Post-Movie Night

[handslive]

Books:

• Fairyland, by Paul J. McAuley. An excellent book. More bio-punk than cyber-punk and rather frighteningly believable. Also interesting in that, from some perspective, the future could have been described as almost utopian (cheap manufacturing, cheap food) but comes away feeling gritty and dangerous instead.
• The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder. I haven't looked at this book since high school. I knew nothing about computing as an industry or as a field of endeavour when I read it then. Now a lot of this is very familiar. The technical stuff is straight-forward. The work culture is a little too familiar. And it's weird to see thirty-five year olds described as 'old codgers'. Heh.

Music:

• mouseman and I finally had a chance to sit down and bang through The Scarlet Cape a couple of times last night. The tango part, which I thought I'd worked a lot of kinks out of, was even worse than I thought, but the rest of it wasn't too bad. There's some stuff in the intro I need to work on the timing of. I hadn't thought closely about how it would sound together. Still, I suppose it wasn't too bad for a first time practice.
• Been walking through some older tunes I had thrown together back in high school and university.

Movies:

• Raider of the Lost Ark. purplejavatroll had some urge to see this movie. That was fun. Because they were intentionally re-using an older style of film anyway, the movie doesn't feel as dated as I thought it would.
• Last Night. Our Movie Night selection (courtesy of D). And A&L came out unexpectedly (yay!). I haven't seen them for a while. It was a very interesting movie. I haven't seen any of Don McKellar's stuff before, but I'd been meaning to. He wrote and directed (and starred in) this one and his work felt very good. The directing, as D pointed out, feels a little like stage work in some places rather than fully using the tools of film, but I didn't notice this so much. Probably this points back to his roots; he probably started out writing for stage and moved to film.

Games:

• Serious Sam. I'd seen this months ago and only just got around to buying a copy (cheap!). Heck, the sequel is out already. Sort of an amusing and fun return to the days of Doom when gamers were men (mostly) and monsters were just big screaming hordes who charged the hero in unending floods from across arena-like settings. Strangely, this feels like a lot of fun. There's absolutely no pretense of "immersive environment", just top-notch graphics and lots of stupid, dangerous monsters. And secrets (dammit!). I'm wondering what deathmatch would be like (and I usually hate deathmatch -- have since Doom, Heretic, and Hexen).

TV:

• Uh...nope.

Comments

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

The food, IIRC, was from nonotech so it was eminently well managed and as good as you'd like it to be.

The books in our library (on our rtaher than G's shelves) and I highly recommend it.

Its worth noting that Paul McAuley used to be a biology lecturer, so he gets a lot of the technical stuff right.