Raithe

The correct spelling is p****. She is married to another soldier.....

To totally change the topic (hopefully for the better), after this mornings rather rough start, I've managed a rather pleasant evening. A friend wanted to do a movie night.. So watched the film "Red" in the conservatory, smoking some cuban cigars he brought back from his last trip to south america and enjoying some croft port. An entertaining film and pleasantly buzzed from the booze. Edit: What's kind of annoying is that I'm buzzed enough to consider changing the order for the family tv to the 46 inch even though its a couple of hundred quid more... but not buzzed enough to not recognise that I'm considering it mostly due to the alcohol rather then any practical reason.

One of those random wanders.. Comic Relief version of "I'm Gonna Be (500 miles)". I'd never noticed Osama Bin Laden was included on the list of celebrities in the audience...

Just finished the first draft of the first professional / academic type of short paper I've written in many a year. Realising I need to tighten up my standards a bit... and my warped humour is pondering just how many "buzz" words I could try fitting in it if I really made the effort.. How many excuses do you get to throw around terms like "visualisation" "transformative processes" and such... For the random news type of thing.. Combat Barbie to return to Afghanistan Last year's "Miss England" is back in the army and all set for a return to duty... Now I've known a few squaddies, and while she's been decorated for bravery, how much schtick is she going to deal with for being Miss England?

I keep sitting down and doing an hour of Fear 2 here and there. Can't seem to really get into a long block of time on it. Not sure if it's because I encountered all those atmosphere building tricks in the original, but they don't seem to be working on this one.. rather then building a moody/scary atmosphere I'm finding the "hallucination" sequences more annoying then anything else..

Kept waking up throughout the night in sweats..very little sleep had. So morning arrived and I crawled out of bed feeling shattered and generally icky. Still, a cup of tea always helps. But guh, kicking my brain into order is taking some effort.

My apologies.. I dropped an n without thinking...

Some of the family have been having brushes with flu the past week..and today it seems it's decided to land on me. Drinking a hot cup of hot tea and trying to ignore it for the moment, hoping it doesn't go full-blown. Hm, and for the random trivia for the day.. "jerky" (as in the food type) is the single word in the English language..that originally comes from Quechuan spoken in South America. Hm, and for the other slightly random, but kind of humerous.. The Fins invented the "molotov ****tail". Named after the petrol bombs they used against the Russians. Named after the Russian minister who kept assuring the world that the cluster bombs they were dropping on the fins were in fact "food parcels". So the Fins turned it into a joke with "here's a ****tail to go with your breadbasket"...

I could swear I'd seen something mention that for the release of Mass Effect 2 on the ps3 they'd actually used the engine tweaked for ME3... But now it escapes me. Of course it could be a false memory but there's something niggling away about it...

Tis been an exceptionally monochrome morning here. Oppressive cloud cover, dark, grey, generally coating everything in that sort of colour scheme. Still, going with a nice cup of tea to keep the spirits up. Just finished watching a quirky National Geographic program about the world's largest cave discovered in Vietnam. The scale of the thing was quite impressive..especially when the camera was focused on one scientist..then starts pulling back..and back..and back.. until he's just this dot about 4 pixels high and you can still only just make out a cave wall to one side. A single cave that runs about 5 km long.. has a couple of fractures in the roof where its letting light in from the surface..and at 400 m below the ground, rainforest is growing inside the cave... that looked a little freaky. Interesting, but a little freaky. Hm, and having the temptation of a 1TB usb powered external harddrive for just over

Ultramarines - computer animated film, based on a rookie squad of Ultramarines on their first actual combat drop when an Imperial Shrine World sends out a distress call. Throw in the usual Warhammer 40k gothic horror, a host of Imperial Iron Fists protecting a sacred relic on a dustbowl planet, Black Legion Chaos Marines, and a Demon... Oh, and a batch of UK names doing the voices.. Terence Stamp, Sean Pertwee, John Hurt... All in all, the 40K world details, the lore..that's in there, the voice acting is as expected from such generally superb, the story isn't exactly original.. and the animation around the battle sequences is a touch sucky. And yeah, it doesn't feel like genetically engineered supersoldiers. They come across as pretty much religious indoctrinated "normals" wearing armour with big shoulderpads.... But if you like 40k, it's probably worth the 70-80 minutes to watch it.

More of an annoying, smug, self-satisfied personality. Ran a couple of tabloid newspapers. Muckracker. Took the place of Simon Cowell as the "scathing english-guy" on a couple of those talent shows in the States.

I believe the mention of Piers Morgan marks this as more wishful thinking then sarcasm...

Well hey, it was the origin of the term Laconic. Laconia, the area surrounding the city state of Sparta.. (just for the pedantic trivia and unenlightened)/ Also, in 300 when the Persians say "We have enough archers to blot out the sky with our arrows." and the Spartas snappy reply "Good. Then we will fight in the shade.", That's a reputed quote mentioned by Herodotus in his histories. While there might be many historical....inaccuracies in that movie, it was nice to see some nod given... And for those who thought the movie was camp, it could have been worse. A lot of people forget that besides the 300 Spartans, there were a group of Thespians at Thermopylae. Could you imagine how badly campy the movie could have been then ducky?

Amusing, and historical.. At the start of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians sent a message to the Spartans (to roughly paraphrase) "If we win, we will destroy your culture, we will kill the men, we will kill the women, we will kill the children. We will wipe you from the face of the land." The Spartans replied with a single word. In fact, the very first word of the Athenian message. "If."

One thing I stumbled on that I'm not sure how many people are unaware of.. The "AskJJB" youtube clips where JJB answers various questions from the DeusEx boards.. Whether the questions and answer be that interesting or not...

The one thats always made me slightly shocked is walking through the village when school finishes, and all the girls who have "designer" bags or jackets with the playboy bunny on. I know there's expanding your market.. but turning it into designer labels for kids clothes and such seems a bit of a strange thing.

Had a fairly stinking headache land feet first on my forebrain as the afternoon wore on. Went with the steak and kidney pie, took an aspirin, and sprawled back with a couple of episodes of Life on in the background.

But it did mention that the "delay" is really only into April rather then any significant time.. Although a job that pays you to spend 12 months playing Deus Ex, Deus Ex Invisible War, and Project Snowblind? That might push it a touch too far..

Woke from some bizarre Dumas-inspired dream sequences to find the cat making insane amounts of noise while chasing/dragging plastic carrier bags around the hall.. Kind of got started on the day, and most of the christmas decorations are now down and half packed away. Although have to go through the christmas tree lights to trace some faults before it all gets shuffled back up into the attic.. The day is grim, grey, heavy, oppresively overcast and was thrashing down some really heavy rain...although it seems to have paused just for the moment.

Preview: Deus Ex Human Revolution I hadn't realised the extent they went to create a "bible" to work from.. something a tad interesting.

On that note of old films, one of the small "arty" cinemas near here did a Kurosawa festival awhile back... I have to say, watching Yojimbo and the Seven Samurai on the big screen was an experience.

Well I wasn't meaning science fiction only..but there seemed to be a lot of sci-fi examples. Series that the execs thought had enough promise to go beyond a simple pilot .. that were written with long multi-season story-arcs.. and then get cancelled leaving all sorts of hanging questions. If they haven't got enough merit to give more then 13 episodes to.. why bother saying yes to series that have those long arcs?

For the slightly random, but sounding kind of funny : Doctor Who is Marrying Doctor Who's Daughter. Or to be more exact, David Tenant (the tenth Doctor Who) is marrying the daughter of Peter Davison (who was the 5th Doctor Who). And that daughter actually played the "daughter" of Tenant's Doctor Who in the series..