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September 08

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was an absolute barrel of fun. Drax gets all the best lines, of course.

August 26

Logan was really enjoyable, with the minor niggle that the dynamic range of the audio meant that I missed some of the dialogue (including Logan's last line in the movie, dammit). It's a thoughtful story, with an awful lot going on in it. Interestingly it's chosen to not really build on any of the existing X-Men world, other than to use some of its characters; everything in terms of backstory is contained in the movie, and not via someone giving expository speeches, either - Xavier's backstory is given in a radio report, for example. I think you could also have played Johnny Cash's Hurt cover for the entire movie, because it'd be fitting at all times.

August 20

BBC works on their reporting:

2017-08-19 18:07:01	Boston march against alt-right rally draws thousands
2017-08-19 18:44:33	Boston march against right-wing rally draws thousands

RTÉ on the other hand, nails it first time:

2017-08-19 20:29:50	Thousands march in Boston against far-right rally

August 18

Celebrating that time we both said, "I do".

I definitely enjoyed how Collateral Beauty started out, and when Time got his initial lines I wanted to hug the scriptwriter, but then when it got to the boardroom confrontation I was a little iffy on the path the movie took. And then the whole bit with Melanie confused me further, and the closing scene in Central Park just kinda annoyed me. I think there were a few ways to take this idea - the concepts are "real" and hoodwinking everyone, the concepts are just the actors being put up to it, the concepts are, in fact, how Howard sees each friend, and so on - but instead it seems like the scriptwriters couldn't quite decide which option to go for and the result is less impactful for that. And the Melanie angle just seems... tacked on. It jars. This is a lovely movie, but it could have been so much better.

August 13

Watching the Waterford/Cork hurling semifinal. Funny to watch these guys shrugging off the sort of physical tackle that'd have a Premier League coach calling for a stretcher, and smaller things like playing the sideline cut from the point the linesman marks, not ten meters closer to the opposition's goal.

August 12

Eye in the Sky is an interesting movie in that the basic premise is of fairly limited scope to base a 100-minute movie on. Once the setup is gotten out of the way, it's basically that whole "lives of the few/lives of the many" scenario, and to be honest I don't think it really manages to pull it off. Which is a shame, because there's an excellent cast (including Alan Rickman in his final role); ultimately I found myself waiting to see which option the filmmakers would go for - hard-ass "collateral dammage is inevitable" or something more "every life counts", rather than being particularly engaged with how they got there.

August 09

Bought a YubiKey, somewhat as a thing to play with and somewhat as a thing I might actually use. First problem: can't use it to lock my password safe if I expect to use my password safe on iOS, since Yubi don't play there.

Second problem: configuring my screensaver to require at least one of password, YubiKey, but not both. I've managed to get it to allow you to fail the password but succeed with the YubiKey challenge, so far; also, if you use the YubiKey, the keychain is still locked. Being cautious about this so I don't accidentally lock myself out of my laptop!

Broken emacs turned out to be an unescaped "<" which for some reason caused the search page to return a 404.

August 04

And here we are in August already. Where has the year gone?

Thor: The Dark World was a perfectly servicable movie but at the same time pretty forgettable - it feels like the middle book in a long series that just serves to advance a few plot lines or hit a few beats without being anything in and of itself. I don't think it was quite as bad as some of the IMDb reviews made out, but it's also not the sort of movie you'd really want to watch unless you've already seen a few others in the Marvel franchise.

Noting in passing that the ugly old chunk of Emacs lisp I use to link movies mentioned here to IMDb seems to have stopped working, so I had to go and look up the link above manually and reformat it into the appropriate HTML myself like an animal.

July 29

I went to add a Dominus quote to my quotes file, only to discover it was already there. Go figure.

July 23

Found a thingy that allows me to enable ssh access to my Airport Express. Turned it on, logged in... er, now what can I possibly do with this?