For this week’s Two 4 Tuesday challenge of clean/dirty it’s once again time to use a single picture to combine the two opposite themes laid out.
This is a closeup on a bluebell growing out of the mess the recently passed winter left behind.
Not this year’s, since we’re still in its grip. A weakening grip, but a grip nonetheless.
ScummVM now has support for games developed using Activision’s MADE engine, including Return to Zork, a less than successful comeback to the land of the Flatheads.
Here’s hoping for the remaining two graphical parts (Nemesis and Grand Inquisitor), soon.
Following a selection of recent news, Charles Stross declares his Halting State obsolete, eight years ahead of schedule.
Utter early eighties genius.
My trek-fu is too weak to recognize all moments in the equivalent TNG/Dallas mash-up.
That’s Bob Dylan, realized indeed with nothing but drawn out cassette tape. Check out the artist’s flickr collection for takes on Jimi Hendrix and the entire Beatles, done with the same medium.
Not to be.
A place in the virtual NHL finals, that is.
Lost the semifinal 3-7 to the fourth seed.
No single factor doomed Hakkapeliitat.
Goalies could have been a little more sure-handed. I could have played Slava Kozlov when he scored 2+1 for Thrashers. Dustin Brown could have actually been productive.
But such is the game, a great regular season comes to naught when the playoffs begin.
On to the bronze game. After all, the third place in this league is won, not lost.
Two things combined today to cause grief:
Combined, this was spooky indeed.
Turns out that the two were completely unrelated. The bill was indeed a spurious one, and the disappearance was due to an “unspecified name service accident” at the service providers premises.
Happily enough normal service was restored within a couple of hours.
This week’s Moody Monday challenge is black and white.
I chose the attached image of two aging elephants, it’s far better in two colors than when using the full spectrum. The photo is from Washington Zoo.
This blog is five years old today.
There are now 3335 entries, which results in about 1.8 entries per day. But trends-wise the posting frequency has increased a lot, with about 970 entries written during the last twelve months.
The by far biggest change in the blog thus far, the move to WordPress as the publishing engine was completed last year – and now the full archives are accessible without resorting to the HTML wrung out by rather buggy homegrown system.
The next proposed changes concern easier findability of entries. Some of the categories are just too bloated for their own good, and need splitting up for easier access.
Content-wise I don’t dare to promise anything big for the next five year plan. After all, this is pretty much nothing more than a therapeutic exercise, and nowhere even close to work.
Watched the very recently released first part of a trilogy based Stieg Larsson’s Millennium books: Niels Arden Oplev’s take on Män som hatar kvinnor, Miehet jotka vihaavat naisia in finnish and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in english. I had doubts about being able to fit a 600+ page book into 150 minutes (and leaving room to provide some extra continuity for the later parts), but the movie is executed well enough for comfort.
But it’s far from perfect. Some of the simplification choices are more or less obvious – excising a couple of characters and subplots have left a lot more room for the main quest, but some are perplexing indeed. And in one case one of the protagonists is turned from a passerby to an active vigilante – not a wholly unbelievable turn of events, but quite against the line taken in the book.
Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, the quite deeply damaged female hacker has drawn accolades for her performance, and she is good at filling out the black leather of the estranged security consultant. But it’s Michael Nyqvist’s take on Mikael Blomkvist that’s the highlight of the cast. His investigative journalist combines steely determination with a healthy amount of swedish smugness to a coherent whole. Too bad the narrow space of the movie doesn’t allow for deeper exploration of the character – there’d been ample material to build from.
The movie is not an easy one to watch – ugly sex and even uglier violence are served in abundance. But neither feels gratuitous – the plot is advanced by the inclusion of both.
I still stand by my conviction that a book of this size and complexity would be better served with a high-budget mini-series, but this film was about as well realized take on the seedy swedish underbelly as can be expected.
The two remaining parts of the trilogy were originally planned to be released as direct-to-television movies, but the rampant success of the first installment has pushed the production company to release all three in theatres.
And speaking of the previously unknown production company, YellowBird – they have taken very aggressive steps to provide a lot more scandinavian mysteries for theatre and television.
A great beginning for the series – I’m definitely looking forward for the remaining duo.
As far as great t-shirt design ideas are concerned, this Bad Decision Mr. Z available from Bytelove is by far the brightest in a long while.
Edge magazine has reached its 200th issue.
And they celebrate the occasion with the publication of no less than 199 variants (the 200th is reserved for subscribers alone). Even though the magazine is securely holstered in plastic, the cover subject can be read from the rear – at least the selection in Akateeminen kirjakauppa was limited to four or so alternates (I picked the one wth Bub).
Saw Sisters of Mercy on a non-specific tour in Nosturi last Monday. And came away underwhelmed, the concert failed to move me any which way (apart from towards the coat check to avoid the rush at the end).
I’ve never been a big fan of the band, and as such this occasion was more of a chance to see yet another rock’n'roll dinosaur than a thus far unfulfilled dream.
The soundscape was surprisingly clean, apart from the drum sound mixed over everything else.
Recognized a couple of songs, but they weren’t simply enough to keep me in the arena, split halfway down the first encore.
For this week’s Macro Day challenge of small, here’s a bumblebee captured last summer.
For this week’s See it Sunday challenge of line I chose the powerline near dusk taken last summer.
The Who Do You Love? photo challenge was launched a couple of weeks ago (and duly noted in my list of photography memes).
For my first participation in this challenge of after dark I’m using an image from Monday. Walking home from a Sisters of Mercy gig the Helsinki harbour was entirely silent – covered with ice, the numerous cranes standing idle in the background.
For this week’s Yy kaa koo nee challenge of 11 I chose the 1984 rockumentary that made that number very famous indeed, by stretching the amplifier volume upwards just one more notch.
The film is heavily recommended to all who appreciate quality comedy and a downright brutal exposure to the surreal aspects of the music industry.
(And no, I didn’t clip the logo off the web, this is a closeup image of the dvd booklet’s cover).
Musicmachinery has published yet further proof that records these days are produced to be uniformly loud – shearing the dynamics off the listening experience completely (yeah, I’m still bitter about Death Magnetic).
For this week’s Photo Friday challenge of extreme closeup I chose the face of a snow leopard.
The photograph was taken last summer in the Korkeasaari Zoo, on a cloudy day when these usually rather sessile cats were active in their rocky enclosure.
For my first ever participation in the Skywatch Friday challenge I’m using an against the sun snapshot from Montreal.
For this week’s Photo Thursday challenge of kitchen I refrain from using an image from the HQ.
Instead, here’s a native american kitchen, as captured in the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.
For this week’s Thursday Challenge of a building my choice fell on the spectacularly irregular Stata Center of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Home of the Underdogs is back in business (although without the download-functionality for the time being).
The greatest abandonware site of them all went under after several years of infrequent acts of management, and has now promptly been resurrected.
