Zorac's LiveJournal

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DVD1: Spider-Man: when I saw this in the cinema, I was somewhat under-whelmed - I suspect this was probably due it the ridiculous amount of hype the film attracted. Yes, the swingin' aroun' the city effects are overdone, but that's the films only real flaw. It's a crack action yarn which gets the clichés working for it, and doesn't take itself too seriously. Plus there's the kind of bittersweet ending that Hollywood should do more often. The quality of the DVD menus is possibly the best I've seen and there look to be stacks of cool extra features - sadly no original teaser trailer, but that's to be expected.

DVD2: Minority Report is classic Spielberg - sci-fi, action and a surprisingly good detective yarn. The vision of the future is intriguing without being implausible, and there's plenty of nifty cinematography.

Theatrical: TTT - out tomorrow (Wednesday), although for assorted reasons, I don't get to see it until Sunday (I wants it for my Birthday Present, my precious). I have every confidence that its brilliance will rise above any flaws (see a couple of posts in annamilton's journal re: Faramir). Must finish reading the book (just got to the end of book 3, now off to see how Frodo and Sam are getting on)

Trailer 1: X2 - I enjoyed the first X-Men film, and this sequel looks like it could be fun. Beware of the less-hairy Gandalf...

Trailer 2: Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle - I have no worries about this film taking itself seriously, and with Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Lui, what's not to like? Plus this trailer has possibly the most ridiculous over-the-top stunt of all time - I love it.

It's that time again - time to pull out the Christmas decorations from whatever mouldy corner they've been hiding in, dust them off and get them set up. A few raggedy bits of tinsel, the odd star and a genetically modified fairy (green hair, bleeding heart and stigmata - my sister's doing a couple of years back) Time to have fun with fairy lights! Fist try: last years lights, string of 20, clear white. A quick test shows they're still working. Put them on the tree - nothing. Take them off - nothing. Check all the bulbs - nothing. OK, so I dig out an older set of lights - 40-60 multicoloured with 4 different settings - a bit much for a 3 foot fake tree., so I decide to pull a bulb out to test the other set. What I get is just the bulb - the glass bit - without the plastic mounting, now decidedly broken. Great, so now I have two broken sets of fairy lights and no [expletive deleted] clue where the [expletive deleted] spare bulbs are - assuming there ever were any. [long string of expletives deleted]
%£^&%*(&@)(&*%^ CARRIER LOST

Just sent out my first batch of christmas cards (cutting it fine - last posting day for western Europe is tomorrow), probably need to send some more in a few days. If you'd be horribly (or even slightly) offended if I missed you off my christmas card list, then you'd best make sure I know your snail-mail address (and unless I've talked to you in the last couple of weeks, I don't know it) - drop me an email or whatever. Of course, if you're outside the UK then it's probably already too late...

This evening, it's off to the company christmas bash - this year conveniently located in easy staggering range of my flat - loo out for a possible 'Mood: drunk' post later on (depending on whether I can be bothered, and the amount of free booze). That'll be my third excuse to wear black tie in less than a month, although I'll be back to doing the bow tie myself again tonight - despite the pleadings of the office manager, I'm forced to go stag due to lack of a suitable person to invite who lives in Oxford outside term time.

I was mulling over a response to an article over in cygnusfap's journal in which I was quoting from an episode of Babylon 5, and was reminded of a favourite quotation which comes from that episode:

No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame; for one person, in the dark, where no-one will ever know or see.

And that got me thinking - could I do that? If so, under what circumstances? I suspect that it's a question that could never really be answer until one found oneself in such a situation - something I sincerely hope never arises.

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500k away from the latest episode of 24, but can I resist the temptation to download a DivX of The Two Towers?

Got an email from Amazon grovelling about the fact that they didn't get enough stock to fulfil all their pre-orders of The Getaway. As the order also has some Christmas presents on, I cant wait for them to get it in stock, so had to cancel that - which then took the order below the £39 threshold for free delivery, so I added a copy of Peter Jackson's Braindead - an early effort from the director of the LotR movies which is possibly the most ridiculous gore-fest of all time and extremely sick fun. On the plus side, Amazon did give me a £5 voucher for my trouble, so all's well that ends well.

Coming back to the subject, I watched Galaxy Quest to cheer me up - a brilliant comedy which works on so many levels:

1. A spoof of Star Trek
2. A send up of the Star Trek actors and fandom
3. As a great movie in it's own right

Feeling much happier now.

P.S. The spell-checker wanted to change 'fest' to 'feast'. Ewww...

I finally succumbed to temptation and started downloading the second series of 24 under the thinly veiled excuse of plagarism research for a fic I'm writing (also because the best way to avoid spoilers is to watch stuff before anyone has the chance to spoil me). Watched the first six episodes this evening and am rather impressed. I won't discuss the plot, although much tallies with rumours I've heard. The only (minor) complaint would be the "how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice" syndrome (cf. Die Hard 2), but that's pretty much unavoidable given the show's premise, and there's plenty of new stuff going on. Plot bunny scoreline so far: one idea I was going to nick and twist the other way - until the show went the opposite way to how I expected, so it'll have to be a double twist (probably for the best), one idea 'inspired' which has no actual link to the show, and on idea I would have stolen if I hadn't already used it (why does that keep happening to me?) So far I'm slightly ahead on my predictions of what will happen next, and I think that's to the credit of the writers.

...NOT!

Unfortunately, they're sometimes necessary. Had to be online at six this morning to do some maintenance, so of course my occasional insomnia chose last night to strike (muttermuttermutter). At least the work went pretty smoothly - albeit slight slower than I might have liked. Of course I've probably just jinxed it by writing that and when I get into the office in a couple of hours I'll find that I've broken everything horribly. Hey ho.

Manually updating RedHat Linux.

No, I don't understand it either. The sitch is this: I'm trying to install a new server, but for some reason the latest installer barfs and locks up every time, so I install with an older version and then manually update all the packages. This latter part is tricky because all the packages have dependencies, so to upgrade one I may have to upgrade (or add) some others which may in turn require more; also, the old packages I'm replacing may be required by other packages which I also have to replace. etc. Anyway, for some reason this activity attracted a crowd of colleagues avidly watching me - and when I got SSH working I made to finish the job from my own desk I was halted by cries of "but then how will we watch?!" (OK, slight exaggeration there - but only slight). Only when the job was complete did I get any peace. Quite bizarre...

Hmm. It appears that a large portion of what I thought was my to-do pile was actually either stuff I'd already done, or a bunch of images with "Do Not Distribute" on them - which I therefore won't be uploading to the site. That notwithstanding, I have uploaded 14 new fan-art images, plus the latest Halloween pic from Eric's site. As always, contributions of fan art or (distributable) EWS pics are welcome - and I may even try to get them on the site a little more promptly.