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Hendrik Little Top of page - Hendrik Little - LiveJournal.com
| Friday, May 21, 2010 16:13 |
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Hendrik Little - Here's a lesson: Top of page -
If I do something I moderately enjoy on the internet, time crawls by pretty slowly.
If I do some work that I moderately enjoy, it flies.
| Tuesday, May 11, 2010 13:04 |
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I had a really pretty awesome weekend! Top of page -
I went for my traditional ten mile run Friday morning and then, due to a shitty day at work where I actually got some solid work done but which was nevertheless ruined by people being dicks, I resolved to fix at least one of my personal situations over the weekend. This I did! Over several hours on Friday afternoon, I was able to go most of the way towards resolving a fairly long-standing and very acrimonious dispute with a friend. Awsomesauce!
Friday afternoon I had a celebratory drink with the other concerned party in the dispute and then, after going home for food, met up with people in the Hoose and had a pleasant and potentially productive night out with them.
Saturday day was MiniCon. I watched some pretty good anime, some of which I'd already seen. Promising series include Kime ni Todoke (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=10625), K-On! (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=10562), Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=10216) and Soul Eater (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=9070). Kimi ni Todoke and K-On! are both cutesy shoujo that could be good or could start to grate really quickly as both established their premise pretty solidly in the first episode. FMA: Brotherhood is potentially awesome in a jar as it is a remake of a brilliant series that was only let down by its plot turning into surreal weirdness towards the end (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GainaxEnding). Allegedly, this has been resolved :)
Saturday night was Paula's birthday so I popped home from MiniCon, got changed and had something to eat before heading over. It was fancy dress so I apologised as I'm not really very good at that. Paula was like "Oh, I think we can sort /that/ out! :3 " Half an hour of changing later and I have a viable drag / fancy dress / cosplay costume! I'm like "Oh, I /have/ to head back to the Pleasance." So I get a taxi over and get there just as the second film is ending. The former AASOC president gets up and turns around to introduce the next showing and is reduced to a gibbering blob of incoherency when he sees me coming in. Oh, many a young anime person was broken that night and forced to go home asking themselves some difficult lifestyle questions! :D
Taxied back over to the International Bar to participate in karaoke. Was too late but we then taxied over to the Banshee Labyrinth (damn, but that's a stupid name) and I sang the theme to 'The Littlest Hobo' there. In drag. Awesome is me.
Overall the best weekend I've had for quite a while and some potentially postive future social interaction to boot. Awesome!
[Photos to come]
| Tuesday, March 16, 2010 14:25 |
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Hendrik Little has written a (semi-) functioning FaceBook app! Top of page -
It automatically posts status updates and their first comment as the title and content of a LiveJournal Post.
Currently it's quite crude and only works with myself as a test user but progress continues...
| Monday, March 08, 2010 16:53 |
| Tuesday, September 15, 2009 15:29 |
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Yes, so, finally, the famous stag night. (Part, The First.) Top of page -
Well, the preparations for it actually weren't that difficult and, despite a bit of gratuitous pressure from my brother (yes, Bob, you know it's true!) being Best Man was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. So far, anyway. Still the wedding itself to go. Of course, I think I was pretty lucky and the existence of the internet, Goddess bless it, made a few things a lot easier. Anyway, the night itself.
Actually, we started at 10.00am on the day, me, Bob and my cousin Tommy who had stayed at Bob's the night before. We had gone out the previous night but I don't want to get into that because for some reason I was just really tired and not up for it at all and ended up having a pretty early one while Bob and Tommy stayed up and drank whisky and took photos. (More on that later.) So anyway, we had breakfast which I paid for, getting an early start, and then shopped for really flashy trainers. Bob wanted a Sacha Baron Cohen theme for the event and we had previously hired Ali G costumes and wanted the trainers to go with them. That done, we went back to the house to meet up with a pal of Bob's (Dave) before the next event.
1pm, the Cain's brewery tour. Having dropped off our costumes at the pub to change in to later, we headed off to get the day's drinking off to a good start. My brother in law and his sons had manifested a reliability failure so it was just the four of us to grab a quick pint and then be guided around the brewery. We had this old geezer as a guide who was pretty cool and his version of the history of the place was fairly entertaining. However the mechanics of the process weren't too magical (wheat, malt and hops comes in one end, beer comes out the other) but fortunately the whole thing was only an hour long so pretty soon we were back to the drinking.
My sister's husband (Richard) and my elder nephew (Jack) had showed up by then so we had a couple of pints each and a (very) light lunch, which were included in the tour. I thoroughly recommend the pub associated with the brewery, by the way, prices are reasonable and the beer quality is excellent. Dave had to run a costume related errand and Richard offered to give him a lift so, while we waited, we rounded off the drinks with a couple more beers. Then it was off to Formby for round three.
Approximately 4pm. While we were in the pub, the weather was very hot and bright but when we decided to shift outside it (typically) clouded over and started to rain. While it was nice however, we were commenting on how good it would be to have a swim. This fitted in with my brothers plans precisely. We had been talking about this and enthusiasm was not at it's highest. Still, into taxis and cars we got and off to Formby beach we went. On the thirty minute journey up, a miracle occurred. The weather became really nice. By the time we got there it was gorgeous and there were no more excuses.
For those of you not intimately acquainted with the urban art scene, Anthony Gormley, the designer of the Angel of the North, has set up a row of life size, mannequin like statues, below the high tide line, facing out to sea, at Formby beach, west of Liverpool. So, after publicly en-nakeding our selves, dressed in fluorescent, lime-green mankinis, we waded out to the closest statue, dressed it in a similar fashion and posed for photos and mpegs. (Links are not safe for work or sanity. You have been warned.) Oh, the shame/pride of it!
| Saturday, August 29, 2009 13:37 |
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Anime I have watched in the last year or so - Red Garden Top of page -
Five very different young women are apparently only linked by the facts that they are all pupils at an exclusive New York private school and that they shared a friendship with a girl who has seemingly committed suicide. They are summoned to a meeting in a car park by a mysterious woman, who threatens them with dire consequences if they do not attend. There they are forced to fight for their lives against a man who transforms into a beast-like monster before their eyes. Eventually they receive horrifying revelations about the events of the night before the battle, which none of them had been previously able to remember.
Red Garden is urban fantasy, unusually set in the US. The plot is eventually revealed to be a loose variation on vampires versus werewolves although this is never stated to be the case and the parallels are somewhat tenuous. The characterisations are good, the girls never fully resolve their differences and the youngest of them, far from becoming the mascot, is, (understandably, under the stress of their circumstances) actually bullied for being weak and ineffectual. None of the characters are completely sympathetic (with the partial exception of the usual Mary-Sue main character, who is actually shown to be something of a priss) but none of them are really bad either. In short, they're well drawn characters with flaws and backgrounds of their own. The show doesn't short on the secondary characters either, although, predictably, I would have liked to have found out more about Paula, the head of Grace, the powerful student council clique.
The production values are very high, the character designs are almost photo-realistic, without being overly heavily CGI-ed, with the odd exception of the noses which occasionally look exaggerated from certain angles. The music is good (I particularly liked the end theme to the first half), with a bizarre exception. Every now and then, the main characters have a tendency to break into song in a highly incongruous fashion. I recommend you fast-forward these sections.
Five girl band, dark urban/high-school fantasy, low-level super powers.
It won't change your world but it's a solid 24 episodes of entertainment. 7/10.
| Sunday, July 26, 2009 15:15 |
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Anime I have watched in the last year or so - Fate Stay Night Top of page -
Ten years ago - a devastating combat results in an enormous fireball which destroys an entire city block. The conflagration's only survivor is an orphaned young boy who is rescued by a man who later adopts him as his son. As the boy grows up his adopted father reveals that he is in fact a magus. The boy also gains a great desire to help people and make the world a better place.
In the present, the boy has become a young man and his father has since died. He lives alone in the house he has inherited, supported by a girl he has known since childhood and one of his teachers. He still feels the urge to improve the world but has learned that he has little or no magical talent of his own except for a single ability. However, he works hard to fulfill not only his own responsibilities but also those of people around him.
In the mean time, ominous events have started to re-occur. There is murder, sickness and death that the authorities seem unable to prevent or explain. An eerie young girl warns the boy that if he doesn't summon his Servant soon, he will die. At the same time other mages emerge and begin to summon Servants of their own. However, even the most gifted among them seem to be unable to summon the Servant who is reputed to be the most powerful of all - Sabre.
Fate Stay Night is the kind of show that is basically aimed right at me. It gets off to a relatively slow start but promises a range and depth of plot complications which it largely delivers on. It maintains a dark tone which isn't undermined as many other series do. There are moments of humour but they tend to be self-referential and in the background and usually serve to strengthen characterisation. On the minus side, Fate Stay Night is based on a computer game and, as a consequence, its plot structure is seriously flawed. Most threads are eventually resolved but it has a tendency to introduce characters and then lose track of them. The core characters are, however, so well defined that this generally makes up for this failing.
There is an unfortunate tendency in anime for main characters to be weak and ineffectual or otherwise unsympathetic, presumably to allow strong secondary characters to shine. The main male character of Fate Stay Night suffers from this to a certain extent. However, as regards the female lead this is certainly not the case. She doesn't appear until the end of the second episode (leaving me to wonder who the figure in the end titles actually was) but when she does arrive, she starts kicking ass right out of the gate! Don't be misled, this is not the loud-mouthed, arrogant, condescending, manic-depressive female character beloved of so many other shows. (Not that I have anything against that!) On the contrary, she is polite, reserved, serious, graceful, intelligent, competent and withdrawn to the point of being cold. But when it comes to combat and the fulfillment of her mission, her reputation for being second to none is fully deserved.
Dark, romantic, super-powered, urban fantasy.
Good music, good plot (if a little poorly structured), good production values, attractive character designs (relatively realistic), excellent characterisation (for main characters, anyway).
Overall, 8/10.
| Friday, July 17, 2009 21:31 |
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I am now using LJ again Top of page - This is because it supports RSS and thus it's content can be embedded in my own web page. So read it there. Not on LJ.
| Monday, July 06, 2009 14:48 |
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I ran ten miles today. Top of page - 'Cos I am just that kind of awesome! And I went to the gym afterwards. I felt like an advert for Nike. But in a good way.
| Monday, July 06, 2009 14:40 |
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I made the century! Top of page -
100 upper body reps! 101, actually. And no LJ posts for over a year! IAFWA!
In other news:- I am currently taking a break from working, after holding down a six month IT contract in Livingston.
- I am no longer going to the gym, after going for about four months, as I got out of the habit with my excessive commuting schedule. I am considering going back, however.
- I am actually getting on with some of my personal projects. It's only taken me a year and a half. I'm going to seriously consider what shitty jobs I take in the future. Nothing that's more than half an hour from door to door, that's for sure. Not for a while anyway. Anyway, the projects:
- I've now got a fully working Catan board generator in Visual Basic (apart from a bit of counter ordering, which is trivial) and I've done some core maths work on corresponding mouse and piece locations.
- I've done some serious figuring out of how to use GIMP. Basically, you use Photoshop for everything and then import the project into the GIMP in order to animate it :) This has allowed me to create fun stuff (ie new LJ icons, see above) from screencapped AMVs and DVDs.
- Speaking of AMVs, my AMV DVD project continues to generate new versions. It currently has 40 AMVs on it (including short spoofs but no longer any op/eds) for a total of two hours. I'd like to start work on a second volume and I went through the top ten percent on animemusicvideos.org but for very little return. A lot of what I did find was in mp4 format as well. I'm going to have to look in to that.
- I have also been downloading a lot of anime. I have (finally!) finished torrenting Rose of Versailles and have downloaded over half of Ouran in AVIs. My new torrent project is The Wire which is a live action cop drama which someone at Conpulsion told me about and is supposed to be all "if you like the Shield then you'll love this".
- And, yes, I have applied for some jobs but no written applications this week. I'll have to pull my finger out a little there. There are actually very few jobs around at the moment and a large proportion of them seem to be email CVs. Which is OK. Sorta.
- No progress on Project Citizenship. I should really get my act together there as well.
- I should have a look at my long term goals list as I haven't looked at it for a while. I know it has 'Go to agencies' on it but frankly, that can GTF for a while at least.
Well, that was longer than I thought it was going to be. Maybe I should cut it but hell, I'm writing this to get things clear in my own mind, not for anyone else's benefit.
| Sunday, April 13, 2008 20:54 |