miscelleny

One of the things that I thought I might miss was the easy access to new music. Given that we don’t have internet in the house (in Spanish, it’s just internet, not the internet, which is the opposite of most cases). Well, I needn’t have worried on that score. I’ve been listening to Where’s the Skill in That on Resonance fm (it’s the current home of the presenters of Mixing it from radio 3) and there are old shows available for download. I listen to the shows as I walk up to the hospital (to teach the doctors) and later on go to eMusic to download albums from groups I like the sound of (which I pay for). At the moment I’m listening to an album by AU, and it’s dreamy Portland collectivist fun. The Spanish radio stations are a little too top forty for me, with the exception of radio 3 (who’d have guessed?) which often demonstrates a satisfyingly ecclectic taste.

As well as the music, the BBC’s current podcast range is very welcome, including the world service documentaries. It seems that with all that, and the guardian weekly, we manage to get all the news and music that we want without having to wade through and filter out all the celebrity dross.

Which is nice.

Okay, there’s a question. I went to see The Dark Knight at Oviedo’s IMAX screen, actually the smallest IMAX I’ve seen. I saw the film in the UK and wasn’t as impressed as the hype led me to believe I should be. However, watching it in Spanish, I wasn’t as annoyed by Batman’s distorted voice as in English, and I enjoyed the spectacle of it all a little more. I did have a couple of niggles though.

Batman’s riding his bike, no mudguards and cape flapping. There’s a massive wheel just behind him. Isadora Duncan time surely?

Harvey, Two Face, Dent speaks very clearly for a man with no lips and no cheek on one side of his face. You try saying anything at all with a P or an M while holding your lips apart… and where’s the constant leakage of saliva?

These are only issues because the rest of the film seems to have gone to such lengths to present a realistic world (albeit where there are caped crusaders and the like).

Oh and dancing? Well Isadora Duncan was a dancer, wore long silk scarves, in open top sports cars in the 20s. Silk scarf, spinning axle…

I don’t think it’s had a UK release yet but when it does Tropa de Elite is a must see. It’s a Brazillian police thriller, directed by the same chap who made Bus 174 (and if you haven’t seen that one yet it should go on whatever lists you keep of films to see, if you don’t do lists, start one now and put these two at the top, round them off with City of God and Carandiru for a four parter that will stop you ever wanting to visit Brazil, or at least the favelas). It’s got that handheld grittiness and the oppressive heat of good Brazilian cinema, the action is horrifyingly believable and the characters are more than the cardboard cut out good and evil that seems to infest Hollywood. The story follows a couple of police lieutenants, friends from childhood, who learn the hard way about police corruption before joining the BOPE, the elite police squad under the command of Captain Nacimiento. Nacimiento is looking for a replacement as he’s had enough, his wife is pregnant and he wants out.

The structure is nicely split up, with a long flashback after a kinetic opening sequence allowing for some aha moments as we realise where we are the second time. There’s a couple of heavily charged political scenes involving rich students who hate the police coming face to face with the anarchy they actually have. I fully expect this one to be in the list of Best Foreign pictures come oscar time…

When I used to watch Star Trek, one of the things I really wanted was one of those nifty tablets that the short skirted PA used to hand to Kirk. I used to use my Etch-a-Sketch to pretend but it wasn’t the same. Then when the Next Generation came along the tablets had gotten sleeker and I still wanted one.

Having read books on my Palm for the last four years I can confirm that the small screen and the back lighting make it a tiring experience, and the fact that I didn’t have to lug a ton of books around was the only thing that made it worthwhile.

So I’ve been following the e-book reader market with some interest. I like the look of the Sony e-reader but it’s not available, I like the iliad but it’s a fortune, I’m not so keen on the Amazon Kindle, largely because it does too much, I don’t need phoned updates and I don’t want to subscribe to things. I just want to read books.

At last… the Bookeen Cybook gen3, which I stumbled across when I was doing almost random ebook searches. It reads mobipocket files (one of the palm formats I already used) it reads html and text files (and pdf files if they’re more text than images). It weighs less than a 400 page paperback and the screen… oh my. E-ink is just lovely. This photo shows you the cybook on top of a page of photocopied text. The screen is legible, no backlighting so no flicker, no juice needed except to turn the pages (they claim up to 8000 page turns per charge).

It’s not perfect, finding your book is slow if you have lots on your card, but the reading experience is a joy. The screen appears solid, just like paper, just with a slightly lower contrast ratio (more like financial times than a glossy fashion mag).

It’s like being in the future, bring on the flying cars.

I had some free time so I went to the flicks, not knowing what was on. I’ve seen the posters for El Incidente all over town last week so I picked that one. It’s another M Night Shyalaman affair. And it’s utterly daft. It starts in central park in New York and for some reason all the people in the park kill themselves. Not a drink-the-kool-aid kind of kill themselves but more a wooooo spoooky, look, they all stop walking and then they find gruesome ways to end it all. Okay, it’s an interesting start despite the flakey stop still, take two steps backwards pre suicide dance.

The first half of the film is like a live action itchy and scratchy cartoon only with suicides. The remainder is pokey fake science, led by Mark Walberg’s science teacher. He figures out what’s going on by erm, thinking reeeealllly hard, even though his mantra earlier on was observation, hypothesis, experiment, observation… which would have led to some fun scenes of him sending hapless bystanders into danger until he figured out why they died. Instead it came to him in a flash of inspiration and he and his rapidly dwindling band of survivors were saved.

It was an airborne thing, which for some reason is accompanied by a dangerous breeze… oooohhh so you can see it coming and run away (like the laughable ultra-cold in The Day After Tomorrow). Still, that wasn’t the worst thing about it. Even the ending wasn’t the worst thing, although it was pretty damn bad, the Incident just stops and the reason it happened is explained by a TV scientist a few months later as ‘one of those things in nature that we can’t explain’ WHAT! You couldn’t even come up with a better explanation than that? Don’t bother making the damn film until you can. That’s what writers are for. That’s as bad as, it’s all a dream.

The worst thing was the boom mic. Maybe I missed something in the dialogue, but in half the scenes the boom mic was hovering around clearly in view. At first I thought it was going to be some clever meta-film or something deliberate because, well it’s Mr shamalamadingdong and he does that sort of thing. Then as we got closer to the end I realised it was just plain rubbish film making. I wouldn’t be surprised to see in the credits Boom Operator (deceased) it was terrible. And who watched the dailies? Because they didn’t see it and it was soooooo obvious. It was even obvious to the ten teenagers who rather than watch the film, just talked all the way through it very loudly (that was the other thing I really didn’t like but I can’t blame MNS for that… or maybe I can, because if he had made a halfway gripping film they might have shut up).

By now I’ll have downloaded the Mark Kermode podcast from radio 5 and I’m hoping for some quality Kermodian rantage. If you haven’t hear’d any of his rants, the best are still available on the bbc website, and well worth listening to.

Maradona and Castro Originally uploaded by cardiffteam.

One of the things I like about teaching English, especially to adults, is that you get to learn stuff you never even thought about before. One of my students, who works for a big business software house, was telling me about his relatives. For some reason we got to talking about the first dead body we ever saw (it’s a conversation class, so we generally just do a lot of conversing, and you can cover a lot of ground in an hour and a half). He said his was his uncle, who had been a diplomat, and who had been thrown out of Cuba in the late fifties after slapping Fidel Castro during a panel discussion live on TV in South America. Another told me he might not make the next lesson because he had to go to Cadiz in the south because he’s the quality manager for an arms manufacturer and he has to go and supervise the firing tests… he said that they fire shells of up to 40km range, straight out into the sea, and that the fishermen in the area love it when they do live firing exercises because it makes the fishing just a matter of scooping up the fish afterwards.

3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433… Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

Here is the strobist page for the latest assignment.

Strobist is a blog and now a flickr group, run by a photographer for the Baltimore Sun. He does really creative things with small lights and at the moment he’s running lighting 102, a follow on from lighting 101 last year. Every few weeks there’s an assignment at the end of which he does a little discussion page, a ‘what we learned’ kind of thing.

My picture of Liz made that page for this assignment… I suspect the liberal use of pie as payment probably helped.

Happy Birthday Dad Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

Thanks for submitting to the mini-photo shoot pa… I think you’ll agree it came out pretty well, and even if you don’t I reckon every one else will.

I went to see Sunshine yesterday, thanks to the National Media Museum and their policy of screening stuff again well after the original release.

I really wanted to like it. It had Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada (from the brilliant Twilight Samurai), Cillian Murphey and was an Alex Garland and Danny Boyle thing. So I was expecting something good.

There were good things… the sound, the visual effects were stunning. The acting was for the most part excellent. The plot… ah… here’s where it got a little silly. Very silly at the end actually where it veered into a sub-Alien spaceship’s not a good place to hide.

But that’s not my real issue.

THERE’S NO SOUND IN A VACUUM!

But this is the tip of the iceberg. It’s an indicator that you’re watching a comic… something less than serious, and for me, when I see that sort of thing I need a story and characters that are totally engaging for me to suspend my disbelief… otherwise I find, completely without meaning to, that I want to say things at the screen.

• Where does the gravity come from… you’re not spinning?
• If you can manipulate gravity why are you in this mess?
• How come gravity comes back on when you close the airlock?
• How come you can stop so easily? Your engines are at the back and you haven’t turned round.
• Why do your designers make routine maintenance of kit that might well need maintenance into a process that means certain death for some unlucky engineer?
• How come you need to be here at all? Can’t the computer do it?
• How am I hearing the whoosh as the big bit of the spacecraft goes past?

THERE’S NO SOUND IN A VACUUM (I want to tattoo it on the inside of the eyelids of movie producers).

Okay. I’m not the norm… but imagine you were watching a film set in Yorkshire, in Leeds… and it’s part of the plot… it’s Leeds. Yet in the background you see Tower Bridge. Do you just say ‘oh it’s not that important. So what? Who cares?”. I care.

SOUND VACUUM

In some films and TV (Firefly is a good example) the story is so good, the characters so gripping that you don’t need answers to these questions (well, tell a lie, I do. I just don’t need them so much unless it’s a slow episode, and in the TV series space was silent, it only had noise in the movie). With Sunshine… I definitely did.

And that ruined it. For me.

Pac-man, donkey Kong, 1943, Kung fu and many more in a free online version.

1980 games – Old online video and arcade games for free – Juegos en flash

Of course… I need to see Robotron and defender before you can call this a complete collection.