Stories

Finally,

I have put my two stories up. The short one, entitled 'Goblins' is the first one I wrote for our creative writing class, so it was written at some point in May and based on a dream I had many years ago. The second is my final piece 'Journey of a King' with amendments after comments from the course tutor and Simon. It was hard work but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm fairly certain that at least two white hairs on my head are attributable to the course, which doesn't bode well for my Masters! I now know that for some reason, creepy stuff is my thing. Very strange. Maybe I should write a story about a werewolf to frighten Simon scare-de-cat?

I do hope people like them, and let me know either way by commenting on the blog, if you just email me Simon will be sad as he'll think no-one reads the blog.

New officey goodness

This last week up at FXhome we've been moving down the corridor and into new offices, which has been rather knackering but also most excellent! I like to think that my recent DIY experience with the spare room came in handy, as I felt like I was decidedly less useless than when we put the last office together. :)

It's really rather grand - to think we were all still working from home just a year ago. We've now got oodles of space, which is essential for storage now that we're shipping, nice new monitors and even a proper leisure/meeting area with comfy sofas. All-in-all it's a far more pleasant area in which to work, and a far easier place to work with regards to sending out boxes and stuff.

The sofa area is particularly spiffy - we're going to get the webcam all set up so that we can do proper web conferencing with Malone and Hendo when they're not in Norwich.

Check it out: http://fxhome.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=31435

Visiting Chris & Jen in Hastings!

Llama hats are brilliant. During the summer they're slightly less brilliant, so I haven't had much opportunity to show off my membership of the Llama Hat club since the inaugural night with Mr Wayne. During our visit to Hastings a few weeks back, however, I got an opportunity to adorn my bonce with another Llama hat, as can be seen in this photo. Chris also appears to be wearing a jester's hat.

Since their return from traversing the globe, Chris & Jen decided to set up shop in Hastings, which gave us an excuse to go check it out. Rather further to go to see them than just two streets up the hill, but they're worth it! (well, except when Chris is physically abusing me - more on that in a moment)

After a fairly painless drive down from Norwich (other than an absolutely foul pub lunch at the roadside Blue Boy in Kent - DO NOT EAT THERE), we then proceeded to get utterly lost in Hastings. I firmly blame this on Jenny's rubbish directions. Once we eventually found their flat, I was then faced with one of the most ludicrously difficult parking situations in automobile history, thanks to late-19th century architects completely failing to predict the rise of the ubiquitous motor vehicle. Remarkably, we didn't lost any wing mirrors, although getting out again would require a similar feat of wheel wrestling, aided by a random stranger who was suspiciously sitting in his car nearby.


Anyways, Chris & Jen's flat is rather spiffy, being top-floor, right on the seafront and complete with C&J cosiness. And we like being cosy. First night Jen cooked a rather magnificent chicken/tuna rice + peppers spicy thingummy, which we really must have again sometime. Saturday involved a pleasant wander around the Old Town and a ride up the funicular (or up the vernacular, as Nadia would have it) in order to gambol merrily about the cliff-top (Chris beat me to the tip of the mound, but only just, and I reckon he'd been practising from childhood).

The afternoon involved an exciting round of Adventure Golf, which Chris actually invented (with a bit of help from his Dad, I believe). I don't know how much of a percentage Chris gets from inventing crazy golf, but he must be set up for life! Jenny somehow got two hole-in-ones, which left us all rather flabbergasted - not to mention in 2nd, 3rd and 4th places. The Hastings Wind was starting to play silly buggers, so we retired back to Chez Chris & Jen for fun and games, joined by Ian and Rachel.

A word of warning: Do not play 'Grab a Pig' with Chris Coleman. As some of you may know, he tends to take his games rather seriously (he also very much likes to count). Grab a Pig involves swapping cards until you hit on a particular combo that enables you to - wait for it - grab a pig, a pig being a small plastic thing in the shape of a pig that sits in the middle of the table. When you've got 6 people playing everything's fine. But that's how it always starts - 'ooh' and 'aah'. Then there's the running, and the screaming. Particularly after, having found oneself in the last round with only Chris remaining, one discovers one's finger bent backwards in a most unnatural manner after a particularly violent 'Chris Lunge'.

I shall get my revenge one day.

We came back to Norwich on the Sunday, and glared with malice at the Blue Boy as we drove past. Do not eat there.

Click here for our pics!!

The Computer(s)

Long while since the last entry and there's lots to talk about! It's been a rather manic month-or-two, one way or another, so I wasn't entirely sure where to start. Given that I'm currently plonked in front of my new computer, however, I thought I'd start there!

Due to Nadia starting her new Masters course this month, she needed a computer. Rather than buy her something cheap and nasty, we decided that she would have my old computer (which isn't massively old, and is actually fairly spiffy still) and I'd get myself something new and sexy. So, yes, essentially it was just an excuse for me to get a beast of a machine.

Installation all went rather smoothly, other than Vista being a bit temperamental when it comes to the order SATA drives are plugged in. The lovely 22" Samsung monitor also had a nasty backlight error, but eBuyer sent a replacement for that swiftly, so all is now good. Certainly better than my first computer building session a few years back, which nearly sent me round the bend - admittedly it was mainly due to me forgetting to use the motherboard mounting thingies, and screwing it directly into the case. Ahem.

I have to say, I rather like Vista. General opinion on it seems to be very negative, but I've had a very pleasurable experience with it so far - even when running old games like The Longest Journey. All that remains is to reinstall XP on Nadia's computer, which is currently in-progress and proving to be a right pain in the arse. After the swift simplicity of Vista, XP's installation is a right old nightmare. Bah!

Next time, we get a pro

This weekend I have been mostly getting covered in paint. As part of our Spare Room Rejiggling, we wanted to get rid of the deep, dark purple that has been on the walls since we moved in and shift over to something a little brighter and less girly goth.

The process got underway last week when we offloaded one of the beds into Tim's new place, which was all rather convenient as Jack needed a temporary place to stay and Tim needed some furniture to kit out his new pad! We still have one bed left, which is proving rather problematic as the mattress doesn't tick all the current 'fire safety' boxes and thus won't be taken by the Salvation Army etc. I'm sure we'll figure something out!

Having removed most of the furniture, however, it came time to get down to some serious painting. A quick trip to homebase discovered our new colour, a sunny, cheery, generally inoffensive peach. Despite Tim's kind offer to help me out next weekend (he was off in Wales this one just gone), I got all over-excited and decided to dive in by myself.

Silly me.

The first coat was a bit of a nightmare, given my general ineptitude when it comes to DIY and having never done Proper decorating before. The second coat, applied today, went much better and the room is now looking actually rather spiffy but, by god, painting a room is so dull. I really have no idea how some people enjoy doing this kind of thing, let alone do it for a living!

Still, the results are looking much better than expected. One more coat is probably needed mid-week. More photos when it's done. :)

Mike & Rachel's Wedding

It would be more traditional, of course, to accompany this entry with a photo of the bride and groom looking all elegant and glamorous, but I simply couldn't resist this rather marvellous snap of Jenny's horror at the sight of a tumbling load of wooden bricks. Admittedly it was rather shocking, but we didn't realise it would cause her quite this level of trauma.

The wedding was fantastic - you might say a new level of fantastic, in fact. Great readings, all very carefully chosen and perfectly evading the cheesy cliches you sometimes bump into at these events. The whole shebang was really very moving, possibly due to Mike being such a big girl and breaking down into whimpers every five seconds. Beautiful location, wonderful people and rather marvellous desserts - all-in-all, a superb day.

It was marred only slightly by our taxi being 45 minutes late, which resulted in a very wet, very cold and slightly scary (there was a definite sense of mild peril) wait in a pitch black forest in The Middle of Nowhere, Norfolk, with only the militant rage of Chris, the righteous anger of Dave, the cow hunting of Sedger and the inappropriate singing of Nadia, Jen and Hena to keep us in good spirits. We eventually found our way back to civilisation, though, and it at least gave the day a rather adventurous climax!

Congrats to Mike and Rachel, who are currently swanning about somewhere in Italy, for putting on a spiffy day and, you know, getting married. Woohoo!

Transformers (2007) review

OK, deep breath.

Where to start?

First off, I won't be reviewing this as a Transformers film, or comparing it to the stuff I remember from my childhood, or which I read in comics as a teenager. There's simply no point, as this film has nothing to do with any of that.

So, instead I'll look at it simply as a standalone film.

I was generally entertained for most of the film, in a typical being-bludgeoned-over-the-head Michael Bay kind of fashion. It's the kind of film where you almost don't have time to consider whether you're enjoying it or not, there's so much audio-visual mayhem going on. On the other hand, once it's finished, you realise that it was an utterly empty experience.

Let's deal with the stuff I liked first:

Shia Labeoeoeieieieiuuueoeouf. This guy is great! I didn't like him in I, Robot - but that was mainly due to his 'irritating sidekick' style character. In Transformers, however, he's fantastic. Really captured that Harrison Ford/Michael J Fox style of natural acting, which can switch between comedy and 'serious' absolutely seamlessly. As such, any scene that he's in was noticeably better than ones without. Can't wait to see him in Indy 4!

The visual effects. Dear god, these were fantastic! Practically flawless, and one of the first times that CG has felt properly 'there', to the same level as a animatronic or puppet version. The rest of the technicals were of similarly fantastic standard - this is a very, very well produced film. With the notable exception of the script, of course...more on that in a moment.

Peter Cullen. Despite being saddled with some seriously rubbish dialogue, Cullen did a great job. It might just be nostalgia speaking, but he really managed to inject a bit of character.

Other than those three elements, however, this was a remarkably shoddy film.

The biggest mistake? All the military and political scenes. Seeing the soldiers in Qatar and later in New York was ok, with some great action, although most of it was still fairly superfluous. It seemed mostly to be a big advert for the companies that make military hardware than anything else.

All the Jon Voight stuff, and anything relating to the Pentagon, hackers and Sector Seven, though, was utter guff. It was simply intensely [i]dull[/i]. This was particularly true in the first half of the film. When we [i]should[/i] have been focused entirely on Sam and Bumblebee's attempts to woo Ms Fox, all of which was highly entertaining and brilliantly reminiscent of the golden age of 80s action-comedies, instead we had to keep cutting back to dry offices, meeting rooms and made-up computer talk. The problem for me was that it was all so tiresomely generic - it really could have been footage cut out of any other random disaster/sci-fi movie. It's been seen so many times before, and it utterly sapped the energy of the film. How much better would this film have been if we'd seen it entirely through Sam's eyes, as this larger world was revealed? The military could still have shown up at the end, could still have been involved, but there was really no need to give them such a prominent role.

Then there's the muddled action. Sure, much of it was fantastic - the military's assault on Scorponok (a total non-entity, unfortunately), for example (my prior comment notwithstanding), was awesome, as was Prime's head-to-head with Bonecrusher. However, so much of the rest was shot in such major close-up that it was impossible to see what was going on, and the geography of the end battle was seriously perplexing at times.

This was compounded - or perhaps caused in the first place - by the crappy robot designs. Now, I'm not saying this from a 'purist' point of view. I don't mind that they've changed the designs from the G1 robots - there's been bjillions of Transformers incarnations over the years, some good and some bad. That they rejiggled them isn't what annoys me - that the redesigns were so uninspired does, however.

This is never truer than with Megatron and Starscream who, in both plane and robot mode, look almost identical - especially given that their scenes are almost all action-based, thus filled with wobbly camerawork, lots of blur and fast movement etc.

The general aesthetic was oddly fragile looking, too - it felt like these robots would just snap in two, or get their gears and levers jammed on something. There are so many exposed parts, all you'd have to do to stop one is stick a long pole in-between a couple of struts!

Then there's Frenzy (I think that's what he's called), the little mincing spaghetti robot. What the hell were they thinking? So many of his scenes were played out as if they should be scary, or at least slightly freaky. Instead, it was just hugely camp and a bit odd - almost like there had been a massive miscommunication between the director and the special effects guys. And why on earth could nobody see him, when he was wandering about in plain sight? Very odd.

There were also numerous action scenes that started to be fantastic.....then inexplicably stopped. The first car chase between Bumblebee and Barricade, for example. Given it was a Michael Bay film, I got rather excited as this began - I knew it'd be fantastic, no matter what the rest of the film was like. Instead, it stopped before it even began. Same happened with the Prime-Bonecrusher fight on the freeway, which ended rather quickly.

Then there's the Prime-Megatron battle, which turned into a total non-fight, and was mainly just two robots falling over constantly. Not exactly the epic final battle between to arch-enemies that have been fighting for thousands of years.

Finally, there's the general dialogue. While Shia somehow rescued his, the rest was decidedly ropey. No more so than Optimus', which ended up sounding more like a patronising school teacher, endlessly repeating asinine platitudes and blatantly obvious moral absolutes - while everybody else seemed to completely ignore him. This was no truer than at the end, where you had Optimus going off on yet another speech, while Sam and Ms Fox get jiggy on Bumblebee's bonnet and Ironhide and Ratchet look on in a perving manner, totally ignoring their leader's 'wise words'. The end result was that Prime came across more like a bumbling, slightly senile old codger, rather than a military and visionary genius.

Add in the bizarre over-acting of every black actor in the film, all seemingly willing to hammer home a bunch of stereotypes, followed by John Turturro apparently trying to upstage them all, and you've got a seriously odd film experience.

This was a film which had big stompy robots, but the filmmakers made them say things like "my bad." I guess that just about sums it up right there.