Ridley Scott is a Pale Imitation of Paul W.S. Anderson

 Normally I would class myself as a moviegoer with at least a little bit of sophistication. I'm no 'buff', to be sure. But I at least like movies that make me think and I like to think about movies. Story, structure, plot and relationships, these things matter to me. I say these things so you won't think me a complete idiot when I tell you I enjoyed the first Aliens versus Predator movie but was disappointed by Prometheus.

The reasons I liked one and not the other movie are perhaps less important than the realisation I came to last night that the two movies are eerily similar - one might even say 'the same' -  despite one being put together by a world-renowned and revered, multi-award winning legend of the silver screen, the other by the guy who made Crash and since then probably only keeps getting work because he married a supermodel. Who also probably keeps getting work because she married a director.

Lets quickly go through the similarities, shall we?

Both movies start in a strange and desolate landscape, sometime in the past, where we see a frightening alien do something we cannot explain but know will somehow affect mankind's future and, of course, be important to the rest of the cast in the 'present'.

Then we skip straight to that present, where we see scientists doing, well, science, that although earthbound, will prepare them to deal well with the mystical aspects of the aliens they are about to meet.

Both films then pop those brave explorers onboard a transport vessel where the plot of the movie is explained to everyone's satisfaction with cool lightshows featuring the expeditions funder, Mr Weyland. There is a small discrepancy between the two films at this point - in AvP, Mr Weyland is alive and well and presents the mission in person. In Prometheus we are told Mr Weyland is dead, so his hologram substitutes.

Eventually we arrive at the site of unexplained phenomena - heat blooms in AvP, star maps in Prometheus (At this point AvP is in fact clearly the superior movie - heat bloom is a simple premise to follow, but how on LV-whatever did the Prometheus manage to break into the planet's atmosphere at precisely the right point to find the skull-pyramids?) and those crazy scientists rush out into the harsh weather to explore, despite warnings form cooler heads.

Once inside, more lightshows and exposition ensue - pictograms and holograms in both films explain the nature of the structures being explored. Eventually both parties get split up, small monsters appear and invade the bodies of explorers, these bodies then go on to attack the rest of the teams. In AvP they do this by spawning xenomorphs, in Prometheus they just seem to reanimate the dead.

Prometheus, sadly, didn't feature Predators. Instead it has Engineers. The two fill identical roles though. Both are responsible for the structures being explored, both use them as weapons storage, both are confronted by Weyland as he demands answers and compliance, both murder Weyland.

The two films then each show the luckless explorers being variously dismembered and destroyed, until only one female survives because she's tougher or more special or something. But she survives the film largely because of the sacrifice of a Predator/Engineer as he fights off a massive xenomorph. She is not unscarred from the fight though and is now aware there is more to the heavens than meets the eye.

In AvP the heroine is ritually scarred and will now travel with the Yautja, presumably to adventures so exciting we could never hope to capture them on film, while in Prometheus she's off on a Engineer ship to see the universe and answer the question 'where are the answers this movie failed to provide?'.

Avp then, and Prometheus. They are the same film, made a decade apart.

I know, I know, it had its faults. One of which was the casting of the voice of Cleveland's nagging wife from the Cleveland Show as the lead. But, apart from that utter failure to capture even a fragment of the magic the Aliens franchise has derived from its revolutionary casting of a strong female as lead, the film really isn't that bad.

Prometheus on the other hand really was a disappointment.

Even though it had Scott at the helm, calling the shots, driving the design, pushing the story to somewhere it would fit alongside and before the original Alien, the movie was a hodgepodge

Here is something that crept into my brain late last night as I started watching 'Prometheus'

Weight Loss Spreadsheet

I have put together a quick and simple spreadsheet to allow me to track my weight loss.

So far its going well - I lost nearly a kilo over the weekend. Some of this was due to diet control - smaller portions, zero chocolate and limited sugar intake - the rest to exercise. I have swum, walked, and done aerobics and yoga this weekend.

None of this has felt like particularly hard work though. Its just a matter of making it a priority to do some exercise each day. I did push myself with the aerobics and yoga, doing one straight after the other, but that was just from a desire to really work up a sweat and do more than I usually do.

Here's the link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApftOCGvZzandEl6R0RvdldkRDJpZUxnOEFSTlNjQkE

As always, happy to hear comments and suggestions :)

Golden Age of Gaming Part 2

Eurogamer just published an article about modern board and card games. Its a wee bit better written than my own post from a couple of weeks ago, probably because the author is a professional journalist who does research and has a budget and stuff. But essentially he says the same thing as me - board games are becoming cool and there is a massive variety to choose from. Even videogamers are becoming converts.

A nice read and some good suggestions for games to try too.

My Olympic Joy

 By about three days into London 2012, I was starting to feel a bit of a curmudgeon. I love sports, watching them at least (although I did love to play in my younger, lighter days too), and the Olympics are obviously the greatest collection of competitive games on the planet. I had boycotted the Beijing games for moral reasons (some of us care that the Chinese murder dissidents and use slave labour to make Homer Simpson slippers for the US) but I was glued to Athens and Sydney. But I also feel that while its a great spectacle, having the Games in your country is really not as great for you as organizing committees, politicians, and the Coca Cola company would have you believe.

If you wear Nike clothing at the Olympics, they make you dance in front of everyone

Add to that the fact that tickets for events were originally only obtainable by the general public through a lottery system, wherein you presumably had a limited chance to get hold of tickets to sports you would actually like to see played at the highest level (Basketball rather than Airgun Shooting, for example), and I was generally feeling glad to have gotten out of London before local taxes were raised to pay for the world's greatest corporate junket and athlete-orgy and to have the BBC covering every single event around the clock.

But then Beach Volleyball happened.

Just like that.

If you haven't seen a Beach Volleyball match, and you like fun, you owe it to yourself to watch a match right now. If you're lucky the BBC Sports site is still hosting video of every match from the main court. Otherwise, er, Youtube, maybe? Its not the most shown sport on TV, hence this being the first time I had really seen it.

For the really uninitiated, the game is pairs volleyball, played on sand. Best of three sets. First two sets are first to 21 points, the decider goes to 15 with the usual must-win-by two points rules. But, and here's the fun bit, it is played in a party-like atmosphere, complete with comperes and DJ's, who whip the crowd up between every point with pumping music, national callouts, sound effects, and so on. Shouting during points is very very much encouraged. God saw fit to grant London great weather over the last week as well and the Olympic Beach Volleyball arena at Horseguards Parade in London has, without a doubt, been the place to be during the Games.

The Olympics is also about art. Sand art.

The next big thing that happened was finding out tickets to various Olympic events were being made available on a daily basis through the official website. This was happening late at night - LOCOG officials were suggesting checking around midnight each night - as, I believe, it was established what 'Olympic Family' tickets were not to be used by their holding corporations and teams. So a sport I love watching, at the Greatest Show on Earth, in my own country at a city near me? I was bitten by the once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity bug and knew I had to go, if I could.

Who could say no to this?

 The first night I checked, there were tickets available for medal matches in the second week of competition. Unfortunately, in a manner of speaking, I would be away on holiday that week. But the second night of looking there were tickets for the very next afternoon. A quick check of the schedule of play showed GBR's women would be playing that day and fifteen minutes later I received confirmation I had a ticket!

Even John McEnroe put in an appearance

I had been concerned traveling across London would be a nightmare. There has been a lot of doom-mongering going on about the capacity of London's transport network and its ability to cope with the influx of visitors to the capital.

None of my worries proved well-founded though as it was easy to get a train into Fenchurch Street and a tube to Charing Cross. No crowds, no muss no fuss. Even walking through Trafalgar Square and along The Mall to the arena was zero-stress. There were people there, sure, and many tourists. But not a noticeable increase from normal numbers.

Collecting my ticket from the Box Office was easy, queuing to get in was easy (and shaded as some bright spark ahad though to place the queues under trees, the soldiers manning the security checkpoint (just like airport security) were pleasant and polite, and the 'waiting area' before one got in to the arena-proper did not even feel that crowded. I have felt more stress and pressure, for example, walking along Tottenham Court Road in the summer.

The arena itself is amazing. It took a bit of effort to look through the fences, stalls, and the giant stands themselves to remind myself what the place looks like, well, the rest of my life. I even got a great seat - maybe fifteen feet from the sand, behind the service line, at the Mall end.

Usually there are soldiers here. Today they were very well hidden.

The only possible misstep the organisers made was perhaps their scheduling. Team GB disappointed in the second match of the day - they narrowly lost the first set, but were never really in contention for the second. The atmosphere for the next tilt was then a little muted to begin with as most of the audience had cheered themselves out for Team GB. It certainly took me most of the first set to drum up some more enthusiasm for the rest of the afternoon's players.

Team GBR losing early kinda killed the mood...

All in all though it was a great afternoon of competition. Even if you couldn't care less whether Holland or Germany win the chance of a Lucky Loser match the atmosphere, the comperes, the music, the weather, and the crowd all combine to make shouting, cheering, dancing, and laughing impossible to resist. I loved my afternoon at the Olympics and wish I could do it every Thursday afternoon.

More art!

The Olympic Opening Ceremony - Most Offensive Ever?

No matter how you cut it, a potted history of the British Isles is pretty much guaranteed to be a catalogue of international offenses and insults. Last nights certainly was.

Also offenses against comedy

 Don't get me wrong - I really enjoyed the ceremony/festivities. It made me proud to be British. But perhaps part of that Britishness is the ability to pick out all the tiny little slights and pairs of fingers thrown around the arena as we went along.

For a start, why on Earth, in a ceremony about unity and inclusion and inspiring a nation, would you have Scottish children singing an anthem about how much the Scots hate the English? Yep, 'Flower of Scotland' is, at its core, about the Jocks fighting back and humiliating Edward Longshanks. I know, I know, these days the politically correct prefer to present it as a celebration of the resilience of the Scottish spirit, as an inspirational. But thats not how it goes down at Murrayfield when the Auld Enemy are in town...

One Ring to rule them all. Or at least keep them in a Commonwealth

Continuing with the theme of Rugby as a vehicle for f***-you-ishness, here's Jonny Wilkinson winning the World Cup - take that, Australia! (To be fair, its not like we have a lot of shots of Brits winning important stuff, and I'm really really glad the ghost of '66 wasn't dragged screaming into the auditorium)

Later on, during the dance-party section, we saw a crowd form the symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - suck on that, USA!

Generally, the UK is against WMD's

Somehow we managed to insult both sides of the greatest and most horrific armed conflict of the 20th Century by a) mentioning the war, and b) not mentioning the Munich deaths. 

Even our own government wasn't left out - how about a few hundred people celebrating the NHS - the Conservatives even took the bait.

Oh yeah, and there were lots of Christian songs (which I don't have a problem with) to celebrate our nations proud religious heritage, but it seems Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists aren't a part of our national identity we show to the world. The dead of 7/7 apparently now are though...

We'll put the slave ships over there, and the Mau Mau concentration camps to the right...

 On a side note, even the Danes, well one of them, took offense. My wife complained this morning athletes shouldn't be allowed to carry cameras and phones around the arena....

Yes, last night was a triumph for all involved. The 7500 volunteers were deservedly cheered and applauded and I would imagine an MBE is the spread to beat for Danny Boyle in next year's honours list.

Also, wtf?

 But Britain's greatest tradition, one we have proudly extolled and exported for centuries, is that of pissing people off, particularly foreigners, and last night was no exception. But given that we didn't even wait for the Games to begin to annoy the entire Arabic-speaking world and what could be the world's most dangerous rogue state, well, should we be surprised?

Here's looking forward to seeing how many more international gaffs we can squeeze into the next two weeks :)

A Little Less Than Daily

Sorry to say, my pledge of daily writing has been more than a little broken recently. It has been a couple of days since I last published on my toy soldiers blog and it was over a week since the post before that.

Part of that has to do with my wife working some crazy hours recently. Term time is over at the school at which she teaches, but that just means it is time for Summer School. Regular students have to audition to attend a course but, in the summer, the doors are more or less thrown open to all comers. Anyone who can pay, more or less, is able to attend a three week course in drama/singing/dancing. Its a fairly intense course for the students and it just about doubles my wife's teaching hours.

This, of course, leaves me at home with two small children. A challenge at any time, it gets worse when one is a baby who is going through teething and then gets a cold too. Oh, and refuses to eat all day and won't sleep all night ><

Stress-filled times at the White house then.

This then has left me little time for reading and writing. I have barely had any time to paint or exercise either. Usually I get about an hour in the morning to do something unrelated to babies and housework. Then it all kicks off...

The end is in sight though. Its the last week of Summer School and then we have a decent break, complete with overseas holiday. My wife has talked about doing some serious sleep training with the littlest monster in the house next week to try to get him back on track. And I should have more time to myself to think and plan and commit to the page.

Fingers crossed....

Limping over the Line

I'll admit I'm not actually sure when I last posted something. All kinds of excuses are possible, Burr essentially the problem is my wife went back to work this week, making me a full time daddy again, and that's hard work. So last night, after I had got both the kids to bed, wiped up all the spills and smears and dirty dishes and tidied away all the toys, all I wanted to was play Lego Batman 2 for a bit and go to bed. And eat sugar puffs, but that's a different issue.

I have several things I want to write about. The ethics of sporting competitions such as Formula 1 taking place in countries with dodgy human rights records, the incredible power of Kickstarter, comparing recent campaigns on that site I have followed and contributed to, and how ridiculous atheists sound when they write off creationists are all ideas I have been mulling over.

Right now though, both my kids are asleep there is a great tennis march on the tele and I'm going to gave some sugar puffs and some rest.

Chest Scan Time

So this evening I went to hospital for an x-ray ray. The reason - I have had a persistent cough for at least two months now and this is an early symptom of lung or oesophageal cancer. Yep, when I said this blog would be full of all sorts of stuff, I meant it.

There has even been a public awareness campaign recently in the UK about it. In fact,I was sitting at some traffic lights, just thinking about how this stupid cough had dragged on for weeks and weeks when I saw one of the adverts.

I have had a check up with the GP, who thinks I am fine, but referred me for an x-ray any way, just to be sure.

I haven't coughed up any blood and there has been no rapid weight loss (if only there was!). I had a genuine cold/cough that led to me actually losing my voice to begin with as well. But - there's always a chance. I did smoke for many years and grew up in a smoking household too.

Its always better to know for sure. Chest cancers are often very treatable and survivable if caught early on. My mother was diagnosed with liver cancer about this time last year - that was untreatable and she was dead within weeks of the diagnosis. I don't know if she could have been helped by an earlier diagnosis but lung cancer certainly can be. As frightening as it is to make the appointments for the GP and the hospital, getting seen early is important.

The thing now is a two week wait for the results. These will be sent to my GP who will contact me if they see anything. If the scan is negative, i.e. nothing found, they don't contact you. So now I'm faced with waiting, with some small amount of anxiety, realistically until the end of month. If I haven't heard anything by August, I'll know I'm in the clear. Fingers crossed then...

Galaxy Note: One Month Later

I've had the Note for a few weeks now, so its time for a re-review. A lot of the points I will make here will probably come across as criticisms. This is not intended in any way to rubbish the phone though. Its just a natural consequence of having discovered more of its limitations through use and experiment.

In fact, the Galaxy Note is a really really good phone. I'll stand by all the points I made in my initial impressions review. It is a very convenient size, very powerful, and very user friendly. Possibly even more so since updating to Android 4.0 on Sunday night. But it is probably that power thing that is the real flaw in the machine.

The battery life on this thing is dangerously low. And, by 'dangerously', I mean if you take your phone out and about all day and use the net or listen to music as you go there is a pretty good chance of running out of juice. Yesterday, for example, I unplugged my phone from its charger at 10am and got in a train for London. I affluent a few hits walking round the ships, almost always listening to music. I may have looked at a dozen pages on the net at lunchtime along with checking in on Facebook. I got back home at around 5 at which point I got my first 'low battery' warning. By the time I plugged it back into a charger at about 9pm the battery was down to 1%.

According to the phone itself, around a third of my power usage that day was down to the internet access. Another third went on display. Knowing how I used my phone all day, these numbers seem 'questionable'. But, whatever the cause, its still a real shock to find my fully charged phone could barely make it through a day of usage.

Full days out like that, with no access to a power point, are a rarity for me. And I could probably buy a bigger, better battery. But I shouldn't have to, really. This phone guzzles power - watching video while recharging slows the process down so much, at one point I wondered if it was actually discharging the battery.

But, let's assume toy do have a full power pack.How much fun is the Note to use? Honestly, a lot.

Samsung's Swype is a lot easier to use than it was on the Tab, and it was already a really really user-friendly experience then. You only have to tap once on wrongly typed words to get a list of likely alternatives and adding new words to the dictionary is a one-tap thing too.

The screen still feels too small for a fun video experience for me. But as I mentioned in my first impressions, I am coming from having the Tab's massive screen. I suspect most people will find the Note's screen a great improvement on their old mobile's.

Coupled with Evernote, the Note is, appropriately enough, excellent for writing on. The use of the stylus gives a much more precise feel to using the onscreen keyboard to a point where I can write on the Note amost as fast as I can using pen and paper. Not as fast as I can type, granted, but still easily fast enough to make taking actual notes and even writing blog posts like this one very practical.

There are a couple of things the Tab could do that got left out of the Note's specs for unknown reasons.

For one thing, not every screen rotates to landscape. The home screens don't and its kind of annoying when you have your phone on a desk stand to watch videos but then switch out to check an email and have to turn your head sideways to figure out where and what your icons are. This Phablet really wants to be treated like a phone.

I had planned to record some video on my trip to London yesterday, then edit it together and post it here so I could talk more about how easy the bundled software is to use. Sadly, it rained so hard, all through the day, I literally had to buy an umbrella in order to not just get thoroughly soaked and miserable. Suffice to say though, based on previous experiments, it really is easy and the stylus helps an awful lot. There are ins and outs, tricks and shortcuts to learn, of course. But that is always the case and I look forward to working with it on better weathered days.

All in all then, my enthusiastic first impressions have not been tempered by time. The Note is a great little (big) phone with oodles of power and features. It does take a lot of power though, so its possibly not the first choice device for people travelling off the grid. But, for writers, bloggers, artists and video makers, it includes a lot of great features and abilities and should definitely be tried.

Diablo 3 is Ten Years Old

So I wrote briefly last night about why Diablo 3 sucks after a certain point. Here, I will elaborateon why Diablo feels more like a game from ten years ago than one that took ten years to make.

More eloquent bloggers then me have broken down the main areas in which the game is lacking. My biggest problem is that eventually the game simply becomes a sequence of corpse runs, slowly whittling down Elite mobs, before getting to some really hard boss fights.

Take the session I played this morning. I was in a group of three -my level 55 witch doctor,a wizard and a barbarian - slogging through the desert, looking for the constituent parts of Zoltan Kulle.

On our way to the first cave with the first part inside, we encountered three different Elites and their associated mobs of demons. We each died half a dozen times on each encounter. Each death required a corpse run back from the last checkpoint - a minimum of twenty seconds for each run. Eventually the last screaming beastie would be vaporised and we would collect our loot, get repaired if necessary, then move on. To the next sequence of deaths and reincarnations.

The fact is that death, for most of the game, is nothing more than an inconvenience, a waste of time and an inconsequential amount of gold. Maybe we died a lot because we sucked, didn't know the best way to beat the mobs or play or classes. But, even if that is true, it doesn't matter. Blizzard wants you to win - eventually -and, most importantly, keep playing.

Sometimes these little battles become farcical.

After a while the wizard got tired of the cycle of dying, running, and repairing, and left me and the barbarian in a cave with a spider mini-boss.  This thing and it's minions were vampiric and molten, meaning they dropped piles of magma on the ground and regenerated health. So we had to kite them a lot, to the point where they were all the way back at the entrance of the cave, waiting for us each time we reincarnated. And so they then had to be kitted all the way back into the cave so wet could at least get into it safely.

So, not only are these fights are not only boring, repetitive cycles, with no real incentive to learn or change ones's approach, they are often frustrating and nonsensical (don't even get me started on 'arcane sentries' - why on Sanctuary would spiders have the ability to summon magical laser orbs?).

The really weird thing is these mini-bosses are actually intended as the main draw to keep people playing the game. Blizzard has stated that 'this is our game', that loot will often be better from these random spawns than from the scripted Boss encounters because they don't want players such in a loop of just killing Diablo again and again in the hopes of getting good loot.

So Blizzard does note want players to come up with the best groups and strategies to defeat the toughest noses in the game. They just want us to endlessly grind through random spawn after random spawn, dying and whittling, dying and whittling, again and again - for what? To do the whole thing at a higher difficulty setting.

This whole set up reminds me of the endless loop World of Warcraft has become since its first expansion. Skills, both gaming and social, used to be necessary to get the best gear, are the most exciting content. Then these things were phased out in favour of grinding currency and random groups where noone speaks to each other. But at least WoW fights still require a rudimentary understanding of your class and the enemy, rather than a willingness to just keep running back into the encounter and do enough incremental damage to eventually kill something.

WoW, it seems, has reached its peak and shown us the limits of popularity for a game structured that way. Its as if the development team for Diablo 3 had not paid any attention to lessons WoW's subscribers are offering.

In todays gaming world you just cannot expect to put costumers on an endless treadmill of gaming and expect them to keep on grinding through the same content again and again in the hopes of getting that piece of loot that had slightly better stats or is slightly more interesting to look at. It is no longer a novel experience - Everquest, WoW, and so many other games have been experienced and played and written about. A lot. And there are so many other competing games and experiences on the market today that just didn't exist in the heyday of Diablo 2 and WoW. Blizzard, it seems, has failed to adapt.

Blizzard would not be the first giant of the business world to be sunk simply because of an inability to change with the times and adapt to new ones and it surely wouldn't be the last.

All of this is, of course, just my opinion of a game that had only been out for two weeks. There are still features, notably pvp arenas, to be added. Expansion packs with whole new levels of content are not inconceivable and might include bosses it its actually worth fighting. Even the current content could be tweaked onto a more worthwhile and meaningful experience.

But, for now, Diablo 3, a game ten years in the making, feels like one that has ignored gaming for the last decade. It is a relic of another era, where grinding for loot and online play was novel. Its structure, the cental mechanic of the game, repeated play for better gear, just leaves players feeling used and bored and wondering what else they could be doing with their time and money.

Two Weeks Later: Diablo 3

Well, I had written several hundred words on how Diablo 3 falls apart at higher difficulty levels and is basically a transparent 'hamster-wheel' of a game, designed as nothing less than another cash cow for Blizzard-Activision . But then my wife called me and that wiped all I had done from the Note's memory.

So let's just say Diablo 3 is polished but disappointing in the long run. And there is a small design flaw in either the Blogger app or the Galaxy Note...

First day back at work.

So today was something like my first day back in the office after maternity leave. Not my leave, of course, my wife's. In the normal course if things she goes to work while I stay at home and look after the kids. We've had the luxury of maternity leave for about four months now though, but that is rapidly coming to an end.

So I have to start thinking about how to organise my days around being home alone with two small children. It's a little daunting, to say the least.

But it is a privilege too. My first child is awesome in so many ways and a lot of that is due to her having had me around all her life.

Without getting too preachy, it is an absolute shame more families aren't able to keep one parent at home full time. A better economist than me could tell you more about why mums working became less about the entitlement to do so than a financial necessity. Or maybe it is just as simple as people choosing to pursue financial and material rewards but just missing out on what is really important in their lives. All I know is we have less holidays than a lot of our peers, drive a crappy car, and so on, but we have two kids whose lives we are filling with memories of happy times doing things together.

Ugh, that does sound very preachy, doesn't it?

Well, it doesn't change the fact that I am going to have less and less time to myself in the coming months. And that means I am going to have to be more disciplined than I ever have been before if I am going to keep raising awesome kids and feel like I am doing something for my own life too.

And that is perhaps what is really daunting...

Review: The Raid - Assault by Precinct 13

I had seen the flashy trailers for this film. You know, the ones that promise you the most amazing experience of your life, the most incredible action, most spectacular fights, calligraphy, and so on. And to be honest, I wasn't all that intrigued. It took an article in Wired, of all places, to get me to want to see the movie, basically because they were very enthusiastic about the stunts in the film.

The movie plot is about as simple as it can get. Truckload of cops, tower block full of villains. Raid goes wrong and, instead of a clinical room by room pacification of the block, one false move results in things going crazy quite quickly. Enter the mad martial arts.

Pencak silat is an Indonesian fighting form it forms, apparently possibly derived from watching a monkey fighting a tiger. Having watched The Raid, I can believe it. The fighting in the movie is really intense.

At times I was actually reminded of some of the hand-to-hand struggles in Saving Private Ryan - us that desperate and intense. It's fast too, but this is not the speedily choreographed kung fu of a Jackie Chan flick, designed to amuse as much as amaze. This is brutal, dirty, survival fighting. It is clear these are moves aimed at maiming or killing an opponent.

There is one scene near the start of the movie where we see the hero, played by Iko Uwais, practising against a dummy. After a few genre-typical situps and stretches, I'll let's rip with a blistering number of punches and strikes to the dummy. At thus point I remembered hearing they used to have to slow down footage of Bruce Lee, so the audience could see he had in fact thrown a punch. But then I wonder if Bruce would have approved of the sheer graphic nature of the violence in a film like The Raid.

I looked away at a couple of points when it was clear we were just building up to a killer applying the coup de grace to a brutalised opponent (victim?). And there were other times when it felt like I might actually be watching a particularly bad piece of Saw-sequel fanfic - way too much blood and gore onscreen than is at all necessary to make the point someone one a fight.

It just seems a little out of place in a film that is really as superficial and throwaway as The Raid. Make no mistake, I'm not saying it's a bad film. It's just not a serious film, like Private Ryan is.

The Raid could be a serious hit without it. The acting, such as there is, what with all the fighting in the film, is good enough. The characters are all sufficiently well written to get the piece moving along and it's all competently directed and all. But that slightly nasty, sadistic side to some of the violence will probably stop The Raid being more than a cult hit for fans of Asian fight flicks.

Not a bad way to spend a fiver and a couple of hours on a Tuesday night, but not the greatest action or martial arts movie to come out of Asia in recent times either. Certainly not one for date night or watching with the kids either.

Last minute post

Just a few spare minutes on a Sunday evening, as my bath runs in the background, for a quick post/update and a few thoughts on the week.

Firstly, Diablo 3 is a little disappointing. I am not blown away by the single-player experience. Yes, its slick as snot, nicer visuals, nice audio and so on. But its a little, er, repetitive, isn't it? I mean, is this really what has gotten millions of people so excited about - endless running around fairly similar dungeons, mostly spamming two or three buttons? Its pretty easy too. I've just killed Belial and it was the first fight with enough difficulty to it that I needed to rejigger my abilities to win. And that's nearly halfway through the game. I don't know, its ok, I just struggle to see the immense attraction if running the same instances again and again, just to get loot to make those instances easier to run. But maybe it gets better in Act 3, maybe public games or higher difficulty levels will be fun.

All this is assuming of course you can actually play. it took nearly an hour to log in on launch say and two hours tonight.

So far, the best thing about playing Diablo is all the time it gives me for other hobbies. I've been working on painting 10 wraithguard I got on Ebay. This is also a little repetitive as the models are more or less identical, but at last at the end off it I'll have sine nice looking models I can use in games with other real live human beings.

I've also been doing a little research for a future article computing the mobile phone market with modern theology. Yes,I can see how you might think that's a stretch.Burr its actually a straightforward concept,I just want to duo a goods job getting background, quotes, links, and so on, so the finished piece will feel a little more professionally done than my usual writing.

And I started looking at what the internet had to say this evening about stimulating creativity. When you set yourself a goal of writing every say toy quickly realise you need a lore of good ideas too write about. One of the tips that came up again and again was exercising. Which its great as I started using The Biggest Loser Alimentary Workout for Xbox Kinect this week, on to of going stunning at least twice a week for the last month our two. It's pretty horrifying seeing your fat self bouncing up and down in screen as you work out, but that in itself is a pretty good motivator to keep going.

So that's all for now. The bath is run, the blog is written and I, for now, am done.

Galxy Note Review - First Impressions

I have had my brand new Samsung Galaxy Note for a few days now and have put together a few thoughts on it. These are only first impressions though. Over time I will no doubt uncover more tricks and secrets for the device along with, possibly, a few weaknesses too, and I will probably write a further review in a couple of months. But for now - how does the 'phablet' fare?

A common criticism of the device is its size. There was a period in time when mobile phone development was relentlessly pushing towards smaller and smaller devices.

Even supermodels were hawking them

Then touchscreens, and more pertinently the iphone, were invented and that trend was halted. A new form-factor was invented and it was suddenly cool to have a big screen again. Oddly enough though, for me, the Note is actually a step down in size as I have been using a Samsung Galaxy Tab for nearly a year. The Note is maybe half its size. It is still of course larger than most phones though but really, don't let that put you off. The Note is still palm-sized for most regularly sized humans and will fit in your front pocket. Its a little weird for me to be able to do that after having a phone that would really only fit in cargo trouser pockets but I could honestly forget the Note was in there. Seriously - a couple of times I have had to check every pocket on my person to find where I put it.

As far as the Note's layout goes, it is identical to the Galaxy S2. I know because that is the phone my wife is rocking right now. Packaged software is also virtually identical too. The only visible difference between the two is the S-pen that comes with the Note. So, why would you choose the larger of the two devices? What benefit comes from having a stylus and a larger screen?

It seems the designers intent is for you to use the pen as a more precise way to interact and work on your phone than just fingertips. There are lots of promo videos showing hip young professionals cutting up screen grabs and photos, maps and illustrations, then mashing them together into SMS's and emails. I have tried doing some of the tasks these videos show and in principle they are as simple and easy as shown. But bear in mind, results will vary according to genuine artistic talent. So my first few annotated photos and drawings look like, well, like they were drawn by someone who never went beyond GCSE art. A long time ago. But hey, if you're of the artistic bent, you can probably put together some nice mashups.

The phone comes with rudimentary video and photo editing software. There's a nice little range of effects in each one. For example, all the effects I used in my unboxing video, made in Windows Movie Maker, are present in the Note's software package and are easier and more intuitive to access too.

The photo editor is similarly easy to use to get quick, impressive results. Witness the most beautiful little girl in the world:

I am no great photographer. I just snapped a quick pic of my sleeping daughter. Then I added two effects, straight in the Note's video editor. And hey presto - instant awesome. (When I tried adding a handwritten caption over this picture, it looked a little less cute. And kind of more stalkery)

Make no mistake - for editing this sort of thing, screen real estate matters. The bigger the better. But precision and control is important too. So the S-pen is great for working with pictures and a big screen is essential too in order to feel like you're making real art and not just farting about and I have found myself wishing, so many times, I could have done the things I can do on the Note on the Tab.

Unsurprisingly given the device's name, Samsung is aiming this phone at people who take a lot notes, whether they be voice, text, or pictures. So it comes with the S Memo system, a really nice Post-it Notes style package. You can write with the pen, write with the onscreen keyboard, dictate, draw sketches, whatever. You can nest your notes to collect related ideas and thoughts. I used it to jot down what I wanted to cover in this post. But here's the problem - your notes are only ever on the phone itself. Given that this is a state-of-the-art mobile device, able to connect to all sorts of networks and will most likely be bought as part of a package with a generous data allowance, why would you want to use a notes package that is not backed up on the cloud?

Consequently, I installed Evernote and cut and pasted the aforementioned notes into it and am now viewing them on my PC as I type.

Incidentally, the S-Pen is really great for taking notes and writing. Combined with Samsung's Swype software and a nice big onscreen keyboard, it makes writing feel natural and easy. The Note supposedly has handwriting recognition software but it struggled to recognise mine. Even if I try really hard to write capitalized, large, clear letters, the phone came back with gibberish so I will probably just stick to the onscreen QWERTY.

The pen is also great for playing games. I have tried Fruit Ninja on my wife's S2, and on my Note, both using my fingers and with the pen, and the pen rules. R-Type, Spirit, and Osmos all also benefited from the precision control the pen offers and I'll be trying it you on some tower defense games soon too.

Thats about all I have for now. So far, so good - no reason to regret getting a Note and no reason for anyone else not to get one too. If you've ever felt the desire to have a mobile device that is truly pocket-portable and truly powerful enough to do real work on, the Galaxy Note could be for you. More thoughts as they come to me.

Samsung Galaxy Note Unboxing

Yay - three days in and I missed one already! I blame Diablo 3. That and new phones arriving for me and the wife yesterday. Anyway, I did get it together enough to record a video of my phone being unboxed. Its not the greatest quality - it was recorded with my Galaxy Tab and my wife managed to get her hand in-frame for most of it. But at least you get to see what is in the box and how to get your phone functional. Enjoy.

More on the Note as I get to play with it.

Brave Beginnings.

How to be productive? Its not as easy as it seems.

As a child from the slacker generation (or the one that came slightly after it), underachieving comes easily to me. Yeah, I see the irony in that. But I wish it didn't. I wish I created more, saw more, did more, and wrote more. So this is a start. But everyone has a blog, right? How do you turn that into a tool, not just to masturbate/flagellate the ego, but to actually promote and assist creativity?

Here is where I'm starting. Its a simple principle - set a goal and have an easily visual reminder/accountability tool. I guess this works because, for those of us who don't go into an office each day, we need a replacement for the social pressure of co-workers, dress codes, and office schedules.

I sort of envy those naturally self-motivated, self-driven, high achievers. The Tony Starks of the real world that have no problem just handling a dozen different projects every day. It would probably help to be born a billionaire, sure. But there are plenty of really good self-starting people in the world that weren't. I'm just not one of them.

But I am motivated enough to try this trick though. I ordered a calendar today which I will hopefully receive by the end of the week. So thats accountability sorted. But what about purpose?

Well, I have some fairly esoteric interests. From politics to game mechanics. From Lego's to world health. I play the occasional game of toy solders too but I sort of deal with that in another blog already. This then, I will keep for everything else.

I will publish a post on this and/or my other blog every day. Not all will be 'complete' articles, as it were. Some will no doubt just be progress updates and some may just ask a lot of questions, rather than providing any answers. 

Its a broad remit then and should produce a fairly varied read. Hopefully, producing it will teach me a few things as well and open up some avenues for further, offline, activities. My plan will be to do it for 365 days, so consider this one down.