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.