I really need a haircut - I'm getting a serious case of mop-hair - so hopefully I'll get the chance to pop down the barbers this weekend and get a trim.
My landlord has been away on his winter holiday for the last two weeks and should be getting back today. Not sure what time, but I guess he'll back by the time I get back from work.
He actually went to Sharm El Sheikh, which is where they had all those shark attacks a while ago. I recommended avoiding swimming, as you would.
His absence was actually what spurred me into sorting through the boxes last weekend, as it can be rather disruptive with me leaving them all over the place, so I tend to like to use the opportunity of them going away to sort through them. Rather annoyingly, though, although he's been away for the best part of two weeks, his holiday only overlapped with one weekend.
He went on a Monday and is coming back today - a Friday, so that's only weekend. It'd have been better for my aching muscles (it took until Wednesday before I could really say they were feeling okay again) if I'd been able to spread it over two weekends.
The only other thing I've got to do this weekend is tackle the huge pile of ironing that's built up. This shouldn't be too great a task and I can watch telly while I iron, so it's no great shakes. What I'm hoping to do is more scanning, probably doing a few more animages.
If I'm honest I'm not wholly enamoured of the new scanning process.
Basically, the post-computer update situation means that I've now got a new, reasonably powerful PC running windows 7 as my regular machine. I've bought and installed Photoshop CS5 and a new Cannon scanner.
The big problem I had was that my old A3 scanner is not compatible with windows 7. But also, I was never really happy with the quality of the scans it produced. It was massively convenient to be able to scan an entire poster that the Japanese magazines give away in one go, but the end result was not that brilliant. It was also relatively slow and obviously quite cumbersome piece of kit. To be fair, it was a cheap scanner, so I shouldn't be too harsh given the advantages it gave me.
Anyway, point is that the new system involves using an A4 scanner, but making use of the photo-stitching tool that was introduced some time around CS2. The results are mixed.
First off, the scanner is a lot quicker and gives better image quality than the old A4 scanner. But I now have to scan every page at least twice - 4 times for the posters. The reason fro this (and why I bought an A3 scanner in the first place) is that all of the Japanese anime magazines are in weird sizes - they're all slightly bigger than A4, so you can't scan a page in a single go.
The net effect then is that scanning takes longer because although it's quicker it's not that much quicker, but also because I'm having to crop and save twice as many pictures.
However, there's also a whole new step where I have to load up the images and put them through the photostich process to stick them together. This obviously add a whole load of extra time, but also the results are really random.
Sometime you load things up and set it going and the results are perfect. Other times, they're rubbish. Most of the time they need some manual tweak - a slight nudge of one of the pictures to get it to line up properly. And of course this is even more time consuming, but also can be very frustrating.
So yeah - it's a real mixed bag.
Friday, 21 January 2011
Thursday, 20 January 2011
inception
My dad has broadband from BT and as part of the package he gets a set-top box that has freeview on it, but it also gives him access to movies that he can stream. He has to pay for them of course - it's effectively a streaming rental.
Anyway, over the Chrimbo period we watched a few films, but rather than review all of them I thought I'd just do the one that was most entertaining, which was Christopher Nolan's Inception.
Obviously I'd been aware of Inception as it had quite a buzz about it, as they say, and I knew it had something to do with dreams. I should also note that I have a bit of a tricky time with Nolan's stuff - some of it I've really enjoyed, like Memento, other stuff I wasn't as impressed as everybody else seemed to be, like his Batman films, and then some I thought was rubbish, like Insomnia.
What I wasn't expecting from Inception was that it was going to be quite so complicated.
The film actually involves what are actually something like shared, lucid dreams - although they're still basically dreams, the people in them know they're dreams and can construct and manipulate them. This is already quite a complicated concept to get your head around as to how it works in the film, but later on they then go into dreams within dreams and things get really complicated.
By the end I think I'm right in saying you've got a triple-dream sandwich, where there's a dream within a dream, within a dream. It's complicated enough to write, let alone watch.
And what adds even more confusion is that this is all a mission to implant a thought in somebody's head, but to do so in such a way that they believe it's an original thought that they came up with themselves, rather than an implanted thought. Which is what the title is about - the inception of an idea.
So yeah - complicated, and so with the potential to be too confusing to understand. But it somehow manages to just stay on the side of the line that keeps it understandable.
I think part of how it does this is by treating the adults as intelligent people. So it doesn't feel the need to constantly explain everything - it does tell you stuff, but that's more about the mechanics than the fundamental plot or ideas. Instead it shows you the story and then lets you work stuff out for yourself.
So yeah, I thought it was really quite good - clever, with a good mix of action and ideas.
Anyway, over the Chrimbo period we watched a few films, but rather than review all of them I thought I'd just do the one that was most entertaining, which was Christopher Nolan's Inception.
Obviously I'd been aware of Inception as it had quite a buzz about it, as they say, and I knew it had something to do with dreams. I should also note that I have a bit of a tricky time with Nolan's stuff - some of it I've really enjoyed, like Memento, other stuff I wasn't as impressed as everybody else seemed to be, like his Batman films, and then some I thought was rubbish, like Insomnia.
What I wasn't expecting from Inception was that it was going to be quite so complicated.
The film actually involves what are actually something like shared, lucid dreams - although they're still basically dreams, the people in them know they're dreams and can construct and manipulate them. This is already quite a complicated concept to get your head around as to how it works in the film, but later on they then go into dreams within dreams and things get really complicated.
By the end I think I'm right in saying you've got a triple-dream sandwich, where there's a dream within a dream, within a dream. It's complicated enough to write, let alone watch.
And what adds even more confusion is that this is all a mission to implant a thought in somebody's head, but to do so in such a way that they believe it's an original thought that they came up with themselves, rather than an implanted thought. Which is what the title is about - the inception of an idea.
So yeah - complicated, and so with the potential to be too confusing to understand. But it somehow manages to just stay on the side of the line that keeps it understandable.
I think part of how it does this is by treating the adults as intelligent people. So it doesn't feel the need to constantly explain everything - it does tell you stuff, but that's more about the mechanics than the fundamental plot or ideas. Instead it shows you the story and then lets you work stuff out for yourself.
So yeah, I thought it was really quite good - clever, with a good mix of action and ideas.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
down, not up
I thought I'd switch things up this week and post reviews on Tuesday and Thursday, in order to help me catch up. I also think I've decided to do reviews of crunchyroll shows on here, rather than on my website proper. Actually, the whole website refresh thing has hit a bit of a brick wall, so dunno what's ultimately going to happen with the site.
Anyway, point is today I'm going to do the weekly weight post.
Last week I was anticipating a small gain or, at best, no change, but actually I had a two pound loss. This loss actually takes me below where I was before my chrimbo splurge.
I must admit I'm actually at a bit of a loss to explain the Christmas splurge. Or at least, at a bit of a loss to explain why the net effect has been so minimal.
Last time I went off-diet was when I had my holiday at the end of last summer. On that occasion I was pretty good for the beginning of the week and did lots of walking throughout the week, but at the end of the week I went seriously "off piste" and ate lots of junk. This had the effect of meaning the week was effectively nullified - I lost and gained nothing.
This last Chrimbo, I essentially stopped my diet, but exercise was partly scuppered by the weather, but also self-sabotaged by my being silly about not building up the distance I was walking. The point being that I didn't do a spectacular amount of exercise, ate fairly badly and have ended up roughly where I started.
My theory last week was to do with slow bowels, and I still basically believe that, but I also wonder if the decreased size of my stomach had a roll to play. See, while I was eating badly, I have to admit I was struggling to eat the sorts of volumes of food I remember eating pre-diet.
There were quite a few days where I'd eat a really big roast lunch (as previously mentioned I came back from my dad with way more roast stuff that I was expecting) and then I'd be so full I would only eat a little bit extra later on. The difficulty there is that the little bit extra would tend to be a few sweets or biscuits, so I dunno.
Anyway, I'm over-analysing. The point is I lost a couple of pounds and lesson learned - I won't make any sort of prediction about this next weekend. It could go up or down or stay the same.
Anyway, point is today I'm going to do the weekly weight post.
Last week I was anticipating a small gain or, at best, no change, but actually I had a two pound loss. This loss actually takes me below where I was before my chrimbo splurge.
I must admit I'm actually at a bit of a loss to explain the Christmas splurge. Or at least, at a bit of a loss to explain why the net effect has been so minimal.
Last time I went off-diet was when I had my holiday at the end of last summer. On that occasion I was pretty good for the beginning of the week and did lots of walking throughout the week, but at the end of the week I went seriously "off piste" and ate lots of junk. This had the effect of meaning the week was effectively nullified - I lost and gained nothing.
This last Chrimbo, I essentially stopped my diet, but exercise was partly scuppered by the weather, but also self-sabotaged by my being silly about not building up the distance I was walking. The point being that I didn't do a spectacular amount of exercise, ate fairly badly and have ended up roughly where I started.
My theory last week was to do with slow bowels, and I still basically believe that, but I also wonder if the decreased size of my stomach had a roll to play. See, while I was eating badly, I have to admit I was struggling to eat the sorts of volumes of food I remember eating pre-diet.
There were quite a few days where I'd eat a really big roast lunch (as previously mentioned I came back from my dad with way more roast stuff that I was expecting) and then I'd be so full I would only eat a little bit extra later on. The difficulty there is that the little bit extra would tend to be a few sweets or biscuits, so I dunno.
Anyway, I'm over-analysing. The point is I lost a couple of pounds and lesson learned - I won't make any sort of prediction about this next weekend. It could go up or down or stay the same.
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
paprika
Paprika was directed by a guy called Satoshi Kon.
Sadly, Satoshi Kon recently passed away. He was well known outside of Japan, particularly among anime fans, as a bit of an innovative genius. Satoshi Kon also directed a film called Perfect Blue, which was probably the first anime film I ever saw that told me anime could do proper films.
Well, that's not quite true - Akira was the first film to do it; Perfect Blue was the film that showed it wasn't a one off fluke.
Paprika has been on my rental list for a while, so when it recently turned up it was therefore tinged with a little bit of sadness.
The film does show flashes of that genius I was mentioning, but it's unfortunately not entirely a success. The problem, really, is it's shot through with a lot of techno-babble and a rather confused plot. The plot is also a little over-dense - it's adapted from a novel and has the feeling of trying to include too much in the time it has.
Paprika is essentially about dreams.
A device has been invented that seems to allow people to enter, control and manipulate their dreams at will. However, in doing so, the device also seems to enable a degree of mind control. The victims of this control then occupy a kind of waking dream state, where they're dreaming, but still running around - a bit like a kind of sleep-walking.
The good side of it is that this dream-world allows for a fluid grasp on reality that seems to suit animation and Satoshi Kon perfectly. The bad side is that the above plot is quite complicated and convoluted and there's a bit too much focus on the technology, and not quite enough on the people.
Which is a shame, as when the film is firing on all cylinders during the dream sequences, it's quite spectacular. Indeed, I'd whole-heartedly recommend catching it just for these bits alone.
There is one other criticism I would make, though - come of the voices don't really match the characters. In particular, the super-fat genius guy seems to have a too light, high pitched child-like voice and the main woman seems to have a bit too 'girly' a voice.
In the case of the fat guy, I think this is supposed to reflect his character, but both voices do just seem to jar with what's on screen. I dunno - it's difficult to explain, and these styles of voices are roughly carried over into the American dub, so I get the feeling it's deliberate, but for me it didn't quite work.
Sadly, Satoshi Kon recently passed away. He was well known outside of Japan, particularly among anime fans, as a bit of an innovative genius. Satoshi Kon also directed a film called Perfect Blue, which was probably the first anime film I ever saw that told me anime could do proper films.
Well, that's not quite true - Akira was the first film to do it; Perfect Blue was the film that showed it wasn't a one off fluke.
Paprika has been on my rental list for a while, so when it recently turned up it was therefore tinged with a little bit of sadness.
The film does show flashes of that genius I was mentioning, but it's unfortunately not entirely a success. The problem, really, is it's shot through with a lot of techno-babble and a rather confused plot. The plot is also a little over-dense - it's adapted from a novel and has the feeling of trying to include too much in the time it has.
Paprika is essentially about dreams.
A device has been invented that seems to allow people to enter, control and manipulate their dreams at will. However, in doing so, the device also seems to enable a degree of mind control. The victims of this control then occupy a kind of waking dream state, where they're dreaming, but still running around - a bit like a kind of sleep-walking.
The good side of it is that this dream-world allows for a fluid grasp on reality that seems to suit animation and Satoshi Kon perfectly. The bad side is that the above plot is quite complicated and convoluted and there's a bit too much focus on the technology, and not quite enough on the people.
Which is a shame, as when the film is firing on all cylinders during the dream sequences, it's quite spectacular. Indeed, I'd whole-heartedly recommend catching it just for these bits alone.
There is one other criticism I would make, though - come of the voices don't really match the characters. In particular, the super-fat genius guy seems to have a too light, high pitched child-like voice and the main woman seems to have a bit too 'girly' a voice.
In the case of the fat guy, I think this is supposed to reflect his character, but both voices do just seem to jar with what's on screen. I dunno - it's difficult to explain, and these styles of voices are roughly carried over into the American dub, so I get the feeling it's deliberate, but for me it didn't quite work.
Monday, 17 January 2011
rain, rain
Rain, rain, go away, come back another day.
Not sure if this seems insensitive given what's happened in Australia and Brazil, but we seem to have been rained on constantly for weeks now. Obviously nothing like the scale of what they've had and they are massive tragedies, but this is my blog so I can only really talk about what's happening to me.
This morning's journey to work was horrible. We've had rain in some form pretty much every day for several weeks, but this morning it was really coming down. And given I set off for work in the dark and just when the traffic's starting to build for rush hour, you can guess why it wasn't much fun.
There's one part of the A31 in particular that seems to form a stream with even the slightest rain. Today it was like driving through a small river. I was actually overtaking a slow moving vehicle and managed to just be in its spray when we hit the river and my windscreen was completely wiped out by it. It took two or three swipes before I could see again, which was not nice.
I guess about the only good thing to say about it is that at least it's coming down as rain and not snow!
Oh - on that note, last weekend when I went shopping the snow had finally cleared from Tesco's car park. It obviously snowed some time back, and they'd piled it all up and the mound they created took ages to go - it was rather bizarre seeing it when it was turning mild and all the other snow had gone, but there was this big pile of nearly black snow.
This last weekend was predicted to be a little bit of a respite from the rain and although it did drizzle a couple of times, I took the combined opportunity of my landlord being away on his winter holiday to sort through some of the boxes in the shed.
My two main goals were to move some stuff that's drifted into my flat back out to the shed and to sort out the blue boxes, which contain my scanned magazines and artbooks. I did these, but it was incredibly hard work and I'm still aching badly today.
What I didn't do was sort all of the boxes. I'd hoped to make a complete list of what was in every box and to wrap everything up in plastic bags, but this proved to be just too much to achieve in one day. I did more than half of it, but when it got to dinner time and I was still way off I decided to quite while I was ahead.
On Sunday I also cleaned the car and, because it was flat-cleaning weekend but I'd been so busy with the boxes, I cleaned my flat then too. It was, to be frank, quite the painful experience as I really ached on the Sunday.
Anyway, at least now I've got a bunch of stuff identified to e-bay, so I can get that ball rolling. Well, assuming we're not going to get a sudden covering of snow as I seem to remember happened last year.
Not sure if this seems insensitive given what's happened in Australia and Brazil, but we seem to have been rained on constantly for weeks now. Obviously nothing like the scale of what they've had and they are massive tragedies, but this is my blog so I can only really talk about what's happening to me.
This morning's journey to work was horrible. We've had rain in some form pretty much every day for several weeks, but this morning it was really coming down. And given I set off for work in the dark and just when the traffic's starting to build for rush hour, you can guess why it wasn't much fun.
There's one part of the A31 in particular that seems to form a stream with even the slightest rain. Today it was like driving through a small river. I was actually overtaking a slow moving vehicle and managed to just be in its spray when we hit the river and my windscreen was completely wiped out by it. It took two or three swipes before I could see again, which was not nice.
I guess about the only good thing to say about it is that at least it's coming down as rain and not snow!
Oh - on that note, last weekend when I went shopping the snow had finally cleared from Tesco's car park. It obviously snowed some time back, and they'd piled it all up and the mound they created took ages to go - it was rather bizarre seeing it when it was turning mild and all the other snow had gone, but there was this big pile of nearly black snow.
This last weekend was predicted to be a little bit of a respite from the rain and although it did drizzle a couple of times, I took the combined opportunity of my landlord being away on his winter holiday to sort through some of the boxes in the shed.
My two main goals were to move some stuff that's drifted into my flat back out to the shed and to sort out the blue boxes, which contain my scanned magazines and artbooks. I did these, but it was incredibly hard work and I'm still aching badly today.
What I didn't do was sort all of the boxes. I'd hoped to make a complete list of what was in every box and to wrap everything up in plastic bags, but this proved to be just too much to achieve in one day. I did more than half of it, but when it got to dinner time and I was still way off I decided to quite while I was ahead.
On Sunday I also cleaned the car and, because it was flat-cleaning weekend but I'd been so busy with the boxes, I cleaned my flat then too. It was, to be frank, quite the painful experience as I really ached on the Sunday.
Anyway, at least now I've got a bunch of stuff identified to e-bay, so I can get that ball rolling. Well, assuming we're not going to get a sudden covering of snow as I seem to remember happened last year.
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