering whether the main character was crazy or experiencing some weird time displacement. I was hoping this would turn out to be a film where the mental health of the main character grew to be known and helped to be minimised with care and compassion. But, no. This turned into a plain horror film. I don’t care for horror films because they are clearly bullshit and the tricks they play on you are trope-like and mostly boring. Every now and then a film will come along that will be surprisingly different but then that spawns a load of shit.
Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg were fantastic in this film. The two lead characters managed to keep their eyes open in terror suitably long enough. This was a well made film but the crappy ending dropped the scoring down from an easy 8 to just a six and so this film gets lumped in with all the other sixes and there’s a lot of them.
I’d be curious to know just how good an Redruth accent the lead female had, @cornishpom?
This is comms#1984. Here are some things that happened in that year of our lord:
The USA and the Vatican restore full diplomatic relations.
I went to the cinema to see a film, a good one this time. It was dark as I approached the cinema along the wharf road but I could see lights flickering off the wavelet tops all the way close to the sea wall so I know the tide was in. How far I couldn’t quite tell but whenever I looked I saw streetlight reflections. This was Rochester cinema, which isn’t in Rochester, and my second trip this week although I suspect not my final trip this week.
After watching a film I rate it on IMDB and then tweet the result just so this communication looks quite good with an embedded tweet. I mean, you could head over to Twitter to see what I thought but now you are here, why would you?
This film was gorgeous. I already knew the story pretty well as I’ve watched the previous films and read a couple of the books. I’m sure that my friend, JH in Cornwall, gave me a copy of most of the books although I can’t remember how far through them I’ve read. I’m tempted to start again but I have too many unread books on my Kindle device thingy.
I wasn’t sure at first whether to rate this film as an 8 or 10. My reasons are that I don’t think I will pay to see this film again but I suspect that I will probably watch it again before the next film comes out. So, it gets a ten out of ten which is frankly what it deserves.
The whole look of this film is just absolutely gorgeous and the scale and vision is impressive. I guess it could be argued that given CGI and the skill of animators it is possible to make anything in a film these days but just to have the ideas of creating such things is still impressive to me. I really enjoyed this film and will one day make my kids sit through it all [ha ha]. I’m not sure they’ll be happy with the ending but I was very satisfied with it all.
When I entered the cinema I had to check which screen I was in as there were two teenage girls in the row behind me and I wondered what they were doing there. Dune isn’t really a teenage girl film I thought at first but then I told myself off and reminded my brain not to be too judgey about other people upon appearance. However, at the end of the film the two girls were not in the theatre so maybe they hated it, maybe they had to leave, maybe they just didn’t realise the film was over two hours long. I don’t know.
This is comms#1983 and so let’s see what things happened in the year I started secondary school:
ARPANET moves to the TCP/IP protocol.
Seatbelts become mandatory in UK for front row seats only.
Air Canada Flight 143 glides in to land in Gimli, Manitoba.
I took a trip out recently to the marshes. Romney marshes to be exact. It’s a strange world down that way and eerily amazing. I think I’m going to have to do again to explore a little more, park the car and see how far I can walk. The landscape is haunting and bleak and I do feel affected by it. Not enough to move there, good grief, it’s a long way to anywhere really but it is amazing.
Dungeness Nuclear Power Station
None of the photographs I took really capture the essence of the countryside there, so here’s a picture of the nuclear power station currently being decommissioned. I wonder if that’s why so much art works on this barren landscape? Photographs can’t quite capture just how strange it is so art does the job for us. While in that area a train journey was taken from Dungeness to New Romney for lunch. The journey was kind of nice, but once you are going it’s just a railway carriage isn’t it. The views weren’t up to much, just the back of people’s gardens. But it was a nice little trip.
A Proper David Bailey
One of my children took the above photograph and I’m thinking of employing them as my editors and filter people as that’s something I can’t be too bothered to do. Maybe it’s time they taught me!
Comms#1982 and so here are some things that happened in the year that included my tenth birthday:
