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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
czeri's InsaneJournal:
| Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 | |
| 9:41 pm | general update In case anyone's wondering I did survive the week from hell at work and haven't been updating mostly because I spend every free moment playing the Sims 3 World Adventures. It's ridiculously addictive, and full of little details that are so much fun to discover. For example it turns out that while in France you can buy 'Parkour' from a bookstore (alas it has a wrong cover and doesn't list David as the author). I did tear myself away from my computer last Friday, though, in order to go see Speaking in Tongues with John Simm. The play was really good but sadly my seat wasn't that great (Royal Circle) and so I could barely see that it was John on the stage :-( I also ordered myself a new laptop. It's a refurbished one, so I'm a bit apprehensive, but it was such a great deal - 4 GB RAM, Windows 7, 8 hrs battery life, under 2.5 kg weight, all for 400 pounds - that I couldn't help myself. And in unrelated news, MisterParkour posted a video from David's workshop in Berlin which has this striking 'What on Earth are you doing, you crazy person?!' scene towards the end. It exemplifies really well how completely differently David's brain is wired so that where sane people only see forbidding walls, he sees a path that he can't help following :-) Current Mood:  cold |
| Friday, November 13th, 2009 | |
| 6:48 pm | ARGH!!!!! So, my co-worker went on holiday, and the girl who helps us out got the swine flu. Which means that next week I'll need to do the work of three people. I guess I might as well show up at the office on Monday with a sleeping bag. And it's not like I'll actually get paid for any overtime, since the company policy is to take the time off for any extra hours worked. Trouble is I already have a day outstanding for the last time my co-worker went on holiday that I still didn't have the chance to use, and I doubt we'll be having any less work with Christmas closer and closer. What's more, it's really the worst week for this to happen because ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} maggie33 is coming to visit me next week and I was looking forward to, you know, seeing her. If I don't manage to pull all the work off, however, over 3000 people won't get paid. ARGH!!!! Current Mood:  distressed |
| Sunday, October 18th, 2009 | |
| 4:54 pm | Happy Birthday _backpages_! May you have a wonderful year, and may Chelsea win whatever cup it is they're playing for :-)In other news, mu journey went well, I landed in Warsaw without a hitch, and feasted my eyes on snow-covered landscapes through my entire train-ride to Lublin. Today my mom and I came to Busk and we'll start a regiment of sulphur baths and the like from tomorrow. And I have 5 Lem's novels to get me through the evenings! :iz happy: Current Mood:  relaxed |
| Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 | |
| 7:09 pm | Winter!!! I'm off for two and a half weeks' holiday tomorrow - I'm going to Poland to go with my mom to a spa in Busk. As it happens Poland has been hit by an early onset of winter, so I will see some snow this year :screw you bland English weather!: The downside is that a lot of the roads are blocked due to trees breaking under the weight of the snow, which means my mom won't pick me up from the airport and I'll have to take a train from Warsaw to Lublin instead. If I manage to land in Warsaw in the first place, mind you, because apparently most of the planes today have been redirected, and so I might end up in Lodz or Krakow... I guess it's a good thing I enjoy travelling almost as much as I enjoy winter :-) Current Mood:  busy |
| Thursday, October 8th, 2009 | |
| 10:01 pm | Kindle I was pretty excited when Amazon announced a few days ago that you can now buy a Kindle in Europe. It just sounds like such an awesome piece of technology - an electronic book with large memory that would allow me to fit my library in a tiny device and take it anywhere with me. How awesome is that? And then I started reading more about it only to find out it's actually quite crappy. First of all, there are hardly any books I'd like available for Kindle. Granted that the more esoteric authors like Lem or Zelazny were a long shot, but Stephen Fry? Poppy Z. Brite? Stephen freaking King? How are they not in the Kindle store? Secondly, the books that are available are not at all cheaper than paper editions - the prices seemed to be around 14 dollars, so around 7 pounds, which is what paperbacks cost. Hardly seems worth it to spend 200 quid upfront if you won't be able to save on the books afterwards. Add to that the little technological annoyances users' reviews mention, and instead of the most amazingly useful thing ever Kindle seems to actually be a piece of junk :sigh: And I so wanted to replace my paper library with a cool gadget! :-( Current Mood:  disappointed |
| Sunday, October 4th, 2009 | |
| 4:17 pm | weekend My movie weekend went fairly well. I went to London yesterday to see District 13 Ultimatum again on the big screen. It was subtitled, not dubbed, so big yay for that. As opposed to the seance in Paris, In London the audience was way past their teens and so only myself and one other guy were actually laughing out loud at the funnier bits ;-) Much as I missed my ff button during all the government and DISS scenes, I'm kinda tempted to repeat the experience next weekend. We'll see. And since I was in London, I used the fact that Hamleys wasn't yet as packed as it is closer to December and I made a dent in my Christmas shopping list :-) Today I went to see Pandorum, and, well, it wasn't as bad as I feared, but nor was it as good as I hoped. It had far too much Descent-like monster moments for me to fully enjoy the more ambitious bits about the deep-space madness, or the ship's mission and its outcome. Ben Foster was great, but then he always is, so that's hardly news ;-) Now, how is it that I can never remeber that Merlin is on? Current Mood:  contemplative |
| Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 | |
| 7:30 pm | films I’ve managed to find one cinema in London that is going to play District 13 Ultimatum this weekend, so that’s my Saturday sorted. I just hope it’s not going to be a dubbed version… And on Sunday I’ll probably go and see Pandorum. It’s funny how two films that I have been waiting for independently for about a year now end up being released on the same day :-) What’s also funny but in the ‘strange’ sense of the word is that while I have already seen B13U multiple times, I know next to nothing about Pandorum. I was hoping for a review in Total Film, but they didn’t include any, so I only have the trailer to go on. It doesn’t look too appealing, but I’ve sat through worse things for Ben Foster. And on the subject of reviews, there was a nice one posted for B13U here. I like how the reviewer bemoans the fact that it takes forever for Leïto and Damien to get together. And this bit made me LOL: I can honestly say after this one that I will do whatever it takes to get through the rest of my life without getting kicked by Cyril Raffaelli. Hee! Current Mood:  content |
| Saturday, September 26th, 2009 | |
| 5:52 pm | films, TV... I went to see Surrogates today and enjoyed it quite a bit. It was short, to the point, and had a great novum that made me play around with the various possibilities the surrogate technology offers for a good few hours after leaving the cinema. Not to mention that I was greatly amused by the few scenes where the robots' physical superiority was shown, since it looked very much like what David and Cyril can do without being made of metal ;-) And speaking of David and Cyril, I read through all the reviews of B13 on IMDB and there was one that mentioned the Q&A session Cyril attended during the TIFF when the film was shown for the first time in North America. Apparently Cyril broke his ankle during filming "on a very simple stunt". Which finally shed some light on the following excerpt from David's book: Je me souviens d’une anecdote qui m’a marqué : à la fin du tournage, Luc m’a serré dans ses bras en me disant : « Ah ! Toi au moins tu es en un seul morceau ! » When I first read it I found it odd that David was so gleeful about surviving the filming of Banlieue 13 without injury after performing death-defying stunts for 20 years without hurting himself. Well, now I know why ;-) And in TV news, I greatly enjoyed the third episode of Supernatural. ( spoiler cut ) Current Mood:  giggly |
| Sunday, September 20th, 2009 | |
| 3:34 pm | TV I have recently made a list of all the TV shows I watch (ones that still have episodes that I haven't seen even if they had already been cancelled/have finished) and I came up with the total of 33. 33! That's insane! Granted that a lot of them have only up to a dozen episodes per season (Being Human, Tudors, Dexter, Doctor Who, MerlinTorchwood etc), and I am not technically certain if Rescue Me will have another season, but still... And the worst part is that I only really enjoy a handful, with Burn Notice and Lost being the only ones I'm actually looking forward to returning. The rest I just watch out of some weird sense of duty - I've started watching them so I might as well finish, no matter how torturous that can be (coughHeroescough). Honestly, a lot of the time I wish the shows I watch would be cancelled, just so I wouldn't have to watch them any more... In a related story, in the last episode of Tudors we finally got to see Anne of Cleves and... she turned out to be perfectly pretty. Which made me burst out laughing when Henry and his court were recoiling at the sight of her. Major casting fail there, TPTB! Current Mood: contemplative |
| Sunday, September 13th, 2009 | |
| 12:36 pm | Hee! I've always thought history was a fascinating subject, but it can also be quite hilarious at times. Check this out for example (quotes from Norman Davies' "Europe"): (on the general disarray towards the end of the First World War): In their very last throw, German military intelligence released their most dangerous prisoner, Joseph Piłsudski, and put him on a train to Warsaw. He arrived on the morning of the 11th, supervised the disarming of the German garrison, and, to the chagrin of the Western Allies, took over the reins of an independent Poland. (on the absurdity of perceiving the Russian civil war as a binary conflict of Reds and Whites): In Ukraine, for example, which constituted one of the most valuable prizes, eleven armies took to the field. [...] The Ukrainian capital, Kiev, changed hands fifteen times in two years. The advent of communism excited many Western intellectuals, for who the defiant utopian stance of the Bolsheviks in Russia proved unusually fascinating. [...] The long stream of Moscow-bound pilgrims, for whom the most murderous regime in European history could do no wrong, offers one of the stranger spectacles of mass delusion on record. LOL! Oh, and Happy Birthday petulans! Current Mood: giggly |
| Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 | |
| 9:22 pm | Happy birthday to me! I didn't have much of a chance to celebrate on a work day, but I'm taking Friday off to have a delayed long weekend, so I intend to have fun then. WTF of the day - there's a New York police car parked 20 meters away from my house. A proper one, with crate between the front and back seats, CPR on the door, and New York license plates. You'd think England was a bit out of their jurisdiction, no? Oh, and I saw "Hamlet 2" recently. Hee! is all I have to say ;-) Current Mood: jubilant |
| Sunday, September 6th, 2009 | |
| 9:01 pm | B13U, what else... Whee! The incomparable maggie33 went to see Banlieue 13 Ultimatum in Polish and cleared up for me all the points in the dialogue that I still had trouble with. So now I understand everything :-) She said she missed the synchronised jumps from the first film, which I forgot about, but I linked her to the caps of the jump from one of the deleted scenes. It is odd that there wasn't even one in the final cut of the film, though, isn't it?In related news, why can't I just write one story at a time? That way I might actually finish one every once in a while... Current Mood: cheerful |
| Sunday, August 30th, 2009 | |
| 4:05 pm | and to think most people have a three-day wekend... The new expansion pack for Sims 3, World Adventures, sounds pretty awesome, doesn't it? You'll be able send your sim to China to study martial arts, so I'll finally have a proper Damien, and you'll also be able to send your sim to France. Here's hoping in France the sim will be able to study parkour (and yes, obviously David would never let EA use the term, but that's what Sebastian Foucan and free running is for, and EA already bought that for Mirror's Edge). If not, I could still at least make my Leïto sim French, which is always something. Speaking of, I've found some custom made tattoos, which are all wrong, but at least they're better than no tattoos, so my sim Leïto finally looks almost right. Now I have until November (when World Adventures comes out) to make him a Damien ;-) Why, yes, it's been a long and lazy weekend, how can you tell? ( Here's Leïto all ready for Damien to call him: ) Current Mood: impatient |
| Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 | |
| 6:25 pm | Happy Birthday annephoenix! Hope your presents are half as good as what I got in the mail today ;-)My B13U DVD has arrived!!!! Nothing can spoil my mood today, not even the surprise announcement that B13U will be released in cinemas in Poland on August 28th (even if such short notice effectively destroyed my plans of going and seeing it there because last-minute flight prices are ridiculous). One look at the "Making of" and I can easily ignore that minor annoyance! :off to make hundreds and hundreds of caps: Current Mood: ecstatic |
| Saturday, August 8th, 2009 | |
| 10:03 pm | |
| Friday, August 7th, 2009 | |
| 6:44 pm | more on B13U I’ve spent the last two days analysing Banlieue 13 Ultimatum, like you do, and here are some of my conclusions: ( spoilers ) Now, has no one really watched the film yet? What are you waiting for?! Come on, let’s flail/commiserate! Current Mood: contemplative |
| Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | |
| 12:29 pm | Impressive – with the B13U’s official DVD premiere still two weeks’ away, there already is a high quality DVD rip available online. Sadly there aren’t yet subtitles in a language I’d understand. I have to say I enjoyed the film far more upon rewatching. Probably because I’ve had months to get over my dismay at Damien having a girlfriend or at Leïto’s status of a glorified extra. Knowing what to expect I was able to concentrate on other things, like the fact that in the last half hour Leïto’s job wasn’t to stand in the background and look pretty, as I’ve previously suspected, but instead to invade Damien’s personal space as much as possible (while looking pretty). Seriously, if not for the scenes in which they are standing across the room in order to exchange meaningful looks you might suspect they were conjoined twins. I’m not doing any screencaps until I get my legitimate DVD, though. Current Mood: impressed |
| Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | |
| 8:27 pm | Another interview! I might be spamming today, but this is just too good not to post - MisterParkour guys located another recent interview with David, thoughtfully provided with English subtitles: ( check it out here ) Hee! Oh David, you perfect lunatic, I could listen to you ramble all day! :-) The bit that absolutely slayed me was: "Except when they (the animals) fall it's not concrete." So perfectly true. So completely unrelated to any point he was trying to make ;-) Current Mood: cheerful |
| 6:55 pm | decisions, decisions... I can't make up my mind about anything these days, it seems. Should I go see HBP or not? Should I buy the French B13U on DVD or bluray? Should I get the HBP game or not? It's torture! With HBP the film my skin crawls at the idea of sitting through two and a half hours of the Trio and their romantic mishaps, but I do want to see the train scene and Blaise Zabini. With HBP the game I do like exploring various locations and collecting things, but evidently there's also Quidditch :shudder, yawn: With Banlieue 13 Ultimatum bluray is only 50 cents more expensive than the DVD and the quality will be so much better (not to mention that there are br exlusive extras). On the other hand I really want to make screencaps, and I can easily live without a French hip hop CD. GUH! Current Mood: undecided |
| Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | |
| 8:21 pm | |
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