Mud - A Tale from the Riverbank

Merry Christmas, everybody.

An excellent film through my LoveFilm subscription, a modern day Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Ellis and his friend Neckbone (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland) find someone living in an abandoned boat they had hoped to take for themselves.

A story of love, fate and growing up, Matthew McConaughey shines as the troubled and desperate Mud. The plot moves at a brisk pace, the dialogue sounds great, and the supporting characters are well played, especially Reese Witherspoon as Mud's girlfriend and Sam Shepard as his father figure. However, this is really the tale of Ellis as he struggles to figure out a complex and dangerous adult world. Very recommended and I wouldn't be surprised if it's in the running for best film or screenplay at the Oscars.

Now You see Me

Through LoveFilm, this is a nice little caper film. Four illusionists (Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson and Isla Fisher) are brought together to stage the ultimate act of their careers, but a much grander show is being played out.

It's a pretty good film, with a good cast (Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman supporting) and a reasonable plot, if a little preposterous, plus the magic tricks are imaginitive. A good, if undemanding, pizza movie.

Killing Them Softly

Via my LoveFilm subscription, this is an adaption of another novel by the author who wrote The Friends of Eddie Coyle. After two small-time crooks rob a poker game, hitman Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) is tasked to sort out the problem.

If Samuel Beckett decided to write the screeplay for a crime film and got Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman to direct it, you'd end up with something like this. I suppose it's meant to be a black comedy, and it is funny in places, but the bulk of it is deadly dull, weary even. In fact, I'd say that it's better to watch the trailer: those are the best bits. Not recommended.

Gangster Squad

As part of my LoveFilm subscription, I watched this merry little cops-and-gangsters tale centred around Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn). John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) is tasked by L.A. Police chief Bill Parker (Nick Nolte) to take down Cohen and his gang.

What might otherwise have been a run-of-the-mill, and more violent, Untouchables clone is enhanced by a half-decent plot and good supporting cast. It's Penn and Brolin's movie, though, and you can feel every punch in the final showdown as they take each other apart. A decent, if undemanding, pizza movie.

Mob City, a series just started in the U.S., covers much the same story, but seems to have a more ambiguous tone:

A few years ago, I read (or tried to read: it's fairly heavy going) City of Quartz, a social, political and cultural history of Los Angeles by Mike Davis.

Despite it's style, it's a fascinating book on a fascinating subject.

P99:L8:W11	P241:L35:W1	P225:L18:W6
P163:L11:W13	P60:L26:W9	P130:L2:W2

Oxfam Sunday - Wombats and Dodgy £20's

I went up onto the top deck today to take over from Lautaro (it's a Spanish name, but he's a Scotsman), and he'd left on the CD player a reasonably decent compilation, in which was this catchy number from those lovable scousers, The Wombats:

It was a fairly uneventful shift: people seem to be concentrating on getting presents for Christmas and leaving us except for cards and wrapping paper.
I'd run out of £10's at one point and asked Mark to bring any up. He examined one of the £20's in the till and started holding it up to the light. He explained that he had a conversation with one of the tellers at the bank and he got a few tips on how to spot a fake. I compared the one he was looking at with another and they were almost identical, but there is a watermarked £20 which was slightly off in the "fake" note:

If it is a fake, it's a good one! It passed the marking test with our security pen.

I also got a Penguin Special from John, The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard:

It's about advertising, S185, published in 1960.

Dragonmeet 2013

For a change of pace, I went to the games festival Dragonmeet at Kensington Town Hall. There were the usual stalls, including Chessex, the dice makers:

Yummy!

I indulged a little and bought a card game I've played before, Love Letter by Aldaric Entertainment:

It's a lovely little game, very easy to play.

I only managed to play one game while there, Camelot by Wotan Games. They were introducing the game and it was delightful to play. It's a tile laying game, interior designing for King Arthur.

The designer, Julian, is the chap in the middle.

All-in-all a nice day out.

Parker

No, nothing to do with Thunderbirds.

After being double crossed and left for dead following a daring robbery, thief and robber Parker (Jason Statham) plots his revenge.

What could have been an ingenious crime and revenge thriller is let down by the meandering plot, mediocre direction and Statham's lack of enthusiasm, as well as being outclassed by supporting actors like Nick Nolte, Michael Chiklis and Wendel Pierce, who are woefully underused. I'd like to say it's better than nothing, but it isn't. Watch something else.

Drugs 2.0 by Mike Power

Today, I went to see a scouser about drugs! Mike Power is a freelance journalist who's written a very intriguing account about the combination of the Internet and the illegal drug business, topical considering the recent arrest of the creator of the Silk Road web site, and he gave a presentation about the background to the book to the London Futurists.

Mike started out, as every Liverpudlian is obliged to do, with the Beatles and he showed this rare photo of them with a common stimulant at the time, Preludin (or phenmetrazine, which is the chemical name).

He'd got interested in the business and culture of drugs while being based in Columbia, which, at the time, was producing 600 tonnes of cocaine a year. He saw first hand the ridiculousness of the War on Drugs, relating a story about visiting a Coca farmer who, upon being raided and having a field of crops destroyed, told him that it would be replaced within six months. It was a similar story with another drug of choice, MDMA, or Ecstacy. This is usually produced using a substance called safrole, extracted from the roots of a type of camphor wood tree from Cambodia, and much time has been spent in vain blowing up stills in the forests there.

When the credit crunch happened, there was a drop in the demand for both drugs, creating a demand for "legal" highs, initially Mephedrone, and the subsequent moral panic leading to the odd situation of an alarmist article on a new drug on the Daily Telegraph web site alongside a Google advert for the same drug.

This all intrigued Mike and he then set about figuring out how easy it would be to make his own designer drug, a variation of phenmetrazine. Not easily, as he found out, but, through contacts and some considerable study, he managed to find a small, professional pharmaceutical lab in China that produced a small amount of his new drug and shipped the substance via the mail system. It was all a bit dodgy and there was lots of anonymity involved (false names, referring to the drug as "metal cleaning powder", post office boxes, etc.) but he got the drugs, all perfectly legal. Or not illegal. Yet.

He then highlighted the role of the Dark Web, specifically the Silk Road web site and it's many subsequent inheritors, pointing out that it's not sleazy, addled dopers who are doing this but very bright tech people with PhD's. Combined with legal highs, there's a very compelling and rational business case and a lot of money to be made. He also pointed out the scale of the problem: there are currently 200+ new, legal, highs, including two derivatives of LSD.

His solution was somewhat predictable, but based on an unusual premise. The derivatives are usually inferior to the original. He pointed out that only two people died at Woodstock in 1968, and one of those was run over by a tractor, despite there being 500,000 people stoned out of their minds on "normal" drugs. This he contrasted with Brownstock, a festival in Essex attended by 5000 people, where some middle management chap died (and his girlfriend nearly did) taking some new drug, 5-MAPB, hardly anyone had even heard of. So why not, on a case-by-case basis, make the old drugs legal, or at least not criminal.

It was a fascinating presentation about a real, and slightly scary, adventure told in an engaging way.

Almost Human

That Karl Urban, he doesn't half get around. If he's not calling Bruce Wilis "grandpa", or playing Bones McCoy, he's being Judge Dredd, and now he's in a futuristic cop series over in the 'states.

It seems a bit formulaic, but it's nice to have a bit of cyberpunk to balance out all the horror\fantasy stuff.

Oxfam Sunday - Fun Lovin' Criminals & B.R.M.C

Today I did an afternoon shift at the shop, up on the top deck. We did a reasonable trade, but I didn't bring any CD's with me, so I had a scout around and spotted an old album by the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club:

Not bad, but it tended to lag towards the end. Next up was the Fun Lovin' Criminals:

Again, a few hits, but falling off afterwards.

Argo

In 1979, six U.S. diplomats in Iran fleeing from the student invasion of their embassy manage to hide in the Canadian ambassadors' residence. A C.I.A exfiltration specialist (played by Ben Affleck, also directing) hatches an extraordinary plan to get them out.

Based on a true story, it's a very tense film, especially the scene at the airport where they try to convince the guards that they've been scouting locations for a film. Ironically, for a film about faking a film, it has become controversial for being elastic with the truth, and it does come across as Hollywood saving the C.I.A. saving their own people and down playing the role of other countries' involvement, especially Canada. It's worth a watch, though.

It's Been a While

I haven't written much in a good while, so something of an update is in order. I've been a bit snowed under with the amount of paperwork we're doing at the college this year, which has irritated me somewhat. How it all relates to the learning process I've yet to figure out.

We are doing Java, though, if slowly. We were at a bit of a slack point the other day, so I asked the other students if they fancied a code puzzle. I mostly got blank looks, but Ricardo, Dipendra and Richard were game. Basically, the code has to output a pattern of "#"'s, like this:

#####
####
###
##
#

but the limitations are that you can only use two print statements, one for the "#" and one for the CRLF. You can use any other code you like. Richard got it within about ten minutes or so, while the others eventually gave up. To up the ante, I asked Richard to produce this:

###
####
#####
####
###

He went very quiet for a long while!

I have done quite a few shifts at the shop, notably today, where I listened to the Morcheeba album Big Calm:

Saturday - The Energy of Nations: Carbon Bubbles and Shale Games

This was a presentation by Jeremy Leggett, hosted by the London Futurists, concerning his new book.

The presentation covered the current state of energy sources, especially shale gas, peak oil and the carbon asset bubble that some claim could cause the next economic collapse.

Jeremy also talked at length of his experience with the media and their negative view of alternative energy, mostly due to the hydrocarbon companies' use of P.R.

It was an entertaining hour-or-so, which didn't feel like it, despite Jeremy's laid-back style. However, he isn't a technologist (and said so, to his credit), which meant that he couldn't discuss some of the more speculative aspects of his presentation and did become somewhat defensive when asked those kinds of questions. I would also have liked to see him address the issue of energy storage, a part of the alternative energy equation which enables it to replace hydrocarbons and nuclear. His view on shale gas was also revealing.

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Mmmmm. As soon as it happens in the 'States, Channel 4 are also showing the new TV series based on the Avengers.

There's been a few grumbles on the web, but it's not bad considering they're not going to get the A-list to be in it. The acting is reasonable and the plot's pretty good, with a nice twist, and a fair share of special effects. There is the possibility of it becoming Heroes, but it's early days.

Oxfam Sunday - Kylie!

As a break from the usual, I've been playing lots of Kylie in the shop today, Aphrodite and Fever:

Yes, I know it's a bit plastic, but she is really good at it and you can get a bit too serious. To illustrate the point, I played Nevermind by Nirvana:

I'm suprised how dated this sounds to me now.

Lewis on the downstairs till commented that he liked the Nirvana, but wasn't so keen on Kylie. "I'll play some just for you next time", I promised.

Pride and Glory

This is a cop drama through my LoveFilm subscription. A compromised detective, Ray Tierny (Edward Norton), is asked by his father (Jon Voight) to investigate the killing of four officers under his brother's (Noah Emmerich) command.

What might have been a fairly mundane film is elevated by both Norton and Colin Farrell as Ray's corrupt and out-of-control brother-in-law. The support is also excellent, especially Emmerich as a commander realising he's no longer in control. Recommended.

Oxfam Sunday - Penguin Special Blowout!

I've started college this week, so I've been rather busy and therefore been unable to make many blog postings, but I have been to the shop. Today, John had a "few" Penguin Specials. Amongst them was a Pelican Special, which counts as a Penguin Special, and this one is Modern German Art (S6) and the earliest special I have so far:

It's in good nick with an intact dust jacket. The rest are a mixed bag, some with and some without dust jackets, ranging from the thick Penguin Political Dictionary shown to the slight Miners' Day (S149). All-in-all, it's almost doubled my collection.

14 Blades - The Man with the Dragon Tattoo

It's a while since I watched a wuxia film and this is a reasonable effort, from my LoveFilm subscription. The Emperor's chief assassin (Donnie Yen) is sent to kill a government minister only to realise he's been set up and teams up with a mercenary's daughter (Zhao Wei, who played Mulan and was in Painted Skin) to clear his name.

The plot is a little convoluted, but is really just an excuse for a lot of martial arts, which are spectacular. Kate Tsui was also rather good as Qinglong's nemesis, Tuotuo, so one to watch out for.

New Lego - 'Ello, 'Ello, It's the Blues Brothers

I got some more series 11 the other day while in town. Looks like Elwood finally got busted!

All very monochrome.

Saturday - Brighton Mini-Maker Faire

Today I went to Brighton for the annual Mini-Maker Faire. I went by rail, via Victoria Station in London, which took a little longer but meant that I didn't have to drive. Despite being ticketed, it was even better attended that last year, from what I remember, although it was only £5 on the door, or £10 if you wanted a nice badge:

It has been laser-cut, and a laser cutter was being demonstrated by a fabrication company:

There was even a knitting android and I was accosted by a pushy Dalek:

I went for a walk down on the promenade before I headed home and the surf was up:

Robocop Reboot

The official trailer for the Robocop reboot is out and it looks pretty good:

It's got a strong supporting cast, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton and Sam Jackson, so it's promising!

Saturday - Biomedical Discoveries and the Ageless Generation with Alex Zhavoronkov

Today I attended the first lecture organised by the London Futurists since the end of the summer break. This was a good, if long, presentation by Alex Zhavoronkov whose speciality is the biochemistry of ageing. He's written a book and the presentation was a overview of the subject.

Alex explained that the main problem with an ageing population, i.e. one where the average age is increasing because everyone is living longer, is that old age brings with it infirmity and loss of function. This presents a major challenge to governments, economics and society, but one which might have a solution, or set of solutions, in the form of advanced treatments which enable people to be more functional for longer. He explained the problems that medicine has in making treatments available, citing up to forty years in some cases, but that given this, the next twenty years or so will see some truly remarkable advances, such as stem cell treatments and RNAi.

The presentation also touched on the impact this has on society and he proposed an increase in the retirement age as mandatory. This is where he drew the most comments from the audience. One pointed out that at the moment it difficult to find jobs for young people, much less the old, no matter how capable. It also occurred to me that retirement would become the preserve of the rich, the poor being obliged to work longer, but he had a point. If you live to eighty, forty of those, the first twenty and the last twenty, are unproductive and you are living off other people, your parents in the former and everyone else (directly or indirectly) in the latter. If you can extend, for everyone, that middle forty by even ten years, it would ease the strain on the economy of a country considerably. Alex even went on to say that not dealing with it could cause total economic collapse in some countries.

Overall, despite the length, it was a very good presentation by Alex, and very entertaining.

Update: The Futurists have a new web site, here.

New Lego - Minifigs Series 11

I didn't finish series 10 in the end, but series 11 is out. I've got a Yeti, a climber, a gingerbread man and a German lady with a pretzel:

No, I don't get it either, but at least everyone seems happy enough, and the Yeti has an ice lolly, which is nice.

Text to Hex

49 20 66 6F 75 6E 64 20 74 68 69 73 20 72 61 74 68 65 72 20 6E 61 74 74 79 20 77 65 62 20 73 69 74 65 2C 20 76 69 61 20 42 6F 69 6E 67 20 42 6F 69 6E 67 2C 20 74 68 61 74 20 63 6F 6E 76 65 72 74 73 20 62 69 6E 61 72 79 20 69 6E 74 6F 20 74 65 78 74 20 61 6E 64 20 76 69 73 2D 76 65 72 73 61 2E 20 54 68 69 73 20 69 73 20 74 68 65 20 72 65 73 75 6C 74 20 69 6E 20 68 65 78 2C 20 77 68 69 63 68 20 49 20 74 68 6F 75 67 68 74 20 77 6F 75 6C 64 20 62 65 20 62 65 74 74 65 72 2E

Oxfam Sunday, Monday & Tuesday

I did a marathon at the shop over the last few days, doing a shift on Sunday, a double "Sunday" shift on Monday and another this afternoon, about 11 hours, all told. I must admit, I am a bit jaded. If you're tired of Chelmsford, go home!

I did find a CD of some Cajun music today which lightened the mood a little:

Cajun, despite seeming to be a dance music, has a lot of blues elements, understandable given the proximity to the Mississipi, so there's a lot of songs about levee breaking.

While upstairs today, I got talking to our Classical Music expert, also called Dave. I asked him what the score was, and he said that although the bulk of it was £5 or thereabouts, he'd found one or two LP's which were worth about £800! People must still collect this stuff.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows

The sequel to the first Sherlock Holmes movie, I watched this through my LoveFilm subscription. Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) face Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) in a race to prevent a European War.

Someone's seen Jared Harris as David Robert Jones in Fringe as he's an excellent Moriarty, and more than a match for Downey. The latter's portrayal of Holmes is a little less forgivable this time around and he's clearly struggling to maintain the accent, not to mention the unbelievably bad disguises. Jude Law does a fine turn as Watson and the plot is serviceable enough, with scenes evoking the World War to come. It's a decent pizza movie, fun and certainly action-packed, but a bit of a diminishing return.

Minions!

I was walking through Southend the other day, when I spotted these in a shop in the Victoria Centre:

The shop is called The Teddy Station and it's on the upper floor. They do all kinds of themed soft toys, as you can see, and the quality seems reasonable enough.

Cowboys and Aliens

I finally managed to watch this through my LoveFilm subscription. A man (Daniel Craig) awakes in the desert not knowing who he is or how he comes to be there, but he has a mysterious bracelet on his arm.

Mix a western with an alien invasion and this is the result. A film based on the comic book of the same name, it's surprisingly good. The two genre's are blended with skill by the director and cast is top notch, Craig putting his Bond experience to good use, Harrison Ford playing the western role Indiana Jones was always meant to be, and with a fine supporting cast including Sam Rockwell. Recommended.

Wednesday - Lambdas: Myths and Mistakes

This evening I went to see the presentation by Richard Warburton at Skills Matter regarding the new functional features of Java 8, about which I mentioned previously.

A few words of explanation for those not familiar with the terminology.

The JSR mentioned is a Java Specification Request, which is what you create when you have a suggestion for how you want Java to change in the future. These are submitted as part of the Java Community Process, set up by Sun when they realised they had something big on their hands releasing Java. In theory it allows everyone to have a voice, but in practise it's mostly those with very extensive knowledge of the language (such as Richard), although the Adopt-a-JSR he talks about is a move to allow the average code-cutter their ten-penn'th, as well as field testing the resulting change. The JCP has been criticised for slowing down changes to Java which might make it more competitive: Microsoft just releases their software to beta without any real consultation, while Google just seems to keep everything in permanent beta, killing it off when they get tired of it.

The "lazy" and "eager" he talks about are functional concepts that are easier to grasp by watching them in action rather than talking about them, but the nearest non-programming equivalent would be the just-in-time of logistics and manufacturing (a part is ordered to arrive just in time to be used, thus eliminating the need to store it and the resulting cost of doing so). The lazy algorithm is executed when it's needed, whereas the eager one is executed completely. This is why there's a problem when the different algorithms are mixed and why the lazy ones play havoc with profilers (software that tries to work out how efficient your code is, amongst other things).

Richard was quite eloquent, highlighting the changes and giving examples of the way in which they should be used, but it became clear that Java 8 is not the radical change that everyone thought it might be. The functional features, like interfaces and generics before them, look like they've been added onto the existing features and even create conflicts with them (the "streams" and collections Richard talks about).

While it's looking as if they are not going to be usurping Scala and Clojure any time soon, the new features look very Scala-like, which does look a little ominous for the latter. Mind you, they also look a little Erlang-like as well, so make of that what you will.

Bizzare aside: While on the way home on the train, I sat opposite the reddest man I have ever seen. It reminded me of this.

Oxfam Monday & Tuesday - Till Trouble

Pulling two shifts at the shop, I had a problem with the credit card machine. It kept beeping at me and when I looked it said that it couldn't connect to the PIN pad. I wiggled the connection (this was upstairs on the Tuesday afternoon, so it was quiet), but it then asked me for a function code (??). I had a few words with Mark and he came up and looked through the little manual that came with it. He fiddled for a while, shrugged, and went underneath the till to find the plug to do the hard re-boot. I told him it reminded me of the running joke in the IT Crowd:

While on the top deck, I found a Luaka Bop sampler with this rather groovy sound:

Rock on!!

Sunday Games Club - Chocolate Trader and Good Juju

Up to Victoria for another playtest meeting at The Jugged Hare. After a rather nice (if pricey) bubble and squeak, we had a go at Chocolate Trader from Laurence Davies.

I don't have much experience of pure trading games, mostly ones that have trading as part of the game, usually to manage resources in an open market (as in my old favourite Supremacy: the market indicators are at the top, with the bull and bear).

I was therefore at a disadvantage and tried to figure out the surprisingly complex and sophisticated rules. The first hurdle was the turn sequence. In each turn the first played picked which phase of the game in which they go would first. There are five phases to the game: Purchase, Production, Market, Innovation and Advertising. In a trading game, as in reality, you make a profit by buying low and selling high, this translating here into the Purchasing and Market phases. Purchasing was actually buying the resources to make the chocolate (milk, cocoa, sugar) and the overhead in production aggregated together into one price. The Market was when you sold the produced chocolate. You bought in one market and sold in another, which took a little getting used to. What governed the price you bought and sold at was also a bit perplexing: when you sold on the selling market, the price went down but there didn't seem to be a mechanism for bringing it back up again. This turned out to be Advertising, which generated demand and thus increased the price (you could "buy" the chocolate at a fixed price per unit). The price in the buying market was a table that depended on what kind of chocolate you wanted to make and increased in price with each purchase. This table then changed each turn to represent Fortuna. Innovation was a way of changing the chocolate-making machine to make more or different (more expensive) chocolate. This was done using an auctioning system, another market essentially.

It was quite a good game once you got used to the complexity, but might be easily dominated by someone who figured out an effective strategy and had luck on his side. Laurence was trying to aim the game at the family market, but it seemed too complicated for anyone who hasn't got good maths. Male gamers might not take it seriously because of the subject matter, plus there are more complex games like Power Grid, but female gamers might like it. Beer Trader might be more amenable to the men.

The second game was Good Juju, a voodoo based card game from Ben Neumann. At least that was the working title, as this was the first time it had been played:

Despite the lack of polish, it was quite a good game. Depending on the instructions on the Charge cards, you put a number of "bad" juju beads into a bag. At the end of the round, whoever had the largest number of beads won the round and got a Totem card. If he gets the art right (and he said he had an illustrator) it'll be quite something, although I thought afterwards the idea of an infinite reservoir of bad juju was a bit gloomy.

Space Hulk!!

Way back when, Games Workshop (current share price GAW:LSE, 776 GBX) produced a little game based on it's established Warhammer 40,000 range called Space Hulk. It was Aliens (as in the film), with Imperial Space Marines taking the place of U.S. Colonial Marines and genestealers taking the place of, er, aliens. The game was simple enough, and difficult enough, to be a challenge for a weekday evening's entertainment over beer and snacks.

It had a few extensions, and a few rule additions published in White Dwarf, GW's monthly magazine, a second edition and then quietly disappeared. Anyway, about two or three years ago a third edition came out, quite unexpectedly and to little fanfare from GW. It was very professionally done, with nice plastic models (these have been painted very well):

Anyhoo, I'm a fan. When the first game came out, I started collecting more of the models from the original line and painting them up, and then I got the third edition when it came out. I've even got the card game from Fantasy Flight:

Now there's a video game that copies the board game very well, and jolly good it is too.

It's turn based and the interface is very simple, like the board game, just point and click. (Here's a screen shot I made using the Steam interface: very handy!)

Notice the log window on the right which details the dice rolls. Lovely!

I've even been busy and made an icon for the desktop shortcut as they don't provide one yet (it's on Dropbox here).

Now it's obviously not everyone's cup of tea, but if you are a W40K fan and loved the original board game, as I did, I recommend it.