Sunday 24 July 2005

Wow. Just wow.

There's a film festival in town at the moment, and I'm booked to see a number of films on the big screen. Last weekend it was Ghost in the Shell 2—gorgeous to look at, but dense and sometimes not easy to follow. Tomorrow it'll be Howl's Moving Castle, and next Thursday I'll be seeing Steamboy.

Tonight I saw Godzilla Final Wars.

Wow. Just wow.

It must have taken immense courage to make a film so…so…so relentlessly bad. Bad actors, bad music, bad story, bad special effects…bad subtitling…just bad. There really can't have been a single cliché that they left out. I started to laugh when the M Organisation did their sentai poses at the beginning, and didn't really stop.

What a wonderful film. I'm so terribly glad I went.

Monday 4 July 2005

Life, and Other Trivia

It's been an awkward week.

Last Wednesday, I was out jogging at around 7:30pm. It's winter here, so it was pretty dark. The upshot of which is that I managed to fall, dealing myself a number of minor injuries—including one hand torn open, which is the chief cause of the awkwardness I mentioned—it's just hard to work one-handed—and totally destroying my iPod.

If you don't happen to own an iPod, you may not fully appreciate how much of a general pain in the butt it is to lose the thing. So just take my word for it.

So there's the question of replacement. This is necessary, because apart from anything else I find it hard to exercise except to music. (And please don't tell me I should just get a radio or a portable CD player. Just…don't.) Sadly, while a new iPod isn't that expensive, it would be a dent in my finances that I don't need right now. So eventually I decided to try an iPod Shuffle. It works out to about NZ$170, which I could afford, and is a somewhat unbelievable device. Smaller than two fingers, about the same weight as a ball-point pen, and it holds 100-120 songs. Wow. That's all. Wow.

What can I say? Angus is happy again. :)

Well, except for the hand. That's still kind of grotty. (We're talking "oozing fluids" here.) But hey, I can type.

In fact, I was going to be typing SM4200 right now, but instead I'm typing this. Sometimes I worry about my priorities.

 

Priorities. Yeah. For example, faced with having to finish off a chapter, I went out and bought a PS2 instead. (Buying the PS2 is one of the reasons my finances didn't need extra dents, when I suddenly had to replace an iPod.) Said PS2 and I have been getting to know one another, and I'm prepared to say that Jak and Daxter is a pretty good game.

Certain friends have told me that if I like Jak, I'll probably like Ratchet and Clank, and who knows? They may be right! I expect I'll find out before long. Plus I've heard Jaelle talk about the Final Fantasy games far too often, so I'll probably have to try them…

My mother and brother came over to dinner yesterday and my brother staked out the PS2. We sat around all afternoon and watched him play Jak. In three or four hours, starting from scratch, he managed to get much further than I'd done in the previous several days. It was extremely annoying. But at least I know what to do now! A-hahaha! Hollow laugh.

 

I bought a new painting, too. Well, a print. It's Salvador Dali's The Elephants, which is weird and grotesque and haunts me and I like it a lot.

And that's Angus's week.