The funny thing about having time off work is that I completely lost interest in updating my blog. This may be because I lost all track of time and if it wasn’t for regular weekly events I wouldn’t have known what day of the week it was. But now that I’m back at work, these little updates seem to mean so much. I can’t even say that they’re a work avoidance technique since I generally don’t blog at work.
Four weeks away from the office allows you to really get yourself together and get all the things done that you’ve been whining about all year. It’s no excuse to claim now that you “don’t have time.” You have plenty of time. You have four whole weeks. Having said that, I didn’t get done all the things I wanted to during my holiday. I was busy everyday with either french study, fencing practise, helping friends with home construction projects, holidaying in almost-exotic locales with Kathi and a whole bunch of other stuff. I only had one day in the entire period where I bludged in front of the TV. I think my list of things to do may legitimately have been too long.
The other events on which I spent my holiday were more personal – my daughters’ first birthday and the anniversaries of their deaths and their funeral. That’s a post for another time.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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The first week of my four weeks off work is almost done. I’ve gotten all the chores out of the way and from here on in it’s all gravy. Here’s a list of the highlights:
Sunday: At training, I took part in the second in a series of lessons introducing Meyer’s dussack fighting style. The wooden dussack was used both as a training weapon for single-handed fencing and as a cudgel carried by the town guard, particularly in eastern Europe. The style is very quick and reminds me a lot of sabre fencing.
Monday: Kathi and I were booked in for another frozen embyro transfer. Well, that is to say, she was booked in for the procedure and I just accompany her in order to look on dumbly and hold her hand. The embyro didn’t survive the thawing process so rather than let this opportunity go to waste, we asked for another to be defrosted. See below.
Tuesday: A bunch of mates came over for a couple of games of BloodBowl. Never in the history of Games Workshop has there been a 4-4 tied game. Yay. Also, I started a running program called Couch-To-5km in 8 Weeks in order to improve my stamina and maybe even lose some weight.
Wednesday: Kathi and I went back to the clinic for a frozen embyro trnasfer. This time all went well.That night at training, we had an introduction to medieval knife fighting as outlined in several historical treatises. This was tempered by one of the guy’s 20+ year long career in the military and his opinion as to which historical techniques work and which were merely advertising to fleece noble kids of their pocket money.
Thursday: I can’t actually remember Thursday at all. I’m sure I did stuff because I’ve put Hesiod’s Theogony on the finished reading pile and all the laundry is done. Also, I put in a second session of the Couch-To-5km program. (The next effort in this regard is due Saturday.)
Friday: Amongst other similarly joyful activities, I’ve scrubbed the mold off the patio roof with some disgustingly evil chemical goop. Now I hurt. A lot.
Anyway, that’s the must-dos out of the way and I can prepare myself for Charlotte’s and Marianne’s wold-have-been birthdays coming up on Monday. I’m taking Kathi out somewhere nice for lunch and we’re just spending the day together.
Right now, I need a coffee and I’m going to throw on the Sarah Connor Chronicles to see what they’re like.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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I had another post here this week. It concerned a dispute with a company I deal with that hasn’t paid its bills since July. I took the post down because it wasn’t very polite and could lead to legal problems.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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A much more positive post this week.
Training with the ACA has been pretty good lately and a lot of technique is starting to click into place (at last!). One of the causes for this is the introduction of some training documents into the group. While we’ve had a basic text for our longsword trainging for a little over a year and another for single-handed weapons, they’ve not been particularly useful outside of the group training night. They were about imparting knowledge and not so much about training. Don’t get me wrong: they are both good cources of information, just a little too high-level to meet my needs right this minute. The new doco puts these texts into practice.
The first of the new texts lists a series of eight drills which take the techniques described in the previous doco and connect them into sequences and patterns of movement designed to promote muscle memory and automatic responses to threats from an opponent. The drills have two features which really interest me.
Fitness: As a fencer, you can never have enough stamina and the drills have the side effect of increasing one’s endurance. It’s well known that body motor skills diminish the higher one’s heart rate. For example, at around 115 beats per minute (bpm), one begins to lose fine motor skils. At around 145bpm, complex motor skills become problematic and it just goes downhill from here. Since I’m dead keen on the rapier, which relies for success on controlling how the point of the weapon moves, the fitter I am, the lower my heart rate during a bout and thus i can maintain better control of the weapon. Presumably, this will result in winning more bouts but that is a theory as yet untested.
Style: Let no one tell you that fencing is solely about effectiveness as a fighter or as a competitor. Grace and style are major components of the sport (or, for the purists, martial art). The truth is that there’s very little chance of me being challenged to a duel to the death, let alone a duel using seventeenth century weapons. Training, to me, is more about recovering or re-learning our lost martial heritage and sportsmanship than it is about preparing to defend my life, hearth and family (until the impending zombie apocalypse occurs, of course). The drills promote style and grace by training your body to move in a particular manner and they focus your attention on performing the moves perfectly and precisely.
As an aside, I first became interested in the precision of my technique after seeing a demonstration of iaido, a Japanese martial art which concentrates solely on drawing the sword, performing brief offensive and defensive moves and returning the sword to the scabbard. The art shows just how beautiful a technique can be.
The second text is a defined set of responses to particular threats while standing in a particular guard position and is (somewhat grandiosely) called The 24 Master Techniqies. This is basically the syllabus for the school. In essence, what it does is say “Ok, you’re standing in middle guard back (our equivalent of the German pflug) and someone attacks to your high outside line (throws a blow at your upper right for the right-hander). How do you defend against it?” By removing the thought process from the rock-paper-scissors like thinking evident in many historical treatises (eg: zwerchau breaks vom tag), it becomes much easier for us moderns who training maybe once a week to become proficient at what we do. It turns historical fencing from something concerned only with static knowledge of the medieval sources into something much more dynamic and functionally driven. These techniques are also built into the drills so that they become automatic and very natural responses.
The best way I’ve found to preform the drills is to do them a few times until you know the moves then do them again with your eyes closed. This makes you (well, me) concentrate on how my body feels and moves during the drill. You can feel how each muscle group changes and interact with other muscle groups during the drill. I’ve found that the precision of movement I can achieve using this technique greatly increases my confidence in my abilities as a fencer – and makes me look good. This concept of muscle memory is dead interesting.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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If you’re not interested in very public exposure of the soul, look away now. To help you, here’s some pictures of bacon taped to a cat.
It’s been nearly a year since my daughters Charlotte and Marianne were born and died and I’m still living very much day-to-day. I have no plans for the future. I can’t even realistically imagine me in any kind of future and that’s largely what this post is about.
Why post publicly? Definitely not as a call for sympathy. Unless you’ve held you children in your arms as they die, you just don’t get it and hopefully you never will. There are three reasons behind this post:
- Knowing that other people may read this focusses my mind and sharpens my expression. Writing publicly demands that I give my ideas a clarity they will never achieve otherwise. This in itself may help me towards an answer.
- This is my life and I like the idea that others know a little bit about how my mind works – but not in an emo “Heather is such a bitch,” myspace kind of way.
- There are other blokes out there going through this who also don’t know how to handle it. If I show them that they’re not alone or trigger a new way of looking at things, my work here is done.
(The distant fourth reason is that someone out there in teh interwebs may actually have a clue about how I can deal with all this stuff.)
Back to the future…
There was a time not too long ago when I had a plan for my life without children. IVF is a gamble and I was always aware that the gamble may not pay off. I had an idea of what my life would look like, the kind of things I’d occupy it with, a sort of overview of how it would unroll. Kathi and I would always regret not having had children but we would always have the knowledge that we did everything we could have done to have kids. It was a fairly positive view of the furture, albeit tinged with sadness.
Then came my angels and I worked out a new idea about how my life would unfold. I now looked forward to all the joyous life events being a father entails: arguing with Kathi about who’s turn it is to be elbows deep in dirty nappies, avoiding the sword of damocles of twins demanding which of them you love more, trying to keep “daddy’s helpers” from undoing all my work in the garden, arguments about “you’re not going out dressed like that, young lady,” and even loading the shotgun to fend off the inappropriate boyfriends, etc.
Now that they’re gone, I can’t imagine life without watching living children grow up. Having had a taste of that life, I can’t find a way to go back to being happy with the idea of never having living children. But the reality is that this may never happen.
The result is that I live day-to-day. I find it hard to get excitied about anything. Most of my time is devoted to short-term goals such as going to fencing training, painting wargaming figures, reading trashy fifties hardboiled detective novels. All of these are pursuits of limited duration. Work is nothing more than a painful annoyance without which I know I’ll lose those things that make my life comfortable. There’s no long-term planning. There’s no “where will you be in five years time?” None of these things matter. I’m in limbo.
If I can’t have my girls with me and watch them grow and discover the world, the next best thing is to talk about them. I love talking about my girls, how they looked, what they did, what they could have become. The problem here is that they only lived for 11 and 12 days. They’re gone and the curse of the surviving parent is that I will never have new memories of them or new things to talk about. What will happen – and is happeneing even now – is that the once scalpel-sharp detail of my memories of my girls blur and fade and in the years to come all I will be left with is the memory that I once had two beautiful daughters and the shared (possibly confabulated) stories of them that Kathi and I tell each other.
Since we started back on IVF this year, one of the main points of discussion is the idea that if we get pregnant again, it almost certainly won’t be with twins. It may sound ungrateful but even if we have a baby in the future who survives more than two weeks, we’ve lost the chance of belonging to the special club of parents of twins. As we get older, the chance of IVF working diminishes. It may be that the brief lives of Charlotte and Marianne will be the only marks of parenthood we will ever know.
I really don’t know right now how to handle this. I can’t live in the past as that way lies madness. I can’t live for the future because a future without living children is just as horrific to contemplate as a future without the memory of my girls. That only leave me the now, the eternal present.
I make sure I keep up with my mates and keep myself busy doing things I know I used to enjoy: historical fencing, reading, roleplaying, watching movies, wargaming, coffee, talking crap with friends, passing particularly harsh judgements on idiots, etc. But these are all ‘now’ events. They have no future either.
While I enjoy all these activities and I love spending time with friends, I feel keenly that there’s a wall which separates me from them and prevents me from fully participating in the fun of whatever playful stupidity we’re currently engaged in. This stuff is nothing but actions to fill in the great emptiness of the now. There is no goal that they’re leading towards that I can see other then they prevent me from crawling into a bottle of either scotch or anti-depressants or both. Maybe that’s enough and all I should expect for now.
The problem is what comes next and what happens after that. These are questions that at this stage I can’t answer.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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Not huge amounts to say this week. It’s mainly been a week of rest — well, OK, laziness. The game of BloodBowl last night was close to the highlight of the week.
So, just as all the cool kids are doing nowadays, taking the place of any real content is this lovely little ditty: Miss Emeline Spankhurst sings the Tin Foil Hat Song.
Warning: I haven’t been able to get this song out of my head all week.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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I’ve been suckered into playing Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl. And not just playing but playing in a the Fisherman’s Stout Bloodbowl League.
I’ve been interested in this game since it first appeared as a liftout in a holiday edition of White Dwarf magazine – way back when it was still owned by Steve Jackson Games and not an in-house advertising vehicle for GW. The game is basically a parody of American football played with fantasy races. Of course, given my Flintloque proclivities, I’ve settled on a team of elves.
Elves, being what they are in the Warhammer universe, are agile and graceful. In game terms, this means they are fast and can throw the ball about quite well. Hence, the strategy for my team it to split the defense by running deep towards the goal line and make long passes to the receivers. Two turn touchdowns will become my team’s speciality.
Also, to highlight the prissy nature of the race, the team refuses to cheat or foul against other teams, indulge in “rough-house play,” or any other form of nastiness. They are here to play the game and show that beings who understand bloodbowl at infinitely deeper levels than any other Warhammer race is capable of are inherently superior. They are frequently know to launch official protests at “ungentlemanly conduct” and other such infractions of the spirit of the game.
In the first league game (last week), the Angels played Peter M Ball’s Underhill Maulers, a team of halflings and were mauled. We launched the first of, I’m sure, many official protests to the league management. If including ten foot tall treeman on a team of halflings doesn’t go against the spirit of the rules, then using them to throw halflings at the opposition surely must be.
Last night’s game, the Angels lost in a complete whitewash against Nic’s Dwarf Warhammerers. In their turns, they grabbed the ball, placed the guy carrying it in the centre of an armoured mass and slowly marched forward into the end zone. In the Elves turn, they rolled ones. For every dice roll which could have affected the game, they rolled ones. You can’t argue with fate.
I’ll post some photos when I get a minute to myself.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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Last Sunday was the twelfth anniversary of the day we were married. Yay us! After all we’ve been through it was a bit of a shock to realise that we’re still together and that we actually like hanging out with each other. To celebrate, we did two things: dinner at a new (for us) french restaurant called C’est Bon on Saturday night, traipsing around the Glasshouse Mountains looking at rocks and stuff Sunday. Both our Satruday night and our Sunday wanderings were brilliant.
C’est Bon has earned itself a good rep both generally and within the french ex-pat community in Brisbane. The restaurant is rather expensive ($150+ for two) but food is simply brilliant and well worth the price. The aspect that sold us was the entree and dessert platters. We love sampling the range of tastes offered by a restaurant in order to decide whether we’ll go back. The degustation d’entrees consisted of all the standards: pate, tomato tart, escargots, scollops (coquille St Jacques) and a mousse of goat’s cheese. I took ownership of the snails and seafood immediately and had a little of whatever else Kathi deigned to leave on the plate. For mains, she choose the Duck a l’Orange (another classic) while I opted for the cassoulet because it always reminds me of our stay at Carcassonne. Both these dishes a la version original tend to be a little too oily for Australian tastes but these successfully and very gracefully leapt this hurdle. The degustation de
desserts included a mini creme brulee and mini creme caramel, as you would expect, but added to these a lemon tart and a chocolate tart whose filling was so dense it generated its own gravity. During dessert, the last Brisbane Riverfire ‘dump and burn’ by the soon-to-be-retired F-111s roared by.
 Glasshouse Mountains Excursion The Glasshouse Mountains north of Brisbane were given their name in 1770 by James Cook who likened these volcanic plugs to glasshouses standing above a generally flat landscape. We wandered about the various lookouts and belleviews that are noted on the maps and took a bunch of photos. One of the things that surprised us was that the local aboriginal legends about the formation of the Glasshouse Mountains were completely lacking. For me, the legend is interesting because it, like many other legends of coastal peoples in the northern half of the continent, speaks of a rapidly incroaching tide which in undates the coastline. Is this a memory of the rising sea-level at the end of the last ice age? The legend is fairly well known but there is no eveidence of it at any of the sites we visited except for cryptic notes saying things like “this mountain features heavily in local legends” or that it is “considered sacred by the traditional owners of the area.” Perhaps, we theorise, the owners of the legend have not given their permission to have the story displayed publicly. Perhaps, it’s a simple oversight by the EPA who manage the area for the state govenment. Hands up anyone with more info? I’m dead keen to know.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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The more I play with Wordpress, the more I like it. It’s usable straight out of the box and, if you like to fiddle around under the hood, there’s plenty of scope for everything from minor tweaks to complete overhauls. Here’s the much abbreviated story of two tweaks which have tickled me deep down in the parts my underclothes cover.
Migrating from Geocities
Moving to Wordpress, I had to deal with how to redirect people from my Geocities web site. The problem is the GeoCities is not interested in letting me access anything interesting such as an .htaccess file, a server-side 301/302 redirection, etc and did not allow me to post perl or php code to do job. I had to fall back to javascript to redirect a browser to here. The unwanted side-effect of this is that Geocities would wrap a very annoying frame around the redirected page.
Never fear! The Wordpress add_action() function is here! A small bit of javascript hooked into wp_head did the trick. The add_action() function takes a pre-defined function and adds it into the hook specified – meaning that the function is added to the list of stuff to be processed when Wordpress is deciding what to include in the HTML <head> tag it sends the browser. Here’s the code in question:
function kill_geocities_frames() {
echo "<script type='text/javascript'>
// <![CDATA[
if (self != top && self.location.host != 'sleech.info' ) {
top.location.href = self.location.href;
} else {
if ( document.getElementById('y_gc_div_adcntr') ) {
y_gc_div_adcntr.innerHTML = '';
y_gc_div_mast.innerHTML = '';
y_gc_div_au1.innerHTML = '';
}
}
// ]]>
</script>";
}
add_action('wp_head', 'kill_geocities_frames');
Excerpts and Ellipsis
My preference has always been to have the front page of my blog include the full text of the latest post only and excerpts of all other posts. To me, this just looks better. The issue is that the theme I prefer did not support this. The code to do this is better explained pretty much everywhere so I’m not going to dig into the explain here.
The problem that concerns me now is how to make make the excerpt display in the way I want it to. This problem can be broken down into two goals to be achieved:
- I want the excerpt to show more than just plain text. I want it to show links, images, bold text, etc — all the standard HTML.
- I want to convert the standard ellipsis [...] at the end of the excerpt to be a clickable link which takes the reader to the full version of the post.
There are numerous plugins which solve one of these problems but none that I’ve found that do both at the same time to the level of quality I want. None of the plugins I tried wanted to play nice together. I chose Advanced Excerpt to solve goal 1 and give me complete control over what HTML is displayed in the excerpt.
To solve goal 2, Wordpress again came to the rescue in the form of add_filter(). This is a function through which you pass a bunch of text – such as the text of the excerpt – which is manipulated and changed according to a function you write for the purpose. In this case, I wrote a function which searches the text given it for the HTML ellipsis entity added to the end of the excerpt by the plugin and replaces it with the HTML code for the link I want. Add_filter() then hooks my function into the the_excerpt() template tag. Here’s the code:
function my_excerpt_ellipsis($text) {
return str_replace('[…]', '… <a href="'.
get_permalink($post->ID) . '" rel="nofollow" class="more">
read on »</a>', $text);
}
add_filter('the_excerpt', 'my_excerpt_ellipsis');
Man, I love this stuff!
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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 Size comparisons are unavoidable Swordplay 2009 was an inaugural event hosted by the Australian College of Arms. The ACA wanted to see if there was any interest in a small inter-school tournament for historical fencing groups in the Brisbane area and ended up drawing participants from all over the country and as far away as Hobart and Perth. Apparently, the gathering even garnered the interest of swordplay groups in New Zealand.
Events on offer included:
- a grand tournament using the (still under development) ACA tournament rules which test skill-at-arms with rapier and a companion weapon,
- a demonstration of the fifteenth century Belgian guild tourney rules,
- a general melee using padded and rubberised weapons and armour organised by KnightFight,
as well as seminars on various topics ranging from:
- an introduction to sixteenth century Italian rapier fencing and
- the bio-mechanics of swordplay.
 Chris Slee (ACA) v Ben (Prima Spada) For me, the highlight of Swordplay 2009 was bouting with guys from the other schools. It’s only natural that you get used to the techniques of your own school and the responses and reactions of the people you train with. Bouting with someone from another school is a whole ‘nother thing. They react to your feints and strikes in ways your training has not anticipated and their strikes on you come from directions you’ve not previously considered. I think these friendly bouts, when conducted at a slowpace, are an invaluable training tool and when we bout at something close to full speed they can become true competitions of skill. There’s a couple of guys from the SCA and from Prima Spada that I seriously look forward to meeting again in the arena.
 Tournament Play In terms of the ACA tournament, the event was great fun even though I was knocked out (not literally) in the first round. There were a few injuries but these were confined to later rounds when the participants were becoming tired. Fatigue and swordplay are two concepts which just plain don’t mix. However, I think there’s something at the core of the experience and within the rules that, with a little tweaking, can provide the foundation of an annual event that all participants can safely be very proud of. I’m sure Scott is being bombarded with comments and suggestions for improvement.
The Belgian Guild Rules tourney put on by Leith Golding of Collegium in Armis was basically a fast and furious version of piggy-in-the-middle using wooden wasters and German longsword techniques. The wooden swords are a little light and under a padded fencing jacket it’s a little hard to register whether you’ve been hit or not. Next time, I’m told, it will be run using proper federschwert. This will make a world of difference to the event.
 Richard Callinan (SCA) Richard Callinan ran a workshop describing the basic offensive and defensive maneuvers of the Italian, specifically Bolognese and Dardi traditions. For me, this workshop made the readings I’ve done into the tradition a lot clearer. The problem with reading the original texts (apart from translation difficulties) is that they all assume that you are familiar with the system or at least with fencing in general. Richard reduced the number of guards to the minimum common across all treatises describing this style of fencing and showed the actions or attacks common to all of them which start and end in these guard positions. A lot of stuff we did in the workshop, we do in our own ACA curriculum but there was plenty of new stuff and extensions on top of what we do. I’m plan on incorporating some of these techniques into my own style.
The seminar on the biomechanics of swordplay was dead interesting and I’d like to know more about the subject. Stu MacDonald of Core Life Concepts talked about how energy moves through the body using the mechanism of contraction and relaxation of muscle groups. He then demonstrated how these muscle groups chain together to create typical swordplay motions such as swinging one’s arm to strike with the blade edge or lunging forward to thrust the blade point into a target. He also provided a bunch of simple exercises (which reminds me that it’s been a few weeks since I went to yoga) to better utilise these muscle chains and improve strength and reaction time.
 Scott McDonald (ACA) From my point of view, there’s plenty here to commend in Swordplay 2009 and I truly hope that others felt the same. I’d really like to see it become an annual event and, with appropriate tweaking, I’m sure it will.
Lastly, I’d like to ask for a big round of applause for the ACA’s own Scott McDonald for going to the effort of bring us all together for this wonderful weekend.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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Lately, I’ve become entangled in a number of debates with others about the quality of various films and novels. Only now have I realised that I approach these media in a manner which seems completely at odds with the way other approach them. Therefore, it’s time I explained myself.
I have a couple of fixed ideas on what makes a movie, novel or short story good. These have developed out of a cloud of different inputs such as:
- four years of studying film and literature at university,
- a strong interest in learning other languaes and reading foreign literature,
- a strong interest in history,
- a memory of what has gone before in literature in general and in certain genres (say, sci-fi) in particular,
- struggling with writing technique as wannabe/failed writer.
My approach to story – let’s use that as a general term for all these media – can be summarised as:
Subject: There is something significant at risk for a character I can feel something for.
Presentation: The story is presented in a way which is consistent, engaging for me and adds in some way another dimension the character’s struggle.
That’s it. See, it’s pretty simple. I’m actually very easy to please. As long as you can make me care what happens to the character, I’m happy and I think the author – again, let’s take this as a general term for the entire production team – has done his or her job. The character doesn’t have to be sympathetic as I like seeing people get their come-uppance. I wish it would happen much more frequently in real life as well.
On the flip side, I’ve developed a list of things that annoy me – and this is where the debate generally resides. These include:
Lying to me: Nothing makes me angrier than when a story sets up the parameters of its world and then breaks them for no apparent reason. A great example of this is the truly woeful 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives. At the end of the film, we find out that the wives aren’t robots after all but ordinary people who have had a chip implanted in their brains. OK, if that’s so, why don’t they burn like people do? Why do they continue making dinner oblivious to being knifed in the stomach? How can one character use his wife as a frickin’ ATM?
Cop outs: This is largely the category for the just plain dumb. It signifies things that have to happen to make the story work regardless of how they defy common sense. For example, … well, pretty much all of Independence Day.
It is also the category in which we are asked to ignore the consequences of the characters’ actions just because they’re the good guys. Steven Seagal pretty much sums this one up in On Deadly Ground. In order to protect the local Inuit population and Alaskan wilderness from a perfectly legal oil drilling operation, Seagal murders dozens of innocent workers. Why isn’t he arrested?
The next two categories are solely related to films although author Matthew Reilly makes a good case for inclusion in at least one of them.
Remakes: This category has some kind of split-personality syndrome. Remakes can be good if the production team has something to say. I’m dead keen on seeing The Taking of Pelham 123 to see what this version does with the story that’s different to either the original 1974 film or the 1998 telemovie. Unfortunately, almost all remakes, such as Starksy and Hutch, are parodies of the original for no other purpose than to convince the consumerist audience that anything more than 20 minutes old cannot have value.
Explosions: Any film which substitutes explosions for worthwhile characters, explosions for story development, explosions for logic, etc. Yes, Michael Bay. I’m looking at you.
I refuse to accept any argument which starts “it’s only a movie…” or “it’s only a book …” While I am overjoyed to debate the merits or otherwise of my position in general or my opinion of any particular work, I will punch in the face anyone who tries to convince me that a pre-requisite to enjoying a piece of modern cultural production is “switching my brain off at the door.” Pretend to be stupid? Why the hell would I want to do that?
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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Given the glowing reviews and praise this film have been receiving, anyone who does not follow suit appears as a curmudgeon. So, I feel the need to explain a couple of things before I launch into my review.
First, I liked the film. I liked it very much and expect to see great things from this director. Second, it has only gathered such marvellous reviews because all the other current offerings, especially any other recent sci-fi, are sooooo bad. The vast fields of crap to which we (particularly sci-fi) fans have become accustomed to putting up with means that anything will be praised highly and much more than it would otherwise deserve simply by being not crap.
On to the review:
District 9 is two movies in one. The first half is done in documentary style looking at how the aliens interned in the camp outside Johannesburg (did someone say Soweto?) are treated by the government bureaucracy charged with their welfare. The second is a very standard action-adventure films seeking to defeat the corporate conspiracy, blah, blah, blah, seen it all before. Only one of these films is worth watching.
Using aliens to examine issues of (paternalistic) racism, the white man’s burden and post-colonial politics is nothing new and in many ways this film is nothing more than an update Alien Nation for the new generation. The documentary style and the enthusiasm with which the bureaucrats go about their duties in the alien camp make you cringe in your seat. There is simply no way to avoid the comparison between the humans’ treatment of the aliens and current politics, whether it be the black townships in South Africa (the obvious parallel), various situations in the Middle East or recent Australian government initatives in the Northern Territory. The fact that it’s aliens rather than people makes it a little more palatable and allows for the polemic to be delivered with so much more force.
This first part of the film is really very well done. The cinematography is beautiful. The director has a good eye for detail and is quite skilful at selecting shots to best capture the scene. The actors create for their characters an uncomfortable mix of trepidation and “for the greater good” which is quite infectious.
Then the film nosedives into the mire and morphs itself into nothing more than a bog-standard break-into-the-secure-lab-and-steal-the-McGuffin story which makes irrelevant all the good work of the first half either by drowning it in brass shell casings or by, at the end, showing that no one actually had to struggle for anything during the film as the answer was there all along. Yes, I’m looking at you, sparkly tractor beam.
It’s only the lead actor’s ability which makes the second half watchable. Yet even he cannot make you feel anything for his character in the action-adventure second half. After the documentary style of the first half of the film distances the audience from the characters in order to concentrate on what they do and why they do it, it is impossible to then want the audience to feel any kind of connection with a man who wants to take an alien’s kid away as punishment for not signing a bureacratic form. That the kid in question in the second half turns into nothing more than the main character’s monkey sidekick shows just how far the film has fallen from the moral high ground.
All-in-all, a well-crafted and entertaining film that disappointed only because I could see the gem shining at its heart regardless of all the shit the production tried to pile on top of it.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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Kathi and I started Tai Chi this week. This is in additon to the other physical stuff I’m doing now such as regularly training with two historical fencing schools (ACA and Collegium) as well as yoga. I’m not sure what the aim of all this huffing and puffing is but I wonder why it’s taken until now to realise how much fun just getting out and running about in the sun can be.
The Tai Chi we’re learning is basically the same as that which we did in our two hour intro to the technique in Hong Kong. Being the physical expression of a Taoist organisation, this form of Tai Chi is completely divorced from it’s more martial counterparts and I think lacks some of the exactness and focus on precision of movement that characterised for us our experience in Honkers. Perhaps this is nothing more than the fact that we’re in a beginners class which concentrates on learning the basics and handling precision later. Perhaps it’s a result of it being a western domainated group (at least where we are) which has divorced the technique from its Chinese context and homeland. I wonder how different a beginners class of Tai Chi would be in China?
In other news, SwordPlay 2009 is coming up at the end of the month. This three-day event is an experiment in getting all the historical fencing groups in Brisbane together for an annual tournament, seminar-workshops and general mixing of ideas. It’s being pushed heavily by the ACA’s Scott McDonald as a way of bridging the myriad of tiny puddles to make one at least average sized pond. Interest int eh event is quite high and it’s drawing participants from historical fencing schools all over the country. There’s even people coming from as far away as Hobart and Perth!
I’ve been reading a bunch of french newspapers on line lately. Of course, these are not the important dailies but the regional newspapers local to the area of France I love, Languedoc and the Midi-Pyrenees. Midi-Libre and La Dépêche are exactly the sort of newspapers I cannot bring myself to read where I live but somehow reading about cats stuck up trees and the like becomes suddenly very interesting when the articles are in a foreign language. I try to convince myself that reading these rags is improving my french as the language of local journalism is very much closer to everyday french than is the language of the major dailies.
Finally, someone sent me a link to a webcomic thingy I’d almost forgotten about: Edison Hate Future. Warren Ellis is a very, very strange man.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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 SCA - Fencing Fest - 2009 - Prize Fight
The biggest surprise for me last weekend was the realisation that the new improved SCA is probably the closest groups to the ACA out of all the historical fencing groups in the country. From what I saw of Fencing Fest IV, their premier fencing competition in Queensland, they have a concentration on rapier and dagger/buckler combat and regular sparring to improve one’s skills. The ACA were invited to attend as guests and although we were not allowed to participate in the competition (unless we became members) we managed to arrange a bunch of bouts on the side. </p>
This is a very different SCA to the one I knew and refused to have anything to do with twenty years ago. These guys are interested in metal weapons rather than foam and are actually interested in history – unlike the previous lot. I managed (not too surprisingly, it seems) get get entangled into a couple of discussions on such wide ranging topic as properly use of the buckler from the I.33 manuscript (AD 1295) to Achille Marozzo (AD 1536) and opinions on the merits and otherwise of the German longsword school as taught by Joachim Meyer and others. All were scholarly and reasoned debates.
We watched their competition and the grading of a student to the next grade. There are some obvious differences in style between our groups. The first is the ACA preference for heavier and less whippy blades – which has inspired me to research again the length, weight and other dimensions of example swords surviving in museums and other collections. The second is that the SCA allow draw cuts. These occur when the blade is placed against an opponent’s appendage and drawn across it in an effort to slice through the said appendage. The ACA doesn’t practice this technique because for the most part normal clothes defeat it. We believe you need to either cut hard against a limb with the sword edge or stick the point of your weapon into the opponent to injure them.
 SCA - Fencing Fest - 2009 - Slideshow I had a few bouts against them. Of note, one was against one of their top-rated sword players and I was completely p0wned by him. I also bouted with a couple of others who were rated roughly the equivalent of me. These were more 50/50 affairs where we both gave as good as we got. All the SCA members I bouted with had extra-ordinarily good point control but I know I could have powered right through their light, whippy blades with solid cuts but we were playing by their rules and this type of thuggery isn’t allowed. All bouts were enormous fun and I can’t wait to see these guys in action again at Swordplay 2009 at the end of August.
I’ve got some photos but none of them feature me. And before you ask: no, I do not play dress ups. The photos feature SCA members who’s names I have no idea of and the ACA’s very own Scott McDonald in his home-made leather armour.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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A Canticle for Leibowitz
Walter M Miller, Jr
A wholly remarkable book but not for the reasons usually trotted out by its fans:
- it is not about Catholicism or the benefits bestowed by religion,
- it is not about trite cliches such as ‘those who do not listen to history are doomed to repeat it’ or ‘with great power comes great responsibility’,
- it is not about power of faith in the face of destruction.
The novel outlines a thesis which describes humanity as fundamentally and irredeemably broken. Humanity, after global nuclear war brought it to the brink of extinction, has been given a second chance to get it right this time, to develop a peace society which respects humanity and, by extension, the rest of the planet. Even with the full knowledge of the consequences, we can’t do it. One of the characters opines that the the first near extinction event could be the result of ignorance. Perhaps the “ancients” simply didn’t understand or couldn’t comprehend the destruction they could cause. That humanity would put itself in the same situation for the same reasons, he says, beggars belief. While playing nuclear brinksmanship for a second time in humanity’s history, the government’s enactment of a law allowing euthenasia only in the event of terminal radiation poisoning is used to show that the world’s leaders are both fully aware of the consequences of their proposed actions but intend to carry them out anyway. That a colonisation mission is sent secretly to the stars is the final proof that no one in this world still holds onto the hope that reason or the human spirit (whatever that is) will triumph. Humanity is a job-lot whose consignment to the dustbin of history is inevitable and perhaps the option to be preferred.
The second of the three parts of the novel outlines the core of the argument. This is a point that is missed by most fan reviewers who usually get caught up in the imagery of the first (the monastery in the wastelands) and the emotion of the last (euthenasia and the impeding second nuclear war) parts. The middle section asks whether “to know” is sufficient motivation for the newly emerging secular scientific renaissance. What responsibility does the discoverer bear for how the discovery is used by others? Miller refuses to fall into the trap of simplistically preferring the good life to the technologically easy life. He very pointedly states that each individual has a moral responsibility to uphold the moral law of helping and protecting each and every individual. It is the duty off each individual to hold themselves and others to account for their actions. Shirking this responsability or abbrogating it to others is the true evil in the world of the novel and technological development without a moral compass to guide it is the tool Miller uses to make his case.
Is it the great work of art the fans claim? No, definitely not. There’s a lot about it that’s just plain clumsy. The figure of the Wandering Jew makes for a good (not so private) in-joke but is ultimately pointless. Miller’s rather heavy-handed treatment of the monks gathering and making rituals of the scraps of shopping lists that survived the first apocalypse lacks any subtlety. That the much vaunted scene between the doctorand the priest over the mercy-killing of a mother and baby with terminal radiation poisoning refuses to devlove into moralising is not a sign of brilliance, so claimed by so many fans, but of mere competence as a writer. The fact that it stands out from the common run of sci-fi is an indictment of moderns writers rather than a sign of Miller’s genius. One could be easily forgiven for seeing this book as nothing more than an expression of Miller’s guilt at his role as part of a bomber crew in World War II which, among other actions, destroyed the first monastery in western Europe, the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, Italy.
(If you want to see someone struggling with his conscience, watch Fog of War, a documentary/interview with Robert Mcnamarra consumed by the guilt of his involvement in World War II, Vietnam and the Cold War.)
Is it a good read? Definitely yes. The world Miller creates (in all it’s incarnations) is fascinating and Miller shows wonderfully well the flow and progression of the characters’ internal debates and quandries. Don’t expect to find the gun-toting action or political intrigue of the standard run of post-apocalyptic novels. This book is not one of them. This book is a well told, well argued, bleak but at times very funny future history of the world and a look at how a bunch of very ordinary people live and deal with the consequences of the actions of their ancestors.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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I’m currently a member of two historical fencing schools: Australian College of Arms and Collegium in Armis. Both teach historical longsword although where Collegium adheres fairly strictly to the German tradition as outlined by Joachim Meyer and others, the ACA takes a more eclectic apporach integrating both the German and Italian traditions into a style based on simple efficiency. My problem has been reconciling the differences in the techniques of the two schools.
Here’s a brief example which illustrates the problem. Imagine an opponent attacks you with a zornhau or dritto squalembratto (an overhand diagonal cut from his upper right to his lower left quadrants; the terms are German and Italian). How do you counter it?
The standard ACA approach (one among many) is simple. Cut down hard with your own zornhau at his sword while stepping out to the right. This bashes your opponent’s weapon into the ground and allows you, before your opponent can recover, to safely reverse the path your sword thravelled to smack him in the head with the false (back) edge of you weapon. Simple, effective and based on gross bio-mechanical motions that feel entirely natural and almost instinctive.
The Collegium approach is similar in that it, too, involves cutting a zornhau at the opponent. In this version, you strike at your opponent’s head while stepping to the right. The step allows you to block the strike while giving you enough of an angle to hit his head. From this position, there one can perform a number of techniques whose names in German look like a bunch of random letters pulled from the scrabble bag such as absetzen, dupliren and abschneiden. The range of options available to you in this position is enormous but they all depend on a very fine judgement of position and how hard the other guy is pushing on his sword against yours. If the fight were real, an error of judgement here would have serious consequences.
Which technique is better? Can such a question even be asked? I think it can and should be asked. Here’s my answer.
There are two different forces at work here. The ACA concentrates on the sort of fencing which makes the fencer effective in a short period of time (which, by the way, is perfect for today’s way too busy world) by harnessing instinctive reactions and turning them into an effective fencing style based on principles of simplicity, sound bio-mechanics and the long tradition of western martial arts. Collegium, on the other hand, has underpinning it’s practice the assumption that these principles are already known to the fencer - as they would have been to Meyer’s 16th century students. Collegium’s fencing style takes the merely effective and raises to the level of an art and science in an attempt to recover the meaning of medieval treatises on longsword fencing.
Each school’s techique has it’s place at the table. While I believe that Collegium’s practice is a valiant and worthwhile attempt at recreating the German tradition of longsword fencing and our lost martial heritage, in sparring and tournament play, I see the techniques of the ACA appear more often and often to greater effect. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that I reckon the ACA style lacks finese or that the Collegium style lacks effectiveness – both styles have ample measures of both.
This widens the question into one which asks whether we praise functional utility or artistic perfection. I’m not sure I’m in a position to answer this. What I will say is that I’m overjoyed to have the opportunity to learn both styles and to be stuck trying to find an answer to this quandry. Both styles – utility and art – are required by anyone interested in sword play in the modern world.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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I’m in the process of making some changes which could bugger up the way my blog displays. Normal service will be resumed shortly.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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 Kathi holding our costume prize Stanthorpe is probably the last place you’d expect any kind of celebration of Bastille Day, the Fête nationale of France, as the town is smack in the middle of the the Queensland Granite Belt which has a long history of German immigration. Claudia’s Restaurant at Thunderbolt Farm remains a bastion of delicate and sophistacted culture amid the rocky outcrops, sausages and sauerkraut. Intrigued, Kathi and I joined our friends Cherelle and Jason for the experience.
We were encouraged to turn up “in the spirit of the celebration” and Kathi made us Eiffel Tower festooned t-shirts in order to blend in with the locals. This won us a team prize of a bottle of bubbly in the costume competition. The individual prizes went to those who looked most like characters from ‘Allo ‘Allo. When the others in the room found out that Kathi made the t-shirts, I think she felt that both her and the t-shirts got more attention than either deserved whereas I was trying to pimp out her sewing skills to anyone willing to pay.
The evening consisted of a lot of very good food and wine. All the standards made an appearance such as Onion Soup, Mussels in Garlic, Duck a l”Orange, Creme Caramel, etc. Later we had a couple of sing-a-longs of such standards as the Marseillaise, Frère Jacques and Alouette. Let me just say right now that singing at all, let alone singing in the round, is not a personal strength. Also, anyone who claims that enthusiam can make up for a lack of talent is lying. I think the entire room proved that.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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You know how it is, you’re sitting in the cinema watching a film and dying to go to the loo. Do you go now and miss the rest of what could be the pivotal or even the only good scene in the film? Do you wait just that little bit longer? Either way your enjoyment of the film is shot for good.
Never fear! Here’s the site for you. RunPee lists all the points in various films that you can dduck out to the bathroom without missing anything significant.
The site has an added benefit. The list of three minute sections of celluloid that the site points out as inconsequential are exactly the same as the list of scenes which should have been cut as pointless and contributing nothing to the story.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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Last night, I saw a great movie on Fox. And by great I mean Uwe Boll great rather than ‘contains actual greatness or even a redeeming feature’ great.
Doomsday (2008) is another laugh-a-minute horror movie from writer/director Neil Marshall, who’s responsible for such masterpieces as Dog Soldiers and The Descent. This time the incomparable Marshall takes on the post-apocalypse sub-genre with typical style to create a melange of every 1980s post-apocalypse and viral terror film that decade produced. Unless you count the way these allusions are skilfully blended into 113 minutes of implausible and often gratuitous violence, it’s really tough to pinpoint any single instance of originality here.
The way to watch this film is to sit back and let the play of images, sounds, references and allusions play over you. For example, in the obligatory Mad Max: Beyond Thuderdome scene (only one of two post-apocalyptic gladiatorial arena scenes), once you grit your teeth through the opening act – fat, bald Scotsmen in kilts dancing the Can Can – the soundtrack waivers between Adam and the Ants’ Dog Eat Dog and the Fine Young Cannibal’s Good Thing before finally deciding on Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Spellbound as the accompaniment to the Scottish savages, still stunned by the spectacle, eating the defeated from the arena.
Somehow, Marshall manages to convince actors who really should know better to appear in his films. I really wish I knew how he does it. It can only have been blackmail that lead Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell to sign up for their parts in this monstrosity. Another actor, David O’Hara, in the film looks and sounds so much like Liam Neeson you are left in absolutely no doubt who Marshall wanted for the part. The main character actor, Rhona Mitra, main assets – her tight bum and sexy brooding looks – are on constant display as she acrobatically tumbles and shoots her way through what passes for a plot.
As always, RottenTomatoes.com sums the film up perfectly and has a whole bunch of nifty quotes from critics that are 100% spot on.
Doomsday is a pale imitation of previous futuristic thrillers, minus the cohesive narrative and charismatic leads.
See this if you liked the Mad Max series, Escape from New York, 28 Days Later, Bambi Meets Godzilla.
Cross-posted from Chris Slee Home Page. Click here to leave a comment.
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