In dreams begin responsibilities

This is a great review of 'Gideon's Daughter' by Hermione Eyre, from The Independent on Sunday (05/3/06); I couldn't find it online, so I copied it from the paper.

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Watching Gideon's Daughter, the latest TV play by Stephen Poliakoff, was like going through REM. At the end of it I felt obscurely refreshed and full of renewed understanding. Only, as after a dream, it took some effort to remember why. I felt as if I had gone under with its first long seamless tracking shot, which glided over several bunches of flowers lying end-to-end on the pavement, panning up slowly to show dozens, hundreds, thousands of bouquets covering the ground - a field of flowers laid, of course, for Princess Diana. With this one shot, Poliakoff regressed his audience to 1997, to its strange sentimentality, it new touchy-feely government.

Flowers then peeked out of almost every shot of the film, which had as its central character Gideon Warner (played by Bill Nighty at his best and most restrained), a New Labour PR svengali going through a breakdown. His office is stuffed with designer tulips in vases full of glass pebbles. His daughter's dress has a print of blown poppies. He makes cherry blossoms fall out of the sky over London as part of an aerial PR stunt. The flowers represent the superficiality of his world of spin, cut flowers being the ultimate symbol of style without substance. Good job, then, that Gideon meets the down-to-earth Stella (a magnificent Miranda Richardson) who takes him to stand in a field of thistles outside an industrial estate.

Thus the PR supremo is redeemed, and quits his job running the Millennium Dome. "What a hole he left behind him" the chorus-figure Sneath (Robert Lindsay) comments dryly.
The flower motif also relates to the play's other preoccupation: a parent's loss of a child. The blossoms must fall, whether to death (Stella's little boy died in a cycling accident) or to university (Gideon's Sphinx-like daughter, played beautifully by Emily Blunt, wants to go on a gap year). There's a rather crass equation of the two in Robert Lindsay's line, "When they go to university, it's like a death, a little death", but then these kinds of condensations, these moral equivalencies, do occur in dreams.
And with its richness in content, its hallucinatory colours (Stella wears pea-green gloves) and hypnotic, tranquil pace, Gideon's Daughter was a dream. A very good one. You would have been better off watching this than having a deep sleep, which sounds rude, but is in fact the most sincere compliment I can think of.

It's like 'Through the Nerdhole'

I was bored a while ago and took some pics of my room and flat, and some of a lego model I made. It's an approximation of the Delphinus ship from Skies of Arcadia,
but with Ramirez's ship colours as I didn't have enough silver and blue bits. Also the Moonstone cannon folds from the underside, as I couldn't make a decent sliding mechanism (not to mention splitting the nose in half), and I added some solar panels that fold out from the sides for fun. It took me about 3 days to make, and then I spent a few hours making it shorter to make it look better. I think it's really good, the only thing I don't like is that the hull is bulky and square apart from at the front, because the solar panel folding mechanism takes up a fair bit of space. You get the idea of a curve from the front though.


The other pics are fairly self-explanatory, if a bit self-indulgent. Meh. Sorry for the quality, they were taken by some ancient Kodak 2MP wood-fired camera. Pixorz.

See you!

BF Tooie

I appear to be hopelessly addicted to this game. I haven't played a game this much since... well probably Smash Bros and Perfect Dark on the N64. Used to do 10-hour multiplayer sessions on those... ah good times...

Anyway, joined a sort of unofficial clan, TUS or The Usual Suspects. Shout out to Snake, Revan, Doodle, BigMick and the rest. It's a lot of fun; we do stuff like one us nabs a plane at the start and parachutes into the enemy uncap base, then we spawn on them and proceed to wreak baseraping havoc. We snipe them out of their chopper on the helipad or while they're waiting for a plane, c4 the assets, lay claymore traps and try and nab the chopper or tank. A lot of the time the people we kill get really pissed off and come and get us in force, while the commander is wasting UAVs and artillery on us- but most of the time we survive through hotswapping the squadleader so we can always spawn. It's so funny having like 5 or 6 guys coming back time and time again to try and get us, but they can't stand up to 4 sniper rifles from hidden hillsides... :D

Patch 1.2... ugh. Basically choppers are fucked; their armour is super-weak now and AA missiles are massively improved in terms of accuracy and lock-on time. Also the attack chopper's rockets payload is reduced to 8x4 from 14x4 and TV-Guided Missile range is reduced. Planes are also subject to weaker armour, dogfights are now just whoever gets behind and a missile lock. Blackhawks and Cows are next to useless as they're the slowest aerial vehicle and the guns are crap now as well. It's just ridiculous that noobs can hop in an AA and take down pilots so easily who had to spend hours getting good. AA needed to be improved, but not that much. Really annoying, as I was just getting good at the attack chopper, I mean it's still ok, you just die a lot more, and I can't play Super Blackhawk Midair Repair Man anymore, it's too weak now. :(

Good bits about the patch are that mines don't activate from teammates, and there is a great new sniper rifle I want to get. Still love the G36C and E.
Played Special Forces a bit more and i'm finding it better now that i've learned the maps and found some decent snipe holes and where enemies will be coming from etc. I like defending the back stairs on Devils Perch, you have like 30 seconds to kill people trying to get up them (easy) and if they get past then they can taste some c4! Also I found a good sniping spot on Ghost Town; on a bank overlooking a couple of flags, you can get some good shots and it's far enough away so they don't often know where you are.

Okay that's it for now.
See you!