February2005Agent Orange21 February 2005 As you can see from the ReViews reviews? I've recently spent quite a bit of my free time reading Fables. Amusing in a dry quiet sort of way. Recommended. I also got to see Hero. I felt it was sparse rather than minimalist, but still an interesting film. Nowhere near as good as Crouching Tiger. I'm looking forward to House of Flying Daggers, assuming it ever reaches here. Wednesday saw some tweaking of the CLAWs TikiWiki setup. Mostly getting to grips with the Smarty templates TikiWiki uses. Smarty is cool, but does the tiki have to have so many? Card games took up most of the weekend. We played V:tES with Jo and Philip on Saturday. Philip left his cards at work (they wanted to be with others of their kind) and so threw together a deck from my spares. Now we have a third - thanks Philip. :) Confluence pwnz0r3d everyone with her Malk sneak-bleed (8 victory points over the two games, no one else got any). Sunday was Munchkin with K and N. Epic Munchkin (played to level 20 and with special powers once you're past level 10) is way cool. I won both games which somewhat made up for Saturday. :) The evening was rounded off with a hand of The Big Cheese. In the background, there was much sawing and chopping as our feudal lords deforested the garden (apparently a precautionary measure against invaders). Best Laid Plans14 February 2005 Well, despite my good intentions this my the first post since the 4th of January. Oh well. A fair amount go done during January, even if it wasn't blogging. On the 15th we made some scenery and tried out the GEM wargaming rules. The stats? for our troops are up under ProJects. The Monday after we made it to Wicked City's gig at the Mercury Lounge. It was somewhat unsettling to discover that I recognised most of the music being played inbetween bands - either the Mercury Lounge is more retro than I realised or very little good music has been produced in the last few years. :| On Tuesday we made it to Sky Captain. I found the golden-glow wash applied to everything a bit unsettling at first - it's not quite the look of a 40s film - but after I had gotten over that the film wasn't too bad. I got the feeling I might have enjoyed it more if I was a 40s film buff. This seems like a good point to mention that I've started a ReViews section to keep track of things I read and watch. Just a list currently but I intend to make it live up to its name. On the 20th we attended a talk at the MTN Science Centre by Dr Ernst Messerschmidt. The coolest part was getting to see extended footage of people performing day-to-day tasks in zero-g. Drawers in the ceiling! The 21st was Confluence's 23rd, with the theme Historical Scientists. I went as Archimedes; she went as Elena Piscopia. The highlight of the gifts was probably a print of Ursula Vernon's Sewer Mermaid. I belatedly bought her http://confluence.za.net/ and associated hosting (which will contain actual stuff as soon as her snot is gone). The day following we attended Konrad's wedding at La Masseria. How can it be bad when the bride and groom leave to the sound of The Ship Song? Nice food too. We gave them a bonsai firethorn. Sunday afternoon was spent quietly at Karen's birthday party. There was some cooing over Emma. The next week was less mad with only sushi at Willoughby's in the waterfront, to celebrate Colleen's birthday, before Thursday. Thursday itself saw the start of Dave's new Cthulhu: Dark Ages campaign - saved at the last instant from some modified hacked-up version of D&D (ptooie!). That weekend we went to Tracy and Patrick's housewarming. We got together with PJ to get them a myrtle and an orange tree. Sunday included some practice V:tES games with Kevin and Neil in preparation for the tournament in February. Confluence totally sk00l3d everyone. On February 1st we saw The Triplets of Belleville at the Waterfront, and went to the EB booksale with Kevin and Neil. Confluence picked up some cheap books. Triplets was awesome but very French. That Saturday we went to see Much Ado About Nothing, timeshifted to World War II, at Maynardville with my mom and her friends. We had a relaxed picnic before hand and Shakespeare is almost always good. On Sunday we had a mad LotR Extended Edition marathon which started at 08:00 and ended just after midnight. It was great. Like FotR, the extened editions of TT and RotK are both much better than their theatrical counterparts. Faramir comes as a completely different character with many of his more nutcase lines now appearing as self-concious echos of scenes dropped for the shorter versions. The marathon included a short break to say goodbye to Claire, who has gone briefly to the US to impress people with her singing. The early parts of last week were swamped by the editing of CLAWmarks 32 (mostly by Confluence). It could have done with a extra evening of cleaning but with the deadline suddenly moved forward that was not to be. The layout was done using Scribus. Quite frankly I was surprised by how few troubles we had with it. A year ago I don't think we could have successfully layed out a 44 page image heavy publication in it. It crashed quite a few times and its text flow algorithm seems to do odd things in some difficult cases but the difficulties weren't too insurmountable or particularly onerous. Scribus isn't there yet but it not too far off either. The weekend started off very badly we I arrived home on Friday to find the burglar bars pried out of the wall and my laptop gone. It wasn't a new laptop and I have most of the data backed up on my external hard drive but it's pretty depressing anyway being computerless again. Thankfully I can use Confluence's computer some of the time, but I can't really hog it for long periods. The rest of the weekend was a bit better. The V:tES tournament on Saturday went well with both our decks performing decently. I won my table in the first round, with Confluence taking second. In the final round Confluence tied for first at the top table winning three boosters and I won a booster in the lucky draw Philip held afterwards. We wound down the evening playing Get Out and Freeloader with K and N. On Sunday we went to our first show house (show flat really). Not really what we want, but it feels good to have started looking. Afterwards read Watchmen - probably the best graphic novel I've read (for once I am not alone in my opinion). And now, to bed. I'll spellcheck in the morning. :) p.s. I lied. |