Friendship and pastel colours and cute animals and what the hell?

Restaurant/eatery websites, or any commercial premises website for that matter, which doesn't have any information on what time it closes other than "late".

What's late? 10pm? Midnight? 2am? Later? If I'm looking for somewhere to grab a snack at 9:45 at night, is it worth me getting in the car and driving twenty minutes to get to the place? What if I'm working all night and getting peckish around 4am? Is the place open or not?

It's not hard to put exact opening and closing times up on a website - that's kind of what they're FOR. If a business doesn't know how late it's going to be open on a given night, why not say something like "Open til midnight, possibly later depending on business"?

It'd also be nice to have a standard format for opening hours, as well, so that searches by Google and the Yellow Pages and whatnot could tell you if any of the places you'd searched for were currently open, and also the next time they were due to open/close.

A victim of its own success. The special effects are (mostly) so well done and so integrated into the environment that they completely lack drama, when they're supposed to be the focus of the movie.

The rest of the movie is just... boring. Daytime television stuff. Blah blah teenage kid has a hard life, pushed around by drunk father and school bullies, lashes out uncontrollably and gets killed. I've never been a fan of the found-footage format, and this film does nothing to make me change my mind on that front.

Honestly, it made me think I was watching a ninety-minute TV series intro. It's perfectly set up at the end for the last character we see to begin Walking the Earth as a Knight Errant.

Might make a better TV show than a movie, actually. Wandering telekinetic, always trying to find the secret of the glowing blue rock thing that the authorities may or may not have taken off to an Area 51 lab, doing good along the way.

Just going over his brief appearance in G1S4 - his armoured carrier mode appears to have six wheels, with a rear double axle (the actual toy only had four wheels). It'd actually fit his personality and function better, as well as reinforcing the "six" theme. He also looks like his fists are extended (and white) - at least, the projecting smaller white blocks at the sides of the front of the vehicle are in the right place for the fists on the toy.

The Japanese model for his carrier mode (Headmasters: Ultra Magnus Dies!) is a lot more integrated and slicker. The knee kibble (front of the jet mode) is much more minimised and partially covers up the wrists, and there is a bonnet/hood, although there are still conspicuously sunken areas on the front of the vehicle (air intakes?).

Greatshot (Victory: Crisis! Ambush in the Desert!) assumes a mode which is much closer to the toy, including the sunken hood and vehicle front, large jetnose kibble, obvious wings, and prominent wheels and radar dish. It's not bad - the large wide wheels do make it look like a desert vehicle.

Hugo
A love letter to early cinema. Wonderful reconstructions and homages to famous clips from the dawn of movie-making. Beautiful story of life and revival. Completely ruined for me by Sacha Baron Cohen as Inspector Gustav, who is an absolute dead ringer - appearance, voice, and very nearly accent - for 'Allo 'Allo's Officer Crabtree.

The Secret World of Arrietty
Superb animation, as only to be expected from Studio Ghibli. Suffers from an attempt to translate a quintessentially Western premise into a Japanese setting, though. It's like trying to set My Neighbor Totoro in London, or having leprechauns in Brazil.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Tom Cruise climbs the outside of a tower while the rest of the cast try to make a movie.

Tintin
Lots of material for fans of the series - check all the backgrounds for many many references. Unfortunately, suffers from being a little TOO accurate in the transition from comic panel to motion picture, in that many of the sequences look very much like they are just getting from panel A to panel B to panel C and so on. Also, the hyper-realistic skin and hair textures clash a bit with the compromise between Hergé's iconic caricatures and the movie's more muted, lifelike proportions. An interesting effort, nonetheless.

The Muppets
Disappointing. It comes across as if a Muppet movie was attempted by people who'd had a wide selection of Muppet movie and TV gags, characters, and motifs handed to them, but who didn't really get the Muppets and what made them so hilariously entertaining. The result is a by-the-checkboxes Frankensteinian assembly of the corpses of once-funny gags and shreds of previous plots. It could have been so much better.

Underworld: Awakening
Gunplay, occasional wire-fu, CGI werewolves, and leather corsets over vinyl catsuits. Leave your brain in a bucket at the door.

Happy Feet 2
Suffers from sequelitis. Not terrible, by any means, but the shine's worn off.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
It's not subtext if it's text... possibly the slashiest big-budget film to hit theatres in months, if not years. Fairly amusing at points, although I would have thought they would have saved the climax for a third film. Could have used a fraction more focus on Holmes' deductive abilities - the first movie was quite good with that.

Found an unused pedestal fan when moving chairs around. Sitting next to my den chair, and with occasional mild self-dousing with whatever water comes to hand, it's absolutely perfect for moving the air in this oven around just enough so I'm no longer in danger of actually melting.

I should totally get hold of a spray bottle / plant mister from somewhere.

Fired the boss.

HATE. WORKPLACE. HATE HATE HATE. KILL WITH FIRE AND SALT AND TAX AUDITS.

Nothing quite like using the Christmas break - the only time I have when I'm not going to be working 11- and 12-hour days - to try and contact a whole bunch of people who might be able to transition me to better opportunities.

After hearing "No, they're not in until next week - come back after the Christmas break" for the zillionth time, I have to start wondering exactly who some of these places think they're catering to. Apparently not people who work during standard business hours.

(Note to self: if ever running one of these places, have it open Thursday through Monday 5am-9pm and open on public holidays.)

A nicely realised version of the first act of the online Agatha Heterodyne stories. The colouration in particular is very craftily done - it makes more sense if you're familiar with Agatha's later adventures and self-discovery. There are even panels where the saturation and hue change from one side to the other... and there's a reason for that, although it's not immediately obvious from the story.

(Only two editing problems I found with it on a quick readthrough: the "as is" on the back cover should be "as if", and there's a dialogue balloon missing from the bottom-right of the page where Tock tears the roof off the laboratory.)

Going back over the story after all this time since it first appeared on the web, the changes in art style over the years are obvious, although not extreme. There are also nicely defining character moments, such as Gil's response to being ambushed by the contents of the storage cupboard - his instinctive reaction is to save the goldfish.

Hate. Workplace. So. Much.

This might be about four years late to the party, but I've been thinking about why the Bayformer aesthetic bugs me a bit, and I think it comes down to elegance.

The CGI models are constructed of thousands and thousands of parts. This allows them to be both super-accurate vehicles and extremely articulated robots. But it's a sledgehammer approach. The appeal of the transformation process, to me... the artistry, if you will, is in using the minimum number of parts to get from A to B. Anyone can turn twenty thousand feet of chain into a sculpture of anything they want, but it's a lot harder to pull off when you only have six or seven pieces.

That's where the skill, experience, and creativity come in. It's a careful balance between minimising the number of pieces (for production cost reasons if nothing else) and still being able to make the final results actually work as vehicle, robot, and toy which can survive fairly rough handling by kids.

Show me an Optimus Prime in thirty thousand components and I'll shrug. Show me one in thirty, each piece carefully shaped, positioned, and painted to enhance the overall effect, and I'll be impressed.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/107217-real-life-constructicon-quadcopter-robots-being-developed?print





http://www.frac-centre.fr/public/actualit/ftat01fr.htm



Thoughts:
I do like the physical simplicity and modularity. If a placement unit is damaged or destroyed, it can be retrieved and another one can take its place immediately. I'd like to see some ability to grip securely onto a building surface, though, in order to wield force-feedback tools like automatic spanners and nailguns, or to allow more precise placement of heavy items. The advantage is that the number of unit resources assigned to a particular part placement can be altered on the fly as conditions change: stronger winds would result in more copters and surface grippers being used per part. This would slow down the rate of construction, but not stop it entirely until conditions became too harsh for the placement units to continue.

And of course, with infrared lasers bathing the worksite, the assembly copters could work 24/7.

In Time: Forgettable. I had to go look up its name again just to write this. The premise has been around in SF for decades, and it gets a pretty lackluster outing here. If there's one message to take away, it's this: Don't waste your time.

Arthur Christmas: I was completely surprised that this was actually really good. The cliches are there, but they don't overwhelm the movie, and there are some genuine tearjerker moments, as well as some great chuckles. Everything wraps up without surprises, but it does so in a remarkably sweet way without descending into being saccharine. I like that Steve and the S-1, though they play the roles of obstacle and harsh reminder of progress, don't get the karmic endings one might expect - and yet it still seems right and proper.

Puss in Boots: Just pure fun. Señor Puss confronts his past, saves the village, and attracts the attention of a very, very good thief. There are some absolute groaner visual puns for the sharp-eyed, and a couple of implied ones in the script that are just as terrible. Puss's characteristic moves from the Shrek films are there, but they don't overwhelm the action, and the ginger hero gets his day in the sun.

This makes me feel all giggly. As soon as we get better fine control of magnetic fields, ideally making them directionally projectable, and room-temperature superconductors are available at every warehouse, this technology will come into its own in a massive way.

Wandering through the CBD on a Saturday can be hilarious when I realise I'm the only person visible wearing a tie.

Apparently I only wear them when no-one else does...

Doing a bit of self-analysis today, I figured that one of the things that pisses me off like no other is the assumption that my time and effort (or any other attribute) is worthless, and therefore other people can, without consultation, assign as much of it as they like to whatever they like whenever they like, either explicitly or implicitly.

Things I'm under contract for, like whatever falls under job duties in the workplace, don't get this reaction, because I was there when the contract was offered and it was my decision to sign up and be paid X amount to do jobs of Y type under Z circumstances.

I'm also less likely to be triggered if someone asks me if I can do something, with no expectation that I will automatically say yes. That way, the decision is mine to make.

 
Anyone who knows me well, though, knows that I don't like being shanghaied into things, I don't like being micromanaged, I don't like people assuming that I will go somewhere or do something just because it would be convenient for them, and the fastest way to get me to refuse to do something is to tell me I'm going to do it. Unless I was going to anyway, I will simply not do it - or even choose to make it worse - purely to make the point that I am not a free resource, I am not anyone's servant of the moment, and that even if I've agreed to do thing A for a person, that does not automatically grant the person the right to have me do B, C, and Q.

It can be a real shock to people who may have thought I was a doormat simply because most of the time I'm relatively easy-going and don't have a problem adding minor things to my to-do list (as a once-off, anyway) when they don't conflict with anything else on there. Especially confusing is when I'll do something once on their request, but not a second or third time, because while I'm fine with helping someone over a bump, I'm not about to take on board an ongoing resource drain.

(A timescaled version applies to changes in my life. I might be willing to tolerate a situation for a week, or a month, or half a year. But sooner or later, I'm going to put my foot down and say no, this is not acceptable as a permanent solution.)

 
I'll do it particularly with jobs. The first week or month in a new job is spent noting all the things that are not acceptable. I'll try and gently change or modify them over the next few months, and/or investigate ways they can be altered with the minimum of disruption and ruffled feathers. But eventually, I'm going to be telling people flat out "Either this changes (and here's some ways it could happen), or I walk." If I honestly cannot see any way to satisfactorily and permanently address a problem, and nobody is willing to offer useful suggestions, I'll simply say my goodbyes.

Life is too short to put yourself through hell every day.

Example: the upcoming work Christmas party. It's being organised (in part) by a co-worker who sits fairly close to me. He's decided it's his job to get everyone to come, and that the way to get me to do this is to (a) several times a day, tell me I'm coming, and (b) try and entice me with lists of all the things that he personally is going to find awesome about it - none of which I have the slightest interest in.

I am not a party person. I am not a drinking person. I am not a socialise-with-people-I-work-with person. I do not appreciate loud music unless I'm playing it. I have no breeze to shoot, no fat to chew, and no up to catch. I know that other people have their own tastes, and that's fine, they can do their thing.

Just don't expect me to tag along.

It was Tuesday when my shoes exploded.

Some arcane combination of flex, cheap materials, and being worn eighty hours a week came together in ways only ancient cobbler gurus might truly comprehend, and I was left standing in two small puddles of dissociated shoe parts on the sidewalk outside the drycleaners'.

It was not, I reflected, the kind of situation most people find themselves in.

Oh, sure, other people generally have more in the way of strange anecdotes, most of which seem to involve alcohol in one way or several. They talk about the weird and wild things which happened to them during their schooldays, and all I can do is look blank and think that I must have been perpetually just around the corner from bizarre shenanigans my entire student life. But then again, I have a talent for not being in the kind of places such stories start.

I don't do parties. I don't go to concerts. Pubs and bars hold no attraction for me. Likewise sporting events, to an almost oblivious degree - it honestly did not occur to me Tuesday morning that the reason traffic was so light was that a whole lot of people were skipping work for the entire day because of a flipping three minute horse race on the other side of the country. It's just not a mindset I can get into easily.

So when things happen to me which belong somewhere out on the far foothills of the probability curve, they're not usually of the "ha ha, and then I woke up wearing nothing but a traffic cone, how we laughed" genre, but more along the lines of "how is that even possible?"

Gremlins, perhaps. One of these days I'm going to zig instead of zag and find out I've accidentally walked into Narnia, or been deemed Second Under-Duke of Dimension X, and will be mildly irritated.

Mainlined the entire show archive, fifty-plus episodes. It has similar elements to The Incredibles, Kim Possible, and of course The Fairly Oddparents, as well as the requisite smattering of pop culture references.

I actually really liked it. Despite it having a fairly predictable core plot dynamic, it does well in not only developing quite a few of the side characters, but in slowly allowing the protagonist to actually develop both experientially and emotionally along the way. The Big Finale show did seem a little cobbled-together, though.

About the only issue was that it seemed the writers could never really decide how much limelight and character to give the sidekicks. Every so often there would be a "Oh yeah, we should really show them as being pretty competent and not just there to be cheerleaders" episode, and then they'd be back to being background filler. I did, however, like the way the characters of the senior Fentons were honed over the series. They did stay true to their first-episode depictions, but become very much larger-than-life once the character interactions jelled.

Overall - not bad!

Managed to design, configure, test, and implement a cross-WAN multi-backup, caching, and cross-site mirror and data transfer setup for the current employer.

Good points: Got to spend time tweaking setups instead of the scuttier end of scutwork. Users across the state will (once this goes live) be able to have actual site servers with file storage they can use, and it will back up properly to the central hub. They'll also get a local mirror of the read-only bits of the corporate tree.

Bad points: Wouldn't have been at all necessary if said employer wasn't such a tight-fisted Scrooge that I had to build the entire thing out of rsync, cygwin, and batch files instead of putting in a turnkey solution. Design took five minutes in my head, implementation was more like five days (on and off) trying to figure out cryptic error messages, and it's still the digital equivalent of spit and baling wire.

Worse: There is honestly very little for me to do at the moment other than grinding through boring projects which are constantly being stalled through lack of money, resources, or the fact that the infrastructure is a complete joke. The office is an overheating thoroughfare with a radio constantly playing in the background, in a beaten-up industrial area at the end of an hour-plus commute, shared with one guy who apparently can't think about anything but sex and another guy who is quite possibly the most casually racist person it's ever been my misfortune to work with. The company itself is run in a horribly crippled way by people for whom IT is an expensive, scary, magic black box that doesn't work.

The kicker: Even if the employees were paid well, the office wasn't a noisy, ramshackle mess, the management gave two shits about the company, the staff were diligent and hard-working (and not assholes), and it was a five-minute commute, their contribution to the economy is flippin' doorknobs. There is never going to be a career path here, and I can't even remotely pretend that anyone at this place is ever going to even stand in the same room as someone who's achieving something worthwhile - or even interesting.

Not one of the highlights on Hugh Jackman's CV.

Story: In an attempt to produce the male equivalent of the chick flick, Touchstone attempts to cram a by-the-numbers boxing movie, giant CGI robots beating the hell out of each other, and a father-son reconciliation/rediscovery into the same two hours. The result is as blandly predictable as a McDonalds menu, and about as appetising. Hugh Jackman appears to have prepared for the role by falling into a #2 shearing machine, then being dragged around a paddock and lightly slapped with a fish.

Despite the failed attempt to pump the movie full of testosterone until it drips, it is most assuredly also not something to take a date to. Jackson might get a shirtless scene, some cardboard flirting, and a vaguely romantic kiss with the barely-onscreen female lead, but the movie is more about large crowds chanting for two humanoid bits of CGI to smash each other into scrap in occasional slow-mo. Unless your sweetie loves playing Rock'em Sock'em Robots, give this one a miss and try... well, anything else.

While replacing a busted tail-light on the car - the globe was fine, but something had smashed the covering - it was brought to my attention that the brakelight on the other tail cluster doesn't work. Power to the cluster is fine, as the indicator works, and the bulb is fine - I swapped it out with a working one to test it; no go - which means something is stuffed with the wiring somewhere. None of the exposed wires seemed kinked, abraded, loose, or detached, so whatever it is, it's buried more deeply. Damn and blast.

On the plus side, hooray for modular cars with easy-swap parts. A couple of relatively easy-access bolts and a keyed electric plug, and the new cluster was in and being tested in only a few minutes. Not bad for someone who's never delved deeper into car maintenance than changing a tyre.

An ironic time to break my accumulating posting silence, given that Steve Jobs just lost his battle with cancer and the internet will be full of nothing but. Even if some people did half expect him to start glowing midway through a Stevenote and turn into David Tennant.

Still, today was the day I figured out how to take a spring and some discs and some slices of magnet and some ball bearings and make a connector of thin flat surfaces (surface-to-surface) with the following properties:

- does not need power;
- is small and very flat;
- is recessed into the plane, so flat things can sit right up next to it and not get dented or pushed away;
- is slightly magnetic, so that thin metal plates pressed up against it would most likely stay there, and would be able to rotate using the connector disc as a rotation point;
- when placed up against an identical connector disc recessed into another flat plate AT ANY ROTATION ANGLE, it will automatically rotate, lock and grip both magnetically and (to a degree) physically, so that while the two plates can rotate around their common joint, prising them apart would require a certain degree of force;
- when used in pairs, the plates will stick to each other and be largely immovable; and
- will separate with a strong enough pull (a sharp tug with a finger, for a smaller model).

Overly complex for a simple connector, you might imagine. But the main hassle was the ability to connect at any angle to a copy of itself and lock, while never (in the unconnected mode) protruding above its recess at all.

That's tricky to do, with symmetrical connectors. Almost every kind of connector out there has one or both halves sticking partway out of the thing it's connecting. The few that don't usually require power or manual intervention in order to go from a "tucked away" state to a "ready to lock" state. The remaining ones are often magnetic, and they're either magnetically asymmetric (traditional), or have to be aligned at a particular angle (rotationally symmetric magnetic patterns). Even when these are mounted on free-spinning discs, there's no physical lock - a slippery enough magnet will still slide right off. With my design, the plates (and, indeed, the connector surfaces themselves) could be coated in teflon and detergent, and they would still lock together.

Hmm, come to think of it, I could replace the spring entirely with a sheet of metal foil, the under-disc with a coat of Teflon, and reduce the whole apparatus to about two millimetres thick, for a small enough connector.

Sketching it out, it looks rather amusingly like a shirt button. Although not actually usable as one, as the holes in it are fake.

Hmm, I could replace the bearings with a rotational scallop pattern in Teflon and ride it on the magnetic fields to reduce wear...

Got the lawns mowed, the shrubs cut back from the walkways, the garden beds weedsprayed, old clothes thrown out, quite a lot of sleep, a lot of washing done, shaved off the beard and got a much shorter haircut, cleared some floorspace, cleaned the ensuite, and re-read Seanan McGuire's Sparrow Hill Road series.

I'm feeling a bit more balanced, too. It helps that we're into the summer side of the equinox, and that combined with the trimmed vegetation front and back give a brighter, smarter aspect to the house. My own personal season may be winter, but the Australian flavour of summer is baked into my very being. Despite the occasional rainburst, we're approaching the time when I'll be able to look up at that domed sapphire furnace and feel it burn me down to the bones, charring away everything but the most simple, cleanest core of pure self.

Is it just me, or are editorial cartoons instantly 90% less funny when anything in them is labelled?

It just seems like a failure on the part of the artist. "I can't be bothered thinking of a metaphor that cuts to the heart of the issue, so I'll slap some generic characters and props together and put name tags on them."

Not terribly impressive. The occasional funny moment, but they tended to be lost in the overall bland porridge. In particular, it fell between the chairs of "no twists, because it's not that kind of movie" and "enough twists to be interesting".

(I did like the drawn-out deconstruction of Chris Foxx's character, though - or at least the leads' assumptions about him.)

The ending was unsatisfying, and although they made good use of at least two Chekov's Gunmen (three if you count Foxx), there were a lot of other aspects which seemed to be introduced, only to go nowhere. The horrible bosses themselves weren't cranked up to 11, which would have made their assorted comeuppances much more satisfying, and even the main characters weren't really fleshed out. I got the feeling that the buttkissing salesguy and the chemical factory mid-manager could have quietly and competently taken care of each other's bosses, if it hadn't been for the third guy screwing up all the time. It's not as if they didn't lock him out for a few minutes to discuss strategy anyway.

Really, it would have been funnier with three competent guys running into one problem after another trying to dispose of the bosses, or with three complete idiots making a total hash of things. The half-and-half approach just wasn't delineated clearly enough to separate the sources of humour.

Not dead. Recovering from illness. Working twelve-hour days, sleeping twenty or thirty hours on weekends. Not feeling great. Not enough time in the week to do everything. Can't keep this up forever. Ugh.

Summary: Vaguely OK, but like Thor, it does better as a character introduction for a member of the Avengers than it does as a standalone movie. Nazis with laser guns aside.

Just musing on what factors would be in my perfect job - and which ones might be different for other people.

- Enough income to live on. Really, this is the baseline. If it's not paying the bills, there's no point in it.

- Predictability, in all aspects. I want to know that next week and next month are going to be similar enough to this one that I can make plans around it. Spontaneous difference is only OK if it's in an area I don't mind, or have prepared for. It also applies to co-workers and management, in that I'd much rather work with or for someone who was grumpy or annoying every day than someone who seemed to be randomly switching between 100 different personalities without a clutch.

- Not horribly against my (admittedly minimal) moral code. I'll audit tax returns and euthanise puppies all day, but I draw the line at deliberately annoying the shit out of people who have done nothing to deserve it, or misleading people just to turn a buck. This is why I don't tend to look for jobs in televangelism, telemarketing, phonescamming, and phishing, and why I am ultra-cautious about anything involving marketing, politics, sales, religion, advertising, and product evangelism.

- Being proportionally rewarded, either time-wise or via pay bonus, for production rate. If I can produce top-quality widgets at five times the speed of the average worker, I want to be paid five times the average rate or only have to work one day a week. Otherwise, I may as well just hire myself out as a contracting firm which can guarantee five person-weeks of work per week, and make five times the contracting rate.

- Minimal travel time between home and work. I'd actually prefer FIFO to a ninety-minute commute. Telecommuting or something involving a home office is perfect.

- No dress code or uniform. I know what looks good on me, and what needs minimal upkeep, and I'd like to be able to wear that all the time. I don't mind accessories - name badge, corporate or hi-viz vest, etc, but fifty-plus hours a week in a suit and tie needs to die.

- Being able to set my own hours. I work best when I'm not being interrupted, and a job which I can do 99% outside of normal business hours is fantastic for scheduling.

- Working in an industry I actually have an interest in. It's a bonus, sure, but if I could get all the other stuff, I'd probably be willing to give this one a miss.

Coughed so hard I blacked out. Decided that maybe I should take some advice from the current boss (who is currently winning the workplace 'how bad is your cough' stakes by coughing up blood, putting him ahead of the guy with a cracked rib) and go see a doc, especially as this has been going on for two weeks now and any improvements only last a day or so before backsliding.

Been down for a week with the lurgi. Bleah. Not quite bad enough to take time off work (although I would have happily spent Monday morning wrapped around a heater swilling orange juice if there hadn't been termite spraying scheduled).

Seems like half the people at the workplace have it, too. Odds are that's where I caught it.

Not as bad a week later, although energy is still low, and am still feeling creaky. Hopefully will be back to almost normal by Monday.

Not the best week. :/

Without giving too much away, Rupert Grint once again has a silent half-second onscreen where he simply rolls up the scene and walks off with it. I guess the director figured it had been happening so much over the years, they might as well integrate it properly this time.

Still wish they'd made more of Neville fitting the prophecy. He does get some great scenes, though. And it's played just ambiguously enough, if you're looking for it, that Neville _could_ have been the right boy in the right place at the right time with the right weapon, while everyone was looking the other way at the kid with the attention-grabbing scar.

The Harry Potter series could really have been The Story Of The Kid Who Was Never Meant To Be The Fated Hero But Was Accidentally Forced Into The Role. It's quite easy to see Nev forming a Power Trio with Luna and Ginny, for example.

Being the internet, everyone has already heard about the clothes-folding robot in development.

What I found interesting was the deprecation of the speed of the robot. Sure, it takes multiple minutes (was 25, now down to 6) to figure out exactly what a piece of fabric is supposed to be and then fold it neatly, but people are missing one point:

The robot can be folding clothes 24/7.

If you have a dryer, or even just a washbasket of items off the line, the clothes can be methodically sorted by the robot while you're doing other stuff. A large pile of laundry might contain fifty items. The robot can sort and fold those in five hours - but you don't need to be there for those hours. The folding can take place overnight, or while you're at work, or even between noon and 5pm.

You could literally dump over two hundred items of washing in front of this thing and it would be done by the same time the next day. And the mobile version in the link is perfectly capable of loading and unloading washers and dryers. If you really like, the robot can even put your clothes away for you.

 
I don't know about you, but if this complete washing solution became available, I'd want to install it, hook up about five gallons of washing consumables, and throw my entire closet and linen cupboard contents in there for the first round. Every piece of fabric in the house could be clean, crisply folded, and perfectly stacked, hung, drawered, whatever.

In fact, have a mode where the robot can strip a bed, dump the linen into the laundry, go get new linen and make the bed while the sheets are washing, and then return to perform folding duties.

You could schedule a "wash everything in the house not washed in the last month" weekend every six/twelve months or so. Or spread it out over a week, if you didn't want the laundry running nonstop for 24 hours.

It's interesting to point out that events which are often conflated together in people's minds as part of the same historical era are actually further away from each other than from events in other mental compartments.

Just as the Australian state capital of Perth is closer to Indonesia than it is to Sydney or Melbourne, or some points in Canada are closer to London (the UK one) than Vancouver, there are certain points in time which can surprise us when we look closer.


Did you know, for example, that the reign of Queen Cleopatra occurred closer to the modern day than to the heyday of the pyramids?

Or that the last time human beings walked on the moon was closer to the beginning of the Second World War than it was to today?

(Here's one for the Transformers fandom - Transformers-the-brand's original launch date was closer to Sputnik's era than Michael Bay's.)


What's your favourite "X happened closer to Y than to Z" fact?

Without giving away particular spoilers, you might get more out of it if you're already familiar with one or more of the following:

- Transformers G1 cartoon episodes "Atlantis, Arise!", "Heavy Metal War", "The Ultimate Doom", and "More Than Meets the Eye";

- The 1986 animated Transformers movie, in particular Megatron and Galvatron's roles;

- The IDW Transformers comic "Stormbringer", issue 2;

- The comic The War Within, particularly for its portrayal of Sentinel Prime;

- The movie "Back to the Future", for Christopher Lloyd's character;

- Pretty much any Desmond Llewelyn appearance in any James Bond movie; and

- NASCAR fandom.


Also - has Sam been taking testosterone pills, or is he just that cumulatively pissed off by his treatment at the hands of the US military, plus his inability to find a civilian job? The whole scene which ends with the line "...That's my car." plays like it was pulled out of the current genre of superhero movies, or designed for a comic splash page.

Bonus: Judy Witwicky is about 99% less annoying in this movie than in either of the two last ones.

Lack of sleep plus being (lightly) run off my feet all day has made me just about ready to drop. Here's hoping tonight is more restful.

I could tell it was affecting me, too - I felt short-tempered much of the day, and had much shallower reserves of patience for one user in particular who kept bugging me about her access problem. Yes, I did realise it was an issue for her, but I had a plateful of sitewide and multi-user issues, plus a handful of executive requests, and some very old loose ends to tidy up before I could even start to think about looking at her particular problem. "Helpfully reminding" me of it every half an hour just makes me irritated. YES, IT IS ON MY LIST, NOW GO AWAY.

Bought the Masterpiece Skywarp I'd had on my want-list for a couple of years. Got him in the classic Superman "Up, up, and awaaaaay!" pose at the moment.

Eh, what can I say, I liked the colour scheme back in the 80s, and teleportation always seemed the most useful of the Seeker powers. To the point where the character had to be dumbed way down so that he wouldn't just insta-kill the opposition every episode. I have to wonder if the Earth wars would have been over a lot sooner if Megatron had just ordered this guy to 'port an atomic bomb with a three-second fuse into a spare storeroom on the Autobot base.

Not much can be said about the toy which hasn't been picked over in the four years since its release and five years since the release of the original mould, so I'll stick mostly to this particular item. For example, apparently there's supposed to be a sticker sheet, but even though I disassembled the packaging down to the bare cardboard, I couldn't see one with mine. Not terribly worrying, fortunately, since I'm not much of a sticker guy.

 
Slightly more irritating was the tendency of parts to pop off. The black fuselage panels which attach to the sides of his silver intakes don't need to come off for transformation, but unless I pin them firmly, they like to make random breaks for freedom. Likewise, although the Dr Arkeville figure can remain in the cockpit seat during transformation, he doesn't click, snap, or tab into place, and likes to suddenly leap out of the underside of the nosecone. I might have to blu-tack the bugger in there for safekeeping. Finally, the display stand wouldn't attach in robot mode until I practically screwed it on - might be looking at some stress marks in the clear plastic from that one.

There aren't really places for the missile racks to go in plane mode, either, apart from the display stand, although they can be pegged into the holes where the shoulder-mounted lasers were in robot mode. The hip kibble is really huge - couldn't it have been collapsed a little? And most annoyingly, it may just be my copy, but the toy really does not want to stand up in robot mode, preferring instead to fall over backwards at every opportunity.

The transformation is a mix of original G1 Seeker, Classics Seeker, Alternators Smokescreen (the abdomen sides) and some nice touches to tweak the outlines of both modes, like the wings swinging out slightly in robot mode, the wing flaps tucking away to emphasise the pointy tips, and the air intakes tilting forward to emulate the different shapes they had in the cartoon between modes.

 
All in all, not bad for $85, particularly when compared to the $195 that the Masterpieces Starscream and Ultra Magnus next to it were going for. And although the Alternity collection nearby was nice, I didn't really feel like dropping that same $85 on a much smaller version of Skywarp. This one is definitely large and in charge.

Oh, and I realised that one of reasons I didn't buy this mould earlier - the way the chest canopy looked like it had been flipped upside down from the G1 position - was just a result of almost every picture of a Masterpiece Seeker on the internet being mistransformed. The central panel of the crotchplate actually tilts forward so that the bottom edge of the canopy can tuck in behind it. The crotchplate is supposed to go over the canopy, not under it. When it's transformed correctly, it looks about four hundred percent better, which is pretty amazing for just tilting one small panel a few degrees outwards.

This would be brilliant for so many things.

Nothing quite like spending a screwdriver-wielding day up to my elbows in printer guts and diagnostics to give a sense of accomplishment. There's something wonderfully clarifying about being able to simply junk a whole pile of oversized IT hardware in order to help clear the decks, mentally, metaphorically, and literally.

On the other hand, there's a part of me which is having a small angry breakdown in a corner about certain life paths which have just become a whole lot more difficult. Not for reasons anyone reading this might think, but partially because of some stuff I found out and partially because of secondary and tertiary effects of said stuff. Surprisingly, knowing myself to be pretty fairly self-centred in many things, it's not the effects on me personally which are the issue. Me-stuff I can deal with. I'm just really not fond of being told "Stand still FOREVER on this pressure trigger wired to the bomb in the box of puppies."

aka "Eric and Charles, the slashening".

Pretty much just one comic book reference after another, along with some giggleworthy decade-specific furnishing and fashion. The groovy sixties pads and catsuits particularly.

How many cameos can you spot when Charles tries out prototype-Cerebro?

From Ferrett's journal:

"Your box of cute has arrived!"

Everyone's seen this one:

But who's seen this?

Or this?

Synopsis: Physics bows to testosterone overdose.

The first in the series with an actual plot (standard heist routine), FF5 can be summed up by the scene where two repainted police cars somehow manage to rip a ten-ton cube-vault out of its concreted-in housing and tear off down the street dragging it behind them like a wrecking ball moonlighting as a slightly excitable puppy. Based on the things it does during the chase sequence, either the good guys' vehicles (including a repurposed garbage truck) are made of solid neutronium, or Rio de Janiero is constructed entirely from cardboard and tinfoil.

Synopsis: silly.

One things which bugs me about SF movies is not the specific gizmotron or whatever which allows the plot to happen. SF as a genre is pretty much about introducing a new thing and seeing how it affects the world.

What bugs me is when the phlebotinum is explained to the point where it could not possibly actually do what we see happening on the screen, due to the writers not doing the research, or just pulling stuff out of their ass, or executive meddling based on what they think audiences would like to see.

It's easily fixed - just alter the premise so that the mysterious glowing green rocks are now able to do what we see, instead of what we would have seen if the original script got filmed.

This is where Source Code falls down badly. ( spoilers )

Idea: The Protectors of the Plot Continuum drop in on a fanfic which crosses Jasper Fforde's Nextiverse over with the Inception movie.

Given that the Nextiverse already has, as canon: ghosts, time travel, supernaturals, people who exist only as future potentials or time knots, AUs, literary subuniverses linked to everything published and unpublished EVER (including, in one instance, clothing wash labels), and unreliable narrators, placing Inception levels on top of that could only lead to interesting things. And then there's the PPCverse itself...

KWK Prome's "Safe House" concept is really interesting. I like the idea of being able to completely and automatically fortify a house into a "lock up and leave" mode, the slab-sided neo-brutalist architecture appeals to me, and the "open" mode is actually quite airy and sunny. (The giant rollershutter is at the back of the house.)

Now all it needs is a way to sink into the ground in locked-up mode for complete security. Bonus points for having grass and a gingerbread frou-frou house on top. :) Or, to make cleaning easier, a giant block of glass with an appropriate full-colour hologram inside. Heh.

You know, right at the moment I am finding it excruciatingly easy to become annoyed with people over the tiniest things.

Annoyance may not be quite the right emotion.

Volcanically livid? Foaming-at-the-mouth apoplectic? Harbouring a fervent wish to plunge them, their relatives, their friends, their pets, and the six surrounding city blocks into the fiery cleansing heart of the sun?

...yeah. I am starting, I think, to run a little short on patience. Both with people in general, the ones I am forced to interact with in particular, and the world as it stands - or drunkenly staggers blindly, anyway.


Yes, I am fully aware that this is not an unknown mental state, particularly and stereotypically in those who start ranting "Fools! I'll show you ALL!" in the third act.


This knowledge is not helping channel the general fury elsewhere, or indeed into anything constructive. It just means that I can't even permit myself the escape valve of ranting like a cheap theatrical villain, however great the temptation. I'm hoping alternatives present themselves before I black out and wake up two days later in a mile-wide crater of destruction, wearing only a ragged purple pair of pants.