Since it’s new year’s eve day party thingy mcthing I’ll keep this short because nobody is going to read it anyway.

Last night I went to see A Clockwork Orange at the playhouse and it was just a thing of joy. Shit was so cash.

No seriously, everybody who has ever even thought about doing far out things that bend the mind and touch you deeply and truly. I don’t think I’ve ever been this affected by a theatre performance before. It was weird. It was strange. It was fucking brilliant.

Such perfect captivation of the story, so amazingly performed. Half the time I was afraid they might actually start pounding away at the audience and doing all manner of strange things to us. And half the mind I was just left with a giant WTFLOL in my head. And then there were times when it was so mindboggling, so sick, so perverted it was painful to watch.

If you can possibly find the time, if you can spare the few euro it takes, fucking go see this show. You shan’t regret it; hat’s off to Mladinsko Gledalisce.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling a deep urge to go fuck somebody up with a stick.

Tags: Around the World, Clockwork Orange, food for thought, intrigues, Kids and Teens, life, New Year's Eve, People and Society, review, Theatre

Children of Men is a bloody brilliant movie that the above trailer doesn’t quite do justice. It is quite simply the best dystopian/post-apocalyptic story my brain has ever had the pleasure of listening to.

The story revolves around the idea of what would happen if the whole world turned to shit, humanity was doomed and only England of all places, remained standing against the onslaught of shite. The best part is that the whole sequence of events and what exactly is going on is never quite explained. We’re told that the world started going fuckwards because of some sort of flu pandemic in 2008 – note the movie was made in 2006 and we had a bird flu scare in 2008 – and then in 2009 all women went sterile … this luckily hasn’t happend IRL yet.

Well the movie goes on 18 years after humans couldn’t make babies anymore. Inexplicably there is a civil war setting up about the rights of immigrants and the whole British government is being very Orwellian in operation. Interestingly, they’re becoming more and more Orwellian in real life as well.

Children of Men, next to the the awesome story, also features  very good cinematography and a neo-hippie – played by Michael Caine – who smokes a lot of weed and is a bloody awesome chap. But most of all, it is one of the scariest non-horror movies I’ve ever seen simply because it’s so fucking realistic you can almost touch it.

Everything, bloody everything, could become true in the next few decades.

Tags: England, Influenza pandemic, intrigues, Michael Caine, review

Last night I watched Avatar nice and proper at the moving pictures – in 3D of course because fuck it, if they spent developing the funky new tech for seven years, I bloody well feel obliged to watch the movie as it was intended.

In short … it was fucking awesome! This is the first movie in 15 years that I am willing to pay for again and probably will. Sometime this week. Yep, I’ve always liked watching movies I like several times in rapid succession – this one however I can’t do justice with my rig at home. So the moving pictures it is!

Because I want each and everyone of you to go see this masterpiece I will not tell you anything about the story, but here are some tidbits that I believe make it more than just your usual blockbuster effects pornography.

1. There is a very good story that ties the whole movie together, albeit extremely cliche, it still throws a glove at the face of modern culture and blahblah. No story talk!
2. So. Much. Eye-porn! Love love love! It was like Angelina Jolie, Liz Hurley and Scarlet Johansson having sex with my eyes simultaneously for three hours.
3. Very fucking awesome scenography! You know those incredibly artistic comics you see in Flight and other proper art books? Well this was just like that, except in a movie! A fucking movie! I’ve never seen anything like it before. It was quite beyond words.
4. The details! Oh gawd the details. How often do you see a movie where scenes shot from within a glass canopy of any sort actually show the glass? That’s right, none. Until now.
5. The world made sense. This is very rare in fantasy these days, but the world made very much fucking sense. The animals looked right, even the topography and fauna looked proper and correct. It felt like properly exploring a foreign planet, not like somebody was pulling ideas out of their arse.
6. The blue people had a language. Now maybe I’m just a language geek, but it fills me with great delight to see that an artist went through the pain of creating a proper language instead of just stringing random words together … although it did sound a lot like a derivative of Quenya.

Now, there were a few annoying little tidbits that felt somewhat … off.

Like for example, if every animal on the world has three limbs, why do the humanoid peoples only have four? Doesn’t make sense.

Or … uhm … why did the animals feel so derivative of Earth animals? You have this wonderful opportunity to create something awesome, and you do, but why the fuck do you make my mind go “Well that’s a Rhino equivalent” … “and that’s a dog” … “oh look, a hyenna” and so forth? Don’t do that. Making animals that are awesomely designed, but then almost neglecting their behaviour … tsk tsk.

All in all, the movie is a definite thumbs up. All f0our thumbs!

Tags: Arts, Fantasy, Film, life, review

It was it truly was! Happy fun times all around.

Until about like six in the afternoon or whatever the time was when everybody looked like a knackered zombie held together solely by the caffeine molecules in the blood stream. The last presenter I was paying any amount of serious attention to – Igor Kolar – even opened his talk with something to the extent of Excuse me when everything goes wrong, but I’m knackered as hell.

But it was fun, although the insolent bastard who provided only herbal tea should be shot, quartered and hung as a pinnata and beaten with sticks by small children until tea started falling out … meh we the tea drinkers forgive him, there was still taurin available.

I put forth a presentation of the Synaptic Web, how we’re getting there and what it means blahblahblah. Unlike last time I even uttered actual words this time! Victory for all involved! Well … not completely, there was the small issue of my having been versed in doing pitches lately, which resulted in the talk being bloody too short by a country mile.

Somehow we fixed that by me blabbing on for a few moments about what Preona is up to and then the whole presentation sort of devolved into a conversation of sorts and we stumbled around the interwebs for a while looking for interesting things and we even watched a video! Yay.

Now that I think of it, I could’ve just rolled the video of Khris Loux talking about these things that can be found on synapticweb.org, some other time perhaps.

Meh it wasn’t all that bad, we ended up being thrown out and even if the public was less than amused, standing there in front of them and making a fool of myself was damn fun.

What else … (the phrased used often during my presentation) … oh right! We can talk for a bit about the wonderful food that was served. It was wonderful! Omnom!

And uhm … well I guess 90% of the people reading this were at webcamp ljubljana anyway so I’ll just shut up now, here’s the slides for my presentation.

Tags: life, review

Yesterday I finally installed my pirated version of Snow Leopard and thus bringing yet another large kitten into my bedroom. It was a shame that I had to go out and buy a dual layer DVD, but such is life when no external hard drives are available to burn the .dmg to and install from there.

So far I must say I haven’t noticed much difference between Leopard and its fluffier cousin. It’s obviously more responsive, something I’m particularly fond of since the old install was getting a bit sluggish for some reason. The fact they managed to trim the operating system’s footpring by almost ten gigs is simply mind blowingly awesome as well. But as a certain mate put it, that only means the previous version had a serious flaw.

Another thing I really love about the new OS is that … I don’t notice it’s there! At all! When you move from XP to Vista, Vista to 7, everything is so vastly different and horrible. Even moving from one Ubuntu version to another can be quite a shattering experience. But updating to Snow Leopard … nothing. The installer made sure to transfer all of my Time Machine backups and everything is as I left it. Down to the tinniest of settings. Awesome! Even all the software migrated properly

But despite the update being quite unnoticable, there are small jars here and there. Things that aren’t exactly as you’d expect and make you go “Whoa!”. I think it’s a bit of an uncanny valley problem, the changes are so subtle you don’t expect them and it makes you queasy.

One such example is that dock menus are now black and transparent, wtf? It honestly startled me when I first saw that, simply wasn’t expecting it. Another is that expose’d windows now get a jarringly fugly blue border around them upon mouse-over. Another wtf. The fact they now have their names spelled out under the screenshot is rather useless as well, makes ‘em look like desktop icons … but not quite! I preferred the old way when the window simply highlighted (became brighter) and there was no name, it’s essentially usless information anyway.

Perhaps the most noticable of changes is that everything, absolutely everything, is more saturated now. Can’t quite say whether I like or dislike this GUI tweak …

PS: I only pirated because Apple is so stupid as to not sell their software in my market and, worse still, not allowing shops in nearby markets to ship to me. So fuck ‘em.

Tags: Apple, Operating system, review, Time Machine

There I was, a complete virgin queuing up to go watch Brüno on its release day no less. I’ve never seen Borat and all experience I’ve had of Sacha was some innocent Ali G – yes, very very insanely innocent compared to what Brüno showed me today.

And we were off, the audience was rolling in laughter when just the intro music started (wtf?) – you just gotta love a movie that can make you laugh before it even begins! But wait, there’s more. After the first ten minutes we’ve seen pretty much everything there was in the trailers.

Then the really weird shit started. All the tacky sex jokes, all the hidden what the fuck moments and all the laughter you can comfortably get out of an evening in a dark room full of strangers.

Yes, yes it was sporadically funny.

Yes, yes it was weird now and anon.

Yes, yes it did catch you by surprise evey other scene.

So why did I feel so strangely confused, so strangely abused, so strangely unsated when I came out? Well … Brüno is Monty Python meets porn. There really isn’t any other way of putting it.

You know when you watch a Monty Python Circuss episode it’s funny at times, but mostly you’re just going “Why the fuck am I watching this? What the fuck is this shit?” and are wishing you were watching one of their films where they’re actually funny?

Brüno was like watching porn you know was supposed to be so absurdly disgusting it’s funny – but it wasn’t, felt a bit predictably boring – you know the subtle humor is funny, but somehow, put together, it just feels like someone was raping your mind. It’s almost De Sade in nature – a fight between viewer and artist to see who gives up first.

Everybody should watch Brüno! Every each one of us. It’s going to be one of those classics we all remember as much better than they actually were. Such is life.

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• Et tu, Brüno? (thestar.com)
• BrÜno’s Sacha Baron Cohen: More Than a Comedian (time.com)
• After Brüno, Hollywood depictions of gays may never be the same. That’s a good thing. (slate.com)

Tags: Brüno, Film, intrigues, Monty Python, review, Sacha Baron Cohen

Even though talking about Coraline feels a bit old and redundant now that it’s four days after the fact, but what the hell, I was busy and blogging over the weekends has always seem a tad bit dirty … almost like I was poking people in the eyes saying “Hey you, yes you, you’re being lazy!”

Anyhow, in an unprecedented feat of being social I assembled my posse this friday to go see Coraline in an actual cinema. Wow! I haven’t done this since … well I’ve never done it to be honest. The reason why I did it is even more mindbogglingly strange – I wanted to go see the movie solely because I used to read Neil Gaiman’s blog and he seemed like a cool cat and talked a lot about how Coraline the movie is being made after one of his stories.

It did not disappoint.

Sure I haven’t read the book, but the movie was absolutely wonderful and its wikipedia page says there aren’t many distinctions from the book. Perhaps the most notable is the invention of a Wyborne character who seemed quite crucial to the plot in the movie so I have no idea how Neil managed without him …

Deciding to watch Coraline in XpanD and the lovely three dimensional thingamagic also turned out to be a stroke of genius. All of the effects were tasteful done and I could identify only two or three scenes that were 3-D porn. This, to me, is something that really sets Coraline apart from all the other 3D movies I’d seen, which were thin on the plot, empty on the characters and drowning on 3D porn.

There really isn’t anything I can find to criticise about this movie,the art was awesome, the story was great and the characters were spectacular. Even the soundtrack was bloody magnificent …

… ah yes, but there is one thing. There is a scene with dancing mice that purports to be stop-motion animation done with 64 or so figures moving simultaneously on stage and thus being a magnificent exampleof just how much awesome this movie is. However, watching the scene gave me an uneasy sensation of CGI repetition. They just moved too unanimously to look real and even their movement seemed rushed. Looked like frames kept being skipped.

All in all though, the movie is bloody awesome and I think everyone even remotely interested in proper cinematography should go see it.

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• Coraline: animation by Neil Gaiman (telegraph.co.uk)
• Coraline review (telegraph.co.uk)
• Neil Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’ Gets Musical Treatment, New Interpretation (splashpage.mtv.com)

Tags: Coraline, life, Movies, Neil Gaiman, review

There we were, dozens upon dozens of likeminded geeks and almost three girls! We had taken over the Josef Stefan institute and made it our own place of networking debauchery and pizza consumption.

The experience was something completely different from last time I sniffed such an event. Most notably it was my second time so I knew exactly what to do, whom to talk to and it was all in all a much friendlier feeling since I knew something like 70% of the faces instead of like 10% I knew last time. Yep. Slovenia is incredibly small like that.

Most of the presentations I went to were quite fascinating if a bit dull at times … except for one miss @sparkica whose Brainmachine presentation was lightyears ahead of everyone else’s in terms of entertainment value. Her (joking?) narcissism really puts the icing on top of all her sillines and I do believe if she someday decided to stop being a computer scientist a darling career in comedy easily awaits her call the morning after.

I was also very pleased with how my lightning talk turned out, apparently people found it as refreshing as I’d hoped to have a guy standing in front of a nearly packed auditorium in complete silence for five minutes. My biggest fear was the slides wouldn’t end up entertaining enough and the audience would start chattering amongst each other. BUT! They all went along with it nicely, the impromptu musical background Mr. Brdo came up with (People Are Strange – The Doors) was incredibly fitting as well.

However I’m not so certain whether my lightning talk was more of a presentation or an art installation, what do you guys think?

Anyhow, the official tally at the end of the day was:

• 17 talks
• 12 lightning talks
• 2 geeks in the hospital after fainting at the sight of that big boobed hostes
• 3 lost virginities
• 1 person trampled to death trying to get sparkica’s autograph
• 5 constipations from pizza overload
• 1 very bored waiter
• 2 very hot Red Bull Bunnies
• 1 disgusted look from vegetarian burek
• 10 awkward geek-to-girl conversations

PS: sorry I couldn’t make it to the after party, but after wednesday’s openCoffee and thursday’s @freeeky taking me out drinking and the barcamp I must’ve met something like 20+ new people this week. That’s more than I usually meet in a month and my brain just isn’t used to it.

PPS, my slides:

Tags: BarCamp, Geek, life, review

There once was a boy, whom you wouldn’t be far from wrong by calling Swizec, who liked racing games. He was once good at such games, completing numerous different rally simulations and need for speed games and all manner of weirdos. There was one, however, that eluded his skillful grasp – Rally Trophy. That he never did get the hang of.

But soon he stopped gameing altogether and the unfortunate game faded from memory and drowned in a long series of sleepless coding nights. Then, one day, as if out of nowhere, the old love rang at the door. It was the only game he could think of that worked on the dazzling sparkle that was his new Mac. And he played, he played a lot and then some.

And he won. Quite much. Except on hard, that was too hard and he only got to 70% before it became too insane.

Then one lonely night, with his girlfriend far away and his code old and boring he decided it was time to play some games again. And he searched and he danced a bollywood dance and he found Richard Burns Rally. A game that surprisingly worked near perfect on wine.

Ah but Richard Burns Rally wasn’t just any old rally simulation, oh no, this was a realistic rally simulation. So realistic in fact, it comes with its own set of driving tutorials. And the boy sucked, the boy sucked so very much he needed to resort to input controls tweaking just to be able to play even passably lousy on his keyboard. The driving wheel, sadly, unfortunately, woefully, did not play very nicely with wine and the boy does fear this game of games can only be played … with a racing wheel controller.

But anyhow, to see the boy suck, please point your eyes at the following shiny pictures of strangely fast motion that the screen recording device sped up for some inexplicable reason.

Tags: funny, life, Motorsports, review, Richard Burns Rally, Simulation