The Clone Wars: A Brief Review
We went to see it on a whim, and it was surprisingly good. The voice acting is a bit dodgy in patches, but it’s not unbearable. In general, both the plot and the character interactions were better done and more interesting than in the steaming pile of crap that was the entire prequel trilogy. I actually sort of liked Anakin: he had a lot more personality than his live-action counterpart.
Amidala gets to have an adventure all by herself, and pwn bad guys with her mad senatorial skillz. There’s a new female hero and a new(ish) female villain (and they only fight each other for a couple of seconds). There are amusing (and short-lived) droid grunts. If they made a plush Baby Hutt, I’d totally get one.
If you’ve been depressed about the current state of the franchise, this should cheer you up at least a little bit.
Schrödinger’s minister
So Trevor Manuel has simultaneously resigned and not resigned. We’ll finally know his state when someone peeks into his office and collapses the wave function. I made this joke purely for the sake of generating an interesting title for my post, and I apologise.
Hellboy 2 was awesome; it’s really nice to be able to say that about a cinema movie for a change. Abe’s makeup was better than in the first movie. I liked the story. I’ve heard of some people saying it’s not very “Hellboy” — but the tragic decline of the pre-human magical races (and their continual attempts to get Hellboy on their side) is a major theme in the comics (”lovecraftian horrors from space try to eat the world” is the other one).
Abe has his own comic spin-off! I have ordered the first trade, but publication appears to have been delayed. I’m also getting the Lobster Johnson trade — I may as well collect the lot.
I am reading the InuYasha manga. Scanlations are funny. It’s very rare for fan translators to have a flawless grasp of English grammar — and they have a tendency to be obsessively faithful to the original text, so if they encounter something difficult to translate they prefer to provide a half-page explanatory footnote than to pick an equivalent but not identical English phrase. Also, since this is generally a youth-friendly manga, I’m pretty sure that InuYasha doesn’t keep saying “fuck” and “bitch” in the official English translation.
I have installed Privoxy at home, and cleaned up some of my previous hacky ad- and cookie-blocking measures (huge blacklist in my browser, mostly pointless since I was not accepting cookies by default and thus only using the whitelist; huge wodge of domains in my hosts file, etc.). The first advantage that Privoxy has over all this crap is that it understands wildcards. Thanks to this, I will not have to allow cookies from every single LJ/Blogger domain individually. And for my next trick, I hope to be able to tell Privoxy to extend the life of LiveJournal’s cookies beyond the session — I’m not a prolific poster, but unless I am logged in (with openid), I keep running into the infuriating new adult content filters[1].
[1] This is what self-policing enforced by vague threats and imprecise rules looks like. Anyone who thinks they might occasionally mention sex in a post (i.e. is a normal person) sticks these on their entire journal, just in case. And of course the anonymous reader is assumed by LiveJournal to be a minor, and subjected to the most extreme filtering by default. I’m an adult. Why do I have to wrestle with childproof caps on my interwebs?
Wildlife photos
My photographs, let me show you them:
Lemurs! Monkeys! Tortoises! Surprise cat! Poultry! Indistinct floaty things with flippers!
It’s alive!
After some misadventures with dynamic DNS, we’re moving our stuff to the lovely CLAWs server in the UK. Yay, countries with less crappy internet.
Notable recent events in no particular order:
Dragonfire happened, and it was cool. Then Hodgestar and I went to Jo’burg (or rather its outskirts) to visit the HartRAO observatory, where work keeps its test radiotelescope, and where we climbed into the 26m dish. Jo’burg and flying made me a bit ill, but the telescopes were awesome.
More recently, we belatedly celebrated Hodgestar’s birthday with a trip to Monkey Town with a bunch of people (longer review and photos forthcoming; you must go there and see the mongoose lemurs, which are like kitties with opposable thumbs).
We went to the awesome second-hand bookshop in Gordon’s Bay, which is huge and impossible to explore thoroughly in less than a week. I got some random scifi, and an old book on lacemaking for R3.
Afterwards we went for a walk on the beach, and I found some exciting flotsam: a not-quite-dead hermit crab with no shell (I think) which I threw back into the sea, mostly unbroken wrap-around sunglasses, filed to a matt finish by the sand, and a barbie leg (not an authentic barbie leg; a cheap imitation plastic doll leg) which I left there for some unfortunate small child with a one-legged barbie to find. I intend to make the sunglasses into a steampunky set of Goggles of Uselessness. They are useless, because the matt surface makes them impossible to see through. They could theoretically be helpful for sleeping in the car. I might write a whole LARP around this prop (which doesn’t exist yet).
Then we went to Hermanus with Akika and drnlm, and saw lots of whales really close up (photos forthcoming). We went to a nursery with Hodgestar’s mom, because they had bonsai there. Hodgestar selected what is allegedly a chinese hackberry, which looks tree-like and has cute little leaves. We have been reading about bonsai on teh interwebs. Apparently the hackberry is easy to care for, and since we have neither aircon nor central heating, and a place outdoors to keep it if it’s miserable inside, we are unlikely to kill it.
I ordered a lot of graphic novels from Outer Limits and they rather surprisingly arrived all at the same time, including the Hellboy stuff from Dark Horse, which has traditionally been held up for months by mysterious forces of import and export. (Adeeb says that Diamond has improved its internet presence, which has made it easier to complain when they’ve stuffed something up.) I’m all caught up on B.P.R.D., I’m still waiting for Hellboy 8 (7 arrived), I got a lot of random lovecraftian stuff from Boom! studios, and I have all the A Distant Soil that’s been written so far.
And now for some actual photos:
- The samurai LARP that ate a month of our lives. It worked out rather well.
- Dragonfire during the day
- The Fountain of Youth, Beth’s LARP, which we helped DM.
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
- I just nuked my Facebook account. When the boat anchor starts biting your ankles, it's time to let go.
- @firstfallen I don't think you're being oversensitive. Waiting would have cost little and been worth a lot. They chose to be dicks about it.
- @firstfallen They all deserve to be summoned to a compulsory team-building workshop on Christmas Eve. :P
- I think encasing the whole block in this tree would make the street look much better. Cut window and door holes. http://tinyurl.com/2vjhg3m
