Looking forward to this, because it's basically my route into town. It's a fairly cheap investment, too, considering the landscaping they'll be doing towards the Docklands end. But five months to complete the project? Considering the Castleknock-to-Ashtown section was delayed by four months over some bullshit land access issue for the electricity supply to the cameras and lights (which are pretty dim. as it happens, and virtually worthless), I think that's a bit of a pipe dream. (Also, while the towpath's closed I'll have to use the roads into town, won't I? I wouldn't mind only that Dublin drivers are pricks until proven otherwise.) #link
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Rounding up my latest movie thoughts on Letterboxd. First, House of 1000 Corpses:
Whatever you can say about Rob Zombie, you can’t say he’s not a trier. But this, his first directorial effort after a music career soaked in horror fandom and imagery, well, it’s too self-conscious about its own recognition of the genre’s tropes to be as fun as it should be, and not nearly as deranged and affecting as the classics it’s blatantly homaging. The clusterfuck pile-on ending, too calculatedly crazy, is case in point. Still, at least he shows some visual flair, and an understanding of what makes a memorable shot.
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A native Twitter client for Mac OS X. Trying this out for a while. #link
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"Success doesn't come from willpower, but creating a maintainable, positive feedback loop—a motivation machine that says 'the results that I get out are worth more than the effort that I'm putting in.' When it comes to staying motivated and sticking to your fitness program, this is the only thing that really matters." Bingo. #link
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On some of South Korean TV's mental programming, along with baseball taking after the Japanese. So it's always been weird to me that pro wrestling isn't a thing there. #link
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I’ve had a nagging illness the past two weeks, sinusitis that started with the usual stuffed-up back of the nose but turned into an earache that made my jaw throb whenever I chewed anything bigger than a crumb, and a dull headache, with attendant surface tenderness, localised roughly in the same area of my skull. Not nice at all. So forgive me when I say the fortnight’s been quite a blur, of working and waiting and a missed solar eclipse, all around and in between that discomfort.
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Isao Takahata's first film in 15 years, and maybe his last, is also one of Studio Ghibli's finest. #link
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Huh. I did not know this before. Suppose I should it this under 'TIL' for 'today I learned'. #link
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How to Make Caramelized Onions in the Microwave
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Decent interview with a past contestant giving a pretty detailed behind-the-scenes at the Food Network's best show. #link
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Turns out the answer is 'all of the above'. I'm gonna need a new favicon file, aren't I? #link
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Weird that the Dutch version of Windows calls it 'Ireland'; that shade of green is far too bright for this country. #link
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I ran into an issue the other week where the text box default assumed one of my pullquote styles. I'd draw a frame, say for a headline or body text, paste in the text and voila: exactly the style I didn't want. I still don't know how that happened. But this tip helped me reset back to the basic un-styled text. Winner. #link
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"Woodley, alas, is as ligneous as her name. I’m talking Keanu Reeves levels of blank-faced disengagement. Literally the only change she undergoes between the first movie and this one is a haircut. Two movies in now, if she can’t connect with Tris on any emotional level, why the hell should we?" #link
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"The year is 2015; we don't quite know what year it is. The notion that 2020 will show up five years from now seems absurd, that '10 years ago' refers to '2005' hardly less so." Nick Sweeney (from whom I got my Gmail invite in 2004, IIRC) reflects on something that's been on my own mind as of late. I was in Forbidden Planet yesterday and saw a magazine on the shelves celebrating 20 years since the premiere of Star Trek: Voyager and I was like '20 years? What?' Because it only feels like a decade if even that. But maybe it's just that as we get older, our sense of time is compressing. #link
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It's on 20 March, this Friday morning! I missed the last one, in August 1999, 'cause I was at work. Weather permitting, I don't intend to make that mistake again. #link
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I’ve had it for something like 15 or 16 years now — the pound sign on the Hodges Figgis price sticker is a giveaway — and I was in the mood for a memoir/diary-type book to read, so I relieved this one from its tsundoku status in my bedside locker a few months ago.
Was it worth reading before seeing Apocalypse Now? I think so. I mean I’ve seen most of the film, in parts, and I know the gist of the story; it’s just that I’ve never sat down and watched the whole thing through. With perspective, I don’t think I was ready for it before — I certainly didn’t have the patience for a three-hour treatise on war and existentialism the night I first saw (some of) it — but I feel primed for it now, having read Eleanor Coppola’s thoughts on and around its making.
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Jesus, do people really send such terrible pitches? I need to get my arse in gear. #link
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Cauli gosh: Yotam Ottolenghi’s cauliflower recipes
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I don't remember learning about Paul Durand-Ruel in my art history class, which is kind of a glaring omission considering how pivotal he was to the impressionists and their movement. #link
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Elmo Keep's lengthy feature on the Mars One project, which doubles as a definitive explanation for why privatisation is a Bad Thing. I mean, Chris Hadfield doesn't like it, so that should tell you something. Bonus content: Wikipedia's Timeline of the far future (something to read if you feel like giving yourself an existential panic attack). #link
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"It’s that Terms of Service that makes Joe Chip’s conapt suck. It doesn’t suck because it’s connected; it sucks because Joe Chip doesn’t own his own stuff. The TOS/EULA turns everything into hire purchase." Tom Armitage on that PKD excerpt doing the social media rounds. #link
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It's been so long since I've watched Robot Chicken; I guess I've got some new DVDs to queue in my Amazon wish list. #link
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Week 705 was a quiet one. From Monday it was head down to the deadline at my semi day job, then a well-earned break on Wednesday afternoon involving a sunshine cycle to the park, where I met these deer. (I’m planning to return with carrots and my good camera on the next sunny day.)
In the meantime, my first album review in ages (not counting my round-up last month) went up on Thumped. There’s a few more in the works where that came from, though it’s still a challenge to sit down and just crank ’em out, y’know? Still chasing my mojo in that respect.
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"It’s all beauty in song drifting on the river between joy and fear." My first album review in ages, rejoice! #link
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Is it just me, or is there something really insidious about all these ‘binge-watching = depression’ stories popping up as of late? I’m talking about stories like this, which run with the results of a single, small-scale university study (red flags waving immediately, there) to patchwork a smothering quilt of consensus.
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Two press screenings in Week 704: British war film Kajaki (out in April, so review to come closer to that date) and Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie, which I reviewed for Thumped.
I cycled from home in West Dublin to Rathmines for the former screening, and that was a fairly pleasant ride, apart from the deplorable condition of what Dublin City Council would purport to be cycle lanes in the Islandbridge/Kilmainham area. That and the cycle home was into the wind, which had picked up a bit too much for my liking. But on the bright side, the fog has cleared from a new area of my mental map of the city.
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It's getting slaughtered by the critics bar a few exceptions, which seems like overkill to me because while it's not a great movie, it's not that bad. #link
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Methinks Jonathan Jones' appreciation of the medium is too rarefied for his own good (there's more to a comic than the pictures on the page, and there's more to comics in general than the graphic novel, or the counter-culture underground). But he makes a very fair point about Chris Ware's work, which I have enjoyed in the past, being "basically a set of tics and mannerisms" -- exactly the same way I feel about Wes Anderson's films [c/o LinkMachineGo]. #link
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There's going through the motions (which can be fine, there are sets of expectations and marks to hit; being a wrestling fan I do that all the time when I suspend my disbelief) and there's spirituality and transcendence (Swans, Boredoms, Sunn O))), etc) and then there's ritual. And Freeman (my editor at Burning Ambulance) argues that actual, religiously inspired ritual is a rare thing in music, particularly in metal. #link
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