A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
February 24
Two movies over the weekend. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
was ok, but it's hard to beat Sam Raimi's movies. I think this
version of Spider-Man is a little too cocky; Tobey Maguire's
version seems to get that out of his system in the first of
Raimi's productions, while this iteration seems to consider it
core to his character. Since I never followed the comics other
than when they occasionally cropped up in the newspaper, I have no
idea which is more canonical, but I do know that I prefer the less
cocky version. Other than that... this prematurely terminated
series (since they stopped after 2 movies of a planned 4) likes
its dark endings, doesn't it? Again, I get that some of this is
canonical fanservice, but I also like whoever it was - Warren
Ellis? - who said approximately that a movie isn't the same thing
as the comic it's based on, and shouldn't try to be. It's
certainly heroic that movies like Sin City and
Watchmen managed shots that looked like the comic brought
to life, but that sort of misses the point about the media being
different, somewhat. Anyway, back to Spidey: mainly I feel like
the best and worst thing I could say about it is that, well, now
I've watched that franchise. Waiting for the Marvel
Universe one to make an appearance on my various non-purchase
sources (TV or streaming rental) so I can see how it works out.
T'other movie was a different kettle of fish altogether: First Man
is, granted, a cinematic rendition of a book, but the slavish
attention to detail is to match reality, not necessarily the
source material. It covers Neil Armstrong's life from test pilot
to moon landing, and for authenticity goes so far as to use the
original CAPCOM audio from 1969 ("Roger, Twan- Tranquility, we
copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn
blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot."). It's a
fascinating look at someone who was extraordinary in so many ways
while essentially claiming his ordinariness; it becomes obvious
with a look at how he dealt with the many mishaps in his life that
he really was extraordinary, separate to winning the lottery to be
the first human to walk on the surface of another lump of space
rock - successfully flying a plane missing a metre of wing,
recovering a plane from a bounce off the Earth's atmosphere,
handling a multi-axis spin in zero gravity when he should probably
have been unconcious, escaping from the "flying bedstead" before
it crashed, and so on. You sort of get to concluding that if he
hadn't been in Apollo 11, it wouldn't have succeeded. Anyway,
great movie, well worth watching.
February 16
Harry Potter and the Threequel of Lucre Part 2, uh, I mean The Crimes of Grindelwald
did not, as far as I can tell, contain any of said crimes. I did
like the movie - Jacob again stealing the entire thing as far as I
was concerned - but I didn't buy Jude Law as Dumbledore, and I
can't take Johnny Depp seriously in this role which, given he's
the uber bad guy, sort of undermines the premise a
bit. Anyway. There's a third one of these probably in the next
year or two so we'll see how it all segues nicely into Voldemort
or whatever.
February 14
Using Apple's Migration Assistant to copy user details from Old
Server to New Server.
run MA on new server.
select "Time Machine Backup" as source, and point at old
server.
prompts for password, accepts it, does nothing.
run MA on old server.
Old server goes through a preparatory dance of shutting things
down, asking for admin password, etc. Once it's good and dormant,
it pops up an error: can't run MA from an active Server - you need
to do one of a bunch of other things, such as Target Disk
mode.
Haul old server out of its niche so I can cable it to new
server. Boot it in headless mode and hold down 'T' for what I
think is a sufficient amount of time to activate Target Disk
mode.
Wasn't long enough. Reboot and try again.
Back on new server, the target disk has appeared but it has a
warning icon on it.
"New Server has Server app installed. Can't use MA. Please
demote new server"
Opt to quit MA on the new server, which I'm accessing via
Screen Sharing because it's also headless; this apparently causes
it such a conniption that the screen sharing session stops
working.
Reboot new server from the ssh session I'd cleverly set up.
Fruitlessly trawl for "demote MacOS server". Implication seems
to be that I need to reinstall MacOS?
Rename /Library/Server and remove Server.app from new server,
and reboot.
Back through the MA launch palaver again.
Yay, target disk isn't tagged with a warning this time.
Can't select what I want to transfer until it's done figuring
out how much data is in each category, ok...
Can't select what I want to transfer even after all that? Uh,
ok...
Doesn't transfer account passwords. That's annoying.
Will take six days! Will take six hours! Will take six
minutes! It's been on "will take 45 minutes" for the last hour or
so, and the transfer speed is constantly dropping to maintain the
45 minute ETA.
Hours later: "Could not obtain authorisation to create new
users on your system" which was the only bloody thing I wanted it
to do in the first place.
So now I'm back to the original advice to reinstall the New Server
from scratch because otherwise I've just got an incomplete clone
of the old server. AWESOME.
February 2
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them:
I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I mean, the main
character - Newt - never quite felt like the main character to me
for some reason. And not because Tina was the main character,
either; the storyline clearly puts her in the damsel-in-distress
position almost throughout, and puts her sister in the
damsel-in-undress (hah! you see what I did there?) role, and
that's pretty disappointing for a movie written by a woman. I think
the character I enjoyed most was Kowalski, because he just rolled
with what was happening to him, and that was both well written and
well played by the actor. I'll probably keep watching these as
they make their way to the TV, but unless the subsequent movies
are dramatically different I suspect I won't exactly be leaping at
the opportunity to see them.
I've thought about this some more, and while Tina did have more
agency and less distress than you might believe from the paragraph
above, it still felt like she was playing a poor second fiddle to
a weak lead - and no fault of Eddie Redmayne; the character as
written was weak, not the portrayal.
February 1
Deadpool 2
was fun, as expected, but not quite as good as the first one. I
guess the first one was a hard act to follow, plus all the gags -
cultural references, breaking the fourth wall, Deadpool losing
arbitrary bits of himself - had already been used in the first one
and no matter how hard they try the second one was always going to
feel like it was either ticking the boxes or doing "same thing,
only with a bigger explosion". Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, I
just felt like I might have had a bit more fun rewatching the
first one.