freckles_and_doubt

It transpires that LiveJournal does not, in fact, spit upon Opera, it simply spits upon the slightly out-of-date version of Opera I was running. A simple upgrade, and behold! drop-down menus permitting colour changes, providing one can pull the relevant hexadecimal codes out of the aether. Or, in this case, out of LJ's useful hexadecimal colour code page. This has now revealed unto me that actually I like all the purple, so I'm afraid, pending impassioned intervention from a majority of my gentle readers, you're stuck with it...

The bread was a mad, runaway success. Nice loaves, nice texture, faintly sour taste. I am so l33t. Have christened the starter Joseph, and am assiduously feeding him up for the next batch. And, to content the mad health-nut that is my mother, yes, they're wholewheat loaves ;>.

Progress on Chapter One, thing of theoretical horror, somewhat discommoded by the discovery that some sad, confused person has stolen Barthes's Image/Music/Text from the UCT library. One wonders why they really need dense semiotic criticism on a permanent basis... Honestly, academia does some strange things to some people. I am now in the process of tracking down Margaret Atwood's short stories, in order to definitively prove, with a casual wave of the hand, that they have no place in this thesis. Hah.

Alas!

bumpycat is apparently not destined to return to Cape Town, since the idiot people who interviewed him for the Perl job wanted someone with more experience. Woe, and likewise doom, not to mention their loss. On the upside, he apparently quite likes London.

I'm still being haunted by the movie AI, which

starmadeshadow and I watched on DVD the other night; I'm still tending to wake up in the morning seething quietly about it. (Warning: rantage follows). It is my considered opinion that Kubrick must be revolving gently in his grave, poor man. The whole nasty mess has fortified my sense that Stephen Spielberg should not, under any circumstances, be permitted to get his hands on science fiction, particularly not serious, issue-driven science fiction. It is patently obvious that the ridiculous man had absolutely no understanding of the script, which he persists in referring to as a fairy tale, despite the fact that it is clearly a rather dark and foreboding vision of those nastier, more desperate bits of the human psyche. Themes: human self-indulgence, wilful blindness, self-delusion, racism, destructiveness, identity. Not, contrary to his belief, a boy's love for his mother, since the story involves neither a boy nor his mother. Natural antithesis to I, Robot, actually: the mechas in AI are curiously, beguilingly and rather believably naive, and certainly much nicer than the people. I liked the way the Pinnochio theme was woven in, but the damned movie should have stopped about fifteen minutes before the actual end, leaving the poor, doomed robot boy to forever contemplate his unattainable ideal. The last few minutes of the film, with their horribly clunky and inelegant voice-over, were simply vomit-worthy. Despite rather cool alienoid robots. Oh, yeah, and Jude Law gets my vote.