Islington Green, wearing expensive looking clothes and an even more expensive haircut. Looking healthy and carrying a jiffy bag, helpfully marked “Robert Gillespie” to confirm the spot.
OggdropXPd
Thank you OggdropXPd for making something that shouldn’t be complicated (making a copy of FLAC originals to OGG copies for my player) something that really isn’t complicated. Your minimal program was a joy to use and just did exactly what I wanted.
Sunshine
Just finished a viewing of Danny Boyle’s film Sunshine, yet another penned by Alex Garland (the pair did both The Beach and 28 Days Later). For the majority of the film it’s a treat; a tense psychological thriller about people on a critical mission that is likely to result in their deaths. It feels like the crew might actually have been psychologically screened and trained before blasting into space.
The minority part? There is a ludicrous slasher sub-plot that adds nothing and just undermines the rest of the plot. Blank it from your mind and you have a great film. However as with 28 Days Later you don’t really have anything that is very original. Like Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz Garland and Boyle are masters of the art of pastiche. Take the best of Solaris, 2001 and Event Horizon (along with the cream of dodgier fair like Mission to Mars and The Black Hole) mix them together with the best effects and photography you can muster. Bingo hit British Lottery film. Remember Boyle’s best film was written by Irvine Welsh.
Acting-wise it’s a stellar cast with obvious talent like Michelle Yeoh and Cillian Murphy. Benedict Wong is excellent and its hard to believe he has such a small role compared to the clichéd and underwhelming Chris Evans (clench fists, look anguished, “I-m act-ing, nnnh”). Hiroyuki Sanada does good work with another small part, he was very familiar but it was only with the power of IMDB that I realised I had seen him from Ringu.
Stalker First Impressions
On Friday my tinned copy of Stalker arrived and over the weekend I had the chance to put in a few hours on it. First impressions were hugely positive. It is rather like Flashpoint crossed with Morrowind. The unique setting is really spooky and interesting and the graphics are full of character and seem really plausible.
However inevitably the problems of such a complex and overdue game quickly became apparent. The main character is amnesiac, just like all RPGs. There don’t seem to be many bugs in the FPS side of things but the log and the quest system are screwed with missions becoming impossible as the mission giver disappears (Nimble in the suit quest) or the mission system fails to assess the completion criteria correctly (dog tail quest, mill cache). This seriously breaks atmosphere and the only answer seems to be a series of game saves.
I’ve decided to start again now but during my restart I found another gameplay issue that has dogged games like this. During a big firefight I accidentally shot one of my fighting companions in the back. As a result the character goes hostile and starts shooting at my character. So I have to kill him, which makes everyone else in the group hostile to me. Which means I have to kill all of them too.
Naturally there has to be some way for the AI to realise that you’re shooting them up but the situation is unreal and a complete mood breaker. A friendly fire incident turns into a brutal massacre of your own faction, its illogical and really only leads to the loading of a saved game. Eternally stoic allies who accept all manner of player inflicted abuse may be naff but at least they keep the game flowing.
Shipwrecked
I may be over Big Brother now but unfortunately my love of Time Team’s brand of non-event TV programming (not strictly true but it is certainly one of the least eventful programmes to go through so many series) has resulted in me coming across Shipwrecked. Two teams, each on separate islands do reality TV “surivival” while trying to attract recruits to their island with the winners being the island with the most occupants.
Now I have a new crap TV addiction because the series has just hit the point where faction and dissent has started to appear. It only takes a group of eight to fall apart apparently, four and five and you are too dependent on one another to get the job done.
It’s that weird mix of grotesquerie and insight that makes reality TV work.
JSP EL
If there is one thing (and there isn’t; there is so much in J2EE 1.4 that is new on the web front) that has changed in-between the last two years since I worked on JSPs and web applications then it is EL. And hurrah for that.
Combined with JSTL EL provides a really clean syntax for writing JSPs that I feel takes away a lot of the criticism that scriptlet style JSP programming received from fans of, say, templating systems. EL is all you really need if you are doing proper views (of MVC) and compared to the Struts Bean taglib it is much more legible and maintenable. Of course as an addition to the core package this is only befitting. Struts pointed the way but EL is an excellent implementation of the principle.
Hot Fuzz
I had a chance to see the new film from the crew behind Spaced and Shaun of the Dead last night at a special preview at the ICA. Afterwards there was a Q&A with Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Frost I’d seen before but Pegg pretty much looks like he does on TV while Wright is munchkin sized with teddy boy style facial hair. Pegg seemed pretty much questioned out and had to stir himself at times to respond to people’s questions. The publicity trail does seem pretty gruelling though, the latest thing I’ve seen him do are introductions to FilmFour’s cult series.
I didn’t ask any questions and the only interesting trivia I picked up is that both Wright and Pegg are West Country boys and Wright shot his early films in Wells (which also the setting for Hot Fuzz). The next day I realised I should have asked something about the relationship between the lack of cop films and the tremendous about of police TV drama.
Anyway… the film is… completely amazing and all-round better than Shaun of the Dead so if you liked that you’ll love this. If you didn’t like SotD then there is at least a chance you will like this. Although all the regular cast members are around (except Mark Heap) there is an effort to get away from the Spaced characterisations (as acknowledged in the Q&A) . Although Wright’s style still relies on really fast cuts and out and out scene stealing from other movies it is actually a movie rather than TV on a really big screen. Pegg has dramatically improved as an actor and has a lot more screen presence that he did in SotD.
The script is really, really funny and there’s less nostalgia and more gags, situation humour and quips perhaps reflecting the use of anecdotes from real policemen rather than just recycling pop culture.
It opens on Valentine’s Day and I’d recommend it to anyone.
Helena Bonham-Carter and Tim Burton
BooYah! An easy double-spot as film director and actress walk their child past Lyndhurst Air Studios. Helena is usually a bit scary but seemed less nuts that usual and she is movie star good looking. Burton looks like a cross between a busker and a tramp. A tramp in expensive clothes I assume. Apart from the big sunglasses he looks like a hippy dad not a master film maker.
Robert Newman, Upper Street
Rather ordinary looking, nervous man with a shabby raincoat and high forehead.
Darkling Plain
Philip Reeve’s Infernal Engines kidult series comes to an end with what appears to be an attack of the Harry Potter’s. A thumping great volume three times the size of any of the previous installments. Fortunately the book isn’t any slower as a result but it does often feel like the pacing is off and while divided into four parts it feels like there are actually two books here.
Part of the problem is the number of characters and sub-plots that are now floating round. There are at least five rattling around and rather like Pirates of the Caribbean it feels like everyone has to have their fifteen minutes. It is a satisfying (and darkly morbid) conclusion to the two main characters’ storylines but given that this is something of a tragic tale the constant diversions into tying up everyone’s storylines is unnecessary. I guess having closure is part of the kidult nature of the books. I’m trying to think what I might have made of this as a kid and I suspect I would have been annoyed by dangling threads.
Still I suspect that there were really two books here and a lot of the material could of been dropped without much loss. Was there anything to gain by returning to London? Was the Stalker Fang stuff really necessary given that she had to be returned to life to end her story?
Overall the series is excellent in its genre and the final book has some fantastic set pieces such as the desert scenes and confrontation in Airhaven. The conception of a world of mobile cities also seemed more vivid in this installment than previously where they were just backdrops for the action.
Echo One 