Raithe

Now You See Me. I actually quite enjoyed this one a lot. Four magicians receive a mysterious invitation and meet up at a creepy address. One year later they're headlining at a Las Vegas show as "The Four Horsemen" and end it with robbing a bank in Paris and giving the money to the crowd. (Jessie Eisnburg, Woodie Harrelson, Dave Franco, and the ever cute Isla Fisher) This then spirals into Mark Ruffalo's FBI agent being tasked to investigate them alongside an Interpol agent and find out how they did it... but it turns out to be only the first step in one big magic trick... Throw in Michael Caine's smirky CEO, Morgan Freeman's former magician turned "Magic Debunker", and it all turns into a nice series of illusions, dark secrets, set pieces and bizarre investigations all carried out at a fairly smooth pace and slickly done. And the nice tag line: "Look closely, because the closer you think you are, the less you will actually see"

Not overly hungry, so went with the incredibly simple of scrambled eggs and toast.. plus plenty of cups of tea.

In a way, I think that's what actually appealed to me with the WoT. All of the minor characters having goals and plots that run along throughout. It makes it actually feel like a living, breathing world rather then just the activities of the "main group" and The Big Bad. Plus, they all made sense within the context of what was happening and the way he wove the rippling effects of all those various things back and forth.. Of course, the books around #8-11 were the ones Jordan was struggling to write through his illness flaring up and pushing him into the grave. I think overall, I'm glad that he didn't try to rush and cram it all in, but spent the time establishing his notes on everything so it could be finished off properly.

Heh, I always remember how when I did my industrial placement yeaars ago, the office manager came down on one of the guys working there because he always wrapped up work and left at 5pm on the dot. The guy turned around and basically did a "Look, if I need to stay over my hours to do the work, I've messed up. If I'm doing my job properly, I should be getting it done without staying past evening's end. If you need me to sit twiddling my thumbs at my desk late, that's a problem you have to sort out for yourself."

Still a-waiting for there to be actual you know.. physical games in the stores. Although I suppose if I want to spend $10 more and forget my pre-order bonus I could just grab the digital version via steam. While I'm not that fussed over the pre-order, I'm kind of annoyed that I'd have to spend more on the version that doesn't actually come with a dvd and case...

Texts and Tweets that work with the Avengers..

Re-reading a bit of Michelle West's "House War" saga.

Hm, while I had a dream about slowly exploring a semi-abandoned industrial estate full of weirdly animated skeletons of kids left by some psychotic necromancer type. There were also fairy sparkles. It was weird. I'm glad I'm awake now.

It's one of those automatic things. If a guild leader hasn't logged in for.. I think it's 60 days? the position will automatically fall to the next senior in the guild.

Heh, although some of the twitterfest is creating a few amusing quotes. "As a dad, I have to go to all the big superhero movies. Ben Affleck's casting has actually made me love my children less." "Spend ten years working your way back into everyone's good graces. Win an Oscar. Then you get cast as Batman, and BAM! You're Gigli again." "I hope Kevin Conroy does the voice for Ben Affleck." "the venn diagram of "good movies ben affleck has been in" and "movies ben affleck also directed" is a single circle." "Really looking forward to seeing Affleck bring the depth and gravitas to Batman that he brought to Daredevil and Gigli." "In the Ben Affleck version, Batman's parents kill themselves." " "I'd have more faith in that movie if Affleck were directing and Snyder were playing Batman."" "All this outrage over Affleck, yet no noise of the fact that they've got less than two years to make a $200M movie they have no script for." ""A Wonder Woman movie would be too big a financial risk! We've decided to go with a proven moneymaker: A Ben Affleck superhero movie!""

There is absolutely no danger of a zombie apocalypse. There just aren't enough actual working brains in the world.

While helping my sister pack and move things.. It's surprising the things you find.

I think I've cleared the basic admin of setting things back in order. Now it's the wait for all the little things to creep up and slap me on the back of the head over the next few months... My sister paid for the help with her stuff by paying for fish and chips tonight. Now I'm staring at the evening moving along, a little worn from this, thinking I really should be dancing I'm back on the internet and with a working pc.. but I've just got The Love Shack playing and trying to figure out what to do now.... Hm. it doesn't have any games installed on it yet. I should do something about that.. Geez. I just realised, I've had Alpha Protocol installed continuously on my machine since it came out. This is the first time I've sat down in a couple of years without that icon on my desktop...

I recently saw a poster at Oxford University which had something like gay, and homosexual and lesbian listed. I was very confused. Has gay become something else? Frankly, I'm wondering if straight/gay/etc is a bit noddy. I had the same question in a topic in the mod forum. Fio directed me to the GLBTTQ page and about half way down you will see enough "variants" to start a new alphabet. Interesting. I keep forgetting about wikipedia. Mad as that sounds. I like that if I reduce it to just Gay Lesbian Bi, then it contracts to 'GLiB'. One of the American comedians did a nice skit over how with everything in the news everyone knows what the Gay and Lesbian part of it stands for, but no-one actually knows the rest. So does that mean they're feeling even more persecuted because the transsexuals and such get forgotten about? Making a nice poke at how the focus is on two parts of this whole grouping of minorities. Hm, dang it, now I can't remember who it was.

It always turns into such a bloody long slog to get everything set up right again. Still, better to do it now and get the foundations good rather then caught out over the next few months and letting it turn into total disorder. Oy vey. Although I am really not looking forward to organising my iTunes library again. That's going to take bleeding hours. I think I'll put that off awhile longer and get the important stuff figured out first. Of course, while all this is going on we've got my sister actually in the process of moving out. So not just helping her paint the walls of the new place or suchlike, but the actual packing up and shifting boxes out for the actual move... With dogs and cat running up and down stairs and winding around feet.

Eh, I have to admit, while I am deeply impressed with the details and depth of the world that Tolkien created.. I find his actual writing to be only so-so. The ideas are good, the concept is interesting, but it rarely seems to be a "fun" read. Jordan, for all the stick that he gets, I tend to rate at some better. The characters were generally more balanced, and you actually had a feel for them evolving over time and the world actually changing and the ripples of various actions spreading as the books went on. Yes, there were books that weren't up to the same standards of some in the series, but as an overall effect, they showed how well a world can be created and grown throughout a series and not just left in stasis around the bubble of a core group of "adventurers".

Cloony was bad because of the script, kilmer was just dodgy throughout his two.

Hope things turn out to be non-fatal for you Nep If it's any consolation, it looks like there's no pysical copies of saints for the pc in the UK either. You have to spend more money to get the steam digital version.

Son of .... Thought I had a backup pst file for my mail. Just imported it into outlook and found that while it does indeed have a chunk of my email, it doesn't have my archived stuff or my contact list.

Right, on the uninteresting front... I now have a pc that works and has windows running. Frankly, it took about 10 minutes to install windows, about 5 minutes to install office, then a few hours to do all the updates of assorted software, drivers, and antivirus type stuff. It's turned hellaciously muggy, and I'm about to make a start on pulling back some of the files and wotnot I was able to get backed-up before the old pc borked out spectacularly.

IT'S ALIVE!!! Alive I tell you! On the less enthusiastic note, now I have to install and setup windows and alll the rest of the gubbins...

RIPD. It had it's amusing moments, although I wouldn't say it was anything special. It did seem a bit confused about exactly what it was trying to do. As they say, it was kind of MIB but with dead people instead of aliens, but they weren't pushing the wacky and making it a comedy all the way. It seemed to bounce between quite serious "action" film story styles and then comedy, not joining the two together. Felt very split-personality.

Well I'm throwing an i5 4670k on a Gigabyte GA-Z87-D3HP board with 2 sticks of 4Gb Corsair DDR3 1600Mhz. I'm being able to salvage my GTX 560 Ti graphics card and a couple of harddrives from my old machine.. As soon as I go out manana and pick up a sata Optical drive, I'll be able to tidy up all my cabling, then install Windows 7 on a 128Gb SSD. I still can't believe I forgot that my old DVD drives were IDE and that most "modern" motherboards just don't bother with that these days.

Well I finally got the news that the copy of WIndows 7 was in with the rest of the gubbins I needed, so I went and collected it. Started the fun of putting all the components together, then found out I'd made one wee booboo. My dvd drives are old enough that they actually need IDE cables.. new motherboards have generally moved past that. Now I need to head out manana morning and pick myself up a sata optical drive. I think this gets filed under #ThingsYouReallyShouldRememberToCheck. Also, since when did Intel stop putting in the thermal paste with chips and heatsink fans?

Now I did see the film a couple of weeks ago, but for general film trivia.. Uproxx - As You Wish: 10 interesting facts we learnt about the Princess Bride from Rob Reiner I thought it might interest/entertain a few folks here