You hear that, Mr Andersen?

#150 - Meths, Weekend, Love Songs, etc.

This marks 150 of these things. Bizarre. Let's see if I have anything interesting to say.

***

I was getting petrol at the BP on Adelaide Rd around midnight. They lock the doors to the shop area late at night, so you have to go up to the window and pay before you get your petrol... which works oddly if you're filling the car up. Anyway, I was waiting in line to finish paying, and I notice the older chap in front of me - no shoes, hospital pyjamas, seemed a bit slow, and asking the attendant for a bottle of meths. The taxi driver he had waiting for him was saying he couldn't have it, but the transaction went on regardless.

Now, the first thing I thought was that he was going to drink it; but he seemed to have a fair bit of money in his wallet, and he was paying for a taxi, which argued that he'd be able to afford something that wouldn't cause you to get pretty ill pretty quick. So maybe he had some legitmate use for it? But what legitimate use is consistant with hospital pyjamas? I wondered about intervening, but I wasn't really sure how. Offering to pay for a bottle or two of wine instead didn't seem like the right solution, and is kind of patronising as well. I think that if I'd been the station attendant, I'd probably have refused to sell him the meths... but is that qualitatively different from a pharmacist refusing to sell condoms without proof that the purchaser is married?

I kinda wish that I'd thought of something to do.

***

The trip up to Foxton to collect various items from my uncle's went fairly smoothly. My passengers were told the tale of my trip to Foxton via the Waiarapa - a calumny that I'd have more success defending myself against if (a) it weren't true, and (b) I hadn't gone to Ngaio to pick one of them up via a slight detour up Ngauranga gorge. (C assured me that she hadn't been waiting too long. :) A special mention of the iron willpower showed by my travelling companions is probably in order - neither of them bought anything at the Nyco choclate factory. (I was not so strong.)

I was meant to go to two parties that night, including a "Holywood" party with compulsory costume; but despite my best intentions (and actually constructing a boom operator's outfit, no doubt inspired by my brother), I only managed to get to one of them. There were a bunch of people who I don't see much anymore, now I'm not flatting with Kate, so it was nice to catch up with them; but I was running a game on Sunday, so I went home about half-past eleven.

***

I was walking to past a friend's desk last Thursday on some task when she asked me, out of the blue, what the most romantic love song was. While I was busy being boggled, it turned out that "Lovesong" by The Cure had sparked off the conversation, since she had thought this was the most romantic thing ever when she was a teenager. I'm afraid I didn't have any particular insight - I suggested that Chris Knox's "Love Not Given Lightly" seemed pretty sincerely heartfelt - but I thought I might throw it out to the general audience for suggestion. Anyone want to chime in?

***

The game on Sunday went fairly well - it could have done with a little polishing on my part, but my worries about some of the players being left out were unfounded. And we neatly sidestepped the issue of my brother being absent by having his character being possessed throughout the episode. (Quick summary for said brother - you remember those two thugs that killed Thom's mother, tried to mug Maggie et al. and were scared off, got ambushed by a vampire where one got killed, and then the other one was grabbed by the werewolves and shot by Thom in the warehouse, ending up in the hospital? Well, it turns out that the one that was shot was put in an insane asylum, and in this game his friend who'd come back as a vampire broke him out... Now, you remember how Maggie used Sarah's ghost to help hide Ethan from his sorcerous father? Well, Thom's mother used that opening to possess Ethan, and hied off in pursuit of the vampires. Jo totally kicked ass, by the way - two vampires dusted, one after the other, bam, bam. They saved Laura's dad, found out a bunch of what's going on, and Ethan has recovered and has been tucked safely in bed by Maggie. Aww.)

Then it was back into town for dinner with Jenni, Lee & C, and meeting up with Rach-to-the-B, closely followed by a really, really long 48-Hour Film Competition award thing. Some really good short films, and no terrible ones. The presenter was fairly harsh about one of the sessions, and when people said, "Aww," he said, "You didn't see them." This was both funny and appalling. :) I'm glad I saw what made it to the final round - judging from this, I'd recommend watching the C4 show.

***

There we are - anecdotes, a moral dilemna, and a request for opinions about music. About the only other things I could do to encourage people to comment is to say something contentious about the latest Star Wars movie, or mention that I've started going out with someone. Unfortunately, I don't have anything interesting to say about the Revenge of the Sith. >;)

Band, Dream, Rates, Road Trip

You know what a great name for a band would be? Incas of Emergency! That would be awesome! The first album would obviously be the seminal Break Glass, followed by Call This Number, and then, after a short break, Stop, Drop & Roll.

Also - is 2000 mockingbird the same as 2 kilomockingbird? Ha-cha!

***

Had a weird dream a few nights ago, but the only image that's stuck with me is that I had a big 20-kilo clear plastic bag of muesli on my bed, that looked vaguely like a cross between the Outward Bound museli and honey-coated cornflakes... but when I ripped it open, I noticed that towards one end there were hunks of salami, feta-cheese chunks and bits of green olive. I believe I tied off the bag at the sweet-savoury interface, thinking that the savoury part looked unappealing, but that it was important not to waste stuff. (I was vaguely worried about the crumbs from the less-appalling part of the muesli, but that seemed less vital than sealing off the two parts at the time.)

I'm aware that this dream is significantly less cool than others that have recently been recounted, but since I've remembered the image a couple of days later, I figured I'd share it. I'm really not that fond of feta or olives, so I don't know who I was thinking I could pawn the weird savoury muesli off on.

***

I've just paid my GST and my rates, which makes me feeling like a virtuous citizen; and since it looks like I won't be paying for some daft motor race, either, I don't particularly begrudge it. :) What's even better is that I had enough money in my current account to actually pay for all of this, and not slip into overdraft - hooray for vaguely budgety-type things! I've still got to work out income tax, but "sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof" and all that.

Also - I realised that for some reason I had it in my mind that I needed to set aside one out four pays for GST - but of course, at 12.5% it's actually one in eight. It's almost like getting an extra half-pay a month, at least to certain parts of my brain that aren't so good at the whole "reasoning" thing. Not that this makes much of a difference, since it's all devoured by the ever-present mega-nega money, but it was heartening, nevertheless. :)

***

Road Trip! In imitation of my heroes, Matt & Debbie, I'll be driving up the coast twice in a row! Saturday, I'll be driving up to Foxton to pick up a bed and possibly an armchair (most likely with the French flatmate and one of my favourite francophones, C-Mac), and then Sunday, it'll be back up to Kapiti to run a Buffy game with a variety of awesome people. Yes, I could have tried to coordinate better, but this way I don't have to worry nearly as much about clashing time-tables. And post-game, it's back into town to watch the cream of the 48-Hour Wellington crop. Those that made it in on time, anyway. ;)

And roast chicken tonight! Yay!

Next post is 150. Hopefully I'll have something interesting to say. ;)

Biscuits, Catball, Give A Dog A Bone

Reading about Debbie's super-wine addiction reminded me that people may not have come across NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown.com, which documents Nicey and Wifey's forays into new and exciting biscuits and cake. The site's mission statement is: "Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely." How can you argue with that?

Which also reminds me of When Biscuits Go Wrong... which leads back to the NiceCupOfTea site, since they review custard creams there.

***

Someone at work pointed at Catball and Clown Girl. Summary? Catball is a cat with no feet and is filled with rage and hate. Clown Girl is his happy, happy assistant. The cartoons appear to be done on whatever scrap paper is lying around - I've seen a paper plate, the inside of a cardboard carton, and a photo receipt. There's not many cartoons there, so it was easy to read it all.

***

Imagine the beginning of the tune of "Nick-Nack Paddywack" (involving "this old man"), if you would - I know it has more recently appropriated by a purple dinosaur for his closing tune, but we'll pass over that travesty for the moment - and then imagine, from out of the blue, a frustrated sysadmin carolling to our errant tape-robot, "I hate you, you suck ass, why don't you sod off and DIE!". Well, the last word was less sung than shouted, but nevertheless, it was surprisingly tuneful.

I suspect locking six geeky males in a room for ten hours a day makes for a strange social dynamic. :)

***

Some of the things that have made me frustratingly busy have been at least partially resolved, and at least one of the problems I'll be able to fix tonight. Hooray! My only problem now is to reduce the pile of problems that weren't super-urgent to a managable level; and that involves being able to concentrate on them for long enough that I can fit all the relevant bits in my head, and solve them.

All in all, things are pretty good. Of course, now I have to go walk home in the freezing cold. Brr. :(

Followup, Bro, Spice

To follow up on what I wrote last time - it wasn't as bad as I expected. The problem that I was called in to solve turned out to be completely unrelated to database stuff; unfortunately, it took quite a bit of investigation to show that. Even so, it wasn't a total loss, since I noticed that a change I'd made earlier on Friday was causing problems, and I was able to fix that (rather than having it broken and complaining all weekend). Plus, you know, a bit of overtime money never hurts.

(Anyway, the inconvenience that I had pales in comparison to what one of my co-workers had to go through. It was his first week on call, and there was not a single night when he wasn't woken up by 4am at the latest. He basically managed to double his pay last week from overtime - and given that we don't go into time and a half until 60 hours, that's pretty impressive. :)

Anyway, I'm glad I got to the 48 Film Competition post-Paramount Premiere party, even if it was as they were wrapping up dinner. It was nice to catch up with the others and just chat, and I choose to see nearly demolishing a side-table & being accused by Jenni of looking like a dentist as just aspects of the whole experience.

***

I was going to tell you the exciting story of my brother's departure to India - but why do that when he can tell you himself? I think he's trying to get all the exciting and terrible things out of the way early-on, so that the rest of his trip will be trouble-free. ;)

***

Got to rewatch The Twins Effect with the ever-awesome Jenni, Lee and Celeste. Those two never stop being mega-cute! (Now, do I mean the two Asian pop-star female leads, or Jenni and Lee? Or maybe Jenni and Celeste? Or Bruce Lee and actual Lee? Ambiguity Man strikes again, bwhah-hah-hah!) This also meant that I had Indian four times in a row - I originally thought it was just coincidence, but now I wonder whether my cuisine is shaping itself in sympathy with my brother's trip...

No, wait, it wasn't four times in a row, unless kebabs and sticky date pudding can be counted as a Indian dish. Which I'm pretty sure it can't be. Curses.

Anyway, it reminded me that, while naan tends to be the same from restaurant to restaurant, onion bhaji can vary wildly between locations. Compare Curry In A Hurry's large nuggets of battered onion-y goodness with the delicious red fragments of Planet Spice. Mmmm. Okay, now I want Indian again tonight - which isn't going to happen.

Probably.

***

Went to a fairly large party on Saturday where I basically knew no-one apart from the person who invited me. Very odd feeling. :) Of course, as the evening wore on it became more like a Wellington party - that is, full of weirdly serendipitous connections. For example, I bumped into the younger brother of someone I knew quite well at Uni, who I also knew a bit; he was only there because someone I had met through the Puggle group had come along, but it turns out that I'd met his girlfriend at another flatwarming, and chatted to her in email about tax. (And the flatwarming I met her at was for someone else who knows Puggle, but who I'd met through Weta - in a very roundabout way.)

Wellington is just an endless chain of coincidence. ;)

***

Apparently the Spice Girls are getting back together. This reminds me of the "Spice World"/"Aliens Ressurection" double feature that people organised, back in the day - it was described to people by those organising it as "an evening of unrelenting horror". I guess I'll be losing any movie-cred I've garnered from the Film Festival by saying that I enjoyed both. ;) I'm not sure whether I've rewatched either of them since, though.

Copyright & Musicals

The good thing about doing work that is either highly esoteric or that requires a lot of context to understand is that the dumb stuff you do can't easily become anecdotes that follow you around. Not that I've done anything spectacular enough to be in the running for the Rogue Element award or anything; it's just I felt that I should balance out the "I am awesome" post of earlier in the week, in light of the fact that I'm occasionally a dumbass. (I think my brilliance to dumbass ratio is pretty good, but I'm certainly not a brainfart-free zone.)

***

The soap in the toilet at work is "rose and [something]", which means my hands smell like turkish delight. Very odd, but somewhat resonant with the LWW film... which we're uninvolved with.

I haven't bought a hoodie.

***

Looking for out of copyright material occasionally makes me feel like a bad person. For example, I was wondering whether "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off" was out of copyright yet; it's a Gershwin song, and I was vaguely hopeful, since George Gershwin died in 1937. Unfortunately, Ira Gershwin didn't die until 1983, so there's another 30 years until those songs become available (or 50 years or more, if you're in the US).

See, saying that it's unfortunate that someone who's created something cool lived so long is the thing about investigating copyright that feels a bit wrong. I should be happy that these people got to live so long, and that they're still looking after their families after their death. (Or the stockholders or officers of the company that they sold the work to, in many cases.)

***

If I'm not worried about reincarnation one way or another, since I don't feel there's any real "me" continuing in the absence of my memories and experiences, does it logically follow that it's okay for everyone to take my stuff if I become amnesiac? I guess that's reasonable - hah, take that, Amnesia Dan! No stuff for you! (You have to give my stuff back if I regain my memory, though.)

***

Thinking about it, I'm not sure I've actually got a lot that's useful to say about writing lyrics that doesn't seem obvious... I guess there are three things that spring to mind. The first is that the payoff should always come at the end; the second is that you should take advantage of the fact that the audience is singing along in their head; and the third is that you don't have as much time as dialogue, but you have more dimensions to play with.

To expand on the first point - repeated bits don't count, so this works fine:

He's not into readin' books,
And he sure ain't got fancy looks,
But only he can eat what I cooks - can't help lovin' that man.

Putting the longer word of the rhyme second is generally the right move, too.

Lots of musical gags involve the fact that you're providing the audience with lots of cues to the word you're heading for at the end of the line - they've got the rhyme, the length, and the context. (This is why the old "faked swears" gag or implied other punchlines work.) It also means that you can use syncopation to keep the audience's attention, since it's doing the same job - providing stuff that's unexpected but still fits. And that's why uncompleted nursery rhymes can be so very creepy - the tension of knowing that there's a little bit more to come, and not having it resolved.

As far as length goes - with seven minutes, you've got time for about two shortish pop songs, or a bit less than a third of a Herbie Hancock jam. So you probably don't have time for things like bridges or long choruses, unless that's where you're sticking the majority of the action; and having the classic blues trick of repeating a line three times and then a payoff line may not be the best way to go. However, if you keep them short, you can get away with a references and allusions to songs that the audience knows - see, for example, the Scissors Sisters cover of "Comfortably Numb" which has the intro of "Eye of the Tiger". (Or possibly "Bootilicious" - which points out a danger with this approach, I guess.) You can evoke a lot about the singer with only a little effort from the music they're singing against - but that's really no different from choosing the appropriate background music, I guess.

Bah - I'm not sure any of this is useful. Maybe I'll try doing a musical, and see if anything becomes obvious. :)

***

[Written at 8pm] Okay, I'm going to take this opportunity to complain. I left work about an hour ago, and I've now been called away from dinner with my Mum and youngest sister at the hospital in order to try and fix something that's gone wrong with filmout. It's not like I'm on call or anything - it's just that the guy who is on call had Hell Week, and we both know that he's too tired to work out what's going on. Baaaaaah!!!

I hope I don't get a call from my brother saying, "We've just watched our short film, and now we're off to do something awesome - want to come?" Because that would be the icing on the cake.

Fong Sai Yuk, Slang, Musical

Saw Fong Sai Yuk yesterday (see IMDB for more details). Good fun - the violence was a little graphic in places, but there was some quite neat character development; and it had exactly the opposite political message to Hero.

Actually, in some ways this brings up an interesting point for NZ Maori - is it better to live in a society that is prosperous and healthy but was built on injustice (and try to change things on that society's terms), or to attempt to overthrow that society, even if it brings hardship to the innocent? My gut feeling is that the situation depicted in Ancient (or Modern) China differs significantly from Northern Ireland, which differs again from modern NZ - but how much of that comes from how much I understand or empathise with the different groups involved? (Or rather, my preconceptions of those groups?)

***

They're offering the 100-year Winter Huffer hoodies again - last day to order them is Friday. I really don't need another hoodie, especially not a $120 one... even though that's cheap for a Huffer hoodie... and even though the embroidered weta and snowflake are pretty awesome... and even though they look pretty cool...

No! No, I shall be strong! I only need to hold out until tomorrow, and the temptation will disappear!

And anyway, it'll be Kong Gear time before too long, and I'm sure I'll be able to waste plenty of money then. :)

***

Good on ya for bringing kid's slang to the people, Ministry of Youth Development! Their translation of "Fo’ shizzle ma nizzle" to simply "I agree" is particularly unhelpful in terms of giving insight, I suspect.

"Wiggidy-wack?"
"No - just regular type."

***

Just before Kung Fu Cinema, they were showing a 48 Hr film (because the guy who organizes the movies was on the team). Didn't see much of it, but it was a musical; and chatting to one of the guys who was on the team, it sounded like they found it pretty hard, because no-one liked the genre.

It made me think - while I was quite confident that we'd be fine if we got Musical, I'm not sure everyone else shared my confidence; and we certainly had some problems writing rhyming lines for Mr de Rezney. I tried a quick google for a site with tips for writing comedy songs, but failed miserably... does anyone have a good site or two? Would anyone be interested in stuff I've thought about regarding the problem?

Actually, don't worry about answering the second question - I'm sure if it interests me enough, I'll write it regardless of the suffering it causes others. ;)

Once Upon A Time, Monkeys

Why do my work triumphs have to involve situations either so esoteric or so mind-numbing that no person in their right mind would want to sit through the set-up in order to enjoy the punchline? Bah. I guess I'll simply have to assure you all that I am teh aw3some as far as my job goes - sometimes, anyway. :)

***

Played a bit of Once Upon A Time last night with the regular rping group - interesting game. I'd be tempted to buy it just for the cards, since I can see how they'd be a cool ideas-generator. (I seem to be posting a lot about random constraint generators at the moment. :) How good are the stories that the game generates? Well... mixed. Actually, no, pretty bad - and that's not just because I introduced a troupe of juggling sheep. (The shepherdess needed to distract the pirates from the beautiful cabin-boy, okay?) Unsurprisingly, the narrative has a tendency to sprawl, and there's very little in the way coherency; but I daresay you might be able to carve out an interesting story from a game, using it as a first draft.

There was also talk about other teams in the festival - specifically, one team who had a poor dynamic within the creative core. One of the problems that they seemed to have was that the main guy wanted to do something that the others didn't believe in, and had very little to do with the genre that they got given. That seems kind of weird to me, by the way - if you have a short you want to make, why don't you just make it? Why enter into the competition if you don't want the challenge of playing within the genre handed to you? I mean, if you were in the situation where you didn't know the genre, like those poor schoolkids that got "Film Noir", okay; but that didn't seem to be the case.

***

One great thing about IT is the crazy terminology that you end up with from simple, logical steps. Latest example? Honey monkeys.

Hooray for "honey monkeys"! If nothing else, that's an awesome team name!

Speaking of monkeys - the Spogemonkeys are advertising sandwiches in the US. Something very weird is going on in the world.

48, Chris Walken/Chris Kringle, LJ

So, the 48 Hour film competition finished yesterday. Very interesting. We were about two and a half minutes too late when we handed it in, which meant that we aren't in the running for any of the prizes (apart from some separate "red scarf" prize, which we're apparently still in the draw for), but it was mostly interesting to me as a demonstration of what is possible.

The answer seems to be - a heck of a lot more than you'd think.

What do I think I've learned from the weekend? Explicit delegation of tasks is dang useful, collapsing the pipeline as much as possible is essential (and may involve training people), and both 48 hours and seven minutes are a lot shorter than you might think. :) Also, I'm not as good at dealing with lack of sleep as I used to be, either; I suspect I haven't been building up any reserves for the last few years. Finally, making movies is moderately expensive, but I suspect that I had an inkling of that already. ;)

(Oo, which reminds me - we've been assured that Weta is likely to continue at about the same size after Kong finishes. This is a mix of reassuring and worrying - I was hoping to be able to do some major changes, and it'll be harder to convince them to let me do that if we're in the middle of production.)

You know that state you get into at conventions when you're in a room with bunkbeds and a tonne of your friends, where you've been doing stuff that's kind of fun and exciting all day, and you're stupidly tired but enjoying the company of the people you're hanging out with? That's a good feeling. Being tired enough that you find yourself doing things repeatedly, not so much. :)

What am I disappointed with myself about? Well, there's the fact that I was pretty much always tardy (apart from the writing meetings, where I was on time for the practice, and early for the real deal - this was probably a good thing, since it was held at my house). I should have realised that I should give all the props that I managed to find/buy to our Prop Master, rather than trying to keep track of them myself, and when Mundens mentioned early on that he didn't know what props went with what scenes, I should have written him a list (with notes on why things where in shots, so he could try to substitute if necessary). I should have seen that they needed a music/incidental sound guy early on, asked whether they wanted me to do it, picked out possibilities for music from the LOOP stuff for the people making creative calls to choose from, and got releases for the music as I found stuff that looked like possibilities. (I should also have finished reading the copyright legislation, so I could work out whether I had any useful Public Domain stuff already, and listened through the PD CDs that people managed to find. And worked out how to properly credit PD stuff, and stuff newly recorded for us.) And when it was apparent well before the shoot that Norman was going to be tied up with filming (and so wouldn't be able to do editing as filming was going on), I should have tried to learn enough about the equipment and software to download it into his laptop and do basic editing - cutting the clips into separate files, listening to the audio and making sure to note any problems to be fixed in post, stuff like that - since I work at the same facility as Norman. Oh, and tried to organize the credits earlier, and maybe even get Norman to show me how to do them while they were doing more important stuff.

I'm glad we managed to find a possible replacement to the track that we were having problems getting released. (That was kinda frustrating - thinking that there would be no hassle using the track in question, then being told that LOOP would call me back in five minutes... and eventually not being able to resolve it to our satisfaction, and having to find an alternate. It's a good thing I'd bought the Green Room 3 the previous weekend, or we might have had Seraph breaking in to the sound of brushed snare-drums a la Svend on the mic - and I don't think anyone wanted that. On the main soundtrack, anyway. :)

So - I'll give myself a solid "Could Do Better". At least I retained enough common sense to avoid an acting role; while I've grown less cripplingly self-conscious as I've gotten older, I still don't particularly like pictures of myself (though I try not to make a big deal of it), which would make it tricky. Plus Matt was an excellent, excellent selection, totally owning the Bodil role - I'm not sure who's idea it was to have the tiger swim downstream during Bodil's soliliquy, but he totally sold me. :) (All the actors were good, but I don't believe I was ever considered for the Faerie King, Evil Developer, or Librarian Love Interest. ;)

Just by the by, there's MovieFest, though the fact that they claim they'll be launching for 2005 on the 9th of May and they still don't appear to have done anything makes me... dubious. :) Plus it looks like a decidedly more amateur affair than the 48 Hour guys.

***

Maybe more people should write to Christopher Walken for Christmas.

Which reminds me - congratulations to those involved with the Fairytale LARP. (I was reminded because I played St Nicolas.) I thought it went very well, and was a cool break from filming; and the fact that so many people chose to stay on and be extras was awesome. Norman as Prince Charming was definitely one of the highlights - especially his glamour shots!

***

To all those reading via the LiveJournal feed, I thought you might be interested in this - a website that culls the last 200 pictures posted to LJ at the time you look. Some of these suckers are huge, so I wouldn't recommend checking it out over a phone connection, and as Shaw Island pointed out, the most common picture is probably of girls - either inversed in a mirror, or at arm's length. I would have guessed that pictures with the words "You are a [obj] - [listing of vague traits]" would be a strong contender, but apparently not. And you get occasional gems, like the one on the right.

Ball/prom photos seem really popular at the moment, as well.

I think it would be interesting to try and make up some sort of narrative from these pictures - you know, you're constrained to the pictures that you get when you first load the page, kind of thing.

Oh, Shaw also points at the LiveJournals Latest Posts feed - which is also strangely compelling. I mean, you stumble across things like someone complaining about the Gamer Nuremberg defence (basically, that it's okay to make it a worse game for others to be true to your character, rather than tweaking your character to make the game more fun for everyone).

So - if you're bored, or have work that you should really be getting on with, that should distract you for a good long while. :)

Networking in French

Fairly busy day today, at least partly because I got up slightly later than planned. (Which in turn has something to do with writing late into the night last night.)

Anyway, I got a bunch of stuff done, and then I popped back home to have lunch with the ever-suprising Amphigory. Well, by "lunch", I mean finishing off a cheesecake, and having a glass of mulled wine and shortbread while we watched Sneakers, which she hadn't seen before. She also tried the blackcurrant rum - I would have given her more than a taste, but I knew she had to go to work afterwards, so it seemed unwise. It was a nice break, and she seemed to enjoy herself; hopefully, we'll do it again in the near future.

I was planning to stay late, but Mum texted me to see if I can get to the hospital by 7pm for cake with Louise. But as soon as that's done, and I've eaten, it's off to bed I go - gotta get some good shut-eye before Friday.

***

I had real problems setting up networking on my flatmate's laptop - I tried everything I could think of, but I couldn't find the solution. Now I know what was going wrong, I can't decide whether it was layer 8 or not - but it was really obvious once it was pointed out, and weirdly enough, it was a mistake that only a person very familiar with computers could make.

French keyboards are not QWERTY.

Having the keys in the "wrong" places means that you may think you're typing the right password, but in fact you're typing some other random string - something that a non-touch typist would never do. Argh.

48 hour writing

Okay, I'm not sure whether I remember how to do this right, but I'm going to attempt to hide part of this post behind a cut, since it's likely to be quite long, and not necessarily of interest to most people. :)

The writing team of Talula's 48 Hour Film entry got together last night for a practice run. Overall, I'm optimistic - I think we'd benefit from having a couple more practices, and possibly going through to a completed script, but I think the chances of the process breaking down completely and dysfunctionally are fairly slim. (I daresay that can be reserved for the end of the process.)

I feel I should give an outline of the second-draft script we came up with. We talked about what genre we thought we might have trouble with, and picked "Superhero". I grabbed three constraints from Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable, and we got "Nutmeg", "Beltway" and "The Grapes of Wrath". What emerged was a 1940s-style fascist society, where Diana was an operative of a governmental organization who hunted down and killed superheroes (but concealed her true job from her husband), and Josef sought a way to escape before he revealed his nascent superpowers to society (and his wife). "Nutmeg" was the slang word for the compound used by the government on superheroes; "The Beltway" was the name of the bar where Josef met Dr Hammet to buy letters of transit for him and his wife; and the book was the code by which he identified himself to Dr Hammet -- he put it down on the counter, and the money to pay for the letters was inside the cover.

Anyway... I thought it might be useful to me if I went through all eighteen genres, got a random set of three constraints for each, and try to come up with at least one script synopsis or jumping off point for each. I'd be very surprised if any of these gave me anything useful for the actual event, but that's not the point -- it's more about me getting a feel for each of the genres. The main reasons that I want to practice are:

(a) it's the main thing I've said I'll do

(b) there are 74 teams in Wellington (and so 4-5 in our genre with the same constraints), and another 202 in other centers (which translates to another 11-12 teams), so we want to be distinctive

(c) coming up with story synopses is kinda fun.

So, let's get started, shall we?

Genre 1: The Mockumentary
Constraints: Animatronics, Beulah, Blade Runner

Okay, this seems like the constraints are too close together. I mean, there's an obvious story - Blade Runner in the Deep South, with the happy black housekeeper (who's actually clockwork, though she doesn't know it) keeping an eye on the clockwork slaves - but we'd have a problem filming that, since we have no appropriate actress, nor sets that seem useable. So... since it's a pseudo-documentary, how about, "B.Eu.L.A.H. - Government Enabling Business!" It'd be a docmentary on the government bureau responsible for replacing the blue-collar workforce with cheap electronic labour. Lots of cheerful plucked-string background music and falsely hearty narration.

Alternately - it's a documentary about how many science fiction fans are actually automata, created specifically to boost sales of science fiction merchandise. "Beulah" could be the fake name of a "real" fan who is being interviewed (in silhouette, to preserve their annonymity) about how crappy SciFi is being pawned off on the unsuspecting public - if we use the same speech patterns as The Comicbook Guy from the Simpsons, it could work quite well. The tricky thing would be to avoid references to real franchises with real money who might really sue us - but then again, that's probably why "Blade Runner" wouldn't be an actual constraint. (Or "The Grapes of Wrath", for that matter - Steinbeck only died in 1968, so the work is still firmly in copyright.)

Anyway, that's two potentially filmable set-ups; on to the next!

Genre 2: The Silent Film
Constraints: "To usher in violins", "To cop a plea", "If you knows of a better 'ole, go to it."

Hmm. I don't think we're going to get out of using title cards. The trickiest thing here, I think, is the constraint "to cop a plea" - how do you convey a character agreeing to a lesser charge in order to avoid a greater one without (or with very little) dialogue? And even trickier, how do you make it funny?

The last constraint and the genre seem to be pushing really hard for a WWI movie, perhaps with a sour veteran pessimist Sarge and the innocent who the Sarge initially dislikes, but ends up defending against the big brass - possibly there'd be a scene where the Sarge uses the last constraint as a line, and the innocent ends up in the general's quarters, and comes happily back with cigars, claiming, "I found the better hole, Sarge!" However, I'd be worried that this was too obvious a tack to take.

So, an alternate? Okay, I have two possibilities, though I'm not convinced by either of them. In the first, the actors are in mouse suits... though how I'm going to do "cop a plea" in this setting, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe it's a couple of bumbling mice before a judge, and we hear about how a caper they were trying went horribly/hilariously wrong? The other possibility is an email romance - both the actors are in their bedrooms, and we see them typing back and forth, jumping up from their keyboard, and so on - but they never talk. Lots of possibilities for physical comedy, and the IRC window replaces the title cards. You might even imply at the beginning that it's late at night, and they have to keep quiet so as not to disturb other people - or maybe one's in a internet cafe/library, and one has someone sleeping in a bed in the background? :) Actually, the more I think about this, the more I like it.

Moving on:

Genre 3: The Cop Movie
Constraints: Battleship Potemkin, "Up for it", Central Powers

And I couldn't get these constraints for the War Movie genre? Bah.

Okay, the first thing that springs into my head is a sci-fi piece - set in space, the Battleship Potemkin of the bolshevik Central Powers, with a story set around the Military Police of the ship. To Bring the Funny, play up the ridiculous bureaucracy, and the way people simply skirt it. Hmm, it might be too Bureaucracy Movie and not Cop Movie enough - maybe if we include the older captain who yells at them, and the mayor who wants to look good for the media, and other cop movie cliches?

Another take - the film revolves around a game of Risk (or something similar), and is actually all about the people who are playing reconnecting after leaving university or college. Maybe it's a fake boardgame, so we can do things like, "Bringing the Revolution, huh? Well, I play my Violent Suppression card - peasants dying, prams rolling down stairs, it's Battleship Potempkin all over again! Bwhah hah hah!" It would be nice if it could be about how people who've grown apart can still connect - not in the same way that they used to, but in a different, maybe better way. How is it a cop movie? Well... make one of them a cop, and one of the others have a problem with that.

Next!

Genre 4: The Science Fiction Film
Constraints: Krazy Kat, "Keep your chin up", The Darling Buds of May

I think I'll let the last constraint refer to the sonnet, rather than the book/TV series. The sonnet, for reference, is no. 18:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Okay, there's lots of scope here. The first constraint can be the location - a bar, a ship, a cafe. Since it's science fiction, I'm tempted to go with a reversal - the situation is static, because someone wants to keep things as they are. Here's one version - you have quite a short scene in a cafe, with a woman talking about some horrible problem, and the person she's talking to telling her something like, "Keep your chin up - it hurts like hell now, but it will get better as time passes." Then we replay the scene, but from a slightly different angle or something - the only thing that changes is the man in the background, who comes in and orders something different. And then we have the final pass, with the man who changes coming in with a friend, and raving about how cool this moment was, and how he knew he wanted to come back to it, so he caught it a few years ago, and uses it a couple of times a week to relax. Then make sure to get a shot of the woman with the problem from the first pass, who's in exactly the same position (and facing away from the visiting guys), but is obviously weeping terribly (mascara running, etc).

Whoops. Okay, that didn't Bring the Funny. Let's try again.

Here's an idea - we could use Frank and Nick Pitt, and go for a "recapturing your youth" kind of thing. How about this - Frank's character is in "The Darling Buds of May Clinic", which reverses aging, and he asks to be made 17. The doctor tries to talk him out of it, and tries to push various other ages, and points out that this will be his legal age, but he's adamant, and we transition to Nick. Then we find out that the whole reason that he's made this change is to get out of going with his wife to a terribly pretentious ballet "The Krazy Kat", which happens to be R18.

Hmm. Well, no-one else is likely to copy the idea, are they? :)

Moving on...

Genre 5: The Pretentious Foreign Film
Constraints: Bucket Shop, Rough Guides, "Rushed off my feet"

Okay, a "Bucket Shop" was originally a place that sold alcohol of dubious quality that had been brewed in buckets, and was then investment firms that played fast and loose with their investor's money, and now refers to travel shops that sell cheap (and especially illegal) airfares. But presumably a literal shop that sells buckets is also acceptable. :)

This is probably the hardest to do well, because pretty much anything will do. Like, you could have a black & white shot of a Rough Guide book to, say, Africa, intercut with really grainy handheld shots of a woman sitting behind the counter, drinking coffee, staring into space with animal noises in the background; a customer comes in, and it cuts to street noise. He says, "So, what do you sell, then?" "Buckets," she replies listlessly, obviously lying. "Much call for those, then?" "Rushed off me feet." The customer leaves, and the shop assistant goes back to dreaming of Africa...

Yeah, that's pretty crappy. Really, the only thing I can think of is to pretend to be doing a version of some well-known big-budget movie, but in a pretentious art film way, and incorporating the constraints fairly randomly. For example:

Les Anges De Jenni.
presente
Oeufs et jambon verts (Green Eggs And Ham).

"Would you, could you - with a goat?"
"Bucket."

Um... next!

Genre 6: The War Film
Constraints: "It makes you feel like the man you are.", Helpline, Identikit

The first constraint is an old Buick slogan, which I think is pretty awesome. :)

Which leads to my first idea - use the War movie motif's, but it's actually a competition between ad companies who're taking things way too seriously. The Identikit will be them trying to find the perfect person to front their campaign (which will go disasterously wrong), and one of them will get some sort of lame executive-related problem ("My god - he's got the caffine jitters!" "Call the helpline!" "I need 50ccs of camomile and a whalesong tape, stat!").

The other obvious idea is the propoganda/recruitment film. "Join the armed forces! Turn in Communists and other traitors to our way of life!" etc.

It's getting late, I'll try to hustle through the rest.

Genre 7: The Heist Movie
Constraints: "Cabbages and Kings", Nancy boy, Euroland

"Euroland" is apparently some American commentators' term for the emerging unification of Europe, as evidenced by the European Union.

I think the key thing in the heist movie is the switch: there needs to be a reveal near the end that puts what's gone before in a different light. First idea - a shop, "Euroland", which is along the lines of "Cool Britannia". The Nancy Boy is apparently trying to impress the shop assistant with stories of various capers he's pulled, speaking with a very affected air (and obviously quoting Alice In Wonderland at some point). However, it'll turn out in the end that this was all distracting patter, and he's actually pulled a con as he's been talking.

Second idea - it appears to be the heist planning scene, with tension between the loud non-European and the nancy-boy Euro. "Well, that may be how you do things over in Euro-land, but it ain't how we do things around here!" The first constraint can either be a quote, or... there's a hotel called the King's Arms that is smuggling in drugs inside cabbages. Hey, if they'll put them in breast implants, why wouldn't they take the time to grow cabbage leaves over them? :) The heist is to grab the drugs & drug money. But what would the twist be? Maybe they're both undercover agents (one international, one local) thinking they're going to be part of a big sting? Maybe one is blackmailing the other with threats to his daughter (who's involved with the blackmailer, unbeknowst to her father), but the father neatly turns tables somehow?

Genre 8: The Musical
Constraints: Golden Farewell, Men Behaving Badly, Black paper

Hmm. A black paper, by the way, is meant to be analogous to a white paper - except it's secret and internal to the organization. But in this context, maybe it's just paper that's black.

The obvious scenario is the office goodby party, with lots of songs that start out praising the person who's going, but end up whinging and slagging them off. Maybe it's a paper-making firm, and the guy going patented the TruBlack paper process - and the real creator is still there, moaning about how they were cheated out of their rightful recognition. I think that these songs would be really fun to write. :)

However, it might be too obvious - it seems likely that others will do a leaving party if one of the constraints is a "Golden farewell". So - how about a group of unscrupulous stockbrokers singing about how they're gutting the company and running for the Bahamas. "And since someone may tell, our accounts are a shell, it is time for our golden farewell!" And then, of course, the IRD break in and take them away... "Been arraigned to a cell, all our plans gone to hell, it's farewell to our golden farewell! Yes, it's farewell, to our gold-den, fare....well!" [clang]

I know that there are problems with synching and getting music - but writing lyrics is just so much fun! :)

Genre 9: The Soap Opera
Constraints: Ministry of Fun, Brain Gain, "Walkies!"

Okay, "Ministry of Fun" was "Ministry of National Heritage" in Britain.

I'd be tempted to do a more or less literal "soap opera" - make it a radio play ("Brought to you by Milkbone, the wacky chewbone from the Ministry of Fun Company!"), with the actors narrating into big microphones, and an installment of a some melodrama being broadcast (presumably live). Meanwhile, have something else going on - say, a lovers spat between two of the actors, which they're trying to do silently - and the others trying to adapt the play and account for the noises to the radio listeners. Product placement is really old, and used to be much more blatant, so we could easily work in other phrases. "You know what they say - get on the Brain Gain Train with Boffo-plus! For when you need IQ, I-quick!"

Otherwise... I suppose you could have an episode of a soap set in the Ministry of Fun's Department of Dog Care, with the crisis du jour being fresh blood being brought in to revitalise the department (and, the current staff believes, clear away the deadwood).

Genre 10: The Religious Film
Constraints: Java, Action man, League of Nations

Wargh. This is another one I suspect I'll have trouble with. In this context, I'd probably go with the Computer Language religious wars - Java, C++, Perl, Python... maybe newsreel footage of the League of Nations called upon to intervene in the increasingly bloody feuding between the different groups. I think we could make it funny for non-programmers - though I'll admit that most of the gags I thought up off the top of my head were pretty obscure.

Another possible conflict which might resonate more with the audience is Coffee. It could be a parable movie, all about how to get the perfect brew. "The Action Man is impatient, and sets the grind too large - weak and flavourless will his brew become. The Thoughtless Man is inattentive, and sets his grind too small - though he tamps and smooths perfectly, his brew will be imperfect. But the Righteous Man notes his grind and adjusts it if needed, not grinding more than is needful unto his brew thereof."

Genre 11: The Horror Movie
Constraints: The Toff, Bulldog Drummond, Buck Rogers

Uh. Other people have claimed that they are quite comfortable with this genre, so I'm simply going to note that anything with Bulldog Drummond in it is going to contain elements of horror.

Okay, so a quick stab - the toff works out a way to make characters from books he owns come into the real world. This doesn't work out quite as well as he'd like.

Genre 12: The Superhero Movie
Constraints: Kirlian Photography, Lazy Eye, Big Four

Um - superheroes Lazy Eye (can demotivate with a glance!) and Big Four (has a really big "4" on the front of his costume!) are called on to bust a fake Kirlian Photography ring!

Or - the Big Four, a superhero team, face off their nemesis, Kirlian Photography Inc., in a showdown at the Lazy Eye corral!

Or - a couple of beat cops are in a bar, bitching about their jobs in a superhero world. The "Big Four" are the four main types of villain they have to face (bricks, blasters, m.a.s, and weirdoes), Kirlian photography is one of the standard bits of police procedure, that sort of thing. "Man, Blasters are the worst. At least with Bricks and M.A.s, you can stay out of reach. Hey, didn't you have to deal with Withering Glance, like, a month ago? Why're you still standing?" "I got lucky. Plus, y'know, she's got a lazy eye - Mudman got her in the good one, and then it was just a case of staying the hell out of the way."

I think we've established that we can write in this genre.

Genre 13: The Fairytale
Constraints: Melvin, Quick Anger, "Join up the dots"

Here's what I'd like to do with this genre - take an existing fairytale, preferably something old and mildly exotic (like the Anansi stories), but have the visuals be modern and incorporating any of the elements that aren't already in the story. I'd also suggest having the elements appear to be plucked out of the air - you know: Start with an empty room with a window to outside, and then - "Once upon a time, there was a boy." [boy appears with a big badge that says 'Melvin']. "He lived with his mother..." [mother appears] "in a cottage in the woods." [trees appear outside the window] "They were happy..." [big tv appears in the background, they're grinning] "but poor." [tv replaced with much smaller tv, smiling a bit less] "Very poor." [replace tv with a copy of TV Guide; they appear despondent]

Another possibility is a just-so story. For this set of constraints, I'd be tempted to go with something like, "Why the Panther has no spots."

Genre 14: The Monster Movie
Constraints: "Swings and Roundabouts", Air guitar, Kid brother

Okay, this pretty much writes itself - playground, younger brother, feckless older brother, and monster and chase until done.

Or maybe something about the younger brother being ignored, but we learn that he can make things he believes in real (plays air guitar and we hear a guitar, stuff like that - and the older sibling yells at him to keep the noise down). The elder sibling gets fed up, and tells him a scary monster story to shut him up - a story that the younger brother believes...

Genre 15: The Educational Film
Constraints: Heavy Metal, Mae West, "Saved by the bell"

I don't think I need to write anything here, except to note that the American airforce called their life-jackets "Mae Wests", which apparently tickled the fancy of the woman in question. :)

Oh, all right - it's a film about how listening to bad music and looking at salacious pictures can send a student down the dark spiral to madness and addiction, and how you should just say no if you're pressured into looking at naughty pictures of Mae West or listening to Led Zepplin. The good student might be being pressured by the naughty ones, but luckly the end of lunchtime bell saves them from having to make a moral choice!

Genre 16: The Buddy Flick
Constraints: Caffe latte, Industrial action, Dullsville

Cafe bolsheviks plan to turn this town upside-down by rallying the proleteriat around their banner. (Proleteriat unimpressed by black-clad bolsheviks.)

Or - locked out of their office (and espresso machine) by striking cleaners, two office buddies decide to go on a (walking) "road trip" to find a decent cup of coffee. We discover that, despite being friends at the office for ten years, they don't really know each other at all...

Genre 17: The Romance Film
Constraints: Vanity plate, Evel Knievel, "Ee bah gum"

Okay, I don't know quite what's going on here, but it sounds like a jolly interesting film. Maybe - motorcycle/stunt nut called Eve and country boy getting together, but the girl is worried that he doesn't understand her - his gift of the license-plate "EVE KNVL" cements their romance, and they jump a bus into the blazing sunset...

Genre 18: The Action Movie
Constraints: Downing Street, Exhibit A, Red Dwarf

A British spy called upon to stop a villain from collapsing the sun, maybe?

Okay, now it's way later than I intended it to be, so I apologise if I've left any typos. But I did, indeed, find this a useful exercise - it made me think more deeply about the genres, and there might even be one or two things I can use. Yay. :)

Slang, preschool play, weekend, copyright

There was a discussion on Indietits about pronouncing the various internet-bourne abbreviations in real life - consensus seemed to be that "roffle" (or the expansion "roffle waffles") were moderately common, but few people said "ell oh ell". The roflcopter was something that came up in the discussion.

I remember being vaguely dismayed when I first met "woot" in conversation. (Hmm, is the internet is the woot of all evil? Sorry, I digress.) But then again, I remember assuming that, since I'd seen it written "w00+", it would mean "woo-plus", or "even more 'woo' than normal". In my defence, I'd been running the =psychoanalyse-pinhead= mode in emacs quite a bit. (BTW, if you haven't done this before, and have access to emacs, type ALT-x and then "psycho" and tab-complete. Let it run for a bit, then hit enter a couple of times - and what you'll have in your buffer is a interview between Eliza, the virtual psychiatrist, and Zippy the Pinhead, sayer of things random. "Hand me a pair of leather pants and a CASIO keyboard—I'm living for today!")

Er... anyway, that leads me to the other thought I had, which was "words and phrases that sound like they should be Cockney rhyming slang, but aren't". 'Pants' was the one that sparked this line of enquiry off, but 'dog and pony' also sounds like it should mean something else.

***

There is a place that looks after preschoolers and dogs next door to work. I was outside when the kids were playing a loud game of "let's pretend" - the biggest crisis that they seemed to be able to come up with was, "Oh no! It's three o'clock, and we haven't had lunch yet!" Maybe it's just because it's in the Playing House genre - they may have felt that robotic dinosaur-riding space zombies weren't an appropriate trope, or something. Even so, am I unreasonable for feeling that they could have chosen to go somewhere more exciting than McDonald's for a Happy Meal?

Then again, if talking about McDonalds is good enough for Tarantino, who am I to argue?

***

Busy Saturday (Yum Char, 48 Film planning meeting, and two parties), and extremely, satisfyingly dull Sunday, during which I watched all of Firefly. How well did whatever replaced Firefly on Fox do, does anyone know?

I wonder whether Star Trek's revival was actually a bad thing - not in terms of the movies and series that it spawned, but in terms of setting unrealistic expectations for fandom. I suspect that it was a particular set of circumstances that led to that revival, and I don't know how the situation has changed - do DVD sales outway syndication as a revenue stream yet, for example? This wouldn't surprise me, since I know of plenty of people who'll download a show as it's coming out in the States, don't bother to watch it on live TV, and then buy it when it's available on DVD - but whether they're a significant fraction of the market, I have no idea.

***

As part of research for the 48-hour Film Competition, I've been investigating exactly what is out of copyright - it's 50 years after the public see it for a sound recording or video, or 50 after their death for a composer, writer, lyricist, etc. I'm not sure what the status of a song where the recording copyright has expired, but the lyrical copyright hasn't, nor whether putting a recording on CD constitutes a different recording... as NTK said, surely Fatboy Slim's "Praise You" is public domain by now...

Rates, Vader's Fist, Misc.

For those in the IT industry, you might find this site of interest: Candle Recruitment comparative wages. Note that it's not particularly well populated, but it's interesting to get at least some data - of course, according to this, I should be getting $65-75/hour, which would be significantly more than a 10% jump. Man, imagine if I could charge $120/hour! That's... $6k a week! Even in the top tax bracket, I could pay my entire mortgage off in just under two years! That merits multiple exclamation marks!!!

Anyhue - enough daydreaming about rates that, let's face it, would only be for short-term contracts, and that I'd be too lazy to strive for in any case. ;)

I've agreed to, and signed, an increase of a little over 7%. And now I don't have to think about it again until much closer to November, hooray! :)

***

Those that follow Vader's Blog may be amused by the homepages of the 501st Legion, Vader's Fist.

***

You know how a number of small, almost unnoticed changes can combine to cause catastrophic failure at surprisingly short notice? Well, that happened yesterday, when a very rare occurance triggered a cascade of events too terrible yet boring to be recounted here. :)

I've also been working on a set of tools that someone who's just left dropped in our lap. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the front end of some of these tools are used by someone outside the company, and I don't know anything about the system, and it turns out the front end they're using isn't documented anywhere.

Argh.

Anyway, everything seems to have been sorted out. (I nearly wrote "soughted out", though why my brain thought that would be a good idea, I know not.)

***

I seem to have a slight cold, which is inconvenient for an enormous number of reasons. I don't have time to get sick at the moment, especially on the weekend - I have obligations. :)

Oh, and something weird I noticed - given the nationality of my flatmates, it's kind of odd that the majority of the music I have with French lyrics is actually Japanese - Pizzicato Five and United Future Organization, for example. (I was going to say "practically all", but I remembered MC Solaar and Maurice Chevalier.)

RPSSL, HR, WARGS, Taser++

See, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your roshambo-losophy.

Thanks to the Indie-tits comments for "Please Hammer don't hurt 'em or release any more albums", which is where I saw this graphic. :)

***

HR have come back with another offer, which I've decided to take. I think I could have beaten them up a bit more, but what the heck - I'll have another opportunity to ask for more money come the 1st of November, and now I don't have to think about it for a while. ;)

Of course, one of the downsides of a higher pay rate means that taking any time off work just keeps getting more expensive, and thus harder to justify to myself. Oh woe! I suspect that anyone who has time to write a blog isn't likely to expire of overwork anytime soon. ;)

***

Went to WARGS last night, and am now actually a fully paid-up member. I don't expect to go to meetings any more frequently than I have (i.e. intermittently), but I decided that it's an organization I'd like to support, and I happened to have the cash in my wallet.

It was hix's first time there, and since the game he arrived to play didn't run, we had a quick game of Universalis with Luke and Sam - which turned out to be a surprisingly complicated political thriller, as well as the musical romantic comedy we were aiming for. Basically, a plot by a sleeper cell of the Otago Farmers association to trigger a civil war by assassinating the President of the North Island with a small child trained in ninjitsu was complicated by the fact that the kid loved another kid, who was actually a secret super-weapon developed by the Taupo Secret Service, but who was being subverted by her handler, a mechanical teddybear who was actually playing both sides off against the other in a bid to lead mechanicals in a coup where he would become the Supreme Leader. Except it was a little more complicated than that... There were only four scenes, and we provided titles for the songs as they appeared, rather than having to write them at the time - there were duets, expository ballads, and at least one reprise of a song that had previously appeared. ;) I think it worked fairly well, all things considered.

Did the game change my thinking about using the game to create the 48-Hour script? Yes, I think it has changed it; but I'm not sure whether it's made me more or less positive. I'll write more about this later.

***

And finally - what's better than a taser? A 110,000 Volt 30-barrel taser cannon, you say? Well, how can anyone disagree with that?

"Most spectators experience some degree of sinus discomfort after several firings, due to the high brissance of the plasma explosion." Indeed.

Dickens, HGF, More Pay Negotiations

Beefsteak Club: 24 King William St, Strand. "There is no particular object in this club, nor is there any particular qualification." Entrance fee, £10 10s.; subscription, £5 5s. The accommodations being limited, visitors are not admitted. -- Dicken's Dictionary of London, 1888

This book has all sorts of useful tidbits, from how much you can expect to pay for advertising (a penny to two pence for something the size of a double crown or double demy), to the nearest railway stations, omnibus routes and cab ranks to St Paul's Cathedral (Mansion House or Blackfriars on the District line, Ludgate Hill on the L.C.&D.; Newgate St, Ludgate Hill and Aldersgate St; and St Paul's Churchyard, respectively). They have some of the original advertising, including Lamplough's Pyretic Saline (cures whooping cough, smallpox, yellow and scarlet fever, etc. etc.), which ends its testimonies with the following advice:

CAUTION. - The Proprietors have received, and are receiving, numerous letters testifying to its medicinal and hygenic properties, never publishing a testimonial under an assumed name as other vaunted and much advertised medicines do; the public should not accept such testimony, so very easily manufactured ad lib by the unscrupulous.

Lovely. :)

***

Just watched His Girl Friday, a Cary Grant/Rosalind Russel film. Quite fun. "He's got a lot of charm." "Yes, it comes naturally; his grandfather was a snake!" One of the first films to let lines of dialogue overlap, for a more naturalistic sound, according to IMDB.

Sometime soon I'm going to have to start watching some of the anime I've got sitting around.

***

Well, I wrote the email to HR. You know, the one that says, "Oo, look at all the cool stuff I'm doing, look at all the people who think I'm great, look at how completely and utterly screwed you'd be if I left - these are all good reasons to give me more money." This was really, really hard to do. Not because any of this wasn't true - they would be in fairly deep poo if I left, not just for this movie, but in terms of getting ready for the subsequent movies. (I base this not on my innate brilliance, but on the fact that they advertised for my position for a year without getting anyone, and no-one is doing my job part-time like I was.) And people do actually seem to be happy with the job I'm doing, and impressed by some of the stuff I've done, and I've done stuff like a major revision upgrade of all the MySQL servers (from 3.25 to 4.0).

But I find it really, really hard to write about stuff like that. I want to write sentences like, "Editorial have said things imply that I have done a mostly satisfactory job," rather than "Editorial have serenaded me with 'I Get By With A Little Help From My Svend'." Okay, I don't imagine that the second one is quite what I was looking for to put in my email to HR either, but I did my best to be slightly more decisive in my language than the first sentence for the actual mail.

Of course, now I've gotten the, "I've got to talk to the person who can decide, so how much more money did you have in mind?" email, the bane of all contract negotiations - at least, for me. It's hard to get an idea of how much you should be aiming for, since most job advertising doesn't include salary information (understandably, since it depends so much on the experience of the people hired). I know there was a NZ website where I.T. people were encouraged to (annonymously) put their job requirements and salaries/contracting rates... but I can't remember where it was. I do recall that some of the unix DBA salaries were ridiculous - three digits an hour for some Oracle positions. It would be handy to be able to point HR at that, if only to cast whatever I end up asking in a favourable light.

Of course, it could be argued that I'm already paid too much for what I do; but I guess that the feeling that teachers and nurses get paid too little shouldn't stop me from trying to drag as much moolah out of the Holywood sytem and into NZ as possible. After all, whatever I charge, the IRD gets an additional 12.5% from the money in the US - and that's before I start paying taxes. Maybe I can screw enough for another artist's dole or two out of them. ;)

Glass Part Deux

I'd like to thank Kelly Glass & Mirror (of 257 Riddiford St, Newtown), who went zap, zap, zap, and cut me some identical glass panels at about 8:45am today for much a much more reasonable price than I was mentally prepared for. The panels are in, and I'll probably put in a pin to make sure that the window can't be levered open from the outside; I've put a nail in for the moment. (I'm vaguely considering bars, but I'm not sure it's worth it.)

The side-gate was unlocked during the party, so I suppose it's possible that someone snuck down the side of the house, took the panels out in preparation for breaking in, and was scared off, glass in hand, by an outbreak of loud laughter... but why wouldn't they try the french doors, which would seem to be much easier than climbing through a window? And wouldn't the fact that the lights were on and the lounge occupied dissuade them? Just... inexplicably odd. And apparently it happened after 2:30am, which is tres bizarre.

Anyway, I better get my invoice in before they take the box away. :)

Flatwarming, Exploding Toads II

Hopefully, people enjoyed themselves at the flatwarming. The numbers were good - enough to give a certain energy, but not standing-room only. Foodwise it worked out all right as well, which is always tricky to judge. And most people seemed to have a good time.

I had a pretty fun night up to just after the time I shooed away the last of the die-hards at 3am. I was tidying up before going to bed (as I did last time), and making a good dent into the mess... and I noticed the bottom two panels of the toilet window were missing. I then spent about three-quarters of an hour looking for them - and failing. I finished tidying up (basically, everything bar the vaccumming, and I rinsed and stacked rather than washing the dishes), and, because I had looked everwhere I could think of (including unlikely places like in the cistern and washing machine), I went to bed.

I got up at around 8-9am to look some more - in the garden, under the deck, in the recycle bin, in, under and around the fridges... still no luck. I washed the dishes, and then (since the house can't actually be locked up at the moment) went in search of someone who'd sell me some replacement glass. I basically ended up spending all of my Sunday morning (when I wasn't cleaning) trying to find a glass place that was open, since I felt reluctant to pay the call-out charge that most places would ask for if I rang one of those "we come to you" places. Trying and failing, by the way - I'm going to have to take some of the morning off tomorrow. I don't know how much it's going to cost, but I have an uneasy suspicion it won't be inexpensive.

Since I haven't seen any evidence of broken glass or anything, and it's not particularly valuable glass, I have to assume it's someone's idea of a hilarious practical joke - albeit one that's going to cost me a fair amount of money, has already wasted hours of my time, and will, come Monday, waste paid time as well as free time. I could try ringing everyone who was there later in the evening - and indeed, I started to - but it feels vaguely accusatory, and it got very uncomfortable very quickly. :/

I think that the thing that I dislike, far more than the stress and wasted time, is the fact that this has coloured my flatmate's introduction to my friends. It's not much fun assuring T. that yes, I did know all of the people who turned up (with very few "friend of a friend" exceptions), and trying to explain that I don't know why it happened, and that almost all my friends wouldn't do this - though, obviously, one did. :( S. seems much more blase about the whole thing.

Anyway, I'm pretty tired, so I'm going to have a nap, and try not to think about it any more.

***

By the by, the exploding toad thing? According to the Der Spiegel (via The Register), they've found out it's crows - they peck through the still-living toad to get at the liver, and when the toad swells up as part of its normal defence mechanism, this hole means that air is through the lung and into the abdomen until the poor creature pops. Here's The Register's version of the story.