Wyrmlog

(39 deegrees today. I’m melting! Melting! What a world! What a world!)

Once again Valentine’s rapidly approaches like a bird of doom (cue descending scale of doom -DA Da daaaaaa!!!). But I’m not too concerned.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to let the dreaded 14th get to me too much this year. I have better things to do than get depressed over a stupid date on the calander. Or at least better things to get depressed about *g*. I still intend to be in a foul mood on Friday, but it’ll be one of general grumpiness and ill-temper rather than bleak despair and bitterness. You can have fun with grumpiness – glaring and muttering darkly at people from beneath your eyebrows, or growling softly at anyone who aks you to do anything even slightly inconvenient, that sort of thing. To be honest I’m almost looking forwards to it. I even bought some new black shirts 🙂

Probably explaining this upbeat (for me 🙂 mood at least partially is the fact that Katie has invited me to her birthday bash on the following Sunday. It’s the first time anyone’s invited me to anything in ages (well, since Rebecca’s party in August), so it’s cheered me up somewhat.

(Well actually it’s not entirely true that I haven’t been invited to anything recently. In fact I regularly get invited to various Starwon events, but that’s because the company is co-located with them so hardly counts. The most recent was “New Year Drinks” last Monday. I didn’t go because a) I don’t drink, b) I only found out about it on Monday morning and, c) the invite included not only me but my “partner” which is a concept so hilariously asumptive that it makes me want to kick something 🙂

Anyway while feeling bored the other day I decided on the spur of the moment to do a vanity search on Google. You know, where you type in your own name? I’ve already done plenty on my real name (for a while there the number one link actually was about me, which was pretty cool :), and on “wyrmworld” which produced a few sites linking to mine, but I suddenly had the great idea to search on my user name, “dpwyrm”. The results? Well, to shove in another obligatory Stargate reference, chel nak!

I cannot express how immensely gratifying it is discover that people you’ve never met are not only using one’s creations, but holding entire message board conversations about them. It seriously rocks. True, the creation in question is only my fairly dodgy Camarilla test, and the people involved are only Vampire: The Masquerade fans, but hey, an audience is an audience, and for a week or so some months back I WAS THEIR GOD!!!!!!!

Ahem. OK, I’m sane again now. Goes right to my head it does *g*. Anyway a whole bunch of people on a whole bunch of Vampire message boards¹ were doing my test and discussing the results. Which was highly gratifying. What’s also remarkable is that although a number of people disagreed with what the test told them (“I’m a Ventrue! Not a Toreador! A Ventrue!!” sheeze, get a life!²) I could not find a single person complaining about it being inaccurate or skewed. Which given that I based it on the free, downloadble PDF version of the game³, which contains some very simplified concepts, seems to imply that I did pretty well with it.

One of the things that helps, I guess, is that the code behind it⁴ isn’t just a simple teen magazine type of thing where a choice from column A gives you 1 point towards one result, column B towards another and so on. Each choice affects any or all of the possible results, positively or negatively. For instance if you say that you avoid social gatherings whenever possible, it won’t only give you points towards clan Nosferatu (who couldn’t get in to any respectable social gathering even if they wanted to), but take them away from clan Toreador (who would rather face final death than miss a party – depending on who’s attending of course). Then there’s some fancy number crunching going on to calculate the final outcome. I even made it use appropriate terminology for the result, so if your highest score in any category is 15%, it won’t tell you that you are that category, it’ll say you “might be” that category. People seemed to appreciate that little touch from what I could gather.

So, anyway I’m pretty chuffed. I’ve though about updating the program to include the other clans, but given that most internet users⁵ don’t go around wallowing in gore, communing with snakes, assasinating people for their blood or even worse things⁶, I don’t think there’s much point. Only inmates of high security mental hospitals would actually be getting the extra results. I’ll stick with the path of humanity for now I think 🙂

Anyway, I’m going to go and put counters all through my site. I know who’s linking to my homepage, but if I get this kind of rush from people using a stupid little test then I want to track down all my deep links damnit! 🙂

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1 Well OK, about three. But come on, allow me my moment in the sun will you? 🙂

2 This from the guy who spent hours programming the test mind you 🙂

3 I now own a copy of the full game. Sheeze! I should get a life! 🙂

4 Pretty much the same code as the Stargate Date-o-Matic, although that’s an earlier version and seems to have a few idiosyncracies. I must go back and have a look at upgrading it.

5 Most internet users 🙂

6 I’m not even going to mention clan Giovanni!

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Well, I’m back.

Not that I’ve actually been anywhere mind you. I just haven’t had the inclination or energy to write for the past few weeks. I’ve been coming home from work and just watching TV. Or playing Spider Solitaire. Or reading. Or sleeping. Or analysing the Oh Alexander I see you standing beneath the archway of aerodynamics bit of Little Eiffel by the Pixies (it sounds so weird because it defies the base four nature of western music even at a sub-phrase level – Go Black Francis!).

So yeah, I haven’t written anything. But I’m writing now, which has to count for something, even if I don’t have a whole lot to say 🙂

Hmmm, yes, so what’s been happening? Not a lot. Rebecca stayed for a few days as I mentioned which was great because it allowed me to get a really big shop done (no, it was great because Rebecca’s cool, the shopping was just a bonus ;). In addition to driving myself and large amounts of groceries around in a very unreliable motor vehicle, she also demonstrated the fundamental honesty of my neighbours here at The Gables by leaving the door to the unit wide open before going out one morning, after I’d departed for work. This turned out to be no problem at all, nothing was missing, and it gave me ample opportunity to tease the living daylights out of her, until only minutes later I locked us out of the building by leaving my keys inside. Talk about irony. We had to hike down to the hospital to find a payphone to call my parents for the spare keys 🙂

It wasn’t all irony and spring onions though, Rebecca did have a bit of a rough time of it getting horribly lost on her way back to the flat one afternoon, and discovering (care of the extras on my Fellowship of the Ring DVD) that out of his Aragorn costume Vigo Mortensen looks like an aging Californian surfer-dude. Quite broke her heart it did, and I shouldn’t joke about it because it’ll just upset her. Sorry 🙂

To change subject completely, my backside is killing me. Yes, yes, I’ll pause here for off-colour remarks and suggestions from anyone reading this who is insufficiently mature enough to let such an obvious opportunity pass <-- PAUSE -->. OK, the actual reason my buttocks are so sore is because I took my bike out last night for the first time since I was struck down with labyrinthitis. Before that I hadn’t taken it out in months anyway, so understandably mine body protesteth most mightily. The occasion was a dinner at my parent’s place with Elvine, who is… OK I’m going to have to go into some family history here.

There are three branches of my Dad’s family. One branch consists of his sisters Faye and Beverly, and Faye’s sons Greg and Michael (my aunts and cousins, obviously). We’ll call them Branch A. Branch B is my immediate family, Mum, Dad and my brother. We’re Branch B. Finally there’s Branch C, who I know almost nothing about because we have nothing to do with them as the result of a long running feud that makes the Capulets and Montagues look like amateurs.

(This is of course an exaggeration – to the best of my knowledge we’ve never taken part in running street battles or drawn swords on each other. Some Great Uncle or other got shot in the foot, but that doesn’t really count because he did it himself to get out of the services.)

By the way Branch C are the rich branch. Did I fall to the wrong side of the family tree or what? 🙂

Anyway, Branch A hate Branch C. Branch C hate Branch A. We of Branch B don’t bear any particular animosity towards Branch C, but when the battle lines were drawn up Dad of course had to side with Branch A, they being his sisters and all. So Branch C, while not actually hating us, like to pretend that we don’t exist, and we thus never hear or see them at all.

Well not strictly never, they do occasionally descend from their financial utopia to mingle with the rest of the family. Like at my Nanna’s funeral for instance. It should be noted however about this solemn event that the wake had to be held at our house, because Branch A wouldn’t set foot in any home owned by Branch C, and Branch C refused to enter any house owned by a member of Branch A. That’s the level of enmity we’re talking about here.

And the cause of this feud? Well to be honest, I’m not entirely sure…

You see, it’s not the kind of thing that’s really talked about in the family. But I do know one thing that if not the original cause, certainly made matters a lot worse. Grandad and Nanna’s divorce. Grandad and Nanna’s divorce precipitated by Grandad’s affair. Ouch.

From what little I’ve gathered (it’s another subject that isn’t really discussed) Grandad had been seeing another woman for quite a while, and then one day came home from work to find all his possessions out on the verge, Nanna having found out about it. Being a particularly practical (and one must suspect somewhat cold) man, he collected it all and left, to all intents and purposes vanishing off the face of the earth, and leaving Nanna to raise their three children by herself. No one had any idea what happened to him.

That is until the mid-eighties when Dad asked a friend of his in the military records office to look up his (that is Dad’s) service records for some reason (Dad used to be in the Air Force Reserve). He came back with two sets of records for Western Australia under the same name. This anomaly was quickly sorted out when Dad explained that his father had the same name as him, so the older set of records were Grandad’s. What was completely unexpected was that the records not only indicated that Grandad was alive and well but that he was living on a military pension in a country town only five or so hours drive south from the city.

There was a fair bit of backing and forthing but eventually Dad decided to contact him, and we all headed down to visit. It turned out that he’d re-married a woman named Elvine, the same Elvine who came to dinner last night.

Grandad passed away probably close on ten years ago, and Elvine had been living in their house down south even since. But in the last few months she’s sold up, and moved up to the city. So it was only polite to invite her to dinner.

Things went pretty well over all. Faye and Beverly actually came as well, which was surprising because they (Bev in particular) have always taken a rather dim view of their father and everything he got up to from the affair onwards (not surprising really). Dad isn’t too fond of Elvine either, since she gave Grandad’s war medals to a museum rather than handing them on to him as standard protocol demands, but he managed to remain polite all evening.

Two things about her did annoy me though. The first was that she repeated things over and over again. I don’t know if this is just because she’s old, or if it’s a personality trait she’s had all her life, but it’s very annoying. For instance she was talking about a man who left his wife to raise their seven children, then came back once they’d all got married, and she took him back (slightly rich, given the circumstances, but still). The thing is every second sentence she said for a good five minutes was “it’s the worst case I’ve ever heard of!”. I don’t mean she said things like “As I said, that’s the worst case I’ve known” or “It’s a very bad case”, she literally just kept saying “it’s the worst case I’ve ever heard of!”, occasionally varying the stress, so “it’s the worst case I’ve ever heard of!” or “it’s the worst case I’ve ever heard of!”. And she kept doing it all evening. I honestly felt like grabbing her around the neck and shouting “ENGLISH HAS MORE WORDS THAN ANY OTHER LANGUAGE ON EARTH!! USE SOME DIFFERENT ONES!!!”. I didn’t of course 🙂

The second annoyance was when we got onto the subject of the recent devastating bushfires around the country. She made a point of saying (several times) that back in her day the Government didn’t give “handouts” to people who’s houses burnt down and “I think we were better for it”. Yes. Well.

Anyway, apart from that it wasn’t a bad evening. Even if I did have to grit my teeth from time to time 🙂

OK, I’ve written more than enough. I’m off to watch Mysterious Ways. They’ve gone to repeats now, but I don’t mind because this is the episode where Miranda gets dragged against her will into the office of a money obsessed investment banker who suddenly realises that this annoying woman investigating him is Miranda Fiegelsteen of the Seattle Fiegelsteens. It’s quite amusing…

Hey, it could be worse. At least I haven’t set up a website about her 😉

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PS: That could be taken as a jibe at either Helen or Ali who run websites devoted to Christopher Judge (Teal’c from Stargate) and Peter Deluise (any number of characters in any number of things) repectively. It’s not. Christopher Judge and Peter Deluise are real people who indisputably exist. If they were setting up sites devoted to Teal’c and oh… Tom Piccolo (from Seaquest DSV) for instance, then it’d be a gibe 🙂

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PPS: No comparison is intended or should be implied by the proceeding post script between my intentions vis-

Been busy doing nothing (although not on the shores of Great Salt Lake). Will blog properly soon. Check this out.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve made an entry. This has sort of been because I’m busy, but has more to do with the fact that I’ve been playing way too much Civilization III. I bought it months ago but didn’t actually have the time to get into it until my two weeks off over Christmas and new years. Now I’m a hopeless addict, and spend my evenings plotting how to get hold of that aluminium resource just inside French territory, or how to get the Aztecs to attack the English without implicating me. Great stuff!

I really have to complement Firaxis on the new resource and trade system. In Civ II you could cut yourself off from the rest of the world and power on to building the spaceship. In Civ III you have to expand to secure sources of horses, iron, saltpeter, coal, rubber, oil, aluminium, uranium and a few I’m probably forgetting. And while you’re at it you need to find luxuries like dyes, silk, furs and ivory to keep your people happy and distracted. And you can trade all of this, so if you’ve got more iron that you need you can exchange it with the Chinese for some of their excess silks. Cool!

Anyway enough rambling about geeky computer games. What else have I been doing?

Well one thing I did do during my break was try to grow a beard. One of those funky Generation-X style goatee beard things, just for the heck of it. I was under the strange impression that this might make me look cool, so I stopped shaving my chin for a week. I’ve always had particularly fast growing facial hair, so I figured a week would be long enough to see how it turned out. So, how did it turn out? Horribly, that’s how.

It appears that while my facial hair grows very quickly (particularly just below my lips) on my chin proper it’s virtually non-existent. So, after a week of careful cultivation I had a thick, caterpillar like growth immediately under my mouth, and below this a great bald patch with a total of six straggly hairs attempting to cover it. This looked utterly ridiculous, so before I went back to work on Monday, I shaved it all off. So much for looking cool 🙂

I am looking a bit paint spattered though. I decided over my break to get on and do a proper job of painting some of the Call of Cthulhu figurines I bought some years back. I’ve got a shoggoth, three deep ones, and a yithian, and all were sorely in need of a decent paint job to replace the seriously desultory ones I perpetrated when I first got them. So to that end I headed off to Games Workshop at the Galleria on Saturday to purchase some paints.

This was actually a bit stressful as I haven’t been inside a Games Workshop store in years, and despite my supreme geekiness I’ve never been all that comfortable around hard-core wargamer geeks anyway. To make matters worse of course it was Saturday morning, which meant there were several games in progress in the rather minuscule store and you could hardly move for tape measures and Tyranids. But I’d done my research and had a full list of the paints I wanted, so just shoved it at the guy behind the counter who flicked them out of the racks with remarkable speed and efficiency. I handed over the cash, grabbed my receipt and then fled before I could be attacked by a genestealer 🙂

Now the great thing about Citadel Miniatures paints is that they all have highly creative and funky names. You don’t just buy “red”, you buy “red gore” or “blood red”. You don’t purchase “purple” you purchase “liche purple”. So rather than thinking to yourself “I’ll try a mix of dark and light greens with a touch of grey and a yellow wash” you can think “I’ll try a mix of dark angels green and snot green with a touch of codex grey and a bad moon yellow wash”, which is infinitely more entertaining.

So, I’ve spent the better part of the weekend teaching myself to paint figurines. Which is harder than it sounds. I started on the shoggoth, on the basis that it would be difficult to mis-paint a festering protoplasmic ooze. As it turned out this was quite easy to achieve, so my shoggoth is now weighted down with about six coats of chaos black and dark angels green (which should at least make it easier to run away from Mountains of Madness style). But I finally got the hang of it, and the final layer of paint looks quite spiffy. I’m working on the deep ones at the moment, and they’re starting to look OK. I’ll probably post pictures when I’m done.

So yeah, that’s been my last few weeks. People waiting on emails should get them over the next couple of days (sorry about the delay), and I’ll try and update a little more regularly from now on (yeah sure).

PS: Rebecca is staying for a few days. Cool 🙂

Well, as I’m sure some people will have noticed, I’ve done a redesign. Woo-hoo! Not only does the Wyrmlog now look ultra-cool (ha!) but it’s been streamlined. Yes! The new Wyrmlog with 35% less graphics to download! That’s over a third people!

Of course (being a real programmer who codes on the fly as opposed to sitting down and planning stuff out on paper) I will have inevitably screwed up somewhere. So, if you encounter any weird errors please email me and let me know so I can get on and fix them (eventually).

But anyway that’s not what I came to talk about. Came to talk about stir-fries.

Ever since Rebecca bought me a wok last year (awesome gift or what? 🙂 I’ve been trying my hand at stir fries. With a few exceptions they were all… edible. That’s about the best you could say about them. Until last night that is…

Somehow last night I managed to make a totally kick-ass fish stir fry. It tasted good, it smelled good and it even looked good, an aspect of the culinary arts I’ve never been particularly talented at. I mean, if someone served this stir fry up to you at a restaurant, you wouldn’t send it back! So, I’m pretty chuffed with myself, even though I have no doubt that I’ll never be able to repeat the process again in my entire life 🙂

But stir-fries aside, I’ve finally decided to jump on the bandwagon that every blogger seems to be jumping on these days. Yes! It’s time for some self-indulgent navel gazing as we take a look at my search engine referer logs!

The reason I’m doing this is I had a glance at them yesterday, and found them quite amusing. For instance someone out there seems to be very concerned about the relationship between Marion and Carl in that execrable TV production Dinotopia. My logs indicate searches for in dinotopia do marion and carl fall in love, in dinotopia do carl and marion fall in love (because reversing the names will turn up so many more results of course!) in dinotopia do marion and carl get together, and Who does Marion love in dinotopia.

I find it highly gratifying that my vitriolic diatribe against the Dinotopia mini-series comes up in the first few links on Google for all of these searches. I find it even more gratifying that anyone searching on this subject from now on will end up at this entry, since it mentions so many Marion, Carl and Dinotopia keywords (he-he!). Self-reference can be a wonderful thing 🙂

However, ironically, the query at the heart of all these searches is one that I am actually able to respond to. The correct answer to the question “In Dinotopia do Marion and Carl fall in love?” is… (highlight to read – standard anti-spoil technique)

I hope that clears that up 😉

There were a number of other Dinotopia related queries such as dinotopia albino, dinotopia AND romana dennison and why did the sunstones fail. I don’t know much about Romana Dennison, but I can say with a fair amount of confidence why the sunstones failed. It’s fairly simple. If the sunstones didn’t fail, then the writers would have had to come up with some kind of original (or at least coherant) plot for the mini-series and that was way too much work for 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. Case closed.

Moving down the list we come to an entry for actress “Stacy Haiduk”. Apparently someone out there is so into the lovely Ms Haiduk that they were prepared to wade through 21 pages of Google search results to get to my one mention of her in relation to “Kindred: The Embraced”. Now that’s either true devotion or pathological obsession – I’m not sure which (the fact that I was prepared to wade through 21 pages of Google search results to secure this information is neither here nor there 🙂

Some of the rest are just plain weird. Like “William Shatner’s New Year Party”. I’m sorry, was someone actually searching for this? Did they want to attend?! I tell ya there are some real sickos out there.

And “psychic morlocks”. What the…? I know I carried on a bit about Morlocks a while back, but psychic ones? Someone has way too much time on their hands.

Hmmm, someone like me obviously. OK, I’m going to shut up now 😉

Well, it seems that my answering machine wasn’t killed by my short circuiting scanner the other day, it was merely stunned. I decided to give it one more chance today and plugged it in, only to find that it worked perfectly. Which given the fact that nothing I could do would get it to function yesterday or the day before is pretty damn odd. Obviously some kind of new year miracle (either that or a Telstra engineer broke in here overnight and fixed it).

In other news I’d like to make some apendments to the lists of the most beautiful and cutest women in the world published on this weblog on December 12 (yes, I’m very bored again :). Recording Artist Sophie Ellis Bextor is added to the Most Beautiful list, taking position four. Actress and former fiance of Marilyn Manson (damn that must be annoying, I am yet to see any kind of media reference to her that doesn’t slip in her engagement to the freakish Mr Manson – what was she thinking? 🙂 Rose McGowan is provisionally awarded position number five, on condition that she eat something and cease her continued and quite remarkable impersonation of a stick. Finally everyone’s favourite Elf princess Liv Tyler is awarded position four on the Cutest list.

There, that’s more than enough Geekery for today I think 🙂

Well it’s a new year. Hooray. *sigh*

You’ll have to excuse me for not being terribly enthused. No big reason for it, I’m just tired. I stayed up last night to see in 2003, and haven’t caught up on my recomended daily sleep intake yet. Once I get a decent night of rest I’ll probably be more excited.

So, did I spend the night partying away then make out with some gorgeous brunette on the stroke of midnight? No. I spent it scanning in and piecing together road maps in Adobe Photoshop while watching some weird French movie about philandering 18th century philosophers (and pigs, although they didn’t do much philandering) on SBS. Compared to some new years eves in my experience, not bad actually 🙂

Now of course in order to scan, I would require a scanner, and since my old one won’t work in Windows XP (grrrr, grumble, moan, growl) this means I must have purchased a new one. Which I have done. Yesterday I walked into town (I just missed my train, so decided to check out the new cycle path on foot) and bought a Hewlett Packard Scanjet 3500c, which I’m very very happy with.

What I’m not happy about on the other hand though is what happened when I plugged it in. The power cord is one of those freaking stupid ones where the pins stick right out of the transformer, making it virtually impossible to plug it in to either a power board, or any socket less than a foot above floor level. So, I was trying to fit it into the one spare socket on the power board I use for my computer equipment when ZZZAAAPPP!!!! I was hurled across the room by a massive electric shock… OK, no I wasn’t, that’s a lie, but there was a loud zap and bright flash as a short circuit arced across the pins.

Naturally I was highly concerned for my computer, it’s peripherals, my stereo and my answering machine (all of which are plugged into the board). Happily on testing, the computer and stereo were fine (I dread to think what would have happened if I followed the instructions in the installation section which tell you to install the software then plug in the hardware while the computer is turned on – who writes these things?) but my answering machine is dead. Well and truly dead. Which is a pain because I’d just thought up an amusing new message. Grrrrr >:(

I’m not pleased. Hewlett Packard owe me a new answering machine damnit!!

But that aside, happy new year everyone! 🙂

(OK, where was I?)

The Alliance of the Two Towers
One of the biggest problems in Fellowship was the characterisation of Saruman. Inthe novel Saruman appears to be working with Sauron, but is in fact playing a verydangerous game of betrayal in an attempt to get the Ring for himself. He’s running aroundtelling everyone what they want to hear while building his own army to take over theworld. He tells Th

Well, it’s been a while between entries hasn’t it? There’s two reasons for this. The first is Christmas, which tends to mess things up fairly effectively, and the second is HEAT.

For the last week or so Perth has been stuck in one of the most appalling heatwaves I’ve ever experienced. A high pressure system stabilised in the bight, fixing a low pressure trough down the coast in such a way that it started wobbling irregularly back and forth and sucking down moist, warm air from the tropics. The end result of which was temperatures between 20 and 25 at night, and 35 to 40 during the day, all with sappingly high humidity. So, I haven’t been up to much except sitting in front of the TV and sweating, which is annoying because I’ve only got two weeks off work and I’ve gotthings to do!.

But anyway it’s over now, and we’ve got a nice break with temperatures in the mid twenties for a few days. Then it’ll start getting hot again, although hopefully less humid. Hopefully.

So, what did I get for Christmas? Let’s see…

1: A bunch of rather amusing books from Ali (although she says that they’re last year’s presents, and this year’s are still to come 🙂 including The Worst Case Scenario Survival Guide – Travel, which has some truly delirious “emergency phrases” in the back in German, Spanish and Japanese (“Hello – I have been seriously injured” “Can I borrow a towel to soak up the blood?” “Why is the water brown/green/black?”).

2: A very entertaining V-CD from Helen, and a picture of Cliffords Tower in York, which we were talking about at one point.

3: An ornamental statue of King Arthur from Mum and Dad, which is nice if not terribly practical.

4: A copy of the Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde from Andrew, which rocks.

5: A garlic holder, a wallet and a few other sundries from various English relatives.

6: A large food hamper from Aunts Faye and Beverly who seem to be under the impression that since I moved out from home I have been completely unable to feed myself.

7: Probably a fair few things I’ve forgotten about.

So all in all a fairly good haul.

On Boxing Day (of course) I went off to see The Two Towers with Ryan, Fabian and Michael. Ryan had booked tickets for the first showing (at 10:00 am), which was pretty cool since it meant queuing outside the Galleria waiting for them to open up, then racing in like rabid lemmings to get a good seat. We even met a genuine Orc from the Helm’s Deep sequence, and since we had a spare ticket let him have it in exchange forlistening to his stories about the filming (he could have been lying, but he had authentic looking papers, and the stories were good).

So, what did I think of the movie? Frankly I was disappointed 🙁

The Fellowship of the Ring was excellent. OK, there were numerous scenes left out for sake of brevity, some of the characterisations were way off, there were a number of plot alterations and several plot elements were skimmed over (some of which were amended in the special DVD edition), but on the whole it stuck to the novel pretty closely. The Two Towers on the other hand. Oy.

The movie is not Tolkien’s Two Towers. It has plenty of elements taken from the book, but ties them together into a very different plot. Given the remarkable effort at veracity in Fellowship I’d go so far as to call part two an outright betrayal 🙁

So what’s so wrong? I’ll deal with the problems point by point.

(This entry was way too long, so I’ve cut it into two. I hope this works 😉

Dreams can be very odd things. Particularly the waking up bit.

On Saturday night I dreamt that I was back at high school. My entire class was there, it was the beginning of a new school year and we were all sitting at long tables in the quadrangle, waiting for the previous year’s results to be handed out*. After a bit of preliminary faffing about the staff got their act together, and started walking up and down the tables handing out report cards. Eventually they got to mine.

I checked it over, and everything was fine, pretty much exactly the marks I expected. Until I got to the bottom of the list and saw my grade for English Lit. 8%!!

It was at this point that I remembered (with a sense of crashing doom) that 90% of our English Lit mark was assignment based. On the first day of term they’d handed us out two major essay assignments to be handed in at the 6 and 8 month mark, and I (in my usual sloppy fashion) had put them aside to look at “later”, and completely forgotten about them. The fact that the staff hadn’t mentioned them since didn’t help.

Looking around at my fellow English Lit students I could see that I wasn’t the only one in this predicament. About a dozen of my fellows scattered throughout the crowd were looking seriously startled. Just to my left, Alison Ranger (on who I actually had a big crush throughout year 12 which is no doubt why she made such a prominent guest appearance 🙂 was looking particularly frantic. Just as we were all about to start noisily protesting, our Lit teacher (who was sort of a combination of Mrs Wolf and Mrs Beam, my Lit teachers from years 12 and 11 respectively) got up and started haranguing us.

First of all, she confided, she was very disappointed in us all. Fully half the class had failed to hand in our assignments, and she was tempted to fail us all. BUT, she had decided to be merciful, and was giving us all one month to get one or both of the assignments in. Which, if we valued our marks, we would.

Everyone let out a small sigh of relief. But by the same token no one was prepared to relax. The assignments were BIG. Like thesis big, and we only had one month to do them both. The sense of crushing doom was replaced with one of sickening tension, and it was clear glancing around that every single one of us was just itching to get up and tear into the library which was just across the quadrangle. But we had to wait until we were dismissed. So we just sat there, tapping our feet, grinding our teeth and sweating. Also (in my case) attempting to remember what the heck the assignments were actually about, never having seriously looked at them. I asked Alison, but before she could reply, I woke up.

Now, here’s the weird bit. I lay there in bed planning out what I was going to do. I knew that I could probably throw together a halfway decent assignment on JRR Tolkien, but before I could do that, I’d have to find out exactly what was required. I went over some possible angles, such as how his writing was affected by his time fighting in the trenches of World War One, or his dualistic and somewhat contradictory views on creativity. After a few minutes though the worry got too intense, and I woke up some more. Enough to realise (with an enormous sense of relief) that I graduated from high school nine years ago, and got an A for Lit.

So yeah, like I said, odd 🙂

Anyway, in a remarkable change from the way my life has been running lately (rent inspections, major projects due with a week to do them in, a certain so called “designer” from a certain so called “design” company) the universe has decided to be uncannily nice to me this week. Not only is episode four of The Dead Zone on this week, the one featuring Alisen Down as a guest star, but starting this Saturday, new episodes of Mysterious Ways!

Time for the Myposian Dance of Joy!!

#Happy dance! Happy dance!#

OK, they’re not actually new episodes, there being no such thing (the series being axed and all), but it seems that Channel 10 (in their usual capricious fashion) messed around with the screening order and held a bunch back last year. So, one last season! Huzzah!!

I’m quite sure the majority of the ep’s will be pretty dodgy, they usually are, but so long as they feature Miranda, I don’t care!

I’m such a loser 🙂

PS: Awesome show 😉

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* Not usual procedure, I should point out, at St Francis’s or indeed any reasonable school in the known universe

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