2 packs of Doctor Who micro-universe figures from Woolies, @ £4.99 each.
1 rare Star Wars collectible miniature from eBay, @ £4.51.
1 Dinosaur Planet RPG supplement from eBay, @ £6.24.
4 OOP Grenadier dinosaur miniatures from eBay, @ £10.29.
Total: £31.02. Just about on budget.
I met Jeremy Beadle once. He was hosting a charity quiz night that WW sent a team along to.
No one had him on their lists for this year’s Deadpool game.
This morning we launched a revised version of the Visit London home page. Along with a tie up with Trip Advisor, a new Japanese site and a site for the China in London season, as well as lots of behind the scenes improvements, it’s been a really packed January.
One thing that crosses over from behind the scenes to public is the addition of microformats to the site. hCard, hCalendar and hReview are all in use. Whilst hCard was straightforward to implement I found the hCalendar and hReview formats a little tricky to apply to our data. Anyway, install Operator and take Firefox for a whirl on the site and see what you find.
Rugby tomorrow. Oh yes, it’s Six Nations time again.
accomplishedI just squeezed my frog a bit too hard and ended up with pink goo all over my hand. Poor frog - I’d only known him a little while and now he’s gone.
This is the second stress ball that I’ve popped in recent months. What lesson can I learn from this?
melancholyMy Christmas stocking contained a stress ball (well stress frog actually) and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Is Santa trying to tell me something?
Obviously I have personally been very good this year, but I suspect that Santa’s data of who has been naughty and who has been nice was lost when a junior elf sent the discs by courier - after all ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
pink_weasel received her presents as well.
Yesterday I went to see the Tutankhamun exhibition at the O2. First time I’d ever visited the dome in either of its incarnations. In many ways it’s a pity that it didn’t get turned into a casino-resort beacuse there’s already a lot about that reminds me of the casinos I saw in Las Vegas.
Anyway, the exhibition itself was extremely well presented and managed the important job of putting into context both stories - that of Tutankhamun himself1 and that of the discover of his tomb by Howard Carter. The level of preservation of three thousand year artifacts is incredible - not just the metal and pottery but wood, even showing the original paint colours.
Being the geek I am, I also enjoyed spotting all the Stargate references. Um, I think I may have that backwards.
1. Relatively speaking. Egypt has a lot of history2 and there was no way it could all be related here, but if you don’t come away knowing a lot more about the Eighteenth dynasty then you must have your eyes closed.
2. Only tangentially related to Tutankhamun himself, my favourite ancient Egypt fact (you may have heard this before). Cleopatra, the famous one, also the last Pharaoh of Egypt, is closer in time to us in the twenty-first century than she is to the builders of the great pyramids.
contemplativeHi [ContactFirstName],
I have a web designer role based in Surrey.
My client is looking for somebody who can work self-sufficient and turn projects round quickly, while maintaining high standards both visually and technically.
…
If you have any of the following this will be useful.
AJAX, BACK-END BUILT WEBSITE AND Action script.
What is a “BACK-END BUILT WEBSITE”? And does “[ContactFirstName]” know how to build one?
Oh, and of course they can’t tell the difference between a designer and a developer (nor the difference between an adjective and an adverb).
Saw The Lord of the Rings musical courtesy of work and the producers. It’s not really fair to call it a musical as it barely contains more songs than the books do, though the fight scenes are superbly choreographed to music. The producers prefer the term ’spectacle’ and it fits that label very well. The design element is superb - Black Riders, Ents, Shelob, the Balrog are all achieved on stage in innovative but effective ways that you probably wouldn’t imagine. The use of crutches and prosthetics to distinguish the orcs may not be very politically correct but it does convey the twisted and deformed nature of their creation.
It’s quite long but still has to compress the story somewhat. The first act follows the first book reasonably closely (no Tom Bombardil, though he does get namechecked at the end, no Barrow Wights, no Glorfindel, and the Nazgul attacks on the Prancing Pony and Weathertop are combined), but after the interval things start to diverge rather more. I was starting to get suspicious when Boromir kept on talking about “The Kingdom of Men” rather than Gondor and it turned out that they had indeed combined Rohan and Gondor - and hence Theoden and Denethor, and Helm’s Deep and Pelennor Fields. Whilst this moved the plot along quite quickly it removed some of the subtlety from the story and a lot of “fan favourite” characters and scenes - no Eomer, no Eowyn, no Faramir, no Palantír, no Wormtongue, no Paths of the Dead, no Witch King. On the plus side they do, briefly, include the Scouring of the Shire.
The performances ranged from the very good to the very camp but even Malcolm Storry as an excellent Gandalf suffers somewhat in comparison with Ian McKellan in the films. In fact the hardest thing to keep in mind when reviewing or just watching the stage version is that it’s an independent adaptation of the book not the film. It aims for a very different feel - more mythic, more rooted in fairy tales, rather than the “realistic” fantasy of the films. In this sense it’s perhaps a little truer to the spirit of Tolkein even if it taks much bigger liberties with his story.
I was tagged by Jack on the grounds that I’ve “not done a meme for a while”.
According to my LibrayThing profile, 858. I know I have at least one more to add to that list and I’d also need to subtract the 27 tagged as !borrowed or !sold. So 832. Minimum, as there may be more hiding somewhere that I haven’t added yet.
A couple of out of print role playing games from eBay. Last ‘real’ book would appear to be Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O’Brian which I found in a bookshop in Amsterdam and made Lettice buy because I’d only just bought something else there and the shop assistant was a bit on the scary side.
I finished re-reading Human Nature this morning. I’ve been wanting to refresh my memory since the TV version came out. The book is bloodier and does a better job of creating the historical context. However it does have a number of elements that are really superfluous and which the TV version correctly ignored.
In reverse chronological order in my life:
I bought this whilst on holiday in Tennessee visiting gleet and littlebun so it reminds me of a great time as well as being a great book. Fortey takes a look at the history of life on Earth from the moment if started to the dawn of human history. Richard Dawkins did the same trip backwards in The Ancestor’s Tale but for me Fortey’s book is more engaging.
Very, very geeky. But as well as being one of the best Treknical fandom works ever it’s also the first book I bought online.
I could have listed several works of fantasy or science fiction that I read during my adolesence - The Lord of the Rings, Dune, the Pern novels and The Colour of Magic prime amongst them, but this collection of low fantasy stories set in a seedy city at the arse end of an empire is the one that stuck in my mind the most.
I was the pefect age for this when it was first published. And from this book sprung my interest in RPGs and wargames. It has a lot to answer for.
A childhood treat - a book with me and my family and my friends in it.
gleetpink_weasel
I know own three SLRs. As well as a Canon AE1 that I bought with a student loan to replace an older model that failed to survive a fall, I have a Canon EOS 100 and, as of yesterday, a Canon EOS 10D. The last two are inherited from my father who has an even more impressive collection of hardware (I suspect that being a Canon fan is an inherited trait).
The 10D is a digital camera, my first. Yes, I’ve finally joined the twenty-first century (well sort of - my MP3 player is broken, I don’t see the point of Twitter, and I still hate mobile phones and hardly ever use mine). Though, from the look of the self-portrait over there, I belong in distinctly more paleolithic times.
chipperFor the second time I got an invite to do a YouGov survey, only to discover after a couple of questions that it was about the work of my employer.
Oh well. 50p is 50p and I did ‘fess up in the free text answers.
mellow