Nevsky

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Posts posted by Nevsky


  1. Sounds like it was a fun night!

    Wow, how was that?

    Oh, it was great. He was a big bundle of enthusiasm and pure passion, dripping with inspiring advice and quotable bits.

    He ended with a big recommendation for using classical chamber music in amateur short films, because they provide emotive scoring, but also they're in the public domain (so you only have to pay the musicians). Then he wrapped up with a rousing appraisal of Bach, and invited his friend Alexander Baillie to sit in front of us and play a piece from Bach's Cello Suites.

    Quite special, I thought. Although, my course isn't in filmmaking, it's in film history and theory, so some of the students were too busy picking apart his views on auteur theory and reader response theory to be set alight by his drive.


  2. I should qualify, the danger of the image made it all the more awesome.

    Or, actually, as I'd been playing a lot of Skate 2 that day, so I was all the more aware of the dangers of skateboarding.

    Or, I was more engrossed in the soft focus loveliness of the image to have any other concerns.

    Speaking of hazy high fives and cuddly music. M83.

    0mpkhcLGeDs

    (There is an official video for this, which has a nice sequence of rollerskating, but it's an edited version of the song, and some of it is a little suspect, like the weird Thriller and Big Lebowski references.)


  3. It was immense fun! Great to meet you Patters and n0wak.

    The Casino Arcade was as good as I'd remembered it, but I was really impressed by the six Street Fighter IV cabinets. I'd not played on networked cabinets before, so it was great how we'd end up playing with someone on the other side of the room.


  4. 360 all the way. I think this might be my first home console game purchase of the year!

    (I am confusing myself, since there are two threads about this game, both discussing which platform we're buying it for. Ugh.)


  5. I saw Broken Social Scene live and they weren't very good, if I remember correctly. They could barely fit on the stage, either. I do like some of their tracks, though, but I think they are one of those Pitchfork generation groups whose status will fade a little over the years. I don't really understand why You Forgot It In People was so big.

    That said, however, BSS off-shoots like Metric, Stars and Feist are all intermittently lovely.

    After some Twit action from N0wak last night, I am listening to this on repeat:

    bbSd7vgG-JA

    Sparse, distant, yet funky. Just like my soul.


  6. I'm a writer, mostly spewing words about films, comics, video games and so on. I've had work at a couple of cool places in the past, like Den of Geek, Film4.com and, for one brief shining moment, Gamasutra. I've got a blog with all of my writing here.

    Recently, due in no small part to the influence of This American Life, A Life Well Wasted, and the BBC World Service's weekly documentaries, I've started to branch out into audio work. My first attempt was a prototype podcast from the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing. The sound is mostly terrible, and it's just me talking with some comic-y people, but I'm quite happy with how the battered, borrowed AKG vocal mic held up for the interviews.

    I have more ambitious ideas, both text and audio, for the future. Hopefully I'll get the opportunity and platform to flesh them out, so we'll see.


  7. So I'm thinking Casino arcade meeting at 6 or 7pm, which ever is peoples preference. Throw me a PM to get my Number, then head to a pub between 8 and 9, have a pint or 4 then over. Good with others? If anything changes I can throw out a text to tell those of changed plans.

    So this is Saturday the 10th? My 'thing that hasn't been set in stone' still hasn't been set in stone, frustratingly, but I have been told vague details by one of the people involved (this is a meeting of ex-housemates, converging on London for the first time in a long while).

    So I might have to duck out of this, which is annoying, because the vague suggestion is going to Camden for a curry - bizarre because curries are not the first thing to spring to mind when I think of Camden, but it means I can't pop my head in the casino and shout gamer-related slurs at you.

    And, no, sorry Patters, I don't know the name of that pub. I just walk into the one with least people in, and rarely note the name. But if you're going up to the Casino Arcade, you're in the Goodge Street area, so near another handful of pubs I've been to but can't remember the names of.


  8. ...Berklee college of music?

    Pff, only Dream Theater fans care about Berklee.

    (I've heard of plenty of American colleges, not just because I have associates who have studied there, but a watcher of American television or cinema should easily have come across many of them. I think I can blame the Simpsons for most of my younger self's knowledge.)

    I am always wary of league tables, because the placing of most universities differ between most lists. (What are you basing your list on, by the way? Alarm bells ring on that one because, well, Imperial is a science/business-only institution, so it can't be that well-rounded a survey...)

    Better to choose what you're interested in, then see which universities offer courses in that area that have good approval ratings, interesting modules and good-looking staff, then whittle them down based on which cities you want to / don't want to live in, and other concerns.

    Hey, books! I'm enjoying the hell out of William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen-Trade, widely believe to be a great book on screenwriting, by the dude who penned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, All The President's Men and The Princess Bride. What I love about it is how down to earth and pragmatic it is - throwing most theory or criticism out of the window in favour of some pretty easy maxims and guidelines. But then the book also works as a collection of anecdotes about Hollywood, and then again as an autobiography. And he's a punchy writer, so it's 'great read', as well. Wowzer.

    Unfortunately I've left it in London, and I'm with my family for the Easter weekend, so I've started reading Mikhail Bulgakov's Black Snow, which is a short novel that also works as a crazy satire on the Moscow mid-20th century arts scene.


  9. Something might be happening for me on the 10th in the evening, but that hasn't been set in stone yet.

    I have a handful of pubs that we could go to, potentially, although I have no idea if they are good in terms of price, because I'm the water-drinking type. So I don't really have a preference in that regard.

    On the topic of the Trocadero and Gamerbase, let's just say I'm more miserly than James.

    I suspect both places will be rammed on the weekends anyway. It can be fun to wander around the Trocadero and observe, though.

    Which pub were you thinking of, James? To be honest, most central London pubs are small and packed.


  10. Don't know about elsewhere, but the UK government offers tax relief and other forms of support to a number of creative industries, such as film and the arts.

    So this is quite a development, as it shows that they're considering the games industry to be as important as those other sectors to the economy/national culture.

    Plus, moneymoneymoney.