Snow

Just posting this for an excuse to show some snow photos.

 It came down worse than I first thought it would. I was only expecting a dusting.

It has dumped enough that camp this weekend has even been cancelled. (kind of glad)

I have taken over 1600 photos in the first two months of this year. A lot of which I am very happy with.

I have started on a long post about my current obsessions the past few weeks. That due to its nature will be a few days off.

I should have recorded a video or two, some of the blizzards and drifts have been very cool.

Snow photography is a bit odd. just a sprinkling looks bad but a large blanket takes away details of what is covered.

That is it for now, though if the snow sticks around I will probably take a bunch more.

It’s not been a fun week

I hate doing self portraits. And don't get me started on #selfie’s (I had to look up the spelling)

But here is some I have taken and oddly my plight of the last few days doesn't show up too well but you can see the source of my pain.

 

 Me circa July 2007

Here is a small time line of my latest issue. Saturday evening sometime after the England game I felt pain in my upper jaw on the left side of my mouth. Fun! tooth ache for the first time in a year or two. It wasn't too bad just a bit annoying. Then Sunday morning arrived and it was full blown strong throbbing pain covering my entire left side of my mouth.

I must have been bad, all pain seems worse at the time but it was enough for me to take painkillers for the first time in over a year. so rolls around Monday. Now able to contact my dentist i come to the realization that its nothing to do with my tooth but a swelling in my cheek by by gum. I now have a swelled up cheek and no pain in any tooth.

A nice side effect of the swelling was struggling to open my mouth wide enough to eat. Then numbness only came in waves with some nice bouts of pain to keep things interesting. To add to the fun I was now going to by busy every evening this week.

I have almost ran out of ways to explained to people why my cheek is swollen and I am almost temped to start making stuff up. (The photos below show the state of my face as now, it was more pronounced yesterday and Monday)

Left - awful. Right - Slightly less awful due to a valiant effort by photoshop

I have taken my share of self portraits but usually put a spin on it, my main photo is always the same style. But in doing today's selfie’s (taken at 8pm in my bathroom, such is my life) I have included two and they show why I hate them. The quality is crap it is a reason most people cover them up with stupid filters. I even tried to rescue one with photoshop.

That's better 2017

I hope my mouth gets back to normal before Saturday. I'm due to meet with some important people in the town hall.

2018's Film List [February]

Onto the short month. INDEX

01. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (02.02.18)
The last of Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance trilogy and perhaps the most strait forward. By which I mean it is crazy and very complex. It is a hauntingly beautiful film from the direction to the settings the music and even the cast. A much more understandable vengeance this time but the mess it causes at the end is something to behold.

02. A Dog's Life (03.02.18)
Chaplin from 1918. The mandatory madness at the start but it developed into a fun little story. One of the happiest endings I have seen from Chaplin. Silent but again the OST from 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture' worked well to accompany.

03. Neo Tokyo (05.02.18)
A strange name for this anthology film, the Japanese name translates into Labyrinth Tales which makes just a  little more sense. I dug this out because Otomo had a part to play and his section was the most detailed and to me the most interesting. Nothing seems to link the film together but it dose play with the mind and cognition a bit. Very well made and for 1986 it looks outstanding.

04. The Cloverfield Paradox (09.02.18)
Two things first, why in disaster movies are the crazy conspiracy nuts always right? Also the is no paradox!!! Such a frustrating film, I love the middle chunk and most of the rest but the are things I cant look past. Slopy writing and hand waving packed together with tropes that they didn't need to follow. So much to like and I like what it did to tie the Cloverfield films together. Also some of the direction looked like it was shot for TV.

05. The Animatrix - Beyond [short] (10.02.18)
The is so much you can do with a virtual world but mostly they are used to show a place but here it its played with very differently. I love how glitches around a house cause it to be haunted. The are a few cool moments but not much of a story to tell. It's a toy box film not a story film.

06. Black Panther [Cinema] (15.02.18)
It worked. Perhaps a bit too safe in story structure but the look and feel of the world was great. I just wish more took place in the bustling city. Very well acted and the story beats were effective enough. Such a bad viewing experience though, I forgot it was half term.


07. The Animatrix - A Detective Story [short] (17.02.18)
This one give a nice look into Trinity before the first film. Nice use of her Alice in wonderland cover. Another by Watanabe and his take on Noir is great. Much more slick than his previous entry.

08. The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (18.02.18)
Let down in two spots but other wise a solid little film. The is a bit of dodgy CG and the girls voice actor was awful. I love the places the story goes and the look and design of all the elements. They should have stuck to traditional animation for this one. I must give Æon Flux another watch.

09. Escalation [short] (19.02.18)
A very on the nose politically driven short film that mocks Lyndon B Johnson the US President during the Vietnam war. It must have been very divisive not just for its message but in the pictures it uses. Made by one of the key Disney animators.

10. Dante's Inferno (21.02.18)
The great Italian version from 191. I am somewhat familiar with the story of the Divine Comedy but reading it has been beyond me. The were some very surprising things, the effects and sets are very very good. The were one or two points I wasn't aware of that took me by surprise but from the point of view of Dante I guess it makes sense. I had to provide my own sound track and Elder Scrolls Oblivion worked well.

11. Your Studio and You [short] (22.02.18)
A nice little mockumentary by the creators of South Park. Supposedly it was just a internal bit of fun but surfaced online at some point. Dry and clever but it has a very narrow market.

12. The Running Man (23.02.18)
It should have been a god half hour longer. It skips past plot relevant stuff so fast it was easy to miss. I love the action and the theme. The use of real stars helped to sell it. The sound track was surprisingly good. Only a bit of dodgy direction but that comes with the times.

13. Source Code (24.02.18)
If they had put a little more into the explanation of the science behind the film then this would be up there with his first film Moon. It looked like it was going to be a 'normal' sifi film with a good ending but the last moments made it all the better but again it needed that bit more to cement the concept. I am still untangling it in my head. The only thing that lets this film down is some very cheep looking explosions.

14. Papers Please - the short film [short] (25.02.18)
The best film based on a video game? Perhaps, it is solid even if it lean too hard on the use of montages. I love the aesthetic of the booth and it captures the feel of the game. Not the story I expected but I guess it works. 

Not a bad list for the shortest month. Best? Black Panther.

A Problem with Ghosts

How do you tell a grieving person that something they believe is the ghost of a loved one doesn't exist?

 The Ghost from 'A Ghost Story'

This is the big take away I have come back with after listing to a paranormal podcast. I have found it to be hard to listen to over the past few days. For multiple reasons. They describe themselves a sceptics but that seem dodgy to me. They exist within their fiction of the paranormal and seem to come at things from the wrong direction.

That is not to say I think they are lying when they say that they don’t believe in ghosts. It it more that they seem overly willing to accept that ghosts could/should exist with the right evidence. But even that doesn't work, do they want ghosts to exist? The big issue is that, the points they give are very inconsistent. I think they are coming at this from a bad perspective.

The Ghost of a witch from 'Paranorman'

If you want to know what is happening you need to have no form of bias or as little as possible. My big gripe with ghost hunting shows are when they tell us what we are looking at, such as putting subtitles over static radio sounds. Pattens are much easier to find if we are told what to look for. This is the issue with hindsight. (This can be dangerous, see the investigation into the Challenger disaster and other post case studies).

One of the hosts said with every ghost photo they assume pareidolia, which yes many sightings can be explained away with. But that narrows your vision away from hoaxes, double exposures and the many other reasons ghosts are sighted. To look at something you need to see every single experience fresh. You need to know as much about the setting and story as possible. Only with more information can conclusions come naturally. You should see what the shape fits into, not what you can force it through.

The Ghost army from 'Lord of the Rings: Return of the King'

I don't believe in ghosts! I do believe in the existence of alien life!

I think I have good grasp of the Fermi paradox and my conclusion is yes. In my life I have heard family members talk about many strange occurrences and ghostly things and yet all the evidence I see is explained by other things. The is no Fermi for ghosts and to me most damningly there are no clear descriptors for ghosts.

I try to get the young people I train to think and asses the situations I give them. I want them to come up with different ideas and solutions. Most of all I want them to ask questions, to find out more information before going ahead with the task. Even something as simple as standing in hight order. My motto the past few years has become 'Everything is interesting' I will go into detail about this soon. But in a nutshell; The more you look at something and learn out it the more interesting it becomes. I think everything has this property.

The Force ghost of Obi-Wan from 'Star Wars: Return of the Jedi'

That is why I struck through 24 episodes of a dodgy podcast. They every now and then got onto a topic that caught my interest. The big one being the ethics of ghost hunting. If a ghost is a dead person then the is/was someone who loved them. How do you tell someone that it isn’t their ancestor but static from a detuned radio.

Some people like to batter beliefs of others, they are often called out as militant sceptics. Many are just frustrated scientists and people who get asked the same questions for years. But you do get on both sides people who don’t care about playing with peoples feelings, they will tall a story about talking to the dead or they will dismiss others as stupid.

The Ghost train from 'Spirited Away'

When do you intervene in someone's belief? When they hurt others? When it caused harm to themselves? It is a hard but interesting issue and one I will be thinking on for a while.