the dark knight

I'm having a little difficulty knowing how to start this review.

The reason is Dark Knight was a massively popular film and came with a massive amount if hype. And I have a weird reaction to hype. I've discussed it before, so I won't bore you with the details, but it tends to turn me off a bit.

The problem is either a reactionary streak in my personality or a slight disconnection from the zeitgeist. Or probably both.

It doesn't help in this case that Heath Ledger died and posthumously won an Oscar for his role as the Joker. I mean, that meant I was wanting to like the film, but, I dunno, worried that if I didn't it made me a ginormous shit.

I'm wittering on like this because I'm not sure if I really liked the film or not.

Part of the problem is that while I enjoyed Batman Begins, I thought it was kinda flawed. There were some specific bits I didn't like, but my main problem was the general tone. It seemed to cast Bruce Wayne as a bit of a reluctant hero, where I never really got that feeling from the comics.

I'd got that he was a bit twisted. A bit warped from what happened to his parents. I'd got that he perhaps had an overly developed sense of justice and a tendency towards control freakery. And other stuff too, but never really reluctance.

I mean, I can understand why cinematically it works and it would be something actors/directors/writers might enjoy playing as a character trait. I can also see how adds drama in terms of his relationship with the woman he loves.

But to me, it's not Batman.

That's not who he is.

He's the guy who, although he regrets that he's loosing the girl, he lets her go - pushes her away even, secure in the knowledge that he's doing the right thing. He knows it's his fate, his destiny, his lot and he's resigned to it. He doesn't seek a way out, because he knows it cannot come.

And so my big problem here is that the reluctance thing continues on into this film. Indeed, it's even stronger here - the film is virtually about Wayne's reluctance. So for me, it's crucially flawed.

Which again, like Batman Begins, doesn't make it an un-enjoyable film. It's got plenty of good action, for example. There's a few good jokes and the basic plot is reasonable. And they've done a good job with the joker.

You know when people complain about comic book adaptations and say that they're not faithful? For me the faithfulness comes in depicting the fundamental character of the book/hero, not in terms of transferring the exact story from the page to the screen. And for me, that's where Batman was wrong but the Joker was right.

See, really they've buggered about with the joker, but what they've kept is the fundamental feel of the character. He's a sadist and an anarchist - perfect.

In fact, actually, the only problem with the joker is actually with the rating of the film. It was 12, and that means they've effectively toned him down. If he'd been let loose in an 18, or possibly even a 15, then I think it would have added quite a lot.

Two-face gets short shrift, though. Well, I say that, but the pre-Two-Face Harvey Dent gets loads of screen time, but once he becomes proper two face (which is a truly horrific thing to behold) he's not in the film very much at all, which is a shame. He's a bit of a victim of the classic "too many villains" syndrome that tends to effect superhero films.

So yeah - mixed bag overall, but well worth watching.

ebay survey

I mentioned e-baying yesterday and that reminded me - a few days ago I was sent an e-mail by e-bay asking me to complete an online survey.

I figured what the hell, let's at least take a look and see what it is, so I clicked the link and it turned out to be a survey mainly about selling stuff on e-bay. I therefore decided to complete it.

Little did I know it was going to take absolutely bloody ages.

To be frank, it was a really badly designed survey - you could have easily compressed it to about half the size and still collected all the relevant information.

It was also bloody stupid, asking all sorts of confusing and contradictory questions. At times it actually felt like I was sat in a police interview room and they were asking the same question over-and-over, but in slightly different ways to try to trip me up.

The basic thrust seemed to be about charges - what would you be willing to pay, which system do you find the easiest to use, why do you do what you do - that sort of stuff.

As part of it there was kind of a role-play thing, where the question was something like "if you were selling an item that was worth x pounds what would you do?" And it seemed like it was trying to establish which charging system out of different possibilities you preferred.

This was gigantically flawed.

First off, I don't fundamentally work in tat way - I don't sell items that are "worth x pounds". I mean, I have hopes for what I might get and I have a minimum price I don't want to sell the item for less than (the starting amount) but items I sell don't have a value in the way this was implying.

Second, these values were ludicrous. One was £1,000! I've never sold anything even remotely worth that much on e-bay.

Third, it asked would you sell the item as an auction or as instant sale, as if they were mutually exclusive, but you can easily do both.

You were also supposed to be making your decision based on the fees. I've never based my decision on how to sell on fees. You know why? Because I know whatever I do, e-Bay are going to rip me off.

I mean, that's what they do - their veritable raison d'être, so why would I investigate the fees? It would only leave me depressed and wretched.

Also, I sell 99% of my stuff with auctions, because that's what e-bay is supposed to be about.

Anyway, the net result was that all the survey really did was further convince me that e-Bay wants to get rid of us small, individual users and become a wholesale outlet.

It did give me an opportunity to vent my spleen at them a bit though, as there was a question asking "what one thing e-bay could to encourage you to sell more?" (yet more assumptions - I mean, if I've not got any second hand stuff to sell, how can I sell more?)

I put 4 things. And swore at them quite a bit.

It's like shouting at the moon, of course, but it made me feel a bit better.

no friday

So having basically forgotten to do a blog entry on Thursday, I ended up totally failing to do one on Friday at all.

The reason for this was that Friday was jam-packed at work and it's usually while at work that I write these posts. In the morning I had to read through and edit a proposal that we were submitting. It wasn't a huge thing, but it needed a lot of work.

The afternoon was filled with a huge meeting that lasted the best part of 3 hours. However, it wasn't because it was a bad meeting, it was actually really useful and I found it really useful. Tbh, the only complaint I'd make was that it didn't happen sooner as it kinda means most, if not all of what I'd done already was rendered pointless.

I mean, it was rendered pointless in a good way in that I now know better what I should do, but still, it would have been better to have had it earlier.

The weekend was pretty productive.

I found the time (and motivation) to put my aircon away, which has been one of my outstanding jobs for a while now.

It's the sort of job that sounds fairly minor, but it takes ages (a couple of hours all told) because it involves sorting through a load of stuff and re-arranging it around where I put the aircon unit when I'm not using it. My aircon is a huge thing - it's a good 120cms tall and about 40cms deep and it weighs a tonne.

I mean, it's a good unit, but it's not what you would call "small and light". With all the tubing it also means it has to go in a particular place when in use, but that means it takes up a lot of room, and spare room is not something I have a lot of, hence having to pack it away.

So yeah, packed it away and had a bit of a clean in all the places that I can't get to when it's out. I also sorted through some piles of stuff. One of the things I discovered was that I've actually got quite a lot of stuff that I need to put on e-bay.

I'd been intending to save it up for closer to Christmas, but I think I might get a few things on sooner otherwise I'm going to get all pissed off at having to do so much e-bay-ing.

I also found the time to watch all of the stuff I've recorded. Well, I say that, but I'm actually saving a series of something because I want to watch the DVDs of the earlier series before I watch it, but that's kinda irrelevant.

Of course doing both of those things meant that I didn't get a chance to advance much other stuff, so I've ended up with a weird feeling of not having done much, even though I did :/.

slip of the memory

I completely forgot about doing the blog today!

What I normally tend to do is write it in the morning, but today I cracked on with a piece of work that I needed to get done and it slipped my mind.

So yeah, that's about all there is to say :/.

dough you know what i mean

I'd normally be putting a film review on the blog today, but the Love Film scheduling means that this weekend I was without a rental (I only get 3 a month - it's a legacy thin from when it was Amazon rental) but also of course I didn't watch any of my bought DVD films because I was so busy watching all the telly recorded.

So instead I thought I'd talk about last night's second attempt at roll making.

It had the same basic outcome as the last time - the dough that came out of the machine was very sticky and I had to add extra flour and knead that in, in order to be able to form it into the roll shapes.

The problem was I don't know if that was because I messed the recipe up again or not, because what I tried to do was tweak the recipe. The last lot of roles was too much - I mentioned they used a lot of flour and that resulted in really big rolls that were too much to really eat in a sensible fashion.

So what I tried to do was halve the recipe, only the measure are such that that isn't easy to do. I mean, what's half of 3 & 1/4 cups? 1.5 cups and 1/8th of a cup is the answer, but that's not easy to measure. That means I could easily have botched the recipe again.

The other problem was that my timing wasn't great - last night I had quite a complicated dinner to cook as well. If I'd really been thinking I'd have just done a normal loaf, but I wasn't and so ended up adding more effort into an already hectic schedule.

So, for example, if I'd really been thinking about it I'd have actually only made the dough into four reasonably sized rolls, rather than the 6 half sized ones I did. But with me dashing about I didn't think, so I made that error.

However, I'm actually fairly convinced I got the recipe about right, but still it gave me the really sticky dough. I mean, the end result was okay, but the super-sticky dough makes it quite a complicated process. I'm therefore coming around to the idea of maybe not doing rolls as frequently as envisaged, owing to how messy the kneading is. I could maybe do them just for the weekend or something.

I've been continuing to watch Saki and it's Mah-jong related antics. I've still got the very strong feeling that if I properly understood Mah-jong then I'd enjoy it a little more, but I can still get the general jist as it's quite well done.

One of the interesting aspects of the show is that Yuri (basically lesbianism) seems to abound. Like 75% of all anime, the series is set in high school, and if the series is to be believed, it would seem that if a girl is interested in Mah-jong she's also interested in the contents of her fellow female team-mates knickers.

Not that there's anything wrong with that of course (No, Sir), but it does get a bit silly at times.

The other interesting thing about it is the way they depict the games of Mah-jong. It's done like one of those Beyblade/Pokemon tournament battle anime, with all like special moves. Lightning forks are everywhere and we keep slipping into a kind of virtual representation world where the characters are engaged in physical combat.

But it's for Mah-jong. Which is closer to chess than karate. The clever thing is that it manages to strike a good balance between knowing this approach is silly and also taking it seriously that really works.

rollover

This last weekend I finally had my first crack at making bread rolls.

My dad bought me a bread maker for me last birthday and I've pretty much used it constantly since then. However, I haven't been particularly adventurous with it, having stuck basically to standard white/brown loafs.

But the machine itself has loads of different settings that led you make all sorts of different breads. Of these, the one that intrigued me the most was bread rolls.

One of the problems with the loaves is that, without the preservatives and other things they put into supermarket bread, they go stale really quickly. Now stale bread is something I'm not at all keen on, so it means I have to use up the bread quickly, which can restrict my meal options, or throw it away, which is rather wasteful.

My hope is that rolls will last a little longer, or at the very least will be slightly more manageable from a meal-eating point of view. But there were two potential issues that were holding me back from trying.

First off the recipe seemed a bit complicated. Basically, when you make normal, yeast-based bread you have to have two periods of 'proving'. This is when the yeast really does its 'thing', pumping out carbon dioxide that forms the bubbles that make bread the fluffy thing we all love.

With the normal loaves, these proving periods are covered in the machine's program where it just sits and waits, before doing more mixing. For the rolls you use a setting called 'dough' that only has 1 period of mixing and proving.

The idea then is that you hoik the dough out, knead it, chop it into individual rolls that you shape and then leave, covered, to prove a second time.

This sounded rather complicated and prone to error, so I've been afraid to try it. The other issue was that the recipe uses loads of flour - nearly twice as much as the loaves I've been doing - so I was afraid I'd balls it up and use up the flour.

My plan then was to make a normal loaf and then immediately try out the rolls. Given that a normal loaf takes 3 hours and the dough setting takes 1.5 hours, the 2nd proving period takes half an hour and the baking takes at least 15 minutes, you can therefore see why I waited until the weekend!

The final result was... (drum-roll)... actually not all that bad.

I did fuck up the recipe a little. Ironically I realised I didn't put the correct amount of flour in. This had the effect of making the dough very sticky, but with some good old fashioned elbow-grease, I kneaded in the extra dough.

I think the lack of flour also made it rise too much - not enough weight to stop it, if you see what I mean. And I was afraid my error and attempt to correct would have the opposite effect.

But nope, after the 2nd resting, the rolls did indeed inflate, and after baking I tried one out and it was really quite nice.

I left the rest of them and checked them out last night. They'd definitely declined in freshness like the normal loafs, but they seemed better and were still quite soft and moist.

Altogether then, I'd say it was something of a success.

best efforts

Well, despite what I would basically call my 'best efforts', I didn't manage to watch all of the stuff I'd recorded last week.

I did manage to view all of the Lost s5 extras, mainly, if I'm honest, because they were a bit thin on the ground. The actual shows themselves lacked seriously for commentaries. Previous seasons have had at least 4 commentaries, but this only had two. The show's final two-part episode didn't even get a commentary, and the end usually does.

Anyway, as far as the telly goes there was just too much of it. I had more than 15 shows to get through and many of them were an hour long and it just proved too much. Not because there weren't enough hours available to watch stuff, but because after a while I just got sick of it all.

I mean, the reason I had all this stuff recorded was because I'd spent all my spare time watching TV during the week, and this was yet more telly to watch. Plus there was a Grand Prix on, so it's kinda understandable I just couldn't face it after a while.

By way of a distraction I played a bit of Anno, though I have to admit I got a bit bored off it after a while - perhaps the lustre has gone away a bit, but I think it's more because I keep rushing things in the game and ending up in less than ideal situations, in terms of resources and planning. I think I need to play a less complex game to really get my head around some of the stuff.

I also did a little bit of the stuff I've been putting off over the last few weeks. I didn't put my aircon away or clean up the detritus left from installing the cable lead, but I did some thing that needed to be done in order to prepare the way for those, if that makes sense.

One of them I think I need to adjust, though, as the end result was less than satisfactory. That sounds cryptic - it isn't meant to be, it's just a bit dull so I can't be arsed to explain properly.

One thing I really want to do is thoroughly clean my car. It's a rather unusual side-effect of these shit summers we've been having - if it constantly rains every weekend, then I never get the chance to wash or hoover my car, so it gets filthier and filthier, which is something I hate.

Trouble now of course is that it's winter so the odds are that I'm not going to get the chance to do it anyway. I've been considering taking it to one of these hand car wash or valet services that seem to be springing up all over the place, but obviously that'll cost money and I've been trying to tighten my belt.

lost marathon

Well, as predicted on Tuesday I've marathoned Season 5 of Lost.

In fact I've not so much marathoned it as veritably gorged on it. Season 5 consisted of 17 episodes (the last being a double-episode) and over the course of the week I've watched every single episode.

I've not finished the set yet, technically, as there are a few commentaries and a handful of other extras to go through, but I've finished watching the actual show. And I have to say it's a corker.

A while back they announced that Lost was going to have a definite end and they committed to actually going right through to the end no matter what. That's actually quite a rare thing for American TV, which is kinda a shame because you can really see the benefits in this season of Lost.

For example, it actually feels like they're building towards an end now, rather than slipping in extra stuff that, while I wouldn't call it filler, certainly delayed them getting around to finishing stuff off. But now it feels like we're building towards something.

Hopefully we're building towards some proper answers to the mysteries. There are two things I'm slightly worried about for the next season - 1) Are they going to give proper answers to the key things? 2) Are those answers going to be satisfying?

In a way those questions are the wrong way around, by which I mean are the answers satisfying is the more important question. If we end up with another Battlestar Galactica, where the final season winds up being a big kick in the teeth then I won't be happy and would therefore prefer if they left things open ended instead.

I don't think that will happen - there have been a lot of fairly big hints in season 5 and I think I get where it's going, but we'll have to see.

One of the things I have noticed about Lost is that people don't tend to explain stuff to each other. Sometimes this makes sense - if you started to explain it then the other person would ask so many questions you'd get bogged down when it's critical they do whatever now.

But often it does feel a bit trite - Character A: "But why?" Character B: "I can't explain that to you now." - happens so often and sometimes when there is actually time to explain.

But overall I've really enjoyed it. I especially liked the way they did some of the self-interaction - the whole area of time travel can become very complicated and it's easy to create paradoxes, but what they did here made paradoxes the whole focus of the show. Can you change the past or not?

Interesting stuff.

Of course this whole thing means I now have a hard-drive full of stuff to watch on my PVR. Considering my big objective this weekend is to tick off loads of little things I've either been putting off or been too lazy to do, it could make things interesting for me too :/.

website change

I mentioned a little while ago that trismugistus.com had come up for renewal and although I'd never get rid of that site I might get rid of my other sites.

Well I think I've come up with a sort of half-way house. I've created a digital-bondage blog and uploaded all my walls there.

Well, I say all my walls, I've not uploaded all of the various resolutions I have on dig-bon. My plan was, where I had multiple resolutions, I was only going to upload the largest version.

However, it quickly became apparent that this involved too much effort. See, the problem was that while I know the main 4:3 ration walls off by heart (1600*1200, 1280*960, 1024*768, etc), I can't remember the 16:9 and 16:10 ones.

As such, rather than go through the tedious job of working out which was which, instead I just pruned out all the smaller 4:3 walls.

Anyway, the point is that I'm going to get rid of the main digital-bondage site, but I'll be replacing any links or references to it with links to the digital-bondage blog. That way I can keep my walls online and available, but it doesn't cost me any money.

I think with scan-city.org I'm just going to get rid of it completely. I guess I could do something similar in terms of a blog, but the problem is it would need a huge amount of space and while I can get it cheaply, it's also a lot of hassle. Especially when you consider I've basically not done any scanning in something like 3 months and am seriously considering giving it up as a hobby altogether.

I'll make some more concrete decisions on that front later.

I've been trying to watch a bit of animu this week. One of the things I've been watching is Baccano. I was deadly afraid I'd over-hyped it in my own mind and I wouldn't enjoy it as much as I remembered from watching the fansubs.

Well I have been enjoying it, but one thing I have found is that the English dub is terrible, because many of the actors are trying to put on New York accents (or should that be "Nu Yoik" accents?) and the level of success is... variable to say the least.

The other thing I've been watching is a bit of Saki on Crunchyroll. I've been kinda enjoying it, but I got really confused and had to look up what Japanese Mahjong was all about.

The site I did that via was this one which has loads of pictures to help you see what's going on.

Initially watching Saki I'd thought it was me being dumb, because it seemed really complicated, but looking at the game on that site it turns out that no, Japanese Mahjong is really complicated.

I mean there's loads of rules just to determine who sits where and who starts before you even start playing the actual game :/.

men in black

DVD rentalage was a bit of a retro-trip this week with Men In Black.

The reason for the rental was that I've never properly watched MiB all the way through. I mean, I think I've pretty much seen most of it at one time or another, but I don't recall ever managing to sit and watch it all the way through.

However, I'm guessing that most people have seen it by now, so I'm not sure I really need to go into much depth here. Especially since I basically agree with what other people have said - it's a really funny film.

What makes it so good is that the comedy is very well played. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones make for a really good pairing. Jones is a really good straight man who plays it so straight it would seem almost weird if it wasn't contrasted by Smith who's performance is very high energy.

It's also quite clever. I must admit one thing I didn't appreciate was that it was based on a comic book. I don't think it was a direct adaptation, more taking the general ideas and working them into a film.

The rental edition I watched was boosted by a couple of really good commentaries. By the looks of things it was a special edition 2-disk thing as there's clearly more content on a second disk (this wasn't sent to me and was separately listed on my rental list, but I removed it).

Anyway, one of the commentaries is sort of a Mystery Theatre 3000 thing. That won't make much sense to most people, but basically silhouettes of the director and Tommy Lee Jones are projected at the bottom of the screen (a bit like subtitles) and stuff is drawn on the screen too.

It doesn't really enhance the actual commentary track as such, but it was a nice little feature I'd not seen before.

Anyway, the basic point is that I really enjoyed the film and if you've never seen it before it's well worth a watch.