Letter from a distant friend… (coughs into hand "bollocks")

Weird dreams of ants last night. Apparently a symbol of industriousness (according to the bumper book of interpretative bollocks, dream edition) This could be good except my ants were giant ants, some of whom had the power of flight, and I was trying to herd them with the underside of a coke can with the intent to kill them. Other insects may have been present. Not covered in the BBoIB so I guess they are unimportant.

Halloween the spooky is back. I was going to say I was lazy, but I wasn’t. I reworked the Anubis mask I made whilst in Portugal. In his original form, it was difficult to see without tilting my head quite far forward; spoiling the perceived peril of the jackal form and making me look more like Eyore going through a Goth phase. So I cut off his ears and snout and repositioned them. Whilst I was at it, I altered the eyes a bit to add menace to his gaze. Dr D would be proud of me, Dr Tocsin, plastic surgeon to the Gods.




According to the BBoIB, dreams of laboratories is an apparent sign of danger. How does that go when your comfort zone is a lab? Ivy is a sign of general good fortune and if you dream of ice it is a sign of danger or difficulties… (cih..)


Ears done :)

Cloudy with showers clearing for a chilly future

One day we will be able to access all our information remotely from wherever we are…
We will call them clouds… Sigh…
As far as I’m aware, we don’t have matter transportation yet, and the super fast characters they have in so many fantasy films don’t actually exist. Couple to that the dangers of “putting all your eggs in one basket” will so many people really go for this?
Probably.
Advantages are probably the impact it would make on manufacturing. If machines have less components they should be cheaper, lighter, and less power hungry. So the required quantity of all those hazardous and expensive elements and compounds that they really don’t have a substitute for can be vastly reduced. Good for the environment. Of course there is a downside. What about security? Internet crime? Identity theft? Do you really trust the government? What about personal files? What will be the cultural impact of this? Will we become like a bunch of adolescents trying to protect our diaries, hoarding our USB or SD RAM cards in secret locations. You would have a huge repository of personal data and accumulated knowledge in a remote location. That sounds safe doesn’t it? My website servers are located in New Orleans. Down-time there during the hurricane was minimal, so that doesn’t really prove my point but what if a more targeted disaster were to befall these proposed servers…

Oh Mr Sutherland, what were you thinking

Was meant to be going to see Shellac tonight (Sunday) but of course I got the dates wrong. It's next week...
So we went to see Mirrors instead. Well, spoiler alert, it's utter shash. It really mounts the downward spiral when he gets the phone call in the car. Something changes, it really does get worse.

Eeek! It’s 2 am.

After my rant about pre-pubescent leave your brain at the door music, I couldn’t sleep. I would have watched Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, but my trusty laptop has started to rebel against the 18 hour day the poor thing has had since purchase and has decided that despite Any DVD, which is fantastic, it will not play region 1 discs anymore. My views on anti piracy are fairly robust, so don’t get me started down that path.
Anyway, being a fan of post apocalyptic drama, which requires some horror, as that is inevitable in such a scenario, but is not the sole purpose of such genres, I decided to give 28 Weeks Later another spin.
Thought the original 28 Days Later was very good, very much liked the remake of Dawn of the Dead too, but 28 WL somehow didn’t work for me last time.
Well, I was wrong.
The only part I would really fault was the full on thumbs in the eyes after Robert Carlyle is reunited wife (Catherine McCormack). Too much blood. Considering they actually held back a lot in other scenes, I think a few side shots there would have had similar impact in horror without actually making me look away. Good acting, the inevitable everything will turn to shit ending was I guess predictable from 2/3 in, but they managed to keep you hoping something would turn out ok. Well, No. So Britain is screwed, Europe also, and America was buggered by that Dawn of the Dead outbreak. Now, I’ve had a bottle of Vinho Verde, so my conclusions might be flawed, but they never actually introduced a source for the virus in DotD, did they? If I’m not wrong then it all ties in nicely. Of course, Australia doesn’t escape, as that had the output from the Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson in the form of Bad Taste. So, Doom Doom Doom!!!

Noah & the Whale, Scouting for Girls

I've been meaning to say this for some time. For some reason this inspid shite is spluttering out of our airwaves everywhere. A band with no merit whatsoever.
Then of course there is that other singing septic tank known as Scouting for Girls. Sinister name, watery uninformed ill-thoughtout lyrics. Poets spend their lives trying to capture and convey a moment, and popular society is happy to collaborate with the purveyours of this crap who form an attritious attack similar to water torture.
I know this is just an individual's opinion, but I AM right.