You could’ve heard me saying “i hate summer” a couple of times already. That may surprise a lot of you out there, so i should refine that sentence: “i hate the boiling hot of summer”. Consider: when it’s any other season than summer, the weather is all right: it may be cold, it may be raining, snowing, or windy, who cares: you can stay in the house, if it’s so critical, you can wear additional layers of clothes—but what do you do against the summer hot? Nothing. You could travel to northern countries, but that wouldn’t solve the problem, because on the one hand that costs a lot, on the other hand, you’d be a foreigner there, without friends and such. You can stay indoors, if you have an air conditioner or live in a old-fashioned village house, with walls as thick as of a fort, so that it’s conveniently cool inside—but what if you don’t have such a house? Go to the beach and let yourself be boiled. Well, that’s a way to solve it: you don’t try to resist it, instead try to enjoy it. But what if you have some official thing to do, have to wear a tuxedo and wait in front of the office of some clerk for hours, sweating yourself as dry as a mummy. The other seasons are a lot better: in autumn i’m always in crazy love, do fun stuff and usually i only remember the autumns of the years past; in springtime you can do whatever you usually do in summer, only that it’s not that unbearable; and in winter there’s Christmas, there’s snow and it’s cold, you can skate and it’s fun altogether. Summer can be fun too, but i can’t stand the hot.
Plans for tonight
Since i’m in the nosleep competition, i’ll have plenty of time to do whatever i want in the coming many hours. I have a couple of planned stuff on my “to be done” shelf, including doing at least three knotted bracelets, reading (and possibly finishing) at least two books (Abigél by Szabó Magda and Indul a bakterház by Rideg Sándor, both of which i should’ve read for the finals, but i didn’t), watching anime (probably FLCL and Venus Versus Virus), listening to music, blogging (i’ve been pressured—not as if that’s a problem—to do more german posts) and… well, whatever may turn out. I may go for a walk in the mountains or something like that. We’ll see. Oh, and i just realised that i have a couple of interesting subjects listed on the same shelf, so you’ll probably get a few nice articles and/or short stories too.
WALL·E
Remember there was that 1986 movie called Short Circuit, about a little robot who, thanks for a lightning, started to think and feel? Wall-e (i don’t feel like doing the official capitals and middot thing) is very much alike: a robot totally abandoned, with the duty to clean up the enormous amount of trash covering Earth, working for about 700 years non-stop, slowly learnt how to feel and how to think.
Stardust
I watched Stardust for two reasons: first, i’ve seen ads of it at the swimming pool when we were in Dunaújváros on the EFOTT festival; second, it was written by Neil Gaiman. Sure this doesn’t guarantee that the movie would be good–but it was.
It’s definitely a fairy tale, but here don’t think of the kind of Nevewhere, which was labelled a “post-modern punk fairytale” by some newspapers–Stardust is a lot more of a traditional fairy tale, just with a few twists that make it enjoyable for anyone above the age of “oh Snow-white is such a great story!”, and a great movie (i haven’t yet read the book, but i plan to). It seems Gaiman has some addiction to worlds present but invisible or unreachable, just think of the mirror world in the MirrorMask or the London Below in Neverwhere.
Avalon
Avalon is a 2001 movie directed by Mamoru Oshii. Are you familiar with Ghost in the Shell? He directed those films too, and i think that tells most of the story. In the not-so-far future there’s a new, addictive computer game named after the legendary island, where the souls of departed heroes rest: Avalon. The game is most likely what massively multi-player shooters will become as soon as complete neural connections will be possible. That technique makes Avalon extremely dangerous: there are some people who don’t awake from the game and become brain-dead, needing constant medical care. The main heroine, Ash is a professional player and was the member of the legendary “invulnerable” team Wizard, that after all proved to be not so invulnerable. In a pinch one of the members called reset (escaped from the game), and that led to the disbanding of the party. Ash only misses one of them: Murphy, their leader. From the past thief of Wizard she learns of a secret level (Special-A), where one can only get in by catching the Ghost (of a little girl) and from where there’s no reset if you fail. And there’s a possibility that Murphy’s in there too…
Proof
The first time i’ve seen parts of {proof} was about a month ago on HBO, and i thought it was really deep, so i watched it whole on sunday. I was right at first: it is a movie that strikes you, not the way the Titanic did but instead aiming at some undefined, unprotected point in your mind. Thus it’s not easy to write about it without revealing anything important of the plot–everything’s important–so i’d rather start with something easier to grasp: the starring. Three out of the top four characters are great actors (i’m sure they are, because even i know their name, being a total movies noob): Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins and Jake Gyllenhaal. Anthony Hopkins somehow again ended up with the role of a crazy man, though this time not a serial killer but a mathematician. As it’s often mentioned in the movie he revolutionised at least three fields of mathematics by the age of 21–though at 26 his illness started and that was more or less the end for him… The young Catherine, his younger daughter is taking care of him, this way taking a life-long maths lesson, constantly afraid of what if she inherited her father’s illness. The movie starts with her father dead, Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), his student searching through his papers for anything that may be of mathematical importance. Catherine decides to show him her biggest work, that solves a problem related to prime numbers present “ever since there are mathematicians”. But neither Hal nor her (extremely annoying) sister believes that she wrote it…
I won’t reveal no more of the story. This movie is great, in every bit of it. Yes.
Although
Although i’ve set my alarm clock for eight, i managed to stay asleep until ten. Then a quick breakfast and we left for Ipolytarnóc, where… oh well that’s beyond my abilities to write in detail about such a trip, since that village is famous for the fossils found nearby. When we arrived back, and after dinner, we went to the Tesco in town to get a few stuff that we couldn’t find anywhere else here–after “checking out”, i spotted a shoe store with some really nice footwear. I was in need for a new shoe for a while now, but though i checked almost all stores in town, there was none i’d wear. But there… In a minute i left in my new Adidas shoe. It’s great, i really like it. It’s a Superskate Vulcan Low and looks like this:
My problem with community sites
How does it feel to post your artwork on deviantArt, your photos or thoughts on Tumblr, or just a blogpost on the sphere, when you know that no one is interested, you can write whatever you want, you could announce that you invented the cold fusion engine, and minimized it so that it fits into your pocket, no one would read you, simply because they don’t know you are there. There are so many people on these places, that you need more than one out of the following: huge luck (for some editor or a famous blogger to stumble upon your activity), extreme patience (to constantly post your works, however tiring that may be, and wait for the people to slowly realise who you are), lot of free time (to go around the sphere finding interesting people and starting to follow them or comment on their posts, hoping that they’ll come back to you to return the favour—note, this is the best way to do it, though it needs loads of devotion) or loads of friends or fans beforehand (if you’re a successful blogger or artist before joining a site where a couple of your readers is present, then you won’t have to wait a minute to receive a comment on whatever you did). Regarding the last few words of the parentheses: the most annoying thing is when you do your best and write or draw or photo really high quality stuff, any no one pays attention because some “popular person” just pooped in his hat. It’s just annoying. You can’t (shouldn’t) spend all your time before the screen just so that you’ll get a couple more visitors, and a bit of appreciation for your work.
new dot facebook dot com
To be honest, i’m not that huge fan of Facebook, but i’m registered ever since my american exchange partner invited me. I wasn’t using it much, so i’m not familiar with it’s deeper functioning, but i’ve read that there’s a new version available, at least the layout is new, and it’s available at new.facebook.com. I decided to check it out, but except for a couple of changes in the layout, i couldn’t see much change. There’s a new bar at the top and the bottom of the page, the bottom one being the more important, displaying how many of your friends are online, your notifications and a popup chat. The Wall got a lot bigger space on the profile page, and somehow all the applications that took up so much disappeared (may be they are not yet running on the “new Facebook”), just a couple is squeezed into the left sidebar. The home page didn’t really change, the left column disappeared and thus the page became a two-column design, which results in a somewhat better look. But the main design, the colours and basically everything else remained just the same. I’ve got the feeling that they’re either going to change a lot more in the future, or they’re afraid that their users won’t be able to get used to the new interface if it changed too much—which is a real danger, seeing the average performance of community site users. If anyone else has a different opinion, or was using Facebook more than i, feel free to write your opinions.
Layout
I’m into layouts nowadays, it seems. I’ll write the promised two posts on the layout and/or version changes of those big sites, but now i’m just announcing that the possibly final layout of the next blog version is ready, more or less. Rather less, since i’ve only done a graphic design of it, haven’t tried to implement it into html as of yet, but it won’t be hard, because this one’s simple, but–at least in my opinion—looks great. While working on it, i realised that if i’ll have a tag system instead of or beside the categories, then the tags should echo the actual content of the post, which in many cases would mean that a tag should be present in more than one language. That’d be quite troublesome, but i think i’ll manage to figure out some resolution (such as multi-lingual tags, same id, different language, a simple double unique key in the database). One question: should the next blog remain in english (i mean the website itself, not the content) or should i rather do it in hungarian (or—don’t choose this, because that’d be loads of work—should i make a multi-lingual interface)? Is there anyone out there reading me, who doesn’t know hungarian?
