The deadliness of a weapon is inversely proportional how advanced it is.

Auto-cannons wielded by T600 terminators are only inconvenient.
Nuclear bombs can be survived just by hiding in a fridge.
Guns in general rarely actually kill people, the bigger and more advanced the gun the less likely to actually kill somebody.
Bows and arrows are deadly, even when used as melee weapons.
Anything that isn't a missile weapon trumps anything that is.

I'm pretty sure the destruction of the world will be achieved by somebody wielding nothing more than a thigh bone.

Oh there is an exception to this, low tech explosives are deadly even though they are clearly higher tech than some sharp pointy sticks.

Cryptic crossword clues and nude modelling, and before ten a.m., I think my cow-orkers are getting filthier.

You know the drill.

Calling a film which begins in Schenectady, New York, and is very much about the whole being represented in part and vice versa, Synecdoche, New York is quite possibly the most brilliantly clever and terrible pun I've witness in a very long time.

Went down to London to spend some London Review Bookshop tokens I'd been given (bought the new book by Iain Sinclair) and thence to Oxford for tea and cake at j4 and addedentry's. Then back into Oxford to see Star Trek with juggzy, timscience, and jackfirecat (the film was really rather good, just the sort of gleeful canon shredding that was needed) and then back to j&o's (via the pub and a noodle place) for the party. Many bad puns were made, guitars strummed, cake eaten, champagne drunk, Scottish folk dance crossover bands discussed, and probably loads of other things I've forgotten. Thank you fivemack for making breakfast the next morning and helping us all feel slightly more human, or at least capable of composing rude limericks about Oxbridge colleges.

Thanks to auntysarah I now have a dreamwidth account, same user name as here and many other places.

Edit: Blimey, didn't take some of you long to find me. :-)

This is a knife.

I appear to need the toner cartridge that nobody in Cambridge stocks. Staples can actually get them at a very reasonable price but can't guarantee next day. Oh well, ordered one with guaranteed next day delivery online. At least my amazon package has arrived so I can stop waiting around at home and go for a walk.

I ordered a couple of CDs from Amazon yesterday at about half five in the afternoon. Knowing I wouldn't be at work tomorrow or Thursday I got it sent to home rather than work, so of course it got sent last night by courier and they tried to deliver it today.

Dear Amazon, just because I've got a prime account doesn't mean you've got to try that hard.

They do appear to be a fair bit cheaper than anywhere else for toner, even for original cartridges, and part of me wonders why. Anybody got any experience of them, good or bad?

I have been full of cold since Thursday, but couldn't take Friday or Monday off because I was at least trying to deal with an urgent customer issue, so completely collapsed at the weekend (to the extent of not getting out of bed and not even looking at my email, which chose this weekend to pile up so I've got 60 things to look at even after the spam filter had done its job).

That urgent customer issue is now dealt with, but instead of going back to what I was meant to be working on I was asked to work on another issue which somebody had foolishly promised to resolve, and given a date for. It looks like a fairly simple problem, but it's clearly going to be DOOM because even the example code provided with the library uses const_cast.

For those of you lucky enough not to do C++, const is a way of saying something is immutable and should be used a lot and const_cast is a way of taking something which is meant to be immutable and making it mutable, sometimes. It's implementation dependent and not guaranteed to work, and is normally an indication that something was designed badly in the first place.

I also finally had my annual review, which was good but annoyingly would apparently have been even better if it were offset by three months. It's nice to be told that if you keep up what you've been doing you'll be classed as a Role Model in your next assessment, it's annoying to know you'll probably collapse in a gibbering heap before then.

Oh, and my LJ user pic seems to have gone awol, I'm not sure if there was a screw up in their database or what, but I've put back again now.

Tickets booked for myself, covertmusic, sonicdrift, and mobbsy. Interesting that there were hardly any other seats booked by now, I think it may have been one of those films that loads of people rush to see the first weekend and then really tails off.

Anybody want to meet at Wagamama for noodles beforehand?

Anybody else want to see Watchmen at 20:15 on Wednesday at the Arts?

So, a link to the New Yorker's review of the Watchmen film got posted to reddit with predictable results—if I ever want to cause death by psychic shock I now know just how I'd do it. Ignoring all the accusations that the reviewer had never read the book (he clearly had, and why should it be required to review the film?) there was interesting bit in the review about how the film differs from the book. Watchmen (the book) does contain violence but I don't think it ever glories in it, and the review rather suggests the film does—sadly it is exactly what I feared we'd get when I heard that the director of 300 was at the helm.

The thing is people have always said that adaptations of Moore's works would have been much better if the film makers had stuck more closely to the text, but I don't think that's the problem. You could produce a film of a graphic novel that is almost a frame for frame reproduction of the book and still completely miss the tone, and I'm guessing that's what we've got here. The best adaptations between media are always the ones that capture some essential essence of the original and run with that, even if it means changing almost everything else.

I'll still go and see it, but I'm not hopeful about really liking it.

This is either genius or awful and I can't quite decide which.

The Haymakers is closing and has apparently stripped a load of stuff out so I doubt there'll be a quiz there this week.

It's funny, I was just saying on Saturday that I hadn't had lunch at the Green Dragon for ages.

I know I've hardly written anything on here recently, been a bit busy and that's not likely to change for a bit but...

Anybody fancy going and seeing Roddy Woomble, Kris Drever & John McCusker at The Junction on Tuesday?

Happy birthday bellinghman!