Mixed Media, Saturday 9 July 2016

I watched The Fall on my flight to Edinburgh this week. It’s a visually stunning film, and I wish I’d watched it on a bigger screen than my iPad Mini. It would have looked amazing on a big TV screen, and even better in the cinema.

At the end of the documentary Daft Punk Unchained on Netflix, I found myself slightly unsettled by the fact that Random Access Memories is three years old. Not so much “huh, I would have guessed it was 2014, not 2013”, but more a case of “huh, 2013 seems like quite a long time ago now.”

Season 1 of Ash vs Evil Dead was fun, but although Bruce Campbell’s character Ash Williams is supposed to be coarse and self-centered, the show doesn’t always stay on the right side of ironic. Horror comedy is hard to pull off well. This mostly succeeds. Not sure if I liked it enough to seek out season 2 when it arrives.

Oh, and I’ve finally got to the point in season 1 of Person of Interest where it has pulled me in. I think it was in episode 15 (“Blue Code”) that I felt the characters — especially Detective Fusco — had reached a critical mass of back story and complexity, and I was starting to care about what happened to them next; and also about what happened to them before. I’m one episode from the season finale now, and there’s a lot of mystery still left to uncover. I can see myself jumping straight into season 2 when I’m done.

I had a ticket to see Twin Atlantic in the Kleine Zaal of Paradiso on Tuesday 28 June, but the band had to cancel the gig because of illness. I hadn’t even heard of them until last month when Scott tipped me off about them, and I noticed they were playing Amsterdam. Since then, I’ve been listening to their album Great Divide a lot, and I had been super excited seeing them in such an intimate venue. Unfortunately, they have rescheduled the gig for Tuesday 19th July, when I’ll be in Scotland. :sadpanda: At least I’ll be seeing Area 11 while I’m over there.

I loved their first album, All The Lights In The Sky, so much that I feared the only was was down. Although there are some parts of Modern Synthesis that haven’t grabbed me yet, there are four splendid rock songs that leaped out at me right from the start: “The Contract”, “Versus”, “Watchmaker”, and “Red Queen”.

Saga continues to be magnificent.

Farewell to stickers

The anti-glare coating on my MacBook Pro (late 2013 model) has been wearing off. It started at the top of the screen, around the camera, but over time an area right in the middle of the screen became affected as well. (The area that overlaps the trackpad when the case is closed.) I brought it along to the Apple store this morning, and they immediately took it in for replacement under the relevant Quality Program. The Quality Program isn’t shown on Apple’s list — you have to take your machine to the store before they will check if it’s covered. Apparently the program only runs until October, so if you have a retina screen whose anti-glare coating is delaminating, should should get moving.

Unfortunately, when they replace the screen, I’ll also lose the stickers I had built up:

After finishing at the Apple Store, I went to the American Book Center to see if I could find volume 6 of Saga. They didn’t have it in stock, but they did have a massive stock-clearing comic book sale on, with boxes of excellent titles on offer for €7.50 each, or 3 for €20. I kinda went bananas, and picked up:

  • Captain Marvel (2014) vols 1, 2, and 3 (Higher, Further, Faster, More, Stay Fly, and Alis Volat Propriis) by Kelly Sue DeConnick, David Lopez, et al.
  • She-Hulk (2014) vols 1 and 2 (Law and Disorder and Disorderly Conduct) by Charles Soule, Javier Pulido, et al. (She-Hulk’s appearance in Howard The Duck made me want to read more about her.)
  • Rocket Raccoon: A Chasing Tale by Skottie Young and Jake Parker
  • Wolverine (2013) vols 1 and 3 (Hunting Season and Killable) by Paul Cornell, Alan Davis, Mirco Pierfederici, et al.
  • Wolverines (2015) vols 1, 2, 3, and 4 (Dancing With The Devil, Claw, Blade and Fang, The Living and the Dead, and Destiny) by Charles Soule et al.
  • The Manhattan Projects vol 1 by Jonathan Hickmand and Nick Pitarra

This was on top of vols 0 of both Spider-Gwen and Silk which I had picked up in Edinburgh last week. Uh, so, yeah.