22 Jul 2008

Much happier stuffs!!



It was my girlfriend's birthday on Friday 18th July [yaaaaaay!!] & we had some great times, including seeing a little film which I've been banging on about for months - Wall-E. Here's what I thought about this film.

OK firstly this is an animated movie from the always-reliable Pixar & according to Empire it's a 5 star movie [check out full review here] which is normally a good recommendation but I digress!

The first thing that struck me was before the film even began - Pixar have a great habit of making a short [only a few minutes] animation before the feature presentation & this one was called Presto. This was definitely the funniest animated short I've seen as well as cleverly put together & perfectly animated. I won't spoil the plot but it had me & our party in stitches even before Wall-E had been seen!!

OK the main event - overall it had great comedy, moving moments, brilliant characters, as well as a distinct [& rather dark] message about technology. What I liked heartily was that the key characters only had a very limited vocabulary - Wall-E could not talk to begin with, then learned new words including his own name! This meant that with limited dialogue all the story-telling needed to be done with actions & gestures but this was done superbly & it was a memorable story - definitely one for the DVD collection when it arrives!!

One final thing to say was about one character called M-O [his entire vocabulary = MO] he was a robot with a cleaning obsession [well it was his job/life!] he was really funny & reminded me of many people who like to clean like they were obsessed [no names mentioned at all!!] Here is a pic because of the cuteness!!


Diss Update!

AKA Frustration 1 over.......Frustration 2 just beginning!!

Had a meeting with Si Davis [Oxford CYM Centre] & went through my dissertation resubmission 'issue' on Monday & I basically have to do a total redraft for the diss, in the next 2 weeks w00t fricking woot!! The key issue is that I went from an empirical to library-based & back again & as such my overall style seems really sketchy.

The bad news is that I have little drive or desire to do all this work for effectively getting 2 marks to bring my where I was originally marked at [twice grrrr!]. Also it looks like a massive battle, as I need to add in a methodology & some deeper & more specific definitions, as well as shift the entire diss to be more empirical. Seems a lot of work & I need to get it done before MWCC [2nd August].

The good news is that I've come up to see Maddie for a while, so I can make a constructive start [I'm currently sat on her lounge floor lolz!] & she's had a flick through & has given me a good start & now I can sit in my preferred working place [Starbucks lol] to try to get this darn thing done. Also I've managed to get some funding to keep me caffeinated for a couple of weeks [thanks mon grand-pere]

Expect a couple more blogs as things develop oh & if anyone wants to proof this bad boy - let me know ;o)