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Watching

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)
Snapping
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Being The
Geekly Diary of Waider
(may
contain traces of drinking, movies, and sport)
- February 16
- Harry Potter and the Threequel of Lucre Part 2, uh, I mean The Crimes of Grindelwald
did not, as far as I can tell, contain any of said crimes. I did
like the movie - Jacob again stealing the entire thing as far as I
was concerned - but I didn't buy Jude Law as Dumbledore, and I
can't take Johnny Depp seriously in this role which, given he's
the uber bad guy, sort of undermines the premise a
bit. Anyway. There's a third one of these probably in the next
year or two so we'll see how it all segues nicely into Voldemort
or whatever.
- February 14
- Using Apple's Migration Assistant to copy user details from Old
Server to New Server.
- run MA on new server.
- select "Time Machine Backup" as source, and point at old
server.
- prompts for password, accepts it, does nothing.
- run MA on old server.
- Old server goes through a preparatory dance of shutting things
down, asking for admin password, etc. Once it's good and dormant,
it pops up an error: can't run MA from an active Server - you need
to do one of a bunch of other things, such as Target Disk
mode.
- Haul old server out of its niche so I can cable it to new
server. Boot it in headless mode and hold down 'T' for what I
think is a sufficient amount of time to activate Target Disk
mode.
- Wasn't long enough. Reboot and try again.
- Back on new server, the target disk has appeared but it has a
warning icon on it.
- "New Server has Server app installed. Can't use MA. Please
demote new server"
- Opt to quit MA on the new server, which I'm accessing via
Screen Sharing because it's also headless; this apparently causes
it such a conniption that the screen sharing session stops
working.
- Reboot new server from the ssh session I'd cleverly set up.
- Fruitlessly trawl for "demote MacOS server". Implication seems
to be that I need to reinstall MacOS?
- Rename /Library/Server and remove Server.app fron new server,
and reboot.
- Back through the MA launch palaver again.
- Yay, target disk isn't tagged with a warning this time.
- Can't select what I want to transfer until it's done figuring
out how much data is in each category, ok...
- Can't select what I want to transfer even after all that? Uh,
ok...
- Doesn't transfer account passwords. That's annoying.
- Will take six days! Will take six hours! Will take six
minutes! It's been on "will take 45 minutes" for the last hour or
so, and the transfer speed is constantly dropping to maintain the
45 minute ETA.
- Hours later: "Could not obtain authorisation to create new
users on your system" which was the only bloody thing I wanted it
to do in the first place.
So now I'm back to the original advice to reinstall the New Server
from scratch because otherwise I've just got an incomplete clone
of the old server. AWESOME.
- February 02
- Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them:
I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I mean, the main
character - Newt - never quite felt like the main character to me
for some reason. And not because Tina was the main character,
either; the storyline clearly puts her in the damsel-in-distress
position almost throughout, and puts her sister in the
damsel-in-undress (hah! you see what I did there?) role, and
that's pretty disappointing for a movie written by a woman. I think
the character I enjoyed most was Kowalski, because he just rolled
with what was happening to him, and that was both well written and
well played by the actor. I'll probably keep watching these as
they make their way to the TV, but unless the subsequent movies
are dramatically different I suspect I won't exactly be leaping at
the opportunity to see them.
I've thought about this some more, and while Tina did have more
agency and less distress than you might believe from the paragraph
above, it still felt like she was playing a poor second fiddle to
a weak lead - and no fault of Eddie Redmayne; the character as
written was weak, not the portrayal.
- February 01
- Deadpool 2
was fun, as expected, but not quite as good as the first one. I
guess the first one was a hard act to follow, plus all the gags -
cultural references, breaking the fourth wall, Deadpool losing
arbitrary bits of himself - had already been used in the first one
and no matter how hard they try the second one was always going to
feel like it was either ticking the boxes or doing "same thing,
only with a bigger explosion". Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, I
just felt like I might have had a bit more fun rewatching the
first one.
- January 27
- Bought a laser measuring thingy. Smallcat has already associated the
beep the thingy makes with the little red dot he likes to chase,
so when the thing beeps by itself (e.g. automatic power off) he
starts running around looking for the dot.
I'm sure no good will come of this.
- January 25
- A Good Day to Die Hard:
ugh. Even for a bubblegum movie this was pretty terrible. The audio
mix meant that if you didn't want to be deafened by the explosions,
you couldn't hear the dialogue, and to be honest I think that's
just fine because you're not really missing anything. This movie
has nothing original about it, and no redeeming fetures.
- January 19
- I very vaguely recall watching the TV series, but I didn't make
anywhere near enough connections between it and The Equalizer
- to be fair, there's a lot of obsessive detail on the IMDb Trivia
page, but I didn't even remember the guy's name from the TV series
which, er, is the same as the movie. So, is the movie any good?
It starts slow. In fact, it takes quite a while to get going, to
the point where I was beginning to wonder if I was watching the
wrong movie. Then it sort of kicks off into hyper-violence, and
then we get the inevitable escalation, although for all that it's
an escalation, none of it really matches the trigger scene in the
office above the restaurant for sheer brutality. Even what I
thought was the denoument in the Home-Depot-a-like store was... I
dunno. It didn't quite punch the same way. Anyway, aside from
that, it does a nice job of going from peaceful la-la-la movie to
cranking up the tension. There are a few facepalms - the guy who
is supremely prepared being surprised that they kidnapped his
friends does not really sell well, for example - and the side
trips into minor retributions, clearly ground-laying for a series,
are distracting and frankly mundane by comparison to the main
story. And, to be honest, the actual denoument (which is after the
thing I thought was the denoument) is deeply silly. "Oh yes, I'll
just take an international trip with no problem whatsoever at
short notice to kill off the last guy, undetected, because that'll
definitely be no problem and will definitely solve the cycle of
escalation I've been dealing with".
So, it has flaws. But it is good, and I'll probably watch
the sequel when it comes around.
Now I need to go and have a word with my satellite PVR about the
fact that it seemed to record three fragments of this rather than
one continuous recording...
- January 13
- How To Train Your Dragon 2:
excellent. The characterisation of the dragons in particular is
incredible; I kept watching them in the background while there was
foreground action going on, and the animators have taken the
trouble to have them do things rather than just sit out of sight
while "more important things" take place. A small bit of the same
complaint as for Minions: Ruffnut being all swoony over Eret's
muscles is a little too foregrounded for a background joke for the
adults, and is a bit off one of the core story points, i.e. you
don't need to be the Brawny Alpha Male to be the hero. I dunno,
I'm not the core demographic for this movie in any sense, so maybe
I'm picking up on things I shouldn't.
The "fetch new data" part of the RSS toy has been producing an
error from a library every time it runs, because someone out there
has invalid UTF8 in their RSS feed and something in the
Python/MySQL world is insisting on treating the data I'm sure I
said was binary as UTF8 data, which then causes the MySQL binary
part of the toy - to which I have no access - to log the
aforementioned error. After judicious poking at various things
I've managed to wrap the triggering code in a context handler
which captures the error instead of printing it; this was
complicated by the fact that the code runs on Mac AND on Linux,
for which the desired hackery is trivially but critically
different, and by the fact that my code was using stderr
implicitly elsewhere, so capturing it and closing it broke that
part of the code. But now, all good.
Well, except for That One Guy and his duff UTF8 code. But I can't
help that.
- January 07
- Almost forgot, I saw most of The Flag
over Christmas. This is one of those well-balanced movies that my
Dad would describe as "harmless" or perhaps "light": it's fun, it
pokes fun at things without being malicious (in this case, it's
very much poking fun at Anglo-Irish relationships and stereotypes,
and doing so cleverly), and it's engaging without being
demanding. Summary of plot: man goes on caper to restore
father's/family's good name, and the McGuffin is the Irish
Tricolour flown above the GPO during the 1916 Rising. It all works
out the way you'd imagine from the outset, and everyone is happy
except the grumpy local barman who cast aspersions on the family
in the first place. And probably the guys who lost the flag aren't
happy either. And maybe the guys in the police car. But, you know,
everyone else is happy, including the audience. A point of
excellence in this movie: the
hapless heroic paddies are
surveilling their target - a British Army barracks - and how do
they conceal their motives? By thickening up their accents and
acting gormless. Pure genius, and of course it
works. I strongly recommend this movie, although you might need
subtitles and maybe some sort of cultural guide.
- January 06
- Helpful error message:
ip_tables: REJECT target: used from hooks FORWARD, but only usable from INPUT/FORWARD/OUTPUT Er, yes.
(This is probably triggered by something fail2ban is doing,
so I'm gonna have a fun time identifying the actual
source.)
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