Category: Reckons

I’ve got the painters in.

Morgan Avery

My painting stuff is coming along well, by the way, I’ve produced a few, with varying degrees of happiness at the results.

James reckons I’m better than most of the people on his course. I don’t know. I reckon I’ve moved from Intermediate school to somewhere around 5th form level, at this rate I’m going to be a nuovo padrone in no time at all.

I’m not even starting ‘Ceci n’est pas un Magritte.’ for a while, sketched it out, but ummm, I don’t want it to be completely cack-handed.

So at this stage I’m still just playing around. It’s great fun. Very therapeutic.

I’m very pleased with the names of my paintings so far:

  1. Ninguno Elephants.
  2. Buzzy Slug.
  3. Maybe Dylan.
  4. Grumbus.

Anyone who wants to see any of them can bloody well wait. I’m not sure I want to show them to people who might point and laugh, and that means all of you bastards.

Frost.

Morgan Avery

Frost, right, well, frost sucks. For another thing, you shouldn’t ever be able to see your breath while sitting in your office, that’s stupid. Especially if the heater is on and the door is firmly closed. Maybe I should turn more of the computers on.

I meant it about the brownies, by the way, but I’ve got too many looming deadlines to get them up right now.

Volcano High

Morgan Avery

The other night we (Jimbo, Lummox (nee. Olderon), HotR & Moi) wandered down into our fair city for a spot of Film Festival Fun… Volcano High was on the menu, and it was güt.

Vaguely reminiscent of Battle Royale (the whole teachers vs. students in a future world in which there have been mass student revolts, etc), only with magic powers rather than crossbows or molotov cocktails.

Looks like it had a much bigger budget, though, with lots of fun CG, and stuff. Also has lots of physical humour, which probably make the laughs much more accessible to the non-Korean speaking audience.

James mentioned something about it being the anti-Harry Potter, and there is definitely some of that in it, though thankfully no podrace^D^D^D^D I mean Quidditch.

Painting id an expression of my ego.

Morgan Avery

I was out shopping with hot red the other night and chanced upon some canvases… I thought ‘right, I’ve already got some canvasses I’m not using, but perhaps if I get another one, it’ll be motivation enough to finish another painting’.

I’m painting my own interpretation of everyone’s favourite Rene Magritte work, I’m telling you about it so I’ll have my own ego forcing me to finish. As I’ll be putting a shot of it up when finished.

Is even my own ego, as mighty as it is, enough to get me to actually finish this work?

Notice I’m not telling you when it’ll be done.

The goodness of my city. *kisses Auckland*

Morgan Avery

It doesn’t rain, but it pours.

So, since we last spoke… Everything has happened.

  • I have work coming out of my ears.
  • I’ve moved house.
  • Had a car crash.
  • Got new toys.
  • And mostly been really really happy.
  • Oh, also had lots of delicious dinners on K Rd.

Auckland is being very kind to me.

Let me start at the beginning… Work. For quite a long time my business was just quietly ticking along, keeping me alive, but not doing much more than that, then suddenly, some time in June, everything just exploded, I got a heap of new clients, I’m working on loads of new sites, and I got an extremely lurative contracting position. So, financially everything is very happy right now.

Next, the car crash, driving with my gorgeous love, Hot Red… Leaving the St Luke’s car park, some guy changes lanes, right into the front of my car, I slammed on the brakes, but still caved his door right. Quite funny, really, the guy jumps out of his car and he’s like "I’m sorry I’m sorry, my fault!" and I said "Uh, yuh!"… Anyway, to cut a short story really short, his door was fucked, and my car didn’t have a single (new) scratch on it. Perfect. One key thing to note – you should probably never drive right away after being in a crash, the chemicals roaring around through my body were quite mood elevating, and as someone who always carries his emotions on the surface I became even more vociferous than usual… Very high indeed.

Then, I bought a new IBM Thinkpad… This goes along with the money thing, I guess. More money, more toys. It’s the way it works, I think.

Possibly the biggest thing to happen though was moving house, talk about a nightmare, anyone who visited the townhouse we were in will know that we had many might steep tight stairs… Manouevering fridges & bookcases was full of fun. Gotta tell you though, three smart strong boys make even tough jobs only moderately tricky. Definitely a lot more talking before moving things, but then right first time every time, including extremely dodgey cantilevering of large heavy items of furniture out of second story windows.

Oh, in the new house we have grass. A garden, with trees and roses. We have a fireplace. And lots of rooms. And real walls (not concrete blocks). It’s a lot colder in real houses than in big concrete erections, I must say. Oh, the wireless works much better in the new place, the wooden walls are like glass compared to the poured concrete and steel plates in the old place.

We haven’t had a flat warming, and I don’t think we will in the conventional sense, but we did have a lovely dinner with a few friends of ours, HoTTT+ Red made a bunch of wonderful curries, and munched on them, and some fresh roti & poppadoms… She even made Raita, super clever girl! YES!!!

That’s all I have for now.

The Matrix : Reloaded

Morgan Avery

Just back from The Matrix Reloaded.

Good stuff. Very very good.

There are a number of elements in the story which will no doubt be compared to Star Wars Episode 2, anyone who says The Matrix is the poorer of the two is grossly mistaken — still entitled to his opinion, as even people that are wrong can share. Thing is, I don’t know anyone who would actually say that, I’m wasting my breath. (do you think that’s air you’re breathing?)

The cave rave love scene… Felt strange, didn’t expect anything quite like that. But it did fit. Thse people have their own culture, they live with one another, they have things they do. One of them is dance in slow motion, frequently jumping up in the air.

In some ways it feels similar (vaguely) to the ‘rolling around in the meadows after riding appalling unrealistic alien cow things’ Episode 2 love scene.

I believe seeing the Animatrix beforehand gives a big advantage, you can see certain things, I feel, which might not tied together so cohesively…

I did think, though, (select paragraph to view slight spoilers) that ‘Beyond’ dealt with the Matrix’s explaination for ghosts and grouls and such much better than ‘the twins’ and the vampire guys in Reloaded.

I also felt that the Wachowskis made some scenes very long, some people may say overlong, I think they were just making a point. The Burly Brawl, which everyone knows is coming, is an excellent example. I thought ‘man, this is cool, and it’s *still* going’, much the same way I felt the first time I saw ‘Heat’, the running through the streets shooting at cops sequence felt almost like a little story in itself it was so long, but…

… I liked it all, it was saying ‘these guys are doing this thing, and this is all of it’. Anyway, Heat is not Reloaded.

Some people have said that Reloaded breaks some of the rules it set in the first movie, I don’t see that. Nothing that happens in the Matrix is real, anyway, the rules *can* change.

One thing that might not make a lot of sense to people is (select for spoilers) the fact that rogue or obsolete programs aren’t deleted, this doesn’t make sense, obviously if you have a program that doesn’t work right, you get rid of it, you might just uninstall it, or you might even reformat and reinstall your OS, well, these programs aren’t like Photoshop, these programs are self-aware, The Second Renaissance parts 1 & 2 go into detail about the fact that the machines value their own existance, the whole war between man & machine is started when one robot doesn’t want to be disabled and rebels against it’s masters. Anyway, the point is this: deletion isn’t deletion, deletion is murder.

I believe that once we seen Revolutions, we will come to realise that each of the Matrix movies come together to form one big movie. Each part must be seen in context with the others before understanding of the whole can be achieved.

The Matrix : re-Voltron-ated.