Monthly Archives: June 2009

Do we expect too much?

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There are some minor spoilers for Terminator Salvation in this post.

I’ve read reviews of Terminator 4 which lambaste the movie for the parts of the plot which don’t make any sense, and appear only to exist to allow a particular shot or to justify a particular action sequence.  I understand the concerns.  For example, why is only one T800 used to try and kill Connor in the SkyNet lab, why not hundreds?  What I don’t get is that movie makers have been doing this for ever, and the ‘original’ movies we love and revere are just as much at fault but the reviewers don’t seem to want to acknowledge that or accept it.

In the original Terminator movie, the excuse given for being able to send a Terminator back through a machine which can only send living organisms is that it’s covered in flesh.  Being covered in flesh does not make you a living organism when you’re also 3/4’s of a tonne of metal alloy inside, at best it should transport the fleshy bit and leave the alloy behind.  Personally if I was Kyle Reese I would have smuggled a powerful weapon through by having it surgically implanted in an animal and sending that through at the same time.  Or, get a couple of 24oz steaks and wrap them around a good gun while they’re still fresh and bring that through with you.  The whole concept of how they can send a machine wrapped in skin is an excuse to prevent them having anything on them from the future, because they couldn’t afford the effects.  But we forgive them that because the film is good.  It’s still just as silly though.  In T4, they didn’t use all the Terminators because it defeats the purpose of the story, full stop.

Bond villains don’t employ ex-special forces snipers with high powered rifles to kill James Bond as soon as he steps out of his hotel room because what’s the point?

That’s why we’re forced to suspend our disbelief.

Now I admit, that if you didn’t enjoy a movie because it didn’t engage you enough, then it’s harder to forgive the silly bits.  Totally understand that.  If you don’t find yourself engaged, the silly bits stick out even more.  But please, don’t claim ‘the original’ or ‘other films’ aren’t as silly.  They are.

Aliens, it’s a superb movie, lots of people think so.  In the first movie Ripley lives through the terrifying process of her entire crew being killed by a single alien, which she witnessed bursting from the chest of a friend, after seeing a facehugger implant the egg.  In the second movie she goes to sleep with a small child in the same room as several containers in which are living examples of those same facehuggers.  Why?  Why on earth would she do that when she knows what they do?  Why take any risk at all?  Totally stupid.  Designed entirely to create the next scene where Burke releases them.

In Aliens, we have technology capable of building androids and travelling hundreds of millions of miles, but apparently, no way of sending down an android to the plant surface to check out if it’s safe to go in before sending live humans.  Slightly less tense but much easier.  We ignore that because it would kind of ruin the story.

In Terminator, The Terminator goes into a gun store to buy some guns.  He has a long conversation with the guy in the shop and then shoots him.  Why does a killer robot need to ask for guns?  He walks in, kills the shop owner with his bare and impressive robot hands and then takes the guns he needs, or he asks for one gun and shoots the guy with that before taking the rest.  It’s a really cool scene as it stands, but it’s totally stupid as well.  The whole scene exists so that The Terminator can say “You’re wrong” and blow the guy away with the gun, and so that we know how many weapons he’s got.  Again, why does The Mighty Terminator need to drive a car into the police station to break in?  He can just step through the wall himself, he’s tough enough to do it.  And many more examples.

If you enjoy the film you forgive the sillyness, if you don’t enjoy it, you linger on the silly parts.  That’s okay, I get it.  I do the same.  But please, don’t pretend that all the movies we loved were perfect and had nothing silly in them – that just makes it sound like a lame excuse.

NB: It’s really quite late, and I’m not sure how well this reads through, but it was in my head last night and made it hard to get to sleep so I had to write it down today, warts and all.

Today, hour by hour

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  • 5:00am – omg ow ow ow ow
  • 6:00am – ZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
  • 7:00am – ZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz
  • 8:00am – ow, ouch, ow ow ow
  • 9:00am – ow, ow, ouch ouch, tablets
  • 10:00am – ow, ouch, omg work tablets
  • 11:00am – ahhhhh ouch ouch ahhhhh
  • 12:00pm – hungry!
  • 1:00pm – argh ouch ouch
  • 2:00pm – tablets!
  • 3:00pm – ah, finally, less ouchy
  • 4:00pm – oh woozy
  • 5:00pm – huh where am I?
  • 6:00pm – huh who am I?
  • 7:00pm – ahh, tablets.
  • 8:00pm – wooooooooooooooozy
  • 9:00pm – woooooozy
  • 10:00pm (prediction) – more woozy
  • 11:00pm (prediction) – ouch, ah tablets
  • 12:00am (prediction) – bed ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz

All gone, all gone

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So that’s it – all my sites / domains are moved off gradwell now.  Just waiting for them to action my request to cancel my outstanding services.  I’m in two minds whether to reconfigure Thunderbird to use Nildram for usenet or whether to just wave goodbye to NNTP entirely.  I was really only using it for the gradwell private groups and haunting long abandoned places as a by-product.  Hard to let it go totally though, I moved from FidoNet to Usenet and it was that which got me involved in lots of things which eventually led to where I am today.

So yeh, hard to let it go.

Gradwell have re-branded (personal opinion of their new website is that it looks horrible) and appear to be far more focussed on servicing businesses than individual technical users.  I’m sure there’s a much better future in that direction, but it would have encouraged me away even had the service not stunk and had I not received sales calls at the same time.

Gandi have been great, and 1and1 have been entirely invisible, other than a single brief outage a couple of months ago it’s been fine.  All-in-all it took longer than I hoped (near 4 months) but less time than I feared and wasn’t painful at all.  The only complexity was related to the .com registrations and changing owners (from me, to me).

Post Surgery

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Surgery went well, up at 5:30am, at Derby City General Hospital by 7:45am, in prep at 8:30am and out of surgery and recovering from 10:30am.  Grete picked me up around 12pm, and I’ve been dozing on the sofa since.  Codeine always makes me sleepy.

It’s pretty uncomfortable when I think about it, but the pain killer cocktail (codeine, paracetamol and ibuprofen) takes the edge of it.

The nurses in Derby were great, really kept me informed and relaxed the whole time, can’t thank them enough.

Now, two weeks of snoozing and asking Grete what time is it.

Terminator Salvation

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I’m beginning to think I’m unsophisticated, easily led, maybe even a little stupid.  I read the reviews for Terminator Salvation and they say ‘doesn’t capture the magic of the original’ or ‘haggard, nothing new’. They say that it’s a tired franchise and that it was a confusing and fractured movie.  I know cinema is an artform, and in art there are as many opinions as there are people.  Everyone reacts differently, but still, I think about the movie I saw yesterday and I wonder what other people went in expecting?

The first two Terminator movies are similar in layout, in my view, to the first two Alien movies.  Terminator is a very personal story about a single machine trying to kill a single person and anything that gets in the way.  Alien is a claustrophobic story about a single alien trying to kill the crew which eventually comes down to a single person.  Both Terminator 2 and Aliens ramp up the action and move away from the heavier horror elements.  I’ve seen reviews complaining that Terminator Salvation doesn’t capture the glory or the originality or the heart of the first movies.  Well, I hate to break it to them, but Terminator Salvation isn’t trying to do that.  It’s trying to be a modern action-based continuation of the Terminator story.  On top of that, how much heart was there really in T1 or T2?  Yes, we get the emotional bond and relationship between Sarah and Kyle in the first movie and we get a bunch of cheesy surrogate-father activity in T2 but they aren’t the mainstays of those two films.

I loved T1 and T2, I think they’re fantastic movies.  I think T3 should have been different, but it had some okay elements.  Personally, I think T4 (Terminator Salvation) is at least as good as T2.  But the rush of bad reviews make me question my own experience, maybe I missed something they saw, maybe I saw something that wasn’t really there?  I have to keep reminding myself that it’s art, and everyone experiences it differently.  I think if you go in expecting something, and  you don’t get it, then it leads to disappointment, and I think too many people went in with too many expectations.  I’m not saying I lowered my expectations, but I went in prepared to watch MCG’s film, not my idea of what it should be, or my idea of how it should play out, but what he wanted to do and the film he wanted to make.

So with that said, here’s my actual comment on the film, and there are minor spoilers.

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Pre-op

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Pre-op appointment went okay, gave some blood, had blood pressure and ECG taken, spoke about what happens on the day, etc.  Being diabetic gives me the benefit of being treated as a priority in the morning since I won’t be able to eat from midnight.

Nurse in Derby City General Hospital was really friendly and helpful.

Operation still planned for the 11th, should know by mid-afternoon that day if I’m going to be home that night or not.

A day of updates #6 – Miniature Mayhem

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Despite the fact that I’m not painting anything at the moment, I just bought a whole bunch of miniatures from Hasslefree, because they’re superb sculpts that I’d love to paint (in the part of my head that thinks I can).

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They had an offer on to raise some cash, allowing you to buy credit with them and then spend it when you wanted with some bonus credit added on.  I spent it all in one go (they understand the difference between profit and cash flow for small businesses, and they needed some cash flow).

So if I do finally get my painting mojo back on – I have plenty to go at.

A day of updates #5 – Cat Attack

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One of the cats in our neighbourhood is male and has not been neutered.  As a result, it quite happily sprays to mark its territory and that spray absolutely reeks.  Annoyingly for us, the edge of it’s territory is the wooden frame under our patio doors.  If you have a male cat, please, please get it neutered, otherwise they’re a nuisance above and beyond the regular cat bad behaviour (digging up any fresh dirt in your garden to use as their loo).  It took us a while to work out the smell wasn’t one of our cats, we even bought a UV light so we could find out where our cats were pissing in the house (because that’s what it smelled like).  When we couldn’t locate the source of the smell we eventually started searching outside.

It looks like the cat has been spraying for a while, but the deck used to sit above the air vents under our floor on the outside of the house.  Now the deck has gone, the smell basically goes straight into the vents and into the dining room.  When it rains it reeks even worse.  We cleaned and treated the wood, and while it was covered in plastic (to assist with drying) the cat even sprayed that, which proved beyond a doubt what was causing the smell.  Every morning since then we got up and it had sprayed again.  It was much easier to clean off the wood after it had been treated and was waterproof, but it’s unreasonable for us to have to clean our woodwork every day just because someone can’t be bothered to neuter their cat.

Grete went on the hunt for some solutions and found a motion detector based water spray in B&Q which people reported working (sometimes).  We needed something that wouldn’t scare away our cats since they use that door as their main entry into the house.  This solution looked ideal.  The motion sensor works up to 10 meters away, and as we found out if the hose pressure is high enough the water spray will go two or three times that far.  Anyway we bought one last weekend and set it up on Sunday when it was baking hot (luckily).  I was soaked!  Took a little while to get the water pressure and sensor combination right so that the water didn’t just spray into next doors garden and during that time I set the sensor off about 15 times, getting sprayed from head to foot each time.

Each night once our cats are in we turn it on, and Grete gets to turn it off in the mornings (in a military style operation to avoid our cats setting it off and getting spooked).  So far, the male cat hasn’t sprayed once since we started using it, and we’re hoping after another week or so it’ll give up trying entirely and we can leave it turned off.  If it does start again we can just plug it back in for a few days and hopefully it’ll get the message.

Here’s a couple of pictures of the device in place.

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