I am returning

I shall be attempting to rekindle my love of blogging. Stay tuned.

So The Hunger Games

Its not very often I will admit I will fall in love with a book and then watch the movie, and I guess I can never quite get over the fact that so many things have to be changed or cut for it to be a movie.

I get that things have to be changed to shorten the run time and I guess if I had just watched the film totally on its own merit I would have thought it to be a good movie. And I really did enjoy it and there are a few scenes done spectacularly well I have to say but there are some massive omissions that I can't help but feel were crucial to the story and I can't overlook that they were neglected.

Ill try and do these in order they should appear but as im doing all this off my head you will have to forgive me if they end up scattered.

The Mockingjay Pin, now I don't mind the fact that it came from a totally different person thats fine, but every one in the book was allowed one item from their own district to take with them and in the movie she had to sneak it in. Not a big deal just found that odd.

Katniss' first days in the arena. Well time in the arena in general. In the book she was in there for weeks, and it added a much greater sense of peril, like the whole thing was more of a struggle and I think they managed to lose that in the movie. Katniss spent the first few days without water and almost died before finding it, which makes her finding the water so much more of an achievement. Similar thing with the lack of a sleeping bag she finds in the pack, you never got the feeling the tributes could die of exposure during the night while in the book as the days went on it was even stated that the days were getting hotter and hotter and the nights colder and colder.

Rue. I don't think they spent enough time with Rue. The scene when Rue dies was really sad and very well done and made me cry as I expected. But I have to wonder would it have had the same impact on me if I had not read the book, if I did't already have this emotional attachment to her. I just don't think they spent enough time building up the relationship between Katniss and Rue and I think Rues death would have had a much bigger impact if they had spent more time on this.

After Katniss finds Peeta. Again it just felt so rushed. When she finds him in the book he is in a really bad way and over the days he gets so much worse before she goes off to get the medicine. And after she gets that it still takes days again before he can really move. They have a lot more time to build up their relationship and for Katniss to develop feelings for him. And then at the end again Peeta is so close to death when the hovercraft arrives which causes Katniss to scream madly for him. I was looking forward to that scene where he is taken into the other room and she is separated by a glass door which she is banging on. And he lose's his leg. It just seems their relationship is glossed over and I wonder if that will come back to bite them in the sequels, especially the third movie.

The Mockingjay too, how it was never explained its significance, which just seems like a vital plot point to me.

In spite of the points I have made, I would like to point out I really did enjoy the movie. And who knows perhaps a directors extended cut will include some of these. But I think the movie falls short of perfection by these omissions and that saddens me slightly.

The Hunger Games cut in UK for 12A certificate

Ok so after largely totally ignoring the Hunger Games until two days ago, Something made me look into it. I had been noticing it here and there but was unaware of even the basic plot. Anyway long story short I have now read the book but thats not what I want to rant about.

Although I knew this already the film is a 12A, ok no worries I mean thats fine, Die Hard 4 is a 12A and might actually be my fav of the 4. But what annoys me is where its mention it has been cut to receive a 12A. And also a line saying it must be a 12A at all cost, oh and its the films "target audience" I mean ffs.

Ok this is 2012, everyone and their fucking dog watches anything. The entire film classification system is archaic and I get the feeling the people that classify them were born in 1901.

Stop fucking editing movies. A movie should be made and then shown to people. If people choose to watch it they should be allowed to, should be allowed to make an informed decision about its content and watch it. Why is that so hard, and this goes for everything. The fucking government is so consumed with trying to protect everyone from things they have already seen and 50 time worse. Someone make it stop, for the love of god.

Minecraft 1.2

So minecraft 1.2 is now live. And it has Ocelots, which for some reason turn into cats when you tame them. I mean the option to have a tameable ocelot would have been nice too but what ever, they are freaking cute.

Oh yah and you can make them have itty tiny kittens to. And for anyone who likes dogs I guess I should mention that you can make baby wolves too now.

I play on mine.lewna.net which will be updated as soon as bukket updates our plugins. So if you like, come and say hi.

Awake 2012 Pilot thoughts

Awake Pilot thoughts.

This isn't going to be a review as im sure there are enough of those around already, what I want to discuss are some of the finer points of how this reality switching works exactly.

As an example lets assume Jason wakes up in the reality his wife has survived at 7am on Monday and goes to sleep at midnight Monday night. It is my understanding that he then would wake up in the reality he son is alive. what is not made clear is what day this is. Does he wake up on Tuesday? Does he sleep? Does any time elapse.

It is logical to assume he would wake up on Monday again in the other reality, but what time does he wake up?

Also what if he stays awake for more than 24 hours?

I know not everyone will concern them selves with these questions, and in spite of these questions I really did enjoy the pilot, but I feel these issues should have been dealt with early on. And I at least hope they do address them at some point.

Zero Punctuation

Yahztee vids not working, don't know why. Try to ignore it.

Americans, car crash, pedestrians

Something is bothering me about when you see people get hit by cars in American movie and tv shows.

Its been bothering me for a while too. See someone steps into the road all of a sudden and then from off screen a car ploughs into them doing 90.

Yeah ok I can buy this someone steps into the road all of a sudden how can you avoid them. Except its never that simple. What bothers me is that its always on a straight stretch of road and there is always at least a five second delay between the person stepping into the road and the car hitting them. So they are far away right?

How is it that the drivers never fucking see them. Even if there were not enough time to break and stop there is surely more than enough time to swerve out of the way.

Anyway, just something that has been bugging me.

1984

So I have started reading 1984, im not really sure what lead me to finally start to read it, but I have always been vaguely aware that I should. Its part of my new thing you see, I got a kindle a few weeks back and so with the added ease of acquiring books combined with (despite what some people may say) the new found ease of reading from a pad instead of an actual book, I thought I would start to read all the books I always wanted to, and even a bunch I didn't know I needed to. This is not going to be so much a review, more just some ramblings. I also plan to start updating the blog again, even if nobody reads it, the simple act of having written what I wanted to write is somehow satisfying.

So 1984 then. Written in 1949 you can't deny it is really in a lot of ways ahead of its time. Take the newspeak as an example. You could argue this is in many ways similar to the internet speak we have adopted. But that's not what I really think about when I read the book. Its the way the government has its claws in every aspect of your personal life. And while 1984 paints a considerably bleaker picture than what we already have, its still scary to think just how much of our lives can be observed without our knowledge.

Will there ever come a day when there will be a camera in everyone's  house that can be viewed at any time by persons unknown to us, its hard to imagine it, but there are people out there that listen to your phone calls so perhaps its not as far fetched as we like to think.

In any case, that's not the thing that really bothers me, ok so people watching your life is unthinkably scary, but not being able to hold the hand of a woman you love in plain view, or even in your own home. That really scares the shit out of me. The loss of control, the inability to say and do as your feel fills me with a cold dread, and you have to wonder would we even see it coming. We slowly concede more and more liberties and one day we might wake up and realise they are all gone, and we did nothing to stop it.

Review of Australia

Pros

Nice Beaches
Awesome surfing
Sunny
Cool accents
Culture
Freedom of Speech
Forests
Lots of Alcohol
Has a British flag on their flag
Lewna lives there

Cons

Dangerous Spiders
Drop Bears
Expensive video games
Censorship or Media
Constant fear of being eaten by animals
Lewna lives there

Neutral

Multiculturalism

Score 8/10

Reorganising a DVD collection

I have a lot of DVD's. by most people standards it would be classed as immense and when people see it for the first time I usually get a wow.

Sadly due to space restrictions I have to store it on a shelf which is two DVD's deep and over time it tends to fall into disarray. And so for the second time that I can recall I decided yesterday to reorganise it. A decision while I am glad I did it I ended up regretting and cursing the idea.

As a rough indication of just how many dvds I have, its in the area of 1100 collected over about 10 years. The space I have for this is a 6 story book case 2 DVD's deep 52 standard DVD's across with space horizontally for more.

So how does one go about organising such a collection. Alphabetical? Hell no too normal. Genre? to a degree yes but too vague. So I decided to go with main actor. Mostly.

Oh yeah and one other thing, the whole shelf is in an area of about 1 square metre.

So you start of by emptying the whole lot, and laying out the collection.

The starting to sort them. Way too many to just categorize as you go so I decided first thing to do was split them into TV shows and movies.

Then I sorted out my TV shows into their individual show obviously. The pride of my collection although somewhat regrettable SG-1 collection. Collected every other week via mail until season 10 was due and the company fucked up. 

See they are numbered, 1 - 63 except that is only seasons 1 - 9 and season 10 was still showing at this point and so 64 was Atlantis. Now at this point I cancelled the collection and though my reasons may seem slightly petty and maybe they are but when you have a collection like this it should be all the SG-1's then all the Atlantis. Not SG-1 Atlantis SG-1 Atlantis Its just wrong. 

Its also the reason that I made them send me one of the DVD's several times as all of the spines make one large picture and one of them near the end is wrong. There is a gap in one of the pictures and I could not seem to make anyone understand how wrong that is. 

Anyway getting way way off track and likely no one is still reading this but anyway. Yeah. You know what I can't be arsed. No one is reading anyway.

JinxyKatte out.