How Do I Blog?

A lot has been going on to prepare me for the immediate birth of my second child, it seems.

We’ve had a fair share of midnight dramas recently, hospital related nonetheless to pre-empt our (likely late night) visit to the maternity ward. I had some issues with my heart a week ago that turned out to be minor palpitations caused by a bit of over-exertion on a few levels, so I’m trying to take it easy (stress-wise, booze-wise and so on). Then Evie came down with a bad turn of croup on Sunday night to make for another dash to the hospital, this time in an ambulance with her on the nebulizer for her breathing, but thankfully she quickly came right.

Now all that’s done, we’re ready to have the kid thanks!

Clare is winding down work this week and prepares for a six month stretch of … being a mother! Baby was due on Monday (revised due date) but still hasn’t arrived and tomorrow is the official (original) due date and we’re hoping this weekend will yield the eventual winning date. Evie finishes creche (as it is closing over the Christmas break for good!) and will spend a lot of time at home with mother and child, which will also be an interesting new development.

Work has finally slowed down a notch. It’s still hectic and full on, as it has been since the turn of the year, but it’s at least not providing me with as many late nights and stressy deadlines. That said, I’m busy procrastinating from my Board Report right now… so I’ll be back to stressing soon.

Evelyn has been developing a lot as of late, tons of talking and expressing herself - still difficulties in getting her to understand concepts at times and getting specific answers to specific questions, but she decided herself that she was too old for nappies, as well as a bunch of other stuff. She’s decided she’s excited about “babby brudda” so let’s hope that positive force continues once he arrives.

I’ve quit poker for a while since I won’t have any time for it and I’ve essentially bust my online roll. A dry spell that lasted about $1.5k worth of MTTs will do that. Variance is a bitch. I’m still considering a live tourney appearance at some point… not sure when though, I’m keeping that possibility saved up for a rainy day.

On the hobby front, not much to report, but I’m finally reading again:

Okay so far, nothing amazing… I’m only a few chapters in.

I’m going to try to get back into gaming again… I’ve picked up Fallout 3 once more, though I only played maybe 10 hours of it previously, it seemed like a fun and engrossing game. I’ve also got a bunch of levels to get through in Plants Vs Zombies, which is always good for a 10-15 minute play… I think I’m on level 4 of 5 so not too much to go.

I also played a demo of a game called Machinarium yesterday, beautiful and intriguing little game - hard to say whether the charm would hold up over the full duration of 30 or so levels, but I’m considering it once I get the current games out of the way.

We’ve also been watching Dexter season 3. I was skeptical about returning to it seeing as they really seemed to jump the shark with season 2’s finale and losing Doakes was a blow to the continuing cast, but it’s actually a lot of fun. They’re really playing fast and loose with tricky moral code issues this season through his less than savoury friendship he’s developed with an Assistant DA (played by the typically hammy Jimmy Smits) who shares his passion for less ethical forms of Justice. Some of the soap opera padding shit (like Debra and her CI, fuck that storyline seriously) is boring, but there’s never too much of it and some of it is very worthwhile to make a decent character beat (like the records-lady dying of lung cancer).

My mind has been wandering back to fictional tales as of late; snippets of script appear alive and playing out in my head, a one-liner here and there, a character twitch. I’ve started allowing myself to daydream in those worlds again as I used to. Taking a break from poker might afford me the luxury of playing in my own headspace for a while as opposed to concentrating getting into the minds of others.

That’s enough of an update for now! Next time will be a direction to facebook baby photos I suspect!

I can’t be bothered to give a full review of Season 5 of The Wire, suffice to say that I felt it wrapped the series up in style - sending up many of its elements from previous seasons as biting satire of a failing system and giving a fitting farewell for many of the characters and plotlines. The newspaper storyline lacked bite and was the weakest of the “settings” where The Wire story plays out on a different stage but that said, the docklands was far weaker than it until the arc finally gained some emotional reasonance in the closing stages.

Given that I’ve now finished the five season spread and watched approximately 70 hours of TV over the past few months, I reckon I deserve some time away from the idiot box.

Or rather, replace one idiot box with another.

I’m looking at upgrading my home rig to a 23″ lcd (for multitabling the internet pokers) with wireless network so that when I finally buy a laptop I can hook it into the net without too much worry plus it allows my PS3 to stream content from the PC so I can stop burning CDs/DVDs for my spotty DivX player.

Work continues to be busy, and the month of November (due date for babby 2) is rapidly approaching. I’m feeling somewhat fatigued at the moment but still peppy enough… I’d like a holiday but a lack of annual leave days and valid opportunity is prohibiting me on that side.

I’ve kicked off the poker blog again at: http://adventuresinlowlimit.blogspot.com/ for any and all musings on my wanderings through the poker world, as I’ve been enjoying some success again recently.

That’s about all for now. I might go see Inglorious Basterds tonight as too many people have said that’s really good for me to ignore.

Update

What’s been going on with me lately? Not a lot to be honest…

Sike.

I’ve been ridiculously busy. New career has been skyrocketing as some positive news regarding our shareholding has meant a lot of work for us at Head Office, plus in general the job has been very engaging… but also financially rewarding. It’s good to have payoff commensurate with effort!

I also got to visit Daydream Island recently for a “conference” where a lot of “heavy working” (drinking) was followed by periods of “reflective introspection” (vomiting) and this led to an “appreciation of our working environment” (lounging by the pool).

Outside of work, life as usual continues, Evie awaits the birth of “baby brother” eagerly and our recent 3D scan was good to get a closer look at the little fella. I think both Clare and I have gotten more comfortable with the idea of a Mini-Me hellraising around us for the rest of our lives… ahh, parenthood is bliss.

I’ve been playing poker again, I know, I know… but in the past 120 days or so I’ve had over $5k US in profits so I must be doing something right! I’m enjoying the game, playing MTTs only really, just need to make sure I don’t get addicted and try to play lots of different stuff all the time.

And other than that…

The Wire - Season 4

I thought it impossible to top season 3. The writing was impeccable and the scope of the narrative pretty astonishing, some of the emotional swings and loss of familiar faces was a big impact. Well, it just goes to show that they can create tangible connections in a short period of time that hit home just as hard, if not harder due to the nature of their particular struggles, as we follow a group of schoolkids getting taught at school and in parallel to that, the real life teachings of the corners. It’s heartbreaking and frustratingly inevitable as we chart the rise and fall of some youths and the lives that some of them cannot escape. This season simply cemented and then gold-plated its status as “best show on television”.

I’m currently a third of the way through the final season, and it is no disappointment.

District 9

I’m still not sure how I feel about this on an overall basis. I wasn’t actively put off (much) during the screening I attended, except at the key stage which I’ll cover off later in the review, but looking back on it the stuff that it did well is (for some reason) clearly undone by the (frankly, quite dumb) broad-stroke approach they took in making this flick.

Starting off as a gritty pseudo-documentary retelling the origins of a nomadic and rather pathetic alien species pejoratively called “Prawns”, who are herded into ghettos and exploited by the local Nigerian gangsters for their inexplicable love of cat food, the film puts its best foot forward. You are sucked into the day-to-day doings of a hapless goof charged with the unenviable task of relocating the entire Prawn populous in an attempt to minimise crime and destructive disturbances both from within and without. It’s worth noting that the protagonist (Wikus) isn’t terribly likable and this a slightly refreshing standpoint for a movie to take… not too often is your character unlikable unless he’s a charming rogue, or devastatingly handsome anti-hero, or whatever, and usually that character makes a turnaround like say a Han Solo saving the day moment… aaaaannd this movie is no exception.

But I’ll get to that.

The initial groundwork in detailing an incredibly complex history is masterfully done in a series of “interviews” and news reels from the past two decades. You get a real sense of the scope of the problem facing the country but I never felt they did quite enough with it. There wasn’t any real indication of the international community having any involvement here, which seems quite preposterous to be honest. No mention of the UN or International Concerns, but instead some faceless (presumably SA) corporation are given the “shadowy government” role for the course of the film. This is fine for creating some biomech-R&D intrigue with secret labs and white coated Gordon Freeman types, but it totally removes the ability to make any sort of compelling social commentary. The parallels between the Prawns treatment and Apartheid are blatant and resonate well enough for a metaphor, but aren’t really played with terribly much.

However, quite neatly and without breaking immersion the movie side-steps from its pseudo-doc feel to an immediate-feeling action narrative as all hell breaks loose. Wikus is put through his paces after his accidental exposure to alien biotech (with some nice references to The Fly) and once diagnosed, is whisked away from everyone into a secret lab to be used as a conduit to alien weaponry. After some experiments and the conclusion that he’s going to be chopped up into little bits, he manages to break free (in a very convenient fashion, I might add) and then the chase vehicle component of the story begins and it becomes a sci-fi action movie.

Unfortunately all the popcorn trappings that come with the genre start to traipse in and mix with the original setting and fresh take on a sci-fi premise. A sadistic Prawn-hating commando is drafted in to hunt down our protagonist, the reason for father-in-law being an evil scheming corporation head became apparent and the voodoo-inspired Nigerians jump in the mix to provide some additional cannon fodder. The reasons why they are doing what they’re doing are fair enough, it’s quite simply laid out, the problem is that it isn’t terribly interesting. So we then look to our protagonist for a challenging dramatic arc and characterisation to fill in this void of rather bland fare.

It’s just not there. Wikus starts off the movie a generally unlikable prick and (in my eyes) ends it not terribly different, except physically. He’s quite clearly a racist and that never changes through what I was shown. And yeah, the whole “he becomes like them and hence gains understanding” angle only works if they explore it guys, so don’t try to pass off the mere physical transformation as anything more than that. In terms of demonstrably understanding the Prawn’s viewpoint, Wikus grows not one iota beyond eating a tin of catfood and growing a few ugly appendages. We know he’s not a monster (or particularly smart) by his refusal to kill a Prawn and then his attempt to break back into the facility to help Christopher (a fellow Prawn) escape from Earth using the biotech fuel for their command module. That’s really the extent of his development though, because later Wikus gets a disappointment from Christopher regarding the true extent of his predicament and lashes out, clobbering his only hope and then (again, stupidly) crashing their only chance of escape and his only chance of saving himself from the condition plaguing him. He launches right back into the selfish stupid mode that got him into the position in the first place, and you know what, while I commend them for challenging the audience with a non-standard protagonist … the end result is that I really didn’t care for him by the end of the story and didn’t particularly want him to be saved from his own stupidity and ignorance.

What followed next was some of the most awesome action sci-fi I’ve seen in a long time. On a conceptual and visual level it was fantastic, the visceral delivery of these scenes was somewhat undercut by the lameness of the script and the terribly inevitable, sloppily constructed “change of heart” for the character (hence why I think the character didn’t really “change”).

That said, I could probably watch Wikus wipe out the gangsters and commandos for ages as the splatter factor and ingenuity of the visuals really gave the action a naturalistic and realistic (yet alien) feel. They really nailed this part of the movie.

So… yeah, not much more to add to that I’m afraid. An incredibly conflicted B.