seasons well wishings and a happy new year

And there we go.

So today is my last day of work for the week, the month and, indeed, the year. Since I generally write this blog at work, it's highly unlikely I'll be posting again until the new year, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to leave a festive message up.

Or, to put it simply, I hope you have a good festive period and a happy New Year and I'll see you again when the calendar says 2010!

unff

So the post office on Tuesday was not as bad as I'd feared.

Don't get me wrong - it was busy, just not as busy as I was afraid it was going to be. I'd say it was about as busy as a normal Tuesday, or the end of the month when loads of people get their car tax.

Why do people bother getting their car tax from the post office any more?

You can do it online and it's so simple and easy, once you've done it that way once you'll never want to bother queuing at the post office for it ever again. I mean, seriously - click, click, click, enter your card details, click, and you're done. It really is that easy and simple.

Plus it's all on databases now, so the little paper disk you get is just a formality and they send it to you in the post anyway, so you just do not need to bother going to the post office and clogging up the queues for those of us that want to do proper post office stuff.

But the big surprise was yesterday when I went to post the next couple of e-bay items. There were actually more staff there than customers.

I don't know if it was the snow or the freezing temperatures that were putting people off from going, or it was the timing (last post for 2nd class is Friday and Monday for 1st class, I believe), but I was straight in, no waiting, do the business and out again. Really simple and easy.

Of course now that I've said that when I go there today I bet it'll be queuing out the door again!

This is one of the pain in the arse things with e-bay - a lot of people pay almost instantly, which puts a lot of pressure on you to get their things sent as soon as you can. I also try to do that anyway in order to avoid the dreaded poor rating of course, but it does make things more complex.

The reason being because there's always one or two people who take a while to pay. So, for example, I had about 15 auctions end on Sunday and by Monday morning, two-thirds of them were paid up.

Now I couldn't actually go on Monday as that's when I go shopping, but Tuesday I dutifully lugged all their parcels (plus the couple that had paid by Tuesday) to the post office and sent them all off.

So I was basically left with only 4 parcels unpaid by Tuesday afternoon. I sent them all an invoice by way of a reminder and two people paid up. So I trekked to the post office again yesterday, with only 2 parcels.

One more person paid last night, so I'm going again today.

That leaves 1 person unpaid and I sent them another message yesterday basically saying "if you don't pay by tonight it'll be next week before I send it"... and he's not even acknowledged my message.

It's a right-royal pain in the arse. If I waited until all the auctions were paid I'd piss off the early payers and get poor rating. But this way I end up having to make loads of trips, which is both really annoying and also costs me loads in postage.

This is part of the reason why I get sick of doing e-bay stuff every time I start on a new session of selling stuff. All the lunch-times wasted in post office queues just becomes really draining. Plus of course there's the fact that it gets really annoying the small return I get.

When you look at the total amount I'm supposed to get by way of payment from people winning my stuff, around half of it goes to other people. First off, e-bay charge you insertion fees (!), then they take 10% of the winnings (for doing very little). PayPal take a big slice in fees (for doing jack shit) and then of course there's postal fees (about the only bit I don't really mind, except for the fact that recorded costs too much).

When you then start to consider how much padded envelopes, sellotape and even car park charges cost it all gets a bit depressing really.

And yes, I did say earlier on that we got some snow yesterday. It started coming down about mid-morning, and somewhat to my surprise it settled on the ground. Well. it wasn't really surprising, because it was so frigging cold for most of yesterday the snow couldn't possibly have melted.

It's meant to be okayish today, but then there's going to be a cold snap tonight and heavy snow is forecast for tomorrow around here. I don't expect I'll be dramatically snowed in like the last time. I expect it'll just make the journey to work treacherous.

It's a pretty miserable and rant-filled post today, huh?

Well, I'm tired and I've had too much work to do and my holiday is still two days away.

the illusionist

Rental service was back to normal this weekend with the illusionist.

It's weird how sometimes there's nothing in a particular genre and then several things come along at once. The Illusionist was released in 2006, the same year as The Prestige.

I reviewed the prestige a while back (or if it was before I started blogging, be assured I have watched it) and quite enjoyed it. Why it's similar to the illusionist, if you can't guess or don't know already is that they're both Magic films.

I appreciate Magic films is not really a genre as such, but that's the best phrase to describe them. They're also both based on books and both are set roughly at the turn of the previous century. Certainly they have a Victorian feel to them.

Both are also focused on grand stage magic, rather than smaller sleight of hand stuff and both feature a "grand illusion" as the central crux of the film. Both also try to blur the lines between real magic and mere illusions. They differ mainly in the central theme, I would say. The prestige was about a rivalry between two magicians, where the illusionist is really a love story at heart.

But they're both similar in the sense that both are entertaining and I enjoyed them both.

There's a bit of a difficult nowadays with films based in the world of magic, because we all know that movies sometimes feature a lot of CGI. And CGI is getting to the stage where it's so good that it's possible to make unreal things seem real.

So the problem magic has on the big screen is that the true skill that is behind magic, such as things like misdirection or even sleight of hand, can simply be faked. You don't really need an actual skilled magician, or a clever contraption to pull of a trick in a film, you can just let computers and animators do their thing.

And at points it's quite obvious that CGI is how they're doing some of the tricks. However to some degree, this actually works in the illusionist's favour, because part of the story we're being shown is the idea that maybe the illusionist Eisenheim really can do actual magic.

Part of the idea is that he's so good he's got tricks that people genuinely can't figure out. He's either one step ahead of the current magic skill level or he can do real magic - and by mixing real tricks with a bit of CGI it helps that idea more than it does undermine the practical magic trick side of things.

Something else that helps is the treatment that's been done to the film, which makes it seem like a really old print. Initially I wasn't sure about this, but after a while it becomes kind of natural and really helps you feel that it's a story from that era.

This is also aided by the (roughly) consistent accents everyone uses and some truly involving performances. It's also a good story, with an engaging, well portrayed love story.

So yeah, overall I really enjoyed the film.

post office horror

This last weekend a bunch of e-bay auctions I had up came to an end. This means that today I have the rather un-enviable task of going to the post office. At lunch time.

I wasn't worried about it until yesterday when one of my work colleagues went to the post office. She was gone about an hour and when she returned she said they'd been queuing out of the door.

Now you could say well part of that is because it was Monday and it's always busy on a Monday. But then today is Market day in Alton, and so it's always busy on a Tuesday too.

But adding into that I believe today is one of the last posting days, and I think it's the last posting day for parcels. I may be wrong on that.

Last Christmas post is a bit of a myth actually. My dad used to work at the post office and he said that the effect it had was to get people to post early and therefore in the actual build up to Christmas there was often less post than usual, which meant there weren't many delays.

Of course, if they didn't set a day, loads of people would leave it until late and then there would be too much and it could potentially cause delays :/. So what the last day means is that that's when they stop guaranteeing delivery before Chrimbo. It doesn't mean your stuff won't make it in time, just that it's not guaranteed.

So yeah, lunch could be fun. Plus I'll have to do it all again later in the week, because some people haven't paid yet. Thankfully it's only a couple, plus if they had all paid I'm not sure I could have carried it all, to be honest, so I'd have had to make two trips anyway.

last working week of the year

I start my last week of work this week for the whole of 2009. It's a little weird when you start thinking in those terms, so I may not think abut it again until Friday when it'll almost be all over.

The Chrimbo meal was nice on Friday. The place we had it is kinda one of those Gastro pub jobs I think. We've been there before and the menu struck me as a little bit poncy, but not overly so, and the Chrimbo food was of a similar style.

If I was to make one complaint it would be the coffee they served at the end. I really didn't like whatever blend it was they were using. Plus it had a very powdery texture to it - like the filter hadn't done its job properly.

Well, actually, if I was to make one complaint it would be that the service was really slow. The whole meal took three hours and that was with us cutting it short because we'd all only paid for 3 hours in the car park. It was a bit of a case of throw down your coffee and go.

However, relatively speaking the chair I was on wasn't too bad, so it wasn't as unpleasant as it could have been.

I tried to do the handover with the now ex-RED employee on Friday too, but really we needed more time. He had to go at 4 and with 3 hours lost to lunch, it just wasn't enough time.

To be frank, I'm basically left with my fingers crossed, hoping nothing he handed over becomes active in any way. If it does I'm going to be having a few problems, I think.

The weekend wasn't a total disaster area. I'd didn't get the "do stuff" bug I was kinda hoping for, but equally I ticked everything off on my basic to do list.

I also found the time to finish off watching the Monty Python documentary I bought a while back. It was pretty good. The series featured 6 episodes and the last 3 focused on the post-TV series stuff, with the films and stuff like the Spamalot musical.

It was quite interesting, though I've heard much of that stuff before, as if I'm honest I tend to regard the films as being much better than the TV series, which was a bit hit and miss at times. I've therefore watched quite a few documentaries and stuff about the films.

Still, as a whole the series was entertaining and interesting. The extras were quite good, adding another good couple of hours of interviews and outtakes.

So yeah, if you like a bit of python then well worth checking out, though I'm not sure if non-Python fans would really gain much from it.

work chrimbo meal

Today is the work Christmas Meal day.

Basically, every Christmas, the company pays for us all to go out for a meal. Now the last few years we've always gone to the same place, but this year we're trying somewhere different.

Well, I say different - we've actually been there a couple of times before, but it's under new management, so it's effectively different.

Today also is when I have to do the handover stuff from a RED employee. Basically he's quit, so I have to go through some stuff with him.

I've mixed feeling about his quitting. He's an alright guy, but then he's also the guy who I moaned about because he tapped his feet and used to drive me insane. To be frank, he was also a bit of a slacker - if you didn't constantly give him stuff to do, he'd happily sit there all day on the internet. But then equally, when he did have stuff to do - especially analysis stuff - he was pretty good at it.

Plans for the weekend are pretty much non-existent.

I'm kinda aware that next week is my last week of work before I go on holiday for Christmas (hurrah), so I think my brain is going into that "well, I'll just do it next week when I'm on holiday" mode. Which is fair enough for some things, but really on others I should be trying to get them out of the way, so that I can properly enjoy my time off without having to worry about them.

So yeah, I'll either have one of those weekends where I do tonnes or absolutely bugger all. Place your bets now.

chrimbo radio times

I'm feeling pretty knackered today for some reason, so I thought I'd do a quick post about something completely random.

And that completely random something is the Christmas issue of Radio Times.

I've heard it said that for most people Christmas doesn't officially start until they see the Coca Cola add featuring Father Christmas and the trucks. Well for me, Christmas doesn't really start until I buy the Christmas issue of the Radio Times.

I actually buy RT every week as I'm a fan of television in general. I use it to help me plan what to watch and record, and I'm sufficiently anal as to be one of those people who circle the programs. Usually on Friday night I'll go through, highlighting the shows I'm already following and seeing if there's anything that peaks my interest.

My routine for the Chrimbo issue is almost identical. I'm expecting/hoping that it'll be on sale when I go into town today to drop my latest batch of washing off. I'll then scan through the articles while eating lunch and then Friday I'll plan out what I want to watch and record over Chrimbo.

Of course for those two weeks (if you've never seen it before the Chrimbo RT is a double issue that covers both the Christmas and New Year weeks) there'll be all sorts of specials and the schedules will be odd. Plus I'll be on holiday so there'll be more opportunity to catch some interesting things.

And that will be it - I'll officially be in festive mood.

Well, at least as festive as I'll get.

I have mixed feeling over Christmas.

First off I'm 100% atheist and, to be frank, the whole religious element actually gets on my nerves a bit. However, the thing about Christmas is it's essentially a winter feasting festival that was taken over by the organised religions, so I'm not totally against it.

The aspects I like are (predictably) the eating, the drinking and the relaxing, but also the spending a bit of time with your family and friends that you may not have seen in a while. The gift giving and receiving isn't bad too.

But, like most people, I get a bit sick of the saturation bombing that goes on. I'm very much on the side of people who complain about all the Christmas adverts. I caught an ad-break last week (so the first week in December) and every single ad was Christmas related.

I mean, it's not like we're going to forget about Christmas. We're well aware it's there and when it is, so the adverts are a bit excessive.

Although to be fair, the ads that really drive me bonkers are the post-Christmas sale ads, because they're fewer in number. At least before Christmas there's sufficient variety that you won't see the same ads over and over. But in that Sale period, every ad break will be identical, featuring the exact same 5 or six ads over-and-over, because the sales are much more restricted to certain types of businesses, like furniture stores or department stores.

Oops - got ranting and this post wasn't as short as I'd intended!

bonkers day

Yesterday was a little bit bonkers at work.

Basically, the person who handles a particular side of the RED business had a day off, and for some reason everyone chose that day to start sending her new requirements. I won't explain the boring tedium of it all, but basically it meant that I was running around like a headless chicken doing loads of stuff that I've never done before.

It wasn't too bad in a way, because otherwise I was waiting on loads of other stuff and so would have had not much to do. Thankfully they're now back in work today and also my other stuff has come back to me, so I can get on with it.

I also got a phone call late in the afternoon from Aldershot Parcel Force depot (I noted it was not from the number given to me and that was causing me all sort of problems) about my problem. Basically, the guy said that the payment had worked. Something he said made it sound like actually it was my re-attempts to pay that had worked, but, confusingly, he also seemed to imply the original payment had worked.

There's also the option that they've decided to wave the charge or there's some system error or something, but either way I guess I don't have to worry about it any more.

In the evening I just laid in bed and watched telly as I was a bit knackered after the bonkers day.

Normally Wednesday would be film review day, but as mentioned on Monday I didn't get a new review disks (it actually turned up in the post Tuesday) and didn't watch any films. As such, I thought I'd discuss a couple of the telly programmes I've been watching instead.

Dollhouse

I'd heard mixed things about this.

The show's actually by Joss Wheddon, who did Buffy, Angel and Firefly, all of which I enjoyed to varying degrees and I think that might have been part of the problem. See, the feeling I've been getting from the show so far is that it's an interesting idea that isn't explored enough in these earlier episodes.

The basic idea is that the Dollhouse is an organisation that can manipulate people's minds, wiping them and implanting new memories and personalities. They therefore recruit people who become the dolls of the title and then very rich people pay for them to fulfil certain rolls.

This could mean anything from them being a master thief to a hired assassin.

And that's sort of the problem - the show starts off too focused on the idea of being something different each week. It's kinda wrapped up in its own conceit - it's like normal telly, where at the end of the episode, the show resets and next week everything's back roughly to where it was.

Which is okay for normal telly, but being Joss Wheddon I think people were expecting more. It also didn't help that the resetting got it back to a weird position of implying "everything's worked out okay", yet you've got these girls who are essentially being abused and it's not making any real comment on that.

However, in more recent episodes, there's been a bit more of a hint of a longer story and it's actually started to focus a bit better on some of the moral issues as well as suggest there's more to the Dollhouse than it appears.

I've heard it gets quite good towards the end, but I'll have to wait and see.

Paradox

The other show I wanted to mention was Paradox.

This is essentially a new crime thriller type show, but it's tried to wrap itself around a bit of Science Fiction. In some ways it's like Bonekickers in that regard, but although I avoided Bonekickers like the plague, I thought I'd check this out.

My feelings are mixed - it kinda works and doesn't work in equal measure.

First up, the actual crime thriller type element combined with the premise (images from the future are downloaded by a scientist) works quite well. It's an intriguing way of providing a twist on the "whodunit" format.

You're effectively being given all these clues as to what's going to happen and then you have to try to work out what it is and how to stop it. It's quite satisfying on that front, in that it's a fair puzzle and you watch the police try to work it out too.

One of the big problems is with who they've decided to use as characters. Two of the worst culprit's are the Scottish detective, who always seems to be cynical about everything, but is also shagging Outhwaite in a "let's make the relationships complicated" fashion, and the Black detective. The black guy seems to be a sort of "always by the book" character so that the maverick Outhwaite can clash with him all the time.

Outhwaite's character and the scientist are actually okay, although again their kinda drawn from a pool of predictable character types, they don't clash with the basic idea of the show. See, the problem is that the way it's being presented is very much from their point of view, in that they believe the images are genuine and that they should try to stop them. The other two go against this and while that might suggest some good tension, in reality, because the scientist and Outhwaite are continuously proven right, it just makes the others seem a bit stupid.

There are also some problems regarding the whole paradox itself. My main one is where are the images coming from?

Weirdly, as they become real things, the camera does a sort of "photo still shot" effect as if it's the camera that took the picture that's been beamed back in time. But how does that work?

Are we supposed to believe that these people are watching grabbed moments from the telly show they're staring in? Very meta-textual, but also very non-sensical. Or in this universe is everyone chased after by film crews?

And if it's meant to be that they're photos taken by normal people or photographers, then how does that work? Some of them are so utterly random no-one in their right mind would take them.

a customs charge is due

About two weeks ago I got another of my parcels from Japan. I can't specifically remember which one it was, but the basic point is that it had a customs charge to pay.

This means that I got a letter telling me there was a payment due and directed me to pay online or at the depot. I always used to pay at the depot, but more recently I've been using the online system. It's relatively painless and avoids me having to make a trip across Aldershot.

Anyway, so in the usual way I paid up and the parcel was promptly delivered a couple of days later. All well and good.

However, a couple of days after that - so, Thursday of last week - I got another letter that told me that the payment had not worked properly. However, because they don't store card details they needed me to pay again.

Now, I try to be relatively honest, and given the number of parcels I receive I didn't want it to become some sort of black mark against me, so I tried to repay. This second letter also indicated that I could pay online again or via phone and it gave me the Aldershot depot phone number.

So this weekend I tried to pay.

I say try, because at every turn it seemed to block me from doing so.

First up I tried online again. I put the details in, it found the parcel and it indicated there was a charge to pay. However, no matter how many times I tried putting in my payment details (and I tried several times with several different cards) it just kept giving me an error message.

But that's all it said - an error has occurred. It didn't tell me what the error was or how I could remedy it or anything. Well, fine, I though, I'll just call them up.

But by this time, it was Saturday afternoon, and I know they don't work Saturday afternoon, but they do have one of those automated phone things where you press the numbers for the options. I therefore gave that a try.

It's a little tortuous, to say the least. The whole process is quite slow with you having to enter your details, but I persevered. It even at one point seemed to confirm that a payment was still due.

However, at the end of it, it told me "you've already paid for this" and that was that!

I then tried again, but exactly the same thing happened.

So I thought, right, I'll give them a call Monday morning and actually speak to someone. They open at 8am, so I'll phone just after that at work.

And this is where it becomes comical.

See, on the automated message it says press 4 for any other problem, which should route you through to an operator at the Aldershot depot.

I say should because it certainly routes you through to an operator. But it isn't one at Aldershot.

Of course, first try I didn't realise it had sent me someone else, so I was arguing with the poor woman about whether they delivered to my area. Eventually I twigged and asked her "Is this the Aldershot depot?" and she said "No, it's Lewisham."

She then tried to give me the Aldershot depot's number, but it was exactly the number I'd dialled. Plus when you get through it actually says Aldershot depot on the automated message thing.

So I tried again. Same basic thing, only it sent me to some depot in Middlesbrough.

I tried two more times up to 9'o'clock and each time it sent me somewhere completely random. And of course these random places can't help me because it's not part of their system.

By this time I was thoroughly pissed off (well, I say "by this time", I was actually pretty much pissed off after the whole internet failure) so I went to the Parcel Force site and sent them an e-mail telling them all the problems I was having and asking how to solve it. Of course, I don't actually expect them to reply. What I expect to happen is they'll ignore me and then I'll get some nasty letter saying "you still haven't paid". In the end I'll probably have to go down to the depot to sort it out.

See, what annoys me is that I'm having to do all the legwork. Y'see, I've already paid, and it's them that's cocked up. Why do I have to run around fixing their cock-up?

foot and stuff

My foot still hurts.

It's a lot better than it was, but it's still not right. I was pretty busy this weekend and I was moving around a lot, but I've no idea whether this is the sort of injury that's made better by using it or resting it.

I managed to tick a lot of stuff off of my to do list this weekend.

I bought my main presents, although I stopped short of buying more wrapping paper and cards. I could have done, it's just my energy started to flag after a while, so I ended up not bothering. There's plenty of time left, and it also occurred to me I might have some wrapping paper left from last year, so I should check first.

I watched everything I'd recorded on my PVR, which was good as there's been a real risk of it building up to silly amounts again. Well, I say everything - there are 3 films I've recorded that are still on their. It was a non-rental disk weekend again this weekend, and I thought about watching one of the films instead, but in the end I didn't find the time.

I also got a haircut. It's been ages since I last had one and to be honest I've been growing it with the thought of it keeping me warm, but my hair just looks so bad when it's long I ended up getting the short cut I'd normally have in summer.

It also means I'm nice and tidy for Friday, which is the work Christmas lunch day.

What else of note?

Well, there was the parcel thing, but I think I'm going to do a separate blog about that as it's quite a saga/pain in the arse.

I played quite a bit of Anno too, but not as much as I could have done. I think I was relatively restrained, actually.

Oh, and I put a load of stuff up on e-bay. 16 things, in fact, ranging across books, manga, anime and regular DVDs. I'd hoped to have a lot more to sell, but then that would require me to be sufficiently organised and sensible to watch and read the things I should watch and read.

But I'm not, so there isn't.

a day off? blimey!

Day off tomorrow! Hurrah!

I'm hoping to square away some Chrimbo shopping activity. I do most of it online of course, but you always need cards and wrapping paper and stuff like that so I'll hopefully get as many of those boxes ticked as I can.

I'm also hoping I'll get some rest and recuperation time. I've been bloody knackered just recently, and it doesn't help with all the bits of me that are going wrong.

Toe still hurts, although it's better than it was. Also my front tooth starting hurting. The tooth was really sensitive when I was eating and drinking cold stuff, so I think it's just my usual sensitive teeth issues, rather than any sort of new problem. It does mean it feels like I'm falling apart!

I saw some interesting news on the Anno front the other day. They've announced an expansion pack. This adds multiplayer, which I don't really care about, but it also adds loads of other new stuff. It's due for release in February, so I guess I'm kinda doomed to play the game more than I should for a while yet.

And speaking of which, rather ashamedly I started on a new world last night. I know I really shouldn't have done that until I'd gotten further with my other world, but I kinda realised I'd made that original world too easy.

I mean, the whole idea was to play an easy world and build up a massive, well developed population, but I'd done stuff like disable the computer AI players and the Corsairs and it made it kinda dull if I'm honest. It certainly meant I didn't have some options and possibilities for doing stuff.

So I started a new game with more of that stuff turned on. Hopefully I'll stick with it.

I'm also planning on e-baying a load of stuff this weekend. I'm mainly hoping it represents good timing as far as Christmas is concerned. Oh, and I'm also hoping that e-bay wont rape me senseless, but that's kinda a non-starter as I know there's no way they won't.

I'm also hoping that this months' megami finally gets shipped over the weekend. Rather ominously the last issue is still saying "Not yet shipped" even though normally it's sent on or before the release date. In this case that was the 30th of November, which was Monday, so things aren't looking good to be frank.

clarkson duel

There was no rental DVD this week.

On my plan I actually only get 3 rentals a month, so that means I often end up with one weekend a month with no rental disk. Ideally I'd upgrade to one of the unlimited packages, but they're a lot more expensive and I've heard they're not quite as "unlimited" as they purport to be. Also I'd end up watching them instead of my bought stuff, which wouldn't be very helpful.

Anyway, I did watch something else that's mini review worthy - the new Jeremy Clarkson DVD, which is called "Duel".

It's called duel because that's basically what it's about - competing things against each other. The competitions included:

- What's the best drifting car?
- Who's the fastest off-road celebrity?
- Which is fastest - a man or a car?
- Which will hit the ground first - a penny or a Ford Scorpio?
- Which is the best TV motoring show - Top Gear or Fifth Gear?

There were other bits too, but those were the main ones.

I should also point out that this is the first Jeremy Clarkson DVD I've actually watched. He's been putting them out for years now, but I've never really felt inclined to buy one. However, recently I've been watching a lot of Top Gear on Dave (don't ask) and this DVD seemed quite Top Gear-ish in nature, so I thought I'd pick it up.

Overall, I found it a bit hit and miss if I'm honest, both in terms of the actual entertainment value and in terms of really being about 'duels'.

One of the big problems is that the first bit on drifting doesn't really seem to have much focus. It's like they took half a dozen cars with them in Spain and then decided what to do with them when they got there. I mean, Clarkson spends half the bit driving around in a 4-wheel drive Lamborghini in which he makes it clear it's impossible to drift.

The idea was he was demonstrating the type of car that wasn't good for drifting and why, but it feels a bit loose - a bit "well, we've also got this Lambo, how can we include it in a bit about drifting?"

And that slightly unfocused problem crops up in several other places too. For example, the Ford Scorpio versus the penny bit just comes across as a random. A bit, let's drop a car from a great height because... er... we can race it against... something. No, wait, I know - a penny!

A penny?

Yes, a penny. It'll be brilliant.

Well, actually, it's okay from a wanton destruction point of view, but it's hardly the world's greatest duel. I mean, you can't really even see a penny falling :/.

And there's also a bit on the end involving a catapult that I didn't really get at all. I mean, if the penny/Scorpio thing is an odd duel then the catapult bit doesn't make any sense as a duel at all.

However, the DVD also has some really good bits too. The actual apple-crushing car drifting part is amusing, for example. And both the fastest off-road celebrity and top gear versus fifth gear bits are genuinely brilliant. In a way, I'd much rather have seen more of them than some of the other bits.

So yeah - hit and miss.

Which means it's actually very much like Top Gear - some stuff is really good, some bits really funny, other bits feel a bit shoe-horned in or don't quite make sense.

On balance, I'd say it's an entertaining watch if you really like the Top Gear stunts and races, but some bits you could skip through and not really miss anything.

toe-tal agony

I've done something to the big toe on my right foot.

I don't know what it is that I've done - I don't remember stubbing it or bending it weirdly, but it's causing me quite a lot of discomfort. Basically, you know when you walk your toes bend as you move your foot? Well all of that movement of my big toe is painful.

It doesn't hurt as I just sit here typing and it's okay if I'm just standing up, but any kind of upward or downward movement (especially if it's taking any weight) is painful.

It actually started some time last week, but was a lot less painful. What I think caused it to become as bad as it is was driving down to Bristol. I tend to hold my foot a little weird on the accelerator - it's kinda difficult to explain, but let's just say I think that doing that for the best part of five hours caused it to get worse.

I think also all the walking about cleaning the car at the weekend didn't really help.

I'm trying to rest it as much as I can, but it's pretty difficult to avoid walking. I think I'll just crawl up in the evenings and avoid going out or anything - that's about as good as it's probably going to get as far as staying off it is concerned.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had a bit of a problem with the old car washing. One of the reasons I was doing it was that my windscreen was horribly filthy. It was getting so bad it was difficult to see out of.

Unfortunately, however, when I was cleaning my car I discovered I'd run out of the real good glass polish I use. It's expensive, but it's good because it cuts through all the grease and road-grime that's difficult for normal cleaners to deal with. But also it doesn't leave any streaks, which can be a real pain when you're driving.

I'll obviously buy some more of the good stuff, but the problem of course is will there be an opportunity to use it? I did clean the screen with more normal stuff, so it's way better than it was, but the streaks where already obvious yesterday as I was driving in to work.

linen overload

So the bed linen turned up on Friday.

Slightly annoyingly it was all in one huge box... which was actually half empty :/. It had been stuffed with packing paper to fill it up. Why they didn't put it in a box half that size or multiple boxes, I don't know, but there you go.

I have a weird thing where I can't wear clothes or use towels or sheets or anything without first giving them a wash. I'm not entirely sure what the root of it is, but I think it's something I developed because (in my mind at least) they put stuff on the clothes to help them fold better for the shops.

Starch on shirts maybe? I dunno, I'm also perfectly happy to think it's just a weird paranoia/phobia type thing on my part, but either way, it means I've overloaded my washing basket.

I don't have a washing machine at my place, so I have to use a laundrette and they're going to have a bit of a windfall over the next couple of weeks. The march of winter and the chilly weather means I'm wearing loads more clothes to wrap up warm, and all this linen will have to be washed before I'll use it.

I'm less worried about the duvet and the pillow, as they won't come in direct contact with my skin, so I've already started using them. The duvet is 13.5 tog apparently. I've no idea how the tog scale works, but basically bigger numbers mean warmer and 13.5 is right at the top end.

It's really warm and snugly, in other words. While I'm pretty sure that means I'll have to by another thinner one for summer, right now with the temperatures having dipped drastically I'm loving it.

I got two new pillows, partly because they were on offer, but also because I like a lot of pillow support. However, these new ones are a bit too big, even for me. I've got an existing pillow that's still in reasonable knick, and with the other two it's too high for me to actually sleep with. It's good for when I'm sitting in bed watching telly, though.

I actually cleaned my car on Saturday. I kinda took myself by surprise actually, as I hadn't particularly planned to do it. However, the atrocious weather we've been having recently doesn't really seem like it's going to end for a while, so I thought it best to take advantage of a lull we had on Saturday.

Also, with my trip to Bristol last week it was very apparent to me just how filthy my car was and I really wanted to hoover it out at the least. My car is variety of quite grey colours. It's not dull, in my opinion, and it all matches quite nicely. The difficulty with it, though, is that inside it really shows up the dirt. It's odd actually, because the outside is the opposite - it can be incredibly filthy, but it looks okay.

However, inside, the slightest bit of dust really stands out. I think it's cos inside the grey is approaching black, which is notorious for showing up dirt, whereas outside it's a much lighter grey which is actually kinda similar to the usual dusty grime you get on cars.

I'm paying for my car washing antics today, though. My hamstrings are really aching. Both washing and hovering the car involves a lot of bending over, and that really strains my hamstrings. I'm almost tempted to do warm-up exercises before I wash the car, but then I'd look a bit of a tit.

Otherwise the weekend involved a heck of a lot of Anno. So much so that my arm was aching a little by Sunday evening. I'm really enjoying it though and have managed to keep going with the same map for yonks now. I'm even on the verge of managing to have all of the possible resources and products in use.

Well, I say nearly on the verge. Actually I need to completely restructure a good chunk of the world so that I can get more people in there, but the real point is that such a major tweak hasn't put me off at all. I have a plan and I'm going for it.

a million-hour work day

Yesterday was crap.

On Wednesday evening my boss had a deadline to meet. She had to print off and bind a proposal so that she could post it. It had to be there by 10AM on Thursday morning, so this meant it had to go the special delivery that guaranteed it would be there on time.

Well, that service itself has a deadline of 5PM. After that time you can't send it via that service.

And she missed the deadline. That meant that, because I was the only person who was available I had to drive all the way to Bristol in order to make it there by 10AM to hand deliver the proposal.

I've never even been to Bristol, let alone to where this parcel had to go, so my Boss leant me her Sat Nav.

That was kinda the start of the problems (well, excluding the whole thing as being a problem full stop :/). Her Sat Nav (and I guess all Sat Navs) are meant o be plugged into your cigarette lighter. Well, my car doesn't have a cigarette lighter.

Which is a little weird when you think about it, because it has a hole in the dash which presumably would normally house a cigarette lighter, but there's no actual cigarette lighter in there.

Anyway, the charge on this Sat Nav was pretty low, so that meant she had to drive home and pick up her AC charger and drop it off at my place so that I could charge it overnight.

Now as I'd mentioned, I've never been to this place, so I didn't really know how long it would take. According to Google maps it was about a 2 hour journey, but of course I'd be getting there at about 9AM which is rush hour, which isn't exactly famed for smooth traffic flow.

I therefore figured it this way - it needs to be there by 10AM, but the place probably opens at about 9AM, so I should aim to get there between 9AM and 9:30AM as that gives me some leeway in case I have to walk somewhere or get lost.

If it's 2 hours normally, then it's gotta be about 3 hours in rush hour. I therefore se off at 6:15AM, having got up at 5:30AM.

In the end, even though those numbers may seem way over-cautious, they weren't far off. I did get slightly lost twice. I also had to stop for a pee. That meant I deliver the parcel at about 9AM, so not that far out all told.

But then to be fair, the sat nav took me on a bit of an odd route. I think it was set on shortest distance, so we went on this very odd rout I just wouldn't have used. The route I would have used would have been a good 15 miles further, but it's roads I know like the back of my hand and can get good speed on, but also they don't suffer from much traffic at that time, which I know from all the times I've been to Devon.

The Sat Nav also only just lasted the journey. The battery literally conked out as I was pulling up at the final destination. Thinking about it now, it would have been better to find my own way t the M4 and then switch it on and use it from there - that would have mean tit was only on for half the time.

When I was driving down the weather was bloody awful - it actually hailed at one point! It cleared up later on, but then I had the problem of bright sunshine shining on wet roads, which is always fun.

Having set off at about 6:15AM I finally got to work at about 12:15PM - of that 6 hours, 4.5 where solid driving.

So yeah, not much fun.

But what makes it tedious and annoying is that having started at 6:15 and done 4.5 hours driving across 6 hours did I get to go home early?

Did I buggery.

That's what annoys me about my boss. I mean, this was her fucking up and me having to go way, way out of my way to fix it, and is there just a little consideration for that? Is. There. Fuck.

it's a mario!

Until Saturday I had never played Super Mario Brothers.

Well, that's not strictly true. In fact, it's not at all true now that I think about it - I had a super mario game on the original gameboy.

But that was in green and black and on a tiny, tiny screen. The only other mario game I've played was a thing released for the Amiga that was more like bubble-bobble if you've ever heard of that. It was a single screen thing where you used to have to kill baddies that came out of pipes on fixed platform single-screen play areas.

You see, the problem was my family was always towards the poorer side of middle class. I don't actually know quite how they decide on classes - I don't think we were working class, but then we didn't seem to be as well off as all my friends families at school.

So where all my friends had all sorts of games systems as they grew up (I remember there was the divide between Nintendo and Sega fans, a bit like X-Box versus Playstation nowadays) I kinda missed out on all that.

So as I say, I thought I'd never really played a mario game - certainly I've never played the 'classics' back in the NES and SNES eras. (I've definitely never played Sonic.)

Anyway, the point is that on Friday evening I got a lovely package from Amazon that contained Tropico 3, which I've not really had a chance to look at, and New Super Mario Brothers for the Wii.

So not only do I now own a 'proper' mario game, I've actually bought a new game for my Wii! A veritable double whammy.

So what do I think of the game?

Well, I've been enjoying it, although I've been suffering from what I believe is called "Nintendo thumb" where the tip of your thumb hurts where you're been pressing on the hard D-pad control.

It seems the basic idea is that the game has a multiplayer mode as its big feature. I've yet to try that out, as I'm just pleased to have the chance to enjoy the old mario game. Is that a bit sad at my age? Probably, but I'm not sure I really care.

zodiac

David Fincher Directed Seven, which is one of my favourite movies, and certainly one of my favourite crime-thriller movies.

Zodiac was a serial killer who attacked 7 victims, killing 5 of them in the San Francisco area during the late-sixties or early-seventies. He was never caught, but he was also one of those serial killers who taunted the police, sending them letters that included ciphers - coded messages, basically.

If you've ever seen Seven, I think you can see where I'm going with this - it seems like perfect Fincher material, with a series of murders committed by a serial killer who behaved in an 'interesting' way.

And as far as that side of the film went, it's really good.

But there's a weird split-personality to the film that I have to admit I didn't like. It's like the film is trying to create a dichotomy - to break itself into two mutually exclusive parts, but it can't because the parts are inextricably linked. But also, it doesn't make any sense to try to split them up, and yet it seemed to be trying to do that.

The two parts are relatively easy to define. The first part where the Zodiac is active and the police are actively trying to solve it and the press are reporting the story and the public is interested and aware. The second is the part where Robert Graysmith is completely obsessed with trying to find the zodiac killer.

Why these don't work as two separate parts is because Graysmith was working as a cartoonist at one of the newspapers the zodiac was sending his ciphers to while he was doing it. In other words, he was actively involved (albeit on the very periphery) in the press side of the story.

So the split can't work because he's there in both parts. Also, when he's trying to solve the case the zodiac is still out there. He's maybe not actually killing any more, but there's nothing to suggest he's not a threat to Graysmith (and his family).

See, one of the particular problems with the narrative is that it's trying to weave real life into a satisfying narrative. The problem is that life doesn't give you nice narratives.

So where Fincher can show you the actual killings in a way that allows him to tell a satisfying, joined up "story-like" way, other stuff doesn't fit that mould. A good example of this is the cipher. Ideally, from a fictional point of view, all of the ciphers would be decoded, but they can't be, because they haven't been in real life and Fincher wants to stay true to that.

I mean, in a super-ideal world it would actually be Graysmith or someone close to him solving the ciphers. However, instead, the first one isn't solved by him, but a random couple who like doing puzzles.

Which is fine, if things are being portrayed in a documentary-like fashion, but they aren't, it's trying to weave these facts into a satisfying story.

I dunno, it feels more like he'd have been better doing a story inspired by the zodiac, rather than actually doing the zodiac if you see what I mean.

Another problem is that even though the film is 2 and a half hours long, it feels like a lot of it is given short shrift, because there's so much to fill in. The story covers many characters across many years and it just isn't possible to fit all of it in, but Fincher seems to want to try.

I'm giving it more of a mauling than it deserves as it's not actually that bad, it's just I think I was kinda hoping for a lot more than I got.

a hundred quid

Yesterday I spent just under £100 on bed linen.

That's a lot of money in anyone's book, but then to be fair I bought a lot of stuff: a duvet, 2 pillows and 3 complete sets of bedsheets, pillow covers and duvet covers.

See, what I think normal people do is they replace things when they need replacing. So if I was normal at the point that my sheets and duvet cover started to wear thin, I would have bought replacements.

I don't do that. I wait until the point where the duvet covers have holes in them and then... well, and then I wait a bit more until the holes are big enough to fit your hand through. At that point I then think about replacing them. And a few years later I get around to it.

As such, rather than the occasional spend on the occasional item, I end up needing to spend a fortune to buy a completely new set of everything :/.

I'm useless like that.

I'm pretty tired today. Yesterday I was bouncing off the walls for some reason, but I seem to have crashed today.

It's actually a little weird that I was hyper yesterday because first thing in the morning I had to go to the dentists. I've mentioned before that I'm not the biggest fan of the dentists.

I think part of it was because I chipped my porcelain crown a few months back and was therefore fully expecting him to say it needs replacing and it would therefore cost me another small fortune, plus involve all the hassle of more trips to the dentist.

However, I mentioned there might be something wrong, but he said he couldn't see any problems. This was really surprising as it was a big lump of stuff that was chipped off and I can see where it's come from.

My guess is that because it was several months ago I've kinda polished the area smooth with brushing, so he couldn't tell it was chipped. Also, the bit that's broken off was kinda a big protuberance, so it breaking off maybe wouldn't seem apparent.

Whatever it was, it's saved me some cash!

wasted weekend

Not wasted as in alcoholically, wasted as in potential squandered.

As I cynically predicted on Friday I spent a hell of a lot of time playing Anno. The problem (if it is actually a problem) is that I've finally got myself a game where I'm not wanting to abandon it and start again.

It's actually in the sandbox (free play) mode and I've finally got it sorted in such a way that I can build up the entire map. In other words, I'm well on the way to doing all the cool stuff like building the Cathedral and Mosque.

I've gotten close to these before, but found myself in a situations where I'd not quite planned it out properly and needed to completely trash and restart some islands. The net hassle of which would have been less than restarting altogether, so I did. But now I think I'm in a situation where I can go to the "end" and build a complete world.

Trouble is, the bigger things get, the more complicated it is and the more time it absorbs. Indeed, this weekend I did little else, even to the extent that my shoulder began to ache. I may have to lay off it for a bit, just so that I don't end up with shooting pains down my arm again.

I also played Super Mario Brothers on the Wii a bit, but more on that later.

The other major thing at the weekend was the weather.

A large part of Cumbria is now under water it seems, and while I don't live in a real flood risk area my part of the country has also been suffering with some severe weather.

On Sunday morning it was actually so loud it woke me up. Very little can wake me up when I'm in deep sleep, but this did. Although the weirdest thing was that it was like a burst of wind.

It seemed to be doing that quite a lot - it would be relatively calm (it was even sunny at a couple of points) and then suddenly there would be a huge burst of wind and mad driving rain with dark skies and then just as suddenly it would all calm down again. It was a little disconcerting actually, and you almost didn't know what to do.

When I went out on Saturday morning to get some shopping in (it was a big one as I'm entering my "buy tonnes of stuff now so that I don't have to do any shopping at Chrimbo" phase) I wrapped up preparing for one of these monsoons, but I overheated because it was actually rather mild. But then as I was coming out of Tesco's the heavens opened and in the short dash to my car I got drenched.

The prospect seems to be that it's going to be a very wet winter. I don't mind that so much, so long as it means it's also a mild winter. The last few winters have been terribly cold, which has cost me a fortune in heating. A mild, wet winter would therefore not be a bad thing for me.

plans

I'm a great one for lists.

It's become an ingrained ritual that every week I make a "to do" list for the weekend. Some weeks the to do list is crammed full of stuff interesting stuff, but the list is generally composed of exactly the same stuff.

Now this may seem slightly odd, because if it's the same stuff every week, why don't I just remember to do it? Well there's the thing - the few times I've not composed the list I end up forgetting something.

The problem seems to be that most things on the list are very small tasks. They are the work of mere moments, so forgetting to do them is very easy indeed.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the list is that it's also a schedule. So, for example, it not only reminds me I've got to put the rubbish out, but it tells me to do it on Sunday morning. It says Sunday morning because then the large amount of detritus I generate on Saturday (and of course over the preceding week) will get thrown away, but it will also definitely get done before the bin men come.

This is level of pedantry is what makes my lists mine. But marks me out as a very peculiar person indeed is that I rebel against my own lists!

You see, what I do is even though I've said Sunday morning, I'll put it out Sunday afternoon, or even last thing Saturday. I'll do this even though experience has told me that Sunday morning is the best time. I'll do it even though it's only me that's reminding myself that Sunday morning is the best time.

It's one of my major oddities. I'll tend to make the final deadline (the bins are actually collected on Monday mornings), but I have to do it on my own terms.

But there's another key problem of mine in there - I have to have a deadline. It's one of the reasons I'm rubbish at finishing things. I'm horribly lazy - if I've no real deadline then I'll often not bother doing it. But give me a deadline and I'll meet it, though I probably won't do the work when I said I would :/.

Which isn't to say I end up doing everything last minute. Indeed, if there's a proper deadline involved there's a good chance I'll be finished a long way in advance.

That was slightly more introspective than I initially intended, but there you go.

This weekend I've planned to do very little other than my fortnightly flat clean. I've been so tired this last week and with the weather is looking like it's going to continue on in its rainy and windy vein, it didn't seem very wise to plan much so we'll have to see what I get up to.

My guess is lots of Anno playing instead of ticking any of my deadline-less tasks off :/.

the waters of mars

Wow, this week is turning into a mini-review spectacular, huh?

I guess the real shame of that is that it's an admission that I'm failing to watch enough stuff that I can do proper reviews of - anime DVDs, for example.

To be fair, autumn/winter is always a tricky thing for me from that point of view. I mean, the nights draw in and it gets cold out, so I'm even more inclined than normal to stay indoors, but all sorts of new shows always get shown during this period and I end up watching plenty.

Just as a random example - a new series of Top Gear started last weekend. It was quite a good episode as it goes, with the boys driving round Romania looking for a road that was supposed to be the best in the world. One of the highlights was James May being involved in two crashes - one of which involved a Lamborghini!

Anyway, I thought I'd do a super-mini-review of the Doctor Who special that was on last weekend, called the Waters of Mars.

It was pretty good.

Wow, that was short, huh?

But seriously, I think it basically worked. One of the things you don't get so much of in new who is really scary stuff. Well, I say that - to some extent, it's difficult for me to judge as the scares are aimed at a younger audience and I'm a long way from young nowadays.

What I really mean is that in the old format where you had longer storylines it would always end on a cliff hanger, which was inevitably quite scary. I remember lots of monsters leering out of the screen, just about to grab The Doctor / the companion or, indeed, you the viewer.

The new format means you don't tend to get those any more, though I'm sure for the kids there's plenty of stuff that sends them scuttling behind the sofa.

Anyway, the point is the monsters were quite a nasty piece of work in this episode and the use of water (that's not a spoiler really - just read the title) was quite clever as it can flow and splash and all sorts.

Although if I'm fair, the monsters looked more horrible than they actually behaved. They behaved creepily and made lots of faces, but they didn't really do anything like kill people or even really hurt them. Indeed, if I'm honest it was entirely clear what they wanted at all. In a way that was unusual, because it's usually fairly clear if people are good guys or bad guys. Here although the general feel was that yes, they were bad, there wasn't a definitive reason or explanation given for that.

It's a relatively minor gripe, but I think it would have helped a little to give it more of a concrete reason.

The ending was interesting.

The general feel was to try to give The Doctor a darker feel. It depicts him on the very precipice of a plunge into evil. In a way it was quite reminiscent of how you can imagine The Master becoming like he did - absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that.

I did actually think that myself, but they also pointed it out in the Doctor Who Confidential thing they do on BBC4 and I think it was pretty deliberate as the trailer for the next two specials due at Christmas will feature the return of The Master.

I'm looking forward to them - The Master's one of the really good villains and John Simm did a really good job with him when he was in it before.

my name is bruce

Forgot to post this yesterday!

A while back I bought a film called Elvira: Mistress of the Dark on DVD.

I'm still a little unsure quite why I bought it. I think part of the reason was that I'd seen the film years and years ago, but I'd kinda convinced myself that it didn't actually exist. When it randomly popped up on Amazon I therefore bought it.

As reasons go that's pretty damn weird for the sake of full disclosure, I should perhaps mention that the film also has boobs in it. That was undoubtedly a contributing factor too.

Anyway, the point is that the film was... odd. I mean, it wasn't bad, but it also didn't quite work. I think the idea was that it was supposed to be an affectionate send-up of cheesy B movies. The problem was that it also wanted to be a cheesy B movie, so the tone was odd.

Also, the acting was unusual. I dunno, I don't want to say it was bad, it was more like it was too self-aware. It also felt like it was "pausing for laughs" as if it was a TV show with a live audience, except of course it wasn't, it was a film.

So why am I bringing that up? Well because My Name is Bruce was bizarrely similar.

In both films, the lead is kinda involved in the B-horror film world and ends up in the middle of a real life B horror film. In both the feel is weirdly mixed - part affectionate send-up of B movies and part B movie. In both the dialogue is slightly over-worked and there's a feel of "pausing for laughs".

The reason I rented this was because I quite like the Evil Dead films and a while back I bought Bruce Campbell's autobiography. Reading that I hadn't realised there were so many Bruce Campbell films and this was a fairly recent one so I put it on the old rental list.

I wasn't really sure what to expect, but I did enjoy the film, despite the slight cheesiness. There's also an entertaining commentary, which was nice.

I think, however, that you need to have seen more of Campbell's stuff than I have to really enjoy the film. There were a lot of references to films and things that I don't know anything about, so I'm guessing proper Campbell fans would get a bit more mileage.

cod: mw 2

So last week I started playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

And last week I finished playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

It's not the longest of games.

It is one of the best looking FPSs I've ever played. It's also got one of the best soundtracks. And it's really fun when you're actually in there playing the missions. Plus it's got the usual brilliant pre-scripted moments that always made CoD something a bit special.

That's all good stuff. But there are a few bad bits too.

There's the length, as I mentioned - you'll be lucky to get 6 hours game play out of the single-player campaign. That's what I got and I'm rubbish.

Then there' the plot.

I remember when the first Modern Warfare came out I was somewhat sceptical. Part of my reservations were that the CoD franchise had always relied on depicting real-world events during World War 2. I mean, they were semi-fictionalised, but you could go and look up the campaigns and stuff on Wikipedia.

So when the first MW came along I was therefore really surprised that it had a decent plot. Now to be fair it wasn't the most original plot. There was lots of stuff you'd seen before, but what helped it through was the quality of the writing and the non-player characters.

It's less good in MW2. The plot is again very familiar, but it's also now got the problem that it feels like it's retreading what Modern Warfare did. Also, the characters are a little lacking.

Well, I say that - it's more like the game is so short we don't really get a chance to experience the characters as much. I didn't really feel anything towards them like I did before.

Another problem is that we seem to switch all over the place too much. I kept feeling throughout MW2 like I was playing a Bond film. You jet off to all sorts of exotic locations (given the timelines I don't quite know how you get to some of the places you do, but there you go), shoot the natives for a bit and then off you go again.

It's too choppy, too quick. Every level feels like a taster, not the full thing.

It also doesn't help that this time out the plot doesn't quite make sense. I'm going to give a good spoilery now that's also therefore a giant spoiler, so you may want to skip ahead.

Basically, there's a bit where one of the good characters fires off a nuclear missile.

His plan, it seems, is to detonate it in the upper atmosphere, causing an EMP that will knock out all electronic equipment.

Well, I think that's his plan. It's not entirely clear if he's not actually doing it to make it seem like the Russians attacked America, because it's a Russian nuke he fires.

But setting that aside, the whole thing is full of holes, the biggest of which is when the actual nuke detonates. You get this cool bit where you're an astronaut floating in space and you see the nuke fly up and detonate. Fair enough, but for some reason they had the ISS and you being blown away by the force of the blast.

The ISS is high enough up that there's no air - so how is a blast wave hitting the ISS? I mean, it's not like it's next to it - it's way off in the distance.

Plus that brings to mind the other big problem - the hero just set off a nuke over continental USA. He kills everyone in the ISS and how many other civilians, who would presumably be hit by loads of radiation and fallout.

Not to mention the idea is the EMP knocks out all electronics, so what everyone in planes drops out of the car, instantly getting killed?

Some hero.

But what makes that worse is after that no-one goes "he's a bad guy" or "that wasn't cool". They're all perfectly fine with it :/.

There are some other problems too.

One is with the mechanics. CoD has always relied on infinitely spawning enemies. You can literally stand in the same place and kill thousands of enemies as waves of them spawn.

This is okay in some scenarios like where you have a large army coming at you like you used to in the old CoDs, but here you are in several situations where it makes no sense. I mean, just how many bad guys can you fit on an oil rig? Well, millions, apparently, until you walk past the trigger point and they stop spawning.

I mean, really this is an old-hat way of doing things that they should really think about redoing. How about instead properly placed enemies that are tougher to kill with really good AI?

Compounding that problem, there's a problem in the levels set in Brazil that there's only about half a dozen character models. That works when you're being attacked by an effectively faceless regular army - the whole point is that Russian soldiers basically all look the same right?

But when you're in Brazil it's an irregular militia - so civvies with guns. And that means you end up killing the exact same guys over and over and it just ends up looking stupid.

I mean how many moustachioed Freddy Mercury lookalikes are there in Brazil? Hundreds, apparently.

far too efficient

Had a bit of an odd weekend, because I was far too efficient.

As I mentioned on Friday my main plan was to watch all the telly stuff I'd recorded. Indeed, it was so much my plan I hadn't really planned to do anything else.

But I was so efficient I'd watched all of it by mid-day Saturday, so Sunday I had almost nothing to do whatsoever. I ended up filling that whole by playing lots of Anno, which isn't necessarily a good thing, as there were lots of things I could have done that would have served me better, but I dunno, I'm not sure I care at this point in time.

The thing I did do that was kinda more productive was start watching a DVD I picked up the other week called "Monty Python - Almost the Truth - The Lawyers Cut".

Weirdly they showed a kind of super-trimmed down version of this a few weeks ago on BBC as part of a Python night (it's a staggering 40 years since the show started) and I'd assumed initially that this was just that short documentary on DVD, but it turned out this is actually a 6-part series, with each episode being 50 minutes.

Weirdly, the description implies the full 6-part show has been on the telly, but I've only seen that trimmed down version.

I've gotten about half way through - it's pretty good is my feeling so far. Certainly people talk quite candidly about stuff, which is good. I'm not sure about the non-Python bits if I'm honest. I think I'd rather have more of them talking than the interviews with other celebs.

Not that the interviews with celebs aren't okay, just y'know, more from the men themselves would be better.

This morning I've been avoiding work by watching this interview with Charlie Brooker of News/Game/Screen-wipe and Guardian columnist fame.

I'm one of those people that like Charlie Brooker (about his only misfire for me was Trashbat, which I didn't get at all). He's not to everyone's taste, but if you also like him the interview's well worth a watch.

The interviews been up a while, but my traditional routine only means I check out Brooker's guardian page on Monday morning, so I've only just seen it.

saki

I finished Saki this week.

I've been surprised by how much I enjoyed it if I'm honest. I still don't know the exact ins and outs of Mah-jong, and while a full knowledge didn't prove necessary in order to enjoy the show, I think if you know the game you'll probably get on better with some of the stuff.

One of the odd things about Saki is it's a mix of tournament manga where the characters are involved in battles against each other and high-school romcom. For me the blending sort of worked, although the romcom element is a bit weaker than the tournament side.

Also, as I mentioned before, it seems like any girl interested in Mah-jong is basically a lesbian, which although not something I'm entirely against, it gets a bit repetitive in a way. And it'd be nice if there were more complicated relationships in there - love rivals or love triangles for example. But then the sexual stuff is more an undercurrent than an explicit thing, so I guess that'd be going too far really.

The other odd thing is the pacing of the show.

There's quite a lot of prep stuff that builds logically into a regional tournament situation involving teams. This all works fine, but the problem is that doesn't represent the end of the show.

Instead, after this you get a lull and then it's into a second regional tournament involving individuals. Again, this builds to a climax, but then yet again, you get another lull and then you're launched into the nationals.

Except you aren't, because that's where the show ends.

It even goes to the slightly odd extreme of having highlights of 'what happens next' across the end credits and a final card saying "the adventure has only just begun".

Even though it's the end of the series.

And given the manga is only at 6 volumes and Gonzo has pretty much folded, it seems unlikely the story will ever continue. Which is a bit of shame really as it'd be nice to reach a proper conclusion. Maybe the manga will get licensed and I'll be able to follow it there.

Plans for the weekend currently revolve around Modern Warfare 2. In a typically impatient bit of planning, rather than add it to my pile of un-played games I installed it and started playing. As such, I'm not actually sure how much there will be left for me to play over the weekend, but then if I finish it I'll have to catch up on all the telly I've skipped in order to make room for me to watch it, so I won't be lacking things to do.

stuff, stuff and more stuff

This last couple of months I've been drowning in new stuff.

Obviously I'm aware that Christmas is 'just around the corner' so in a way it should be no big surprise, but I dunno, I'd always kinda assumed most of the stuff I buy is rather immune from the Chrimbo effect.

The best example is that I'm collecting quite a few manga series and manga is released periodically. Now for some series that have been going for a while there's a gap between what's being released in the west and where the series is in Japan, so it can only been two or three months between new volumes. For others they're pretty much up with the Japanese, so it's more like one a year.

So if that's the case, how come every single series I'm collecting has volumes out either this month or next month and in some cases in January too. In order for that to happen they must all be trying to release a Christmas volume or two.

Which initially seemed a little illogical to me. If these things are coming out every few months or in the middle of the year then people are buying them anyway. In other words, they're not really Christmas present territory.

Generally, stuff comes out at Christmas because it can then be bought as gifts, you see. The good example of that for stuff I buy is computer games. COD: Modern warfare 2 came out this week and I'm sure it's therefore lodged on a lot of people's Christmas lists (even if it is an 18-rated title).

But then it occurred to me - people get money as a present too, so then it makes more sense to have these 'non-Christmas' items out too. It gives people something to spend their Christmas money on, especially given the manga market has been in a bit of a decline. So it's more like a sensible "alignment" than bringing them out specifically as gift items.

Anyway, the real point of this is that because I pre-order everything on Amazon ages in advance I don't tend to pay attention to the dates. And because of how complex the dates are I generally set everything to deliver "as soon as possible". I mean, it doesn't make sense if you're ordering two things, one of which goes on sale in October 2009 and the other in August 2010 to put it as "despatch together" does it?

Well no, but this means that over the last couple of weeks I've received a constant stream of parcels of new stuff. Indeed, it's gotten to the stage that it's sucked all of the money out of my bank account. Considering I keep about £200 in that account and each book only costs about £8 delivered, you get some idea how many things have been sent.

In fact I've actually switched the payment method over to a credit card because I just don't have the cash to cover it all and I swore I'd never do that after I racked up so much debt before :/.

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 :/.