Mawd

I think Fury was amazing. Best war/antiwar movie I've seen. (though yeah I do like Jarhead, Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now). I think a big thing Fury has going for it beyond the soul crushing grit is that it never felt too long for me while still being fully realised.

You could buy an HDMI to Pc input maybe? I think they're kind of cheap, I don't know if they're super great though. I was looking at the opposite type of cable to hook my PS3 to my monitor so I am just assuming that it exists. Still though with a cheap tv on the table a cable that costs probably >$15 shouldn't be too big a deal.

Which is an even better reason to shop online. Of course catchy names don't always bring the details.

This is a shot in the dark but I think after a point the way someone chooses to portray such a dynamic can be described as 'dumb' as in "there are better more considered ways to show this off". Maybe this can reduce to "this is too childish" but I like to think that not everything childish has to be super blunt or poorly thought out.

Fell off some slippery stairs. Now I've hurt an already battered tail bone and shocked my entire lower back. Everything from my bum to my lower ribs hurts. Yeah went to A&E half an hour after, X-ray machine is off due to staff shortages and a shoestring budget. Was given 60mg of codeine, BP and O2 levels okay, and spent almost an hour talking about the healthcare system.

I feel like I should be reading Terry Pratchet's Snuff currently but I'm feeling pressured to power through the Dark Heresy 2 Rulebook so I can run my campaign on time.

Isn't Cyber Monday also a thing over in 'murrica? Seems like a much preferable alternative than the consumer electronics version of the Running of the Bulls.

I don't think many rap groups come with a brass section these days.

I saw that in a group with a movie nerd friend of mine and by the end he actually apologized to me for our mutual viewing experience I don't think it's quite that bad but it did get a little tired. Biggest complaints would be the run time and how repetitive and recycled every main character's meditations on women were. Also the way they handled the macho bullshit in that film. When handled correctly macho talk can make for an interesting character or at least a convincing one; I'm thinking Crank as a successful example. But in SS:ADTKF everyone said pretty much the same thing and it came off as the posturing it was.

I don't think I've heard this for at least ten years. Groove Armada is the shit though.

Finally saw The Wolf of Wall Street it was a pretty good watch it certainly prefers to go with J.B. on his master of the universe excursion and paints him as default hero rather than selfish antihero (would've at least been closer to the real deal). But my main fault with the movie is that at the end when he's hosting a conference in Auckland, New Zealand the presenter does not have any kind of NZ or AUS accent at all. The movie doesn't stop to say anything about the dude so it's just one of the worst fake New Zealand accents I've heard since Enter The Dragon. It's a tiny thing but try to imagine a 'born an raised' Bostonite speaking with a SoCal skater tone.

I had a silly dream last night where I was in this fighting game tournament (think Samurai Gunn with LoL character designs). I managed to easily fight my way to the top but we all had a break before the final playoff. Shortly after I found myself in a highschool classroom and I was surrounded by 15 year olds while still my 21 y/o self and I had this teacher breathing down my neck saying "You didn't pass algebra!" In mean bold letters I can't be bothered typesetting. I spent a small while in this annoying classroom before remembering I did pass my highschool maths and I got University Entrance so I told the teacher to stuff it and strutted out the room.

There are some pretty interesting recommendations here. My latest/only great manga was Berserk which was a sad experience to complete because I doubt anything as good will be around for a while. I'm currently trying to fill its hole with the somewhat average King of Hell and Uzumaki. I think I'll be sure to check out Fuan no Tame, Junji Ito, and Bride's Story.

I'm beginning to think that House of Leaves is just one of the peaks of a writing style I've learnt to loathe. I'd say elements are similar to Infinite Jest only DFW made them actually entertaining for me.

Take a look at The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. It's a brilliantly constructed novel spanning about a dozen of extremely realised characters as they uncover a murder mystery in a mining town in Victorian goldrush era New Zealand. One of the neat gimmicks/techniques the writer uses is assigning every major character a zodiak star sign and constructing major plot arcs and character interactions around the zodiak calendar. It's more than just character interactions though there's quite a bit of hidden meaning within the symbols and certainly enough to fuel a one hour lecture on the subject which I regrettably missed. Another beautiful thing about this book is that the characters frequently misunderstand/decieve each other and one of the great pleasures of the book is to watch the characters become swayed to and from their chosen courses based on the information they each have at hand. There's never just one viewpoint character although each chapter is told biased to one person's viewpoint specifically. I think one of the most wonderful things about this book is that it's not really about the mystery. It's about being with the characters and seeing what they do. I think it's fair to say its like Twin Peaks in that even if its not that kind of Lynchian mystery. Finally the best part of the book is that while it does such a wonderful job at establishing setting and mood and inner thoughts in the first sections of the book; the further you read the shorter the chapters get which is usually quite the opposite. In a way the book is constructed like a Jigsaw puzzle where one starts with the outer corners first and while you can guess where the image of the puzzle is coming together its only as you finally complete it that it attains meaning/completion. By the end some chapters are less than a page, because they don't have to tell you sprawling inner monologues about the characters you've already come to know; its in this final stage of the book that you discover just why several of the characters do what they do and what informed their relationships going into the beginning. Seriously I'd call it a masterwork of fiction (the setting has also been heavily researched from news clippings, interviews, and the like.) and its fully deserving of last year's Man Booker Prize.

I usually ave sound off while playing DF but the looping them really is a nice piece of music.

I had a good dream the other day where I was the manager of a Dwarf Fortress and I'd overseen an excursion into the caverns layer. Sadly though our mining had attracted a forgotten beast which happened to be basically a giant land kraken. It's tentacles were so large they spanned a dwarf across and they were threatening to destroy a part of my fortress so I spent what seemed to be the entire dream running through the levels of the fortress alerting my fellow dwarves of the kraken, gathering up a posse to fight it off and, while it was distracted I proceeded to build walls to seal it off from the fortress. : D

Okay so I used the search bar to see if anyone had seen Under The Skin but it seems no one has or if they have their opinions have been sanctioned by evil forces. So has anyone else seen it? I did a few months back and it became easily my favourite movie of this year and almost certainly my favourite film made since Drive, Kill List, or The Place Beyond The Pines. Some people say it was a little too thin exposition wise but I think it was enough for me to subsist on because I felt it was sublime and amazing. I'd thoroughly recommend it if anyone wanted a modern day, understated, humanist, sci fi story. Okay with that said I must confess that it is a movie almost so completely built on the "Show don't tell" method that it can physically hurt you if that kind of experience isn't your thing. More than once during the movie my partner and I asked ourselves "What the fuck is going on with this movie?". It's good that the film is such a visual feast otherwise it might not be able to withstand our repeated attempts to demand some kind of explicit plot, some kind of Gordon Freeman avatar to come along and knowingly explain everything to us in the same way that I've come to dislike from him in almost every movie (except Shawshank because I can't hate the original G.F. explain-a-thon it didn't mean to hurt anybody and also excepting The Lego Movie since it's having so much fun with him). However I do think there is a great reward in seeing this movie and later coming back to it. By staying aloof it opens the door for return visits unlike say Inception. I do kind of wish that the film was less subtle than it was in particular about the main character's emotional journey but I think it's done a wonderful job as it has and I don't really think I'd change a thing about it which is more than I can say for most films these days.

I'm reasonably keen for this but I'd go for an animated tv show of it far more readily.

All I'll say is that as time passes more people appreciate the zombies, even the rabid ones as the people they were rather than what their bodies have become. Of course in a show like this many people still hold views to the contrary and even have reason to do so

I've just finished the miniseries In The Flesh. It was reeeally good. It's a zombie show but the plot concerns reintegrating the zombies into society. The show follows a young guy in a rural english town as he adjusts to his new life as a living dead.

The amount of times you can accidentally sex people in bioware/'mature' rpg's in general.. I mean even when it's the recognised flirty option a bunch of the time it's just too much escalation or not consistent to the tone. Which is seriously annoying to me when I'm developing character relationships outside of what the game dialogue spits out. At least it can make for interesting dynamics when my PC and the sex partner become at odds. OT: I quit Shadow of Mordor. It was fun sure. But I can never seem to develop relationships with my nemesis that are strong enough to continue; it also just sucks when someone you've built up is removed in an offscreen power struggle. The mind control sounded neat But I already know I would be able to do it to everyone if I wanted to.

It's pretty enjoyable especially when you have an experienced team+monster and everyone has a mic. Which was rare during the alpha. I encountered some pretty game wrecking bugs for example my one time as monster the abilities I had bugged out in the last third of the match, right when I was hoping to win. I had a shot at the power but I had an assualt right behind me, I could have beating him to the power core if I had charge and leap slam up but all abilities were bugged. This disappointment was quickly followed by two minutes of only being able to swipe at the hunters and a very sorry death. I like the game length although some matches were disappointingly short, the worst was 3.36 but I like the capped length of ~22 minutes. I can in no way justify the USD$79.99/NZD$103.57 that the game is asking for on steam though.

I've begun. But I'm off to an abysmal start as it also has been a busy month for me. I've chosen to mine my life for fiction. I don't mean to get anything historically correct; my main goal is to get the 'feel' of what my life was like during University. It's not a fixed window of time though; I plan to let it jump back and forward. When I'm done I might not use the basis of me as the main character, someone or something more interesting will probably crop up. I'm treating this all as a prototype that'll be vastly rewritten if successful. I've lately been a firm believer in "write what you know" so I figure if I start with the closest fidelity to my life I can export the frame of these experiences into actual works of fiction.

I must have read close to twenty books in the time it's taken for me to read half of IJ. But that's okay because even though I may never return to it the book was a wonderful piece of fiction. For me its one of those rare books that I don't need to complete to get what I need from it.