A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
September 28
The Hitman's Bodyguard
dragged just a tiny bit in the third act, was generally
predictable, and, well, I didn't much like the denoumant for the
Big Boss, but on the whole was a complete laugh riot and something
I'd happily watch again to see what I missed the first time
around. Some of the stunts - which I take to have been practical -
were pretty spectacular.
September 27
Anthropoid
is an excellent movie, although not one for cheers and smiles -
it's pretty much grim from the get-go. By all accounts it's a
pretty accurate telling of the true story, which is a little
surprising given some of the dramatic beats like the failure of
the gun to fire at a critical moment. Definitely worth watching.
(half-watched a few other things over the week as I was
travelling. Wild Card
is a completely forgettable Jason Statham "I need the money"
vehicle; its most bizarre feature is that the sequences of Statham
kicking the crap out of people, which are what you'd assume is
supposed to be the big draw, are all edited into distracting
slowmo or weird cuts and angles. There were, I think, two other
movies but I've completely forgotten what they were.)
September 23
DSPsrv admin notice: something broke yesterday that's preventing
logins. Haven't figured out what but I'm guessing something
auto-updated that maybe shouldn't have.
September 20
So, ah, John Wick Chapter Three: Parabellum
(which I now know, thanks to the movie, means "prepare for war"):
it has no story. Really. Or if it does, it's an accident. It's
basically one long shootout/brawl briefly interrupted by
cut-scenes where noone shoots. There are some gags, such as "oh no
we're all out of bullets at the same time" but really I was hoping
for a bit more from this than two hours and eleven
minutes of Keanu Reeves kicking the crap out of people and/or
having the crap kicked out of him. OH well. At least it had the
dog.
In Nerd News, the latest release of Safari has disabled the
handful of extensions I use because... er, because I don't
actually know why. Apparently Apple would prefer I don't use my
password safe, my ad blocker, or GreaseMonkey scripts. On top of
that, the extensions "app store" is terrible - no search facility,
and you can't even Cmd-F over the list of extensions to do a text
search because WHY APPLE WHY. Gah. I'd more or less quit using
Firefox and Chrome because I was quite happy with Safari; now I'm
gonna have to go back to one or the other of those because frankly
at the very least I need that ad blocker. The password safe
disabling is REALLY irritating because it only had integration
with Safari, and now that's gone.
September 19
Just to note that on this day in 2005 I stood outside the closed
door of an office in Roe Lane wondering what to do next, because
noone had told me I needed to bang on the door to be
admitted. Shortly afterwards - once I'd gotten inside - Ted handed
me a Post-It note with some random characters on it and said, "this
is your password. I'm sure you can guess your
username."
September 13
Really enjoyed Tolkien
which for some inexplicable reason seems to have had a mediocre
critical receiption. It's funny, poignant, and well shot; it has
drama and character development and what not. I guess there are no
exploding helicopters or spandex-clad heroes so maybe that's why
it's not scoring higher. I think you should see it.
September 6
Despite having read the book, I couldn't remember the slightest
plot element from The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
It's an excellent movie despite its age, and the plot is actually
rather good. Also it's funny seeing 1965 Dublin standing in for
Berlin and parts of London (why they used St. Stephen's Green
instead of, say, Hyde Park is probably a matter of logistics, but
it was pretty funny seeing the familiar pond & island in what was
supposed to be a London park.)
(now I look it up online and find references that say it's
Battersea Park. I'm not convinced.)
September 2
Finished reading Catch-22. Erm. I think the idea's good
but the execution is questionable. There were whole sections I
sped-read through because frankly I couldn't be bothered.