Sunday 14 January 2018

A-Bomb A-Holes, Amazing Aloy and Auditing Life

The word of the week is tremulous.

Jan 8 - Pixar... X-Wings?

Let's start the week out right: with Star Wars!

Not just *any* Star Wars though, but a 'What if?' kinda teaser:

What if Pixar had made a Star Wars animated film, along the lines of Cars?

Cue a cute and very well-done trailer:



Jan 9 – Horizon: Zero Dawn

Wow! While looking for something different to watch here and there at work this week, I stumbled upon this 'cutscene assembly movie' from the recent videogame Horizon: Zero Dawn, which is described as:
Horizon: Zero Dawn is an exhilarating action role playing game developed by the award winning Guerrilla Games, creators of PlayStation’s venerated Killzone franchise. As Horizon: Zero Dawn’s main protagonist Aloy, a skilled hunter, explore a vibrant and lush world inhabited by mysterious mechanized creatures. Embark on a compelling, emotional journey and unravel mysteries of tribal societies, ancient artifacts and advanced technologies that will determine the fate of this planet, and of life itself.
Here's a synopsis review that doesn't spoil too much about the story:


I quite enjoyed the 'cutscene movie' which was almost 1.5 hours long and excellently written: for a near-future story, it had great depth and the main protagonist of Aloy was an engaging character all on her own. I especially liked her sense of curiousity, which drove her to become what her world needed.

Great job, Guerilla Games - more stories like this, please!


Jan 10 – Wisdom from Beyond

Some profoundly wise words today from a 27-year-old young woman, who wanted to share them with the world shortly before dying of cancer a week ago on January 4th 2018. She had her whole life ahead of her, and speaks clearly about how her looming passing put her time here into clarity:












 
Jan 11 – Pseudoscience

Ah, the ignorant things I see people type online of a day...

Pseudoscience especially: it really IS true that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and people are willing to listen to anything that sounds somewhat plausible, despite there being so little science involved that you couldn't fill a thimble with it.

Such as this posting, by an ardent anti-climate-change commenter, who has NO idea how science works, but is quite vocal in his opinion of how he thinks science works:

That's right folks - this is 'science' to some people...

 A common thread among folks like the guy above is that they usually offer YouTube videos as 'proof' of their claims, or links to non-scientific blogs. In Matthew's case, he pointed to the video below, which contains such tenuous and flimsy pseudoscientific premises that anyone with an ounce of scientific knowledge would dismiss them immediately:


We live in an age where anyone with internet access can find solid scientific data, thousands of sites, yet garbage videos like this draw people in like moths to flames.

I begin to see where pundits from the sixties decried the death of knowledge when they coined the term 'boob tube' as people tuned into television, and tuned out their brains...


Jan 12 – 2018's Films?

On a lighter note: this year's going to be FULL of fine films!

Here's a HUGE LIST of 44 of the biggest movies coming out in the next 11.5 months, and of that list, 14 are of mild to MAJOR interest to me, as follows:

Feb 16 - Black Panther( HECK YEAH! )
Feb 23 - Annihilation( interesting? )
March 9 - A Wrinkle In Time( kinda...? )
March 16 - Tomb Raider( interesting? )
March 30 - READY PLAYER ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
April 6 - A Quiet Place( Horror, so I may rent and watch it with the lights on )
May 4 - Avengers: Infinity War( mostly interesting? )
May 25 - Solo: A Star Wars Story( interesting? )
June 1 - DEADPOOL 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
June 15th - THE INCREDIBLES 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
July 6 - Ant Man and The Wasp( interesting and funny? )
Nov 21 - WRECK-IT RALPH 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Dec 21 - Aquaman ... and also Bumblebee!

As you can see from the list above, many are sequels or reboots, but on the whole everything looks good enough to see in the theatres... which would be a BIG change for me from 2017, where I saw about six films in total on the silver screen.

Of all of them though, it's a three-way tie between Deadpool, Ready Player One and Wreck It Ralph... those three alone will make 2018 a memorable movie year!


Jan 13 – WTF, Hawaii???

For the millions of people living in Hawaii, today was terrifying:


Though it turned out to be a false alarm, I can only imagine the horror and helplessness people were feeling there: there were reports of parents pushing their children down manhole covers into the sewers for shelter, among other things. 

What stunned me though was that so many people were laughing it off online: comments ranged from "great joke!" to "I wouldn't want to live in Hawaii today" to "I keep hoping this isn't a joke" - the last comment should tell you how many Neanderthals are still alive today and learn to use social media.

I never thought that the world could so easily return to the state of fear akin to that of Cuban missile crisis in the sixties, with nuclear annihilation was only a few breaths away. I grew up in the 1980s, with the threat of MAD hanging over all our heads from the US - Russian Cold War standoff, but it was never immediately real because the public wasn't intimately and immediately aware of developments.


Cue Twitter and 45's penis-size contest via nuclear proxy, and here we are today. I can only hope that everyone who voted for 45 had enough of a shock today to begin re-thinking their support of the madman with the nuclear button...


Jan 14 – Life Audits

I spend much of my time thinking, in addition to doing.

While most of my doing is humdrum, day-to-day tasks at work or the samesuch at home, my thinking tends to rove all over the place... or at least, it used to.

For the last few years, much of my thinking has been in 'survival mode' aka how to make money stretch, how to get a better job, how to overcome my health issues. Little time was spent thinking about fun things, or the future, or even interests outside the narrow scope of immediate entertainment, or writing.

Going into 2018 with a better financial sense of how this year is going to turn out month-to-month means that my thinking can finally escape survival mode and get back to the business of living life by examining it from a far freer scope.

Part of that means looking ahead, as I mentioned above: where do I want to be in the near / far term, what do I want to be doing, and how do I want to get there?


As is often the case, LifeHacker has an article on just this sort of thing form back in 2013: Performing A Life Audit. It asks some excellent questions, such as:

·       What life do I want? In 5, 10, 40 years?
·       What areas of my life could be improved?
·       What’s my motivation?
·       What do I believe in?
·       What do I consider essential?
·       What does “meaningful” mean to me?

These questions, among others, will help you get a handle on where you want to be and how you're going to get there. As I described to my girlfriend today over a nice relaxing lunch at Garrick's Head Pub, for years I've felt the disconnection between my knowledge of what I need to do and my ability to achieve it, akin to seeing a series of handholds rising up a wall towards success... but the bottom one is just out of reach, no matter how hard I strained or jumped towards it.

My hope is that a firm financial plan will provide the boost that I need to grasp that first run towards a far better future this year, in all respects of my life.


It's been a good week: while I've made little progress on my novel, I made BIG progress in the financial side of things, and my health's teadily improving( I swam twice this week! )ao I'm going into this coming week with a steady stride...