Leia now a Disney Princess

The news broke today the George Lucas has handed over Lucasfilms – and the Star Wars frachise – to Disney, and that Disney intends to start pumping out new Star Wars films, the first to hit the screen in 2015.

Now, in an exclusive* deal with Disney, the Wyrmlog is proud to present the first look at the under development Star Wars Episode VII!

All hail the mouse!

(* By which we mean entirely fictional….)

Melbourne – Part 1

I’ve been promising to write up what went down in Melbourne for weeks, so I’m going to damn well do it! So there! 😉

OK, first of all, the reason for the company pulling up sticks and relocating to the east coast for the weekend. One of our websites was nominated in the Australian Web Industry Association Australian Web Awards. This is the first time any of our sites have reached such lofty heights, so Dale coughed up the money for us to head over to the awards ceremony, being held at Luna Park on the evening of Saturday October 6th.

(Spoiler: We didn’t win. Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you’re finished).

While Dale did cough up money for the trip, he didn’t cough up a whole lot of it, so we ended up catching a red eye flight on an economy airline, scheduled to take off at 11:00pm on Thursday night. Due to various delays and incompetence the plane didn’t actually take off until 1:30, at which point we’d been standing around in the departure lounge for well over an hour. To make matters worse, bad planning on my part (combined with the burger I’d had at lunch not sitting too well) resulted in my having to pay $14 for a bottle of water and a ham sandwich. Bloody airports.

Anyway, we eventually boarded the plane – having to walk out across the tarmac like chumps to do so. Honestly, what is this? The middle ages?

The flight was about as comfortable as one would expect. That is to say, not very. I was able to snatch a few scattered hours of sleep, which was apparently more than the rest of my colleagues managed. We touched down at Tullamarine about 6:30, and fortuitously grabbed a maxi-taxi right outside the airport doors.

This (eventually) delivered us to the general vicinity of Hotel Tolarno. Happily all our rooms were ready, and Cleyton and I lucked out by getting the largest of the three. Dale and Janina were almost dead on their feet and immediately disappeared, while Cleyton, Bruce, Daniel and I wandered outside in search of sustenance. The hum of the city waking up in the morning sunlight was enhanced by a Paul-Kellyesque smell of burning leaves, which turned out to be a rubbish bin someone had set on fire. Welcome to St Kilda!

We located food in a bakery across the street (I indulged in one of those gigantor sized Red Bulls and a quiche), then retired to Daniel and Bruce’s room where we sat around mocking breakfast TV and shrieking theatrically every time they replayed a shot of Tony Abbot’s lycra-clad crotch (honestly, it was about every three minutes).

After a while Daniel and Bruce both started passing out, so Cleyton and I left them to get some sleep. Cleyton got his laptop up and running on the hotel’s wifi, and I set off on confront Melbourne’s tram network on a trip to the Coatman.

Happily I’d done my research and after picking up a Myki card at one of the dozen or so 7/11’s scattered along Fitzroy street found tram transport no challenge at all. I arrived in Glen Huntly just before 9:20 – and discovered that the Coatman doesn’t open until 10:00.

Derp.

I spent the next forty minutes wandering up and down Glen Huntly road, taking photographs of anything that looked even mildly interesting. Eventually the Coatman opened, and with very little fuss I was assisted in locating a very fine coat, which cost me only $125. I caught the tram back to St Kilda, feeling quite chuffed with myself, then went for a wander – mostly to check out a rather impressive church spire I’d spotted on my way down.

After some architectural appreciation I headed back to the hotel. Cleyton was asleep so I did some quiet reading, which soon evolved into some sleeping of my own. We were woken about midday by Dale who was getting everyone together to go have lunch and do some business planning so the day wouldn’t be a complete write off work-wise (he rather nicely said that I could be excused so I could go and buy my coat. The fact that I’d already done so and had time to come back and get some sleep seemed to genuinely shock him). We ended up at the Italian restaurant just across the street where I had a very nice chicken and vegetable soup, and loads of garlic bread.

Business out of the way, Bruce, Daniel, Cleyton and I caught a tram into the city and went for a stroll along the Yarra. We ended up at Federation Square where some kind of concert to save the Kimberly was being set up (I later learned that the John Butler Trio and Claire Bowditch were performing – I should have hung around). We then headed into the city proper and, rather suspiciously, kept running into places particularly suited to Daniel’s interests (Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, the Apple Store, a games shop with an entire floor devoted to Ninetendo…). We eventually ended up at Minotaur, where I quickly realised that there was absolutely no middle ground – I could either buy stuff, and end up spending hundreds of dollars, or buy nothing at all. I reluctantly bought nothing at all.

By this point it was getting towards evening. Bruce was meeting up with some mates he hadn’t seen in ages, and wanted to get back to the hotel to get cleaned up first, so we caught the tram back. Cleyton got back online and I got back to my reading. Eventually Daniel came knocking and the three of us headed out into Saint Kilda to find somewhere to eat.

This wasn’t easy. We found plenty of places, but none seemed to appeal. We followed  Fitzroy street down to the bay, then continued along the Esplanade and eventually all the way down to the end of Acland Street. Eventually – sick of walking and quite hungry – we ended up at a little cafe about midway along Acland, and had quite an adequate meal before getting a tram back to the hotel at about 11:30.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Fracksticks!

Kusanagi on a crutch! It turns out I did lose a bunch of important data when my hard drive died a while back 🙁

Most of it I can reconstruct – with some hard work. What’s frustrating is that I’m sure there’s some of it that I can’t remember, which means I can’t reconstruct it, which means it’s lost forever. It’s also personally galling that I didn’t back it up in the first place – I was so certain that I’d backed up everything important, so to miss such a big chunk of data is just humiliating.

Well, I guess it’ll encourage me to be more careful with backups in future 🙁

At least last night’s Hamster Wheel cheered me up somewhat…

Mostly Just for My Own Benefit

The Zurvár second (ZS) is 1.10592 seconds long.

The Zurvár minute (ZM) is 125 ZS long, for a total of  138.24 seconds or 2.304 minutes long.

The Zurvár hour (ZH) is 25 ZM or 3125 ZS long, for a total of 57.6 minutes long.

There are 25 ZH in one standard 24 hour day.

The hour count of a Zurvár day begins at sunrise and continues until the following sunrise. This means that a given day may be longer or shorter than the standard 25 hours depending on latitude and time of year.

A traditional Zurvár week lasts five days. A month is five weeks (25 days) and a year five months (125 days). The traditional calendar has been superseded by a redesigned 365 day calendar on Zurvár Arèáná, but the traditional calendar is retained for cultural and traditional purposes.

For scientific purposes the Zurvár epoch is fixed to 00:00:00 GMT on January 1st 1954. The traditional calendar has also been synchronised to sunrise on this date.

In the traditional calendar, today (Oct 22nd 2012) would be the fifth day of the fifth month, in the year 172. A person born today would be ascribed the horoscope of ‘Double Knot’, which predicts a well balanced personality skilled at problem solving.

Boorman You Wacky Man

THIS COULD HAVE HAPPENED!
I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way...

Stumbled over this recently on the Middle-Earth in Film page on Wikipedia…

…In the 1970s John Boorman was contracted by United Artists to direct an adaptation that would have collapsed [The Lord of the Rings] into a single film. […] In the script by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg, many new elements have been inserted or modified. Among other things, Gimli is put in a hole and beaten so he can retrieve the password to Moria from his ancestral memory [and] Frodo and Galadriel have sexual intercourse…

My initial reaction was What!? But then I discovered that John Boorman was the guy behind Zardoz, and suddenly it all made sense.

What makes the proposed film even more disturbing is that in the 1970s they wouldn’t have been able to use the digital editing that Peter Jackson used to shrink his actors, and may not have been willing to do an entire film with the complicated trick photography Jackson used when he wasn’t using CGI. So Gimli and the Hobbits would most likely have been played by dwarfs. A movie where little people are thrown into holes and beaten in between sex scenes doesn’t sound like heroic fantasy – it’s more akin to something you’d get under the counter in an ‘adult novelty’ store.

Thank the lord Boorman made Excalibur instead, which (if memory serves) features very little dwarf S&M content.

Ramblings

You know, I was planing to write up what I did in Melbourne this weekend – including why I was there in the first place – but I ran out of time. So instead I’m going to blog about television.

Exactly when did swamp-dwelling hillbillies become a television genre? Swamp People, Swamp Men, Turtleman – what maniac decided these were good ideas for shows, and what maniacs watch them in sufficient numbers to make them viable?

American Digger – I think this show is mis-titled. It should be called American Destroying the Archeological Record for Fun and Profit.

Caught the first episode of Black Mirror last week – the one where the British PM is blackmailed into… well you know if you watched it. They describe the series as black comedy, but I didn’t find anything comedic about it. Which is not a condemnation – I found it a taut and thought provoking thriller. I’d like to watch the others in the series, but they’re on a bit late and I need to work Tuesday mornings. No doubt they’ll be available online.

Apparently that’s all I’ve got to say about television. Hmmm.

Caught Lawless last night with Rebecca. It was actually really good – I’m astonished to relate that Shia LaBeouf can actually act. The Appalachian accents were a bit tough to decipher from time to time, and Guy Pearce’s villain was a bit over the top, but overall a damn good watch. Also, Jessica Chastain – wow (and I was thinking that before she got her kit off thank you :)).

Um, yeah. That’s all I’ve got to say.

10 Years On

Well, it’s ten years on from the Bali bombings.

I didn’t really feel much when the bombings happened. No anger, no terror, just a sense of dull numbness and weary resignation. I think I was still – even over a year later – in a state of shock from the September 11 attacks. I’d kind of readjusted my mind into a state of acceptance that terrorism was the new reality and that a bunch of innocent people getting horribly murdered was the kind of thing that was going to happen from now on – where and when being mere, irrelevant details.

I didn’t really snap out of it until the 7/7 attacks in London. I guess enough time had passed for the shock to wear off – the fact that I have a disproportionate love of that city no doubt helped.

Now, on the tenth anniversary, I still don’t feel much. I’m just glad that there haven’t been any more attacks on Australians as bad as Bali.

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