27/May/2012

An open letter to the spider on the washing line

You don't need to put cobwebs on the clothes pegs. You don't need to put any on my jeans, either. You don't -- look, no webs on the washing line, alright? It's a good job you're doing, and you seem like a really efficient worker, but it's wasted out here. They're mighty fine webs, but I don't think any bugs are going to be interested in my pants. We could probably make an arrangement where I make my pants a bug paradise, and you could...

Look, just get a hobby.

Love, Mark.

I'd meant to have a Bomberman update, but I'm having computer problems. Namely, I can't get past the boot cycle!
In my infinite wisdom, I installed XP Service Pack 3, and Microsoft's site ever so kindly didn't bother telling me the million or so hoops you need to jump through just so it won't fuck up your computer. After looking for a safe way to remove it, I'm told that just doing a bog-standard uninstall should do the trick... and now I can't access my desktop. Thanks a bunch, SP3! Thank you straight to hell.
Amusingly, I installed the service pack in the first place because a program wouldn't run until I had SP3. Now that it's working, it doesn't do what I wanted. Wahey!
I'm not hindered too badly by this - I last made a backup in April, and I honestly have no clue what I've done all this month (it's nearly June already?!), so the possibility of lost files is nothing to cry over (I hope!). Not having a machine is just a bit of a bummer, though!
Thought I'd keep all two of you posted.

16/May/2012

"Oohh, this is candy, I'm having fun!"

While up in the Donegore garden centre, I discovered alongside pastiches of the "keep calm and carry on" posters, sentimental tea towels and other kitsch, boxes of Lucky Charms were being sold.
Selling cereal alongside ornaments is odd, yes, but this is the first time I've ever seen Lucky Charms in person. I'm serious! As far as I am aware, Lucky Charms are not sold in Northern Ireland. Every mildly tourist-y location in the country will try and shill plush leprechauns, leprechaun keychains, leprechaun clothing and all manner of leprechaun tat, but no one has capitalised on selling leprechaun approved foodstuffs. I don't even know if they're sold in England; a few years ago an acquaintance in England threatened to send me some, though nothing came of it. I can't remember if she just bought hers from a local store, or if she had to import them. Either way, it was a kind offer!

This box cost £7. That's not cheap. For reference, cereals in Northern Ireland are kinda bog-standard! It's all flavoured flakes or rice crispies or "o" shapes, and the very thought of marshmallows in cereal confuses and confounds me. You can find Kellogg's stuff on every shelf for about £3 or more, and cheap shops will usually stock no-name al-Qaeda cereals* for a pound, and that's about it. If you want your cereal infested with candy or deluged in dripping honey, then you'll need to enter the shaky world of homebrew cereals. That's a bad road.
* It's a Max & Paddy's Road To Nowhere joke, nothing to worry about.

The box is practically a big ol' advertisement for DC Comics. There's a mini Justice League comic book inside, a cut-out Batman mask on the back, and it promotes the Green Lantern cartoon on the side. Why they don't just have Lucky join the Green Lantern Corps is beyond me.

My only direct experience with the Justice League is through one episode of Justice League Unlimited episode "This Little Piggy", which only had Batman and Wonder Woman, and they barely even shared the screen if I recall. The comic's pretty bog-standard, save for a couple of goofy looking panels. They also have online continuations! For all the bad shit I hear about DC nowadays, I give them credit for trying to hook in kids with these things.

That said, I can't even look at any splash image of the Justice League without hearing in my head, "NEVER FEAR, WHITE PEOPLE ARE HERE!"
While I'm making bad jokes, it tells you to get a parent to cut out the Batman mask. That must be painful for him.

So, after all this build-up, what's the cereal like? Well, it's not bad. It's definitely a different experience from the boring ol' cereals you get over here. The bulk of the dish has a strange resemblance to Sugar Puffs, though I haven't eaten those in years so I'm probably talking rubbish. The marshmallows aren't a completely alien addition, they work pretty well. I can still taste the sugar rush, though, so I probably won't be eating it right before bedtime. That's one of life's mysteries solved.
Funnily enough, the garden centre had a couple of other American foodstuffs available! At least, I thought they were American imports - I read that a few of these are available in the Republic of Ireland, apparently? I can't personally vouch for it without catching a few trains in that directing and carousing through a few grocery stores, but hey, interesting info.

Reese's Pieces advertises that they got peanut butter in crunchy shells! I became a sucker for peanut butter chocolate back when Wes mailed me stuff a couple of years ago (and has been threatening to send more - and I've nothing to repay him with! Do they have Jelly Tots in the USA?), so I was looking forward to these. They're okay. They taste nice and all, but at this scale you can barely taste the peanut butter; it's like eating M&Ms or Smarties, and then something in the back of your mouth reminds you, "oh, there's a lick of peanut butter in these. Well ain't that something." It's a small bag, and I got a bit sick of them halfway through. My sweet tooth is not what it used to be. Can't compare to Take 5s, though.
I'm familiar with the old Tootsie Pop commercial, but I never knew of Tootsie Rolls. It's basically just toffee, isn't it? It was okay, but I can't say I was too impressed. I get the impression the real excitement is about the lollies, because how many times do you see a wad of chocolate on a stick? ... that is what it is, right? Man, I'm gonna be so disappointed if it isn't.

... at one point I had a good way of segueing into this topic, but it's gone now: It's funny how other countries interpret American pop culture, so to speak. Thanks to the internet or even just regular media, it's so easy to discover all kinds of in-jokes and references to bits of pop culture that are complete unknown outside the country. That old ad of the Native American crying about garbage is parodied a lot, but it wasn't until the internet I ever saw the original; until then I had only ever seen parodies, like in Wayne's World 2 and The Simpsons. I thought the former was where it originated from, and thought the latter was referencing it. Funny how things work.

10/May/2012

Bomberman Fantasy Race has been ported to the new layout. Not much actually new, but you don't have to look at that awful dark green tiled backdrop any more.

Watched The Birds. A few days ago I'd caught that episode of The Simpsons that parodies it with the babies in the daycare centre, and figured, hey, let's check out the source material!

Melanie Daniels, entranced by a hotshot lawyer named Mitch that pesters her in a pet shop, seeks out his home to bask in his company for a while longer. Mitch lives with his mother and sister, and is apparently renowned for being a bit of a lady killer; the local school teacher lived far away once, but chose to stay to be in touch with him. Mitch's mother worries not that her son will be with another woman, but fears of being abandoned with no one to love her. As such, Melanie earns her automatic scorn, but as time goes by, the two wind up warming up a little to each other, with the hope that eventually HEY HOLY SHIT BIRD ATTACK

Yeah, I knew Hitchcock's films can be long-winded and spend a lot of time on something that's ultimately rather meaningless (as intriguing as it was, the plot around the girl's first identity in Vertigo was basically something to tide the audience over until the real plot kicked in), but The Birds was a bit like a romantic drama/soap opera about the human emotions and desire to be wanted had a head-on collision with a zombie movie (with birds!). And then fell down the stairs somewhere along the line.
Sure, there's bird attacks within the first hour, but for the first seventy five minutes, the inter-personal relationships between Mitch, his mother, his sister, the school teacher and Melanie are what dominates the picture. It's not your typical horror movie "hi then die," this is over half the movie dedicated to the goings-on of the townspeople, with a lot of complex relationships going on.

The worst bit about this is that the acting is really stilted. I admit I am plenty biased and have come to expect old-timey films to have rather dodgy acting, but a lot of it isn't bad. Vertigo was perfectly enjoyable, and I got rather engaged in the character drama. This, however, spends seventy five minutes of time on the drama between these people, and they felt like marionettes bouncing around. Actually, the leading lady reminded me a hell of a lot of Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds - they share a similar car, they share a similar look, and they're both just as wooden! I should be soft considering this was the actress's first film, and I'm hardly a talented actor myself (and certainly don't have a pretty face to fall back on), but my god, for a film that tries to be about human drama, they don't feel like humans.

But the movie is shot well. Really, really well. Spectacularly well. The cinematography is beautiful, and there are plenty of really fantastic scene setups. A lot of the shots, especially with the birds roosting around the town, have a strange, dream-like quality to them, especially the iconic ending shot. The first twenty minutes are dedicated just to Melanie tracking down Mitch; barely a thing happens, but seeing the great landscape views makes it worthwhile. The premise of killer birds is a rather iffy one, but Hitchcock knows how to shoot a film about them without it getting too corny. The imagery of the flapping creatures and the downright spooky electronic chattering and fluttering, it combines to make some truly devilish scenes.
... but the acting! My god, the acting! I wasn't a big fan of the little girl in the first place, but after a haunting scene of the school teacher found dead on the front step of their house, the three characters drive away in silence to safety... and then she has to start blubbering and explaining what happened. I could live with the iffy direction, but this was the one scene that really ground my gears. You had a perfectly good visual setup there! That one scene explained everything! I don't need to be told she got the little girl to safety! CUT!!
Mind you, Hitchcock is pretty renowned for treating actors like trash, so I can imagine that's why the acting is bad. The actors might have been perfectly talented individuals for all I know, but this was most certainly not the film to persuade me.

The premise of killer birds is really fascinating. I'm just a sucker for birds, plain and simple. Why do you think I've got these photos of them on hand? I love them, I respect them, and I'm also aware just how freaky they can be. My dad didn't really like the 'behaviour' of the birds in the film - they act as lethal threats one minute, and then ominous bystanders the next. Personally, I dig it. Take zombies, for instance - they're brutish, brain-eating monsters, but since they bear a human image, we cast certain traits upon them, so to speak. Characters tend to predict their attitudes and behaviours, and they can serve as ham-fisted social commentary.
But birds, man, who the fuck knows what's going through their heads? Birds be crazy! And that creates a very alien threat - how do you know how they'll behave the next time you see them? Dad suggested a few ideas, even brief visual themes just to ground the threat a little. The sheer lack of predictability is part of the appeal to me. And let's face it, we only see the bird attacks through the eyes of the main characters - as far as I recall, there's no major cutaways to show what the birds are up to now.

My main beef with the film is that nothing really gels. There's a lot of fantastic elements, but none of it clicks together as well as it could do. A huge amount of time is dedicated to these dudes and we learn a lot about their relations and emotions, and I kept expecting some sort of theme to run from it... but nothing comes of it. Melanie talks about how her mother abandoned her family, and as such she doesn't have a mother figure in her life - at least, not one she respects. Mitch's mother doesn't like Melanie, but the two do warm up a little, and by the end the mother tends to her wounds, and the last shot of them is of Melanie leaning against the mother warmly. Does that signify, hey, she found the mother figure in her life? I guess? Really, that's about the only storytelling theme I got out of the movie. Besides "don't fuck with birds."
Personally, I expected the mother's abandonment worries to come up again. You've got a horror scenario where the characters want to make a break for freedom, but are trapped indoors; it would be easier to escape alone than as a group, but nobody wants to die alone. It's a terrible thing to think, but when Mitch was preparing the car for the getaway I was expecting him to take the car and just fuck off on his own. There's your abandonment issue, bitch!

Like a lot of films, I'm glad I watched if just so I can say I watched it. Some fantastic elements, but none of it really clicks. I can hardly judge when I've only seen one other of his films, but it's a very shaky one for Hitchcock. I've only seen bits and pieces of Psycho, but I get the impression "monster horror" isn't quite his forté. Still, good to discuss.

Today's observation: If there's one thing of showing how productive you are, it's by griping about the internet!
Is it just me, or is there a trend of sites (mostly Tumblrs, it seems) sporting impossibly small text and/or hard-to-read font colours?

I can live with the small fonts (I'm guilty of it!); most browsers at least have a zoom function, so you don't need to jam your face all up against the monitor like you did ten years ago. But the colours... for god's sake, why? Does very light-grey text against a white backdrop suddenly become legible if you read it on a phone? Does everyone just hit Ctrl+A before they attempt reading any web pages nowadays? Is not being able to read a damn thing the "in" thing nowadays? On one hand I'd like to know why, but on the other hand if someone has to justify why they deliberately chose such a monstrously bad design, I don't think I'd want to hear it.
(my excuse for the terrible blog layout is that I can't understand WordPress to save my life)

06/May/2012

"This is probably a stupid question, but do you hire real birds to make your chilli, or do you just get guys in costume?"

... I asked the canary wearing a chef's hat.

Today's observation: I have no idea what last night's dream was all about. It involved going go-carting with my friends; being invited to a group of medieval knights living in the mountains (who called themselves the Nigerian Knights, but had surprisingly few Nigerians); a group of canaries making chilli as a tie-in promotion for the Super Mario Bros. movie; and an arcade game based off M*A*S*H, with Game Over screens featuring shocking amounts of blood and gore from the main characters.

Today's epiphany: My dreams have better writing than my actual writing.

03/May/2012

So, uh, I decided to go back to an unfinished project I started a little over four years ago. I sure hope somebody's still interested in that stupid thing, otherwise I'll have killed an afternoon for naught! (if anything, it's better to have killed an afternoon for something you can still look at afterwards. You wouldn't believe the evenings I've totally wasted in trying to complete campaigns of Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil 5 on the hardest difficulty)
Also, some sprites. That's about it for the update.