August has been a slow blogging month. Not sure why - as usual I’ve got a lot of nothing in particular to be verbose about. It’s more of a “can’t be arsed” phase. My Blog Reading has also fallen victim to that. So, dear diary, what have I been doing? Well, I have been…
(more…)

So there’s this book meme going around that’s based on the Big Read or something similarly populist and that I found out about at Lisa’s. There are some rules along the lines of having to bold what you’ve read, underline what you love, italacis/ze what you intend to read and strike through what you’ll never read/read again.

I do this more often with films (namely the Top 100 films on IMDB at any one point) but, you know, what the hell. I’ll do this as it’s a space filler.
(more…)

Is it possible to write, direct and edit a short film in 30 days?

The answer is, quite obviously, yes. Easily. I mean, you can do it in 48 hours as is evidenced from the plethora of “Make a film in 48 hour” type challenges that some festivals hold. The last time I planned to do one of those, I knocked up a rough first draft of a script in an hour or two but, as is ever the case, the scope and scale of the story evolved into something which would probably require far longer than 24 hours to film (with another 12 hours to edit). Other events intervened to put the kaibosh (sp?) on that though.
(more…)

When I started my present contract in Nottingham, I needed a place to live in during the week. I found a nice flat in an old converted mill that was well furnished and at a reasonable rate. For convenience, I decided to rent the flat under my company name but had to jump through some hoops such as credit checks and references before being able to do so. Even though the company has been around for 6 years, it’s only fully been used in the last 2 years so at the time had little solid credit history. In the end, I had to pay 6 months rent up front before the letting agency would let me move in which wasn’t a problem and was actually quite convenient. I’ve got to admit, though, that the entire process made me feel a little like I was in the wrong – like I was some sort of scam artist or potential criminal.
(more…)

It’s almost embarrassing to admit but my shiny new laptop has got a cold.

It’s my own fault, really, as I wasn’t paying attention. I also was doing something fairly – but by no means hugely – risky. Let me start at the beginning. Last weekend I got the urge to revisit an old game called SWAT 3 which is a tactical police squad shooter that’s set in real-life LA locations and can be quite entertaining. It’s an old game – released in 2000 or something but I still have the CD so installed it. Next task was to get patches for it which is not as easy as it sounds because a lot of the links to patches and a lot of the fansites which gave comprehensive patch information no longer exist but anyway, I managed to get that done. One problem remained: the game wouldn’t recognise the CD in the drive (which, I reiterate, was a genuine, shop bought, original CD). I was faced with two options: 1) Try to fix it or 2) find a no-cd hack for it (which, for those of you unfamiliar with these things, is a hacked file which allows you to play the game without needing the original CD in the drive).
(more…)