Zorac's LiveJournal

OK, I finally got around to putting this month's Sabrina Online strips up on th Unofficial site. The XML to LJ syndication is proving ... tricky, and has been moved to the back-burner for now.

Oh, and if you haven't seen Star Wars Kid yet, it's worth a laugh (the second version more than the first).

Grr! Arrg! The spammers have been getting on my nerves even more than usual of late. Firstly, there was a bunch sending their spam with forged From addresses at one of our domains. This of course resulted in me getting piles of complaints from people who don't know how to report spam properly. This evening, however, something even worse came along - a bunch of spammers who have their servers configured with another of our domain names on it - in such a way that any bouncebacks from their spam then end up getting bounced on to me. I got about 2,400 of these in under 40 minutes before I blacklisted their IPs completely (and I can see from the reject logs that they're still flooding in). There went two hours of my evening, and doubtless this will interfere in me getting real work done tomorrow...

Illness Update: Thanks to everyone who persuaded me to go see the Doctor. Have penicillin, will get better. The soup and ice-cream diet over the weekend also helped, as did a heavy dose of musicals. Should be back to normal in another day or two.

Enter the Animatrix: DVD out today, so I'm all caught up on these. All sorts of interesting stuff in there - backstory (both distant and recent) and just adding more depth to the world. Also looked at the comics on the main Matrix website over the weekend which another way of expanding the universe. Wah! Need Revolutions now!

Fast cars: Got pointed the other day in the direction of this neat website. Yes it's all a gratuitous promotion for BMW's cars - but with style. It's a series of short films - mostly car-chasey - with big name directors and stars. Haven't had the chance to watch all of them yet, but my fave thus far is the season 1 'Star' - featuring Madonna getting thrown around the back of (and then out of) the car, plus neat Blues Brothers reference. Be warned: Large downloads.

As others of you have pointed out, the temperatures in parts of the UK at the moment are really rather irksome and certainly not conducive to a good night's sleep. This is doubtless a contributing factor to the the dry spot which has developed into a full-on evil sore throat. Normally this is just a dull ache, but whenever I swallow, SEARING AGONY - I managed to struggle through most of lunch, but eventually had to give up and am considering starvation as a viable alternative to supper.

If it follows the usual pattern, it should be gone by tomorrow, but if not, it's time to find someone who'll prescribe me some nice strong drugs...

OK, so I'm two weeks late in writing this up - as usual, everyone else got there first ;-) See hermorrine's report here and picklepuss' here.

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I seem to have been sucked in by the meme meme of late. How scary. Anyway, here's my take on the pics meme:

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Yes, folks, it's the 100 Movies Meme. I've gone with yet another different list, just to be ... different. This one's the top-rated movies from IMDB, a somewhat different list to the AFI/BFI and Biggest Box-Office lists, albeit with some of the same names.

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Woo! I score exactly 50%. Another reason why this list works so well.

This time yesterday, I was watching The Matrix Reloaded. I am extremely jealous of my past self. As for the movie, well I loved it. Some interesting plot-stuff, but that's not really the point - this is an action spectacular second to none. What you see in the trailer is merely the tip of the iceberg, just a peek at what are easily the most impressive effects sequences ever seen. I won't say any more to avoid a painful death at the hands of those who haven't seen it yet, but will remind them to stick around for a preview of Revolutions after the credits.

In related news, I caught the world television premiere of one of the Anmatrix shorts - Final Flight of the Osiris - on five. It's a neat little bit of backplot just before Reloaded, and is as nice a piece of CG realism as I've seen, worked on by the same folks who did the pretty but plotless Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I've already watched the four freebies on the website and am looking forward to the DVD due out in a couple of weeks.

Question now is, can I survive until 7th November?

Today I watched the last ever episode of Buffy. I was a bit of a latecomer to the show, having twice tried to start watching it then losing track. Eighteen months ago, I finally gave in to the peer pressure and took the plunge, buying up the DVDs and watching through the entire first season (most of which I'd seen before) just before Christmas 2001. On new year's eve, I started watching season 2, and in the next 13 days I watched 4 entire seasons of Buffy and 2 of Angel - I was hooked. Thankfully, the latest season were then showing on pay-TV, so I could continue watching (although there was the whole digital-TV-company-going-bust thing, but the Boss came through with copies of the last few episodes.

Last autumn, the advent of DSL allowed me to keep up to date with downloads of the latest episodes from the states - there was no way I was going to wait 4 months for them to reach UK TV, even if I did have to put up with the strange scheduling. As noted yesterday, things almost got tripped at the final hurdle, but some quick rejigging of my network and BitTorrent came through with the goods. The swansong itself? It was Grand, and indeed a Finalé. It didn't pack the powerful emotional punch of Sleeping in Light (the final ep. Babylon 5), but was very good in it's own, typically Buffy, fashion - comedy and drama, action and romance...

Thanks, Joss & co., for 232 almost uniformly high quality episodes in the Buffyverse, and hopefully a good few more to come, albeit not in the original show. I'm reminded of an anecdote I read about Joss Whedon (the guy behind the show) appearing at a convention - the fans do the whole "We are not worthy" thing, and he deadpans his reply: "No, you're not."

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OK, so I've read 37% of the books on the list - not bad going, methinks. There are a few more on there which I'd like to read - and plenty that I ought to read at some point. Somehow, I think that the libraries will be quite busy with these, though...