Looking out towards Megabuilding 4
Looking out at the city from the mountainous road outside of Night City.
I love this world.
Charlize Fury
Found the Mad Max: Fury Road Easter egg in Cyberpunk 2077.
It wasn’t until I read the archive document on the scene that I realised what it all was.
Watched The Fog
I do love a John Carpenter film.
Last night (and today, as I was too tired to watch the whole thing late last night) I watch The Fog for the first time.
At least I don’t remember watching it in my youth.
I enjoyed it thoroughly.
It actually made me jump in two separate parts, which was nice.
And it was more violent than I was expecting. It’s not actually that graphically violent, but there were a couple of moments I did wince.
And that’s a good thing in horror.
I loved how quick and to the point it was too. As with many of Carpenter’s films I’ve seen, it gets straight into the meat of the film and then as soon as it’s resolved it gets out quickly.
I do enjoy a slow-burn character story from time to time. But when it comes to most horror, I do enjoy it when it stays concise and gets to the point fast.
There’s still a couple of Carpenter’s films I’m yet to watch, and “The Thing” that I desperately want to re-watch.
It’s been a while since I was fourteen.
Till then, Tata.
Watched Alien Romulus
I’ll just start by saying that I really enjoyed Alien Romulus.
After the atrocity that was Disney’s How to train your alien (Alien Earth) I have been in need of a good Alien fix.
This started with me finally playing through Alien Isolation and absolutely loving it.
I then thought I’d give Romulus a chance, on the advice of a friend. And I’m so glad I did.
What I thought worked really well
The general vibes of the film. It felt somewhere between the first and second Alien films. And that sat great with me.
The storyline is nice and simple.
The Alien itself was actually scary again. None of that running around in bright daylight rubbish.
Some nods to previous films were okay (more on this shortly).
The face-hugger scenes were incredible. Instead of being a means to get the Alien born, they actually featured in two of my favourite scenes in the film. Creepy AF.
And the ending, although I was warned that it was a bit iffy, I actually didn’t mind. Gory as hell and went to a place I didn’t think it would.
What made me cringe
The CGI Ian Holm. This was not needed in the slightest. Pure uncanny valley that just didn’t need to be.
All the bloody fan service. Whilst a couple of scenes that seemed to nod back to previous films were ok, most were just pure cheese.
The re-saying of certain iconic lines were just out of place. They sounded like a film student had won a competition to write some lines of dialogue for the film.
We don’t need fan service dialogue.
The film would have been a strong 8 out of 10, if it weren’t for those bits. I think it sits at about 6.5 for me after all is said and done.
Arrived in the Indian Jungle
Started Tomb Raider 3.
The remaster of this game looks gorgeous.
Watched The Innocents (1961)
We decided to watch The Innocents (1961) for halloween evening film watch last night.
A bit of a left field one, but is considered one of the top horror films.
I thought it was okay. Good creepy vibes throughout and lots of abiguity.
I was surprised when the ending kicked in.
I guess I was expecting more of a gut punch ending or something.
All in all glad I watched it. Its another classic to tick off the list.
Watched The Wicker Man
Last night I finally got round to watching one of the classic horror films that has somehow been evading me for all this time — The Wicker Man (1973)
Not the apparently-dreadful remake. Oh not the bees.
I loved it.
Despite knowing the ending already, probably through some kind of film osmosis over the years, I still enjoyed it all the way through.
It was wonderfully creepy, occasionally inappropriate and all with a glorious feeling of a creeping dread.
Now thinking back to the film Midsommar, that now feels like The Wicker Man on acid in retrospect.
I should probably rewatch that soon.
Im not going to attempt any kind of analysis, only to log for myself that i saw it.
How that copper got any sleep in that pub bed and breakfast I dont know.
Stop the racists
On my way to get some chips from my local chippy last night, my faith in humanity was restored.
As I sat there waiting for red to turn green, I noticed white spraypainted words written across a sky plus billboard advert.
The first two words I read were “Stop the…” and my eyes immediately rolled in anger, expecting the third word to be “boats”.
However, my mood was immediately shifted when I saw the third word was actually “Racists” with a heart painted next to the whole thing.
“Stop the racists”.
Yes.
To whoever wrote that, Thank You. Let’s have more of it.
My website is now cut off
I’ve decided to bring my website back to a traditional website without all of the “social gubbins”.
I love the IndieWeb, but I just can’t be bothered to jump through the hoops of marking up the posts with the extra classes and fiddling with my theme to make sure other sites can parse it fully.
And the Fediverse. The fediverse is great. It feels like a last ditch effort at having some kind of nice social interactions online. Without all the capitalist bullshit and “influenzers”. (Yes I intentionally spelt it that way)
But I don’t want my website connected to it anymore. I dont want all my posts going out and getting saved in other peoples servers, regardless of how trusted they may be. Especially now big tech is hustling in on the fediverse game.
So this is all there is. A single website, built on ClassicPress, with basically no plugins, with me as the sole author. The author who does not use AI in any stage of this website, or any other website for that matter.
Just me, myself and I. And any of you lovely people who pop by and visit.
Unless you’re a fascist. In which case you can fuck off.
Tata.
“ai” is the worst thing to happen to society.
“ai” is the worst thing to happen to society.
Removing more and more people from working, whilst making cancerous billionaires richer, is only ever going to result in greater and greater inequality.
Everything else is parlour tricks.
There is pretty much nothing good to come from any of this crap being peddled as “The greatest thing to enhance human capability”.
The whole “human in a loop” thing – this is essentially taking people out of creative and critical thinking and reducing them to glorified conveyerbelt workers on a production line of “content”.
Whilst “ai” is the worst invention to flood the world in recent times, the word “content” is the word I’d love to confine to room 101.
People talking about “content” just pull every creative expression down to its lowest form that all comes down to “engagement” which itself basically equates to “analytics clicks / views / whatever”.
The World Wide Web was a gift with the greatest of potential.
It has been reduced to a mincing machine that steals from the creatively-gifted amongst us, in order to give non-creative people the false sense that they are.
All so they can create, and I use that term very lightly, slops of images and videos that will be forgotten tomorrow.
All at the cost of ours and the planet’s future.
Collect the Flamethrower
Like mother, like daughter. Big girl shit about to go down.
