A lackluster and disappointing movie which feels more like a collection of one-off action sequences than a real story.
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Diagnosis Technological Developments
It amused me to discover that despite this being 2009, despite the huge advances in medical science, hernias are diagnosed using the following two techniques,
- prodding and asking ‘does it hurt there’
- pressing and asking you to cough
I’m not complaining it obviously works, and it’s quick cheap and easy, but I just found it funny.
You can keep your multi-million pound body scanners, just press there tell me if it hurts and cough for me, thanks.
Grasstastic
Before Grete had major back issues for half a week, and before I really accepted I should be resting due to a potential hernia, we cleared/dug over the back and front garden areas ready for some grass seed, and then put the seed down.
It took ages for it to show through and we’d started to assume the pigeons had eaten it all – but then a couple of days ago we spotted a thread of green! It’s odd though, if you look down vertically onto the soil you can’t see the grass, if you look at an angle you can and if you look at it horizontally, it’s clear to see!
Back garden
Front garden
The front doesn’t look as good because neither myself nor Grete have been in any condition to get out and keep it weeded, but hopefully the grass will pull through. The back is looking excellent and we hope the grass will stop the soil washing down the bank in the first sustained heavy rains we get. The other side of the apple tree is on the same kind of slope and the grass keeps it all in place.
The apple tree has gone crazy as well, I thought the pruning would keep the apples away this year but the tree appears to have decided to wreak revenge by growing twice as many apples. The thin branches are dropping under the weight of the slowly forming apples already. I suspect I’ll have to take action to get rid of them before they mature otherwise the branches are really going to suffer.
Terminator Salvation
So I’m starting to see some reviews for Terminator Salvation and it’s not looking hopeful. Disappointing, let down, missed opportunity – those phrases never add up to anything good.
Maybe in the battle of the Giant Robots this summer, Transformers has already won.
Star Trek
A fast paced, well executed action sci-fi flick, with emphasis on the -fi and the characters, this franchise reboot gets it right in so many ways.
Resident Evil 5
Despite not being very good at ‘shooters’, I picked up a second hand copy of Resident Evil 5 for the PS3. I’m playing it on the easiest level it has and it’s fun, certainly engaging. I was frustrated by the first ‘boss’ encounter which seemed to auto-kill me every time I tried until I worked out I had to get out of the room, but after that it’s been entertaining.
The only major downside is probably because I’m playing it on easy, which means my inventory gets full quickly because I don’t chew through healing stuff (don’t get me wrong, I suck enough that I die and I still need to use the healing things, but I’m not using them so quickly that they don’t sit in my inventory for ages). Also, I know I’m not making effective use of grenades, which is why I usually end up selling them by the bucket load.
One thing I do like a lot, even though it’s not entirely visible to me, is that the game adapts the difficulty even withing the set difficulty levels, based on how well you’re doing. So if you die a lot, the enemies get a little easier and if you’re doing really well and not getting hit, they get a little tougher.
There are enough checkpoints to avoid too much frustration of re-doing stages, and there’s a checkpoint before any moment which can lead to sudden death. There’s also a good range of different styles of game play. A lot of it is moving around carefully and killing the bad guys, there’s some out-right grenade your way out of a mess, some cut scenes which rely on you hitting the right buttons when prompted to avoid deadly danger, different kinds of boss fights and some nice tactical elements. My favourite moment so far, was entering an area filled with zombie-soliders in tactical gear, and watching them come into the room in single file like you see SWAT / military types in movies do. You have to hide behind crates and pop around while they reload to take them out, moving your way through the room. It was such a different style to the early crazy-zombie encounters and very refreshing. I really enjoyed that.
I also like the way you can stop at any point, restart the game, but keep your gear. For someone as inept as me, this gives me the chance to build up some decent weapons (by upgrading them), and then trying the game on a harder setting (like, normal) without getting immediately wasted.
All-in-all, I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying it, I was looking for something with a more roleplaying element, and when the shop didn’t have anything I sort of picked up RE5 expecting to be frustrated. But it’s proven to be engaging, entertaining and fun.
D&D 4e Rules I got Wrong
Probably a recurring theme, but here’s the first 4th edition D&D rule that we’ve been doing wrong
1. You only roll once to attack, even when you’re about to Critical.
It looks like we skimmed the rules around this section, or we read them and then forgot them, or we just plain got them confused. When you roll to attack, if you roll a 20* then you automatically hit. You also have the chance to cause a critical hit. The determination of whether it’s a critical hit is simple. Does your total attack roll score enough to hit. If it does, you criticalled, if it doesn’t you still hit, but for regular damage.
So if the enemy AC is 23, and you roll 20, and add 2 for a total of 22, you hit but don’t crit, if your total turned out to be 24, you would have caused a crit instead. This gives you the chance to hit something 1 in 20 times that you might never otherwise be able to hit, and also gives you an increasing chance to crit against creatures as you increase your attack bonuses off of that automatic hit.
Let me know if I’m still wrong 😉
* A 20 is always an automatic hit, some weapons have an increase critical hit range (19-20), if you roll a 19 and the total is enough to hit, you crit, but if you roll a 19 and the total is not enough to hit, you miss and don’t crit. Only a natural 20 is enough to automatically hit, no matter what the weapon.
Expenses
So, the British Government are under heavy scrutiny due to apparent abuse of their expenses system. I don’t want to write loads about it, I just want to say two things. Firstly, there are always people who take the piss, there are people who make mistakes and there are people who do ‘what everyone else does’ because well, that’s what you do. So I don’t think all the MP’s were corrupt, or that they were all intentionally defrauding the country using a system with badly defined rules to get away with theft, as some people do.
Clare Short has this to say (here),
She told the BBC she had switched from an interest-only to a repayment mortgage and had continued to send bills to the fees office – but had repaid the money when the error was pointed out in 2006.
I accept that. I believe she’s being honest. I work in a large organisation where this kind of thing is probably pretty common. Confusing rules, mistakes, people paying things back. But here’s the kicker, and the second thing I want to say.
Clare Short may not have been abusing the system, Clare Short may have made a real mistake, and may have rectified it. Many MP’s probably did. But those same MP’s knew their colleagues were fleecing the system. They knew their colleagues were claiming stuff that didn’t add up. They knew the system was too easy to abuse. They may not have personally abused the system – but they didn’t make any obvious, real attempt to stop others doing so.
As a result, the entire establishment is at fault. It should shut up, stop whinging and deal with the issue at the root.
HeroQuest (again)
I’m quite excited by the prospect of using the mini’s from the HeroQuest boardgame for use during D&D sessions. They’re plastic, robust and ideal. However, they don’t cover all the monster options you need. Despite that, I’ve been painting them, as you know, and there’s a huge pile of them to do. In the last couple of days I’ve been checking ebay to see what else there might be, and I was reminded of Advanced HeroQuest (which is not the same as HeroQuest Advanced edition). Then I remembered I had an edition of Advanced HeroQuest, and then I remembered I had three editions of HeroQuest (one of which is HeroQuest advanced). Thinking about it, I realised I only had two sets of hero miniatures. Which meant it was likely I was missing two sets.
Today I opened the boxes, and the net result is another pile of miniatures to paint. Basically, I now have (including HeroQuest x 2, HeroQuest Advanced Edition x 1, Advanced HeroQuest x 1, 2 x HeroQuest expansions)
- Skaven – 20 – unpainted
- Heroes – 16 – 5 painted
- Chaos Warriors – 12 – 8 painted
- Chaos Priests – 3 – 2 painted
- Gargoyles – 3 – 1 painted
- Ogres – 7 – unpainted
- Zombies – 10 – 8 painted
- Skeletons – 20 – 4 painted
- Mummies – 10 – 2 painted
- Fimir – 12 – 2 painted
- Pikemen – 12 – unpainted
- Men at Arms – 10 – 1 painted
- Orcs – 31 – 3 painted
- Goblins – 24 – 18 painted
So we’ve got our work cut out. The Advanced HeroQuest figures and the Ogres are more traditional miniature resin than the plastic of the old HeroQuest figures, so they’re not quite so robust but they’ll still do the job. And I needed a lot of skaven, as it happens.
Fringe Benefits
So I’ve seen 18 episodes of Fringe now, and a comment from Mark prompted me to blog about how it’s going. I’m still compelled to watch each week (which is good), and while there are dips of ‘odd thing which Walter solves’ there are also highs of ‘really odd thing which explains some stuff and asks more questions’.
It’s worth saying again, this is not a programme which intends to depict fringe science as anything but totally made up. The writers take a thread of what might be a possible thought about the existence of some concept in fringe science and then turn it into something totally outlandish. Don’t watch it for the science. It’s an FBI / Weird-Shit-Goes-On investigation programme.
So are we any nearer to knowing things? Yes and no, during the season we’ve learned something things about Olivia, we’ve had some hints about Peter, both his past as a child and maybe his past as a young man. We’ve learned a little about Walter, but mostly there are still many questions. In the last few episodes it feels like we’ve had some deeper revelations but JJ could just be toying with us. I’m pleased at how the relationship between Olivia and her boss (Phillip Broyles) has improved. It grated on me that they didn’t trust each other at the outset. I’m pleased as well that we’re seeing Olivia unravel to some extent, she’s seeing a lot of weird shit and it needs to have some impact if we’re to give it any kind of credibility.
If you like detail – then you’ll like the series. Most of this goes over my head, I’m just in it for the story and the characters, but JJ makes sure there’s a lot of detail. For example, the colour motif (red, yellow, blue) shows up for several episodes, several times an episode. A line of M&M’s, a poster in a nightclub, lights in a room, even the gore on a body. The fan forums are full of people discussing the deeper meaning of the tiniest things like that, I scan them every now and then but I don’t need them to enjoy the shows.
Threads sometimes get dropped and never resurface (we’ve not heard anything about the odd egg-shaped things travelling through the earth from an early episode), and sometimes they do come back (the glass discs). Links are starting to appear, but as I said, JJ is likely to be messing with us on some level.
In general, I feel that it’s been worth watching, I’ve enjoyed most of the individual episodes for what they are, I’m starting to enjoy the arc that is forming and I’m interested in knowing where it goes. I’m hoping that JJ won’t annoy the shit out of me with a huge cliffhanger ending to series 1, but somehow I think I’m going to be upset.