2010. The year that South Africa hosts the Fifa World Cup. It's been hyped up for so many years that I have a little trouble believing that it's actually happening in only a few months.
And, after that time, it'll be over. No more TV adverts about what Telkom is doing to prepare for 2010, no more new signs and painted roads to make the country attractive for tourists and their valuable foreign money. All those years of work... well, at least we'll have some nice stuff for a while.
The holiday calendar of my final school year has been totally disrupted by the World Cup, seeing as the government's giving us a huge holiday in June and July so we can stay up all night watching soccer matches or whatever. Unfortunately, it'll cause major disruptions in the studying time I'll get before and between the preliminary and final exams, which puts the class of 2010 at a unique disadvantage. Oh well.
Movies
I seem to be talking about movies quite a bit lately, don't I?
Anyway, I saw that Fanboys movie the other day. It sucked. Really sucked. Why is it that so many comedy movies that get released these days use the exact same brand of sexual humour? It's lazy scriptwriting, and wastes a concept's potential. Why even bother coming up with interesting/funny concepts if you're just going to make your movie's humour exactly like the humour of so many others?
Now, I'm not saying that this kind of humour never works. It worked quite well in The Hangover, because it was appropriate, and exactly what you'd expect. But that movie had other types of humour too, which supported the sexual humour. It didn't rely totally on one brand of comedy.
Zohan, Balls Of Fury, Fanboys, etc... they all had concepts that could have been really funny (or at least funnier than what they were) if they were actually used a bit more. And all of them had their funny moments (some of them had a few more than others) which relied on the humour that based itself on the core concept.
I'll be honest I have a bit of a prejudice against sexual humour. It can be funny, but I prefer it to be used very sparingly, because it gets really old really fast. And it's been done to death. Find some other ways to be funny, damnit, there are soooo many.
I saw the Hitch Hiker's Guide movie recently. First half great. Second half not so much. That is she the one? bit at the end sounded like fan fiction. It really sucks that all movie adaptations of stuff have to stick romantic subplots in where they don't bloody belong1. Incidentally, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish is my least favourite Hitch Hiker's Guide book2.
1 I know Douglas Adams intended it, but that doesn't mean I agree with the decision.
2 Life, The Universe, And Everything is my favourite, with the first two books tying for second place and Mostly Harmless coming in third.
Most recently, though, I saw Sherlock Holmes. And it was awesome. A capable, not fat Watson, and a druggie, flawed, non-deerstalker-wearing Holmes. Plus action and funny dialogue. Plus references to events within the original novels and short stories. It took them about a hundred years, but they finally got it right.
Speaking of which, this last decade has had quite a few great adaptations of books (as movies). Narnia, Lord Of The Rings1, etc... even A Series Of Unfortunate Events did a good job of capturing the feel of the novels, even though it took a lot of liberties with the actual plots.
A few years ago (when I was considerably younger), I wanted total by-the-book adaptations. I wanted eight hour long movies with the exact same contents as the books they were based on. That eroded a little, and then I decided I wanted the movies to take things out where necessary, but never put things in. Then I decided that it all depended on the execution, and the type of things that get put in.
Hence why I liked Sherlock Holmes, which created a whole new mystery, but retained the general flavour of the characters (with a healthy dollop of modernization, of course) and had some continuity nods.
Also hence why I loathedAround The World In 80 Days beyond all reason. Bloody Hollywood turning an awesome Frenchman sidekick into a Jackie Chan main character and utterly omitting the most awesome part (the rescue of the Indian woman from being sacrificed).
There's one good thing about that film, though:
Quote: Wikipedia
the film was a box office bomb and ended up generating a huge loss for the studio
I feel much better after reading that. Let this be a lesson to us all: if you want to make a movie about Jackie Chan pretending to be a Frenchman, don't give it tenuous links to a classic Jules Verne novel. Or anything else, for that matter.
Sorry about that little tirade, I just really hated that movie, and thinking about book-to-movie adaptions reminded me of it.
1 Too bad about Tom Bombadil, though.
2 I'm not mentioning the Harry Potter stuff here because I lost interest at around halfway through book 4, which was released shortly before the movies3 (and the hype) started. I was uncool before uncool was cool, but then became cool when uncool became cool instead of cool.
3 Which I didn't watch.
Books
Finished two books recently. And Another Thing..., Eoin Colfer's new entry into the Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy series, and Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card's science fiction classic. I like my sci-fi.
Despite being in the same genre, the books couldn't be less similar. And Another Thing is a humourous and whimsical outing into Douglas Adams's strange-but-familiar universe, whereas Ender's Game is bluntly really depressing.
As for my thoughts on whether or not Eoin Colfer did a good job of emulating Adams I preferred And Another Thing... to So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. I'm not a big fan of romance as a main plotline.
As for whether or not I'm going to read the sequels to Ender's Game... nah, probably not. The story I was interested in was nicely wrapped up in the book, and I really don't have much interest in the Speaker For The Dead plotline.
I'm currently reading Mirrorshades The Cyberpunk Anthology, featuring short works from the likes of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. My favourite short in the collection is currently (and will probably remain) 400 Boys, by Marc Laidlaw. I also found Greg Bear's Petra quite intriguing. The rest of the stories I've read so far are good and entertaining in their own way, but I prefer imaginitive mash-up settings to the slightly stale-feeling standard cyberpunk setting4.
4 The sort that features extensive bodily modification for the purpose of fashion, bizarre concepts I can't always fathom to my liking, and a very pervasive 80s atmosphere5.
5 Considering the setting was invented in the 80s, I guess that's to be expected.
Life
Grade 12 has been piling so much damn homework since we began about a month ago. It's only this weekend that I've actually been able to do all of my homework during the week and now have a decent amount of time for my own stuff. I doubt it'll last very long, though.
The weather and by weather, I mean rain has been absolutely crazy lately. This is a record year for rainfall in my area. We've had tonnes of little rainstorms, and two really insane ones one about a week or two ago, and the other on Saturday afternoon. These two rainstorms helped me discover something my ceiling leaks.
I'm lucky in that the leaking is confined to a small area of my roof, and only ruined the National Geographic poster I had stuck over it6 and made a corner of my blue rug a bit damp. I'm also lucky that the leak only leaks during especially violent rainstorms.
I've been luckier than a lot of other people. There's a few entire road intersections that have been completely flooded.
Next Sunday is Valentine's Day, but more importantly, it's my birthday. Yay!
6 I give my room character by sticking posters, print-outs, and all sort of other things on nearly every available space of wall, and I'm running out of space there, so I've got a few things stuck on my ceiling.
Gaming
Gaming's a lot nicer now that I've upgraded my PC. Stuff doesn't lag, I can play games on graphics settings other than ultra-low, and so on.
My sister wants to buy The Sims 3. Seeing as it won't run on her laptop, she'll have to play it on my PC. And, because I'm such a profiteering jerk even within my own family, that's gonna cost her. All the money goes to my next upgrade/a purchase of Windows 7 (I'm thinking Home Premium) for when my evaluation copy dies.
Seeing as I haven't had the computer power to run new games in quite some time, I decided it was time to get a new game now that I did. So I bought Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game I'd heard good things about.
It's a pretty good game. It's got a lot of variety, and every single gameplay segment is done well. From figuring out riddles, to beating up 12 punks at a time, to sneaking around gargoyles and picking off armed goons one by one, to the mind-screwy horror sequences, to the boss fights, it's all really fun. And there are so many unlockables and non-essentials to find! I'm near the end of the game, but I've only completed 47% of it.
A friend highly recommended Mass Effect and its sequel. Given the nature of the story, I'd have to play the first game before getting the second. Any thoughts?
Skating
Been trying to do a salchow lately. I've jumped and landed it successfully a sum total of once, and I guess that was kind of a fluke. But yeah, I'll get there eventually. It just takes some degree of courage/recklessness to actually jump the thing; a degree of courage/recklessness I don't really have.
On the plus side, it looks exactly like it's supposed to except my rotation isn't airborne.
Music
I got Dream Theater's Black Clouds & Silver Linings a while back. It's archetypical Dream Theater, or, in other words, totally awesome. Every song is amazing. The Count Of Tuscany deserves a special mention for how funny it is. Take one helping of melodrama, stir it in with another helping of mundanity, and you have this song.
Speaking of hilarious, I saw one of those videos on YouTube where some guy reinterpreted the screamed lyrics of a Trivium song. Amazing how much it sounds like the singer is singing about limes and wanting to ride bicycles. Really hilarious too, if a little hard on ears unaccustomed to that sort of music (like mine).
Oh, by the way, I made an extension for GM (also available as a collection of scripts). It's called Shorthand Functions. It doesn't do anything revolutionary, but I've found it to be a good time-saver. Basically, it's a bunch of functions to do stuff that often needs doing, but usually requires too much actual code to do. Stuff like instance_destroy_other(instance to destroy), and draw_set_centertext() (sets the halign and valign to fa_center and fa_middle, respectively) and draw_lives, a function for representing values with images (like the way a lot of games show lives). Tell me what you think; maybe suggest things for me to include in future versions.
F1ak3r
Football, not soccer!
I just got back from seeing Sherlock Holmes and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The one thing I didn't like was how most of the crucial detailed are only revealed at the end to complete the story, not during the actual events. I like being able attempt to solve the mystery... :P
I like being able [to] attempt to solve the mystery...
Yeah, a lot of people do1. Myself not included. I see a mystery plot as a failure if my personal theory turns out to be true. =)
1 - That's probably what brought about the Crime Club, a group of mystery authors who wrote whodunnits many years ago, and were bound to a strict code - always give enough clues in the body of the story to allow the reader to solve the mystery without reading the last chapter.
Yo dawg I heard you liked fighting bane you I added banes in your common thugs so you can fight bane while you fight common thugs.
>:/ One of the game's major downfalls.
football makes more sense. why americans named american football that instead of something else beats me...
and i agree with you on the movies. a whole ton of them dont have very good originality.
#7
Posted by
Alert Games on February 08, 2010 at 01:19 am
@GHG: Agreed. I'm also not overly fond of the Killer Croc level.
@Alert Games: 'Tis strange, yeah.
ok i got through the movies and then lost it... you really should break this up, i mean if your gonna write a biography you might put it in pdf format or something... lol
and I couldn't care less about the world cup... this is pussy football :P imho
#10
Posted by
mesenberg on February 08, 2010 at 02:28 pm
@Moikle: Yeah, he did. I remember that. One of the reasons I liked the movie, in fact.
@mesenberg: I divided it into neat sections with headings and --s and everything. =( Also, I wrote a blog twice this length a few months ago, so yeah. I guess "too long" is pretty subjective.
