A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
December 25
And a Merry Christmas to you and yours.
December 24
So we decided we'd watch the Star Wars: A New Hope (wait, what,
there are 2012 and 2015 versions of this in IMDb as well?) - well,
ok, the 1997 remix, with the very obvious CGI additions, and you
know what? It looks quite rough and unpolished next to the latest
work. Ok, sure, 40 years of updates in movie technology, a uniform
editing rather than layers of What George Did Next over the
original, but still - the dialogue is so much less fluid, the
acting that bit more hammy; you can almost hear the direction to
Han Solo to look screen left and smile knowingly, it's that much
of a distinct beat in the movie. I'm actually kinda surprised at
this.
December 23
Saw Star Wars: The Force
Awakens last night. It was awesome; I had been
promised a good movie (by my circle of friends / acquaintances on
the Twitters) and things that could be spoilers, and frankly I got
all that was promised. The movie is, to my eyes, full of
fanservice tips to the original trilogy, which is pretty much
exactly what I didn't know I wanted (but I did). Given the
possibility of spoilers, there's not much more I'm inclined to say
other than that if you are even remotely a fan of the original
Star Wars franchise, you should go see this.
One thing I will say, however: when The Phantom
Menace came out, lots of pontification occurred along the
lines of "Of course it's not as good as the original
trilogy; you were a child when you saw those, and now you're a
bitter and cynical adult and the style of storytelling (or
whatever) simply doesn't have the same effect on you." I think
The Force Awakens knocks this entire argument into the corner
and beats it into a shapeless lump. I had my misgivings given
Disney and the choice of director, but boy was I ever
wrong. Again: go see this.
December 21
So I got this
and downloaded this and
then nabbed twincobr.zip and now I'm reliving a summer
in the early '90s when I played this game every lunchtime on my
break from working in the amusement arcade. PEW PEW PEW PEW
FOOOOOM PEW PEW PEW PEW aw crap dead again.
December 20
Upgraded the Mac Mini today, and it failed to come back
online. When I hooked up a screen to it, it had an inscrutable
error message, and the only option was to hard-boot it. This got
me a gray screen with a prohibition sign on it. After some
fiddling around I got a recovery boot; I launched Disk Utility,
which spun for a bit without showing me anything, and I quit
it. Then I launched "Select Startup Disk", which allowed me to tell it
to boot from, hello, what's this, the boot-up disk that wasn't
showing up in Disk Utility? Fine, that'll do... Server booted,
logged some messages pertaining to the boot cache, rebooted again,
then came up but running extremely slowly. Eventually I was able
to log in and noticed a bunch of complaints about disk1, which
died months (possibly years) ago, and has been absent from the
list of hardware for quite some time - it appears it revived
enough to cause trouble, so I guess I'll have to actually replace
it.
Found this in the logs, just now:
hfs: mounted Faulty
HD on device disk1s2
Very
reassuring.
December 19
Part two of The Bourne Identity: runs through the rest
of the plot from the book, although I think it's maybe compressed
a little and a few things definitely get left out - like Bourne's
assault on Carlos' headquarters. Conklin is also reduced to pretty
much a passer-by, which is a shame, because Conklin as Bourne's
adversary drove much of the tension in the book. Still, I was
again very impressed with how much of the book made it to the
screen; even details about the climactic fight were retained. You
should definitely see this - bearing in mind that it's not a
crash-bang-wallop modern thriller, and scenes can last tens of
seconds before a cut to another angle...
December 18
Screenclick, nee DVD Rentals, is no more, alas. The last movie
I got from them was The Bourne Identity - Richard
Chamberlain, not Matt Damon - so we watched part one tonight. It's
extremely close to the source material, so much so that I
was concerned that we'd have to obtain another disk to see it out
to the end; and for a movie made at the end of the eighties, it's
aged surprisingly well - sure, some of the clothes still have the
epic '80s shoulders, and the cars are clearly all very dated, and
noone has a computer worth talking about or a mobile phone - but
it's very easy to watch it as a period piece at which point those
elements become irrelevant. Looking forward to the rest of
this.
December 4
What We Did On Our
Holiday is a slightly dark family comedy starring Billy
Connolly doing, well, whatever he likes. I can't tell if the kids
in it were scripted or if they just let 'em say and do whatever
they wanted, then edited it into the story. The whole thing is
charming and while it's not (for the most part) laugh-out-loud
funny, it'll keep you chuckling at the very least.
I found myself trying to figure out a little bit more what was
wrong with Spectre and I think part of it was that by the
time you get to the end of the movie, the major threat has passed
and it's basically Bond out to save himself and the girl; once I
pulled that thread, though, I realised that that was
pretty much the case for all of the Daniel Craig Bond movies with
the exception of Quantum of Solace, where "saving
the girl" lines up nicely enough with "defeating the
villain". Spectre's Bond was also veering back into
the cheesy oneliners and the inevitable seduction of, well, I
half-expected him to start on Q at the rate he was
going. So in other words I've no idea quite what was wrong with
it.