My Motley Meanderings

Extract from an email I sent last night:

If you ask me it's the outside contractors who get the worst of it. The client employs you to build him a missile complex underneath an extinct volcano, complete with giant piranha-pond, then just as the contract is nearly fulfilled and you're looking forward to blowing all the profit on six months in the Bahamas, Bond comes along and blows the place up. The client gets into a submarine and vanishes, and you're left explaining to your suppliers why you're unable to pay them for the twenty-seven monorail cars you ordered.

From the XKCD web comic.

Found via Neil McGovern's blog.

I've never played the Goldeneye N64 game, but I've played a few other first person shoot-em-ups. I was a huge fan of the Duke Nukem franchise - I once bought an N64 just so I could play Duke Nukem 64. So I found this video pretty funny. The dull, repetitive background music, the stupid enemy AI (particularly the soldier who tries to run off a balcony), the clumsy movements, the player who repeatedly bumps into a garage door instead of ducking under it, the soldiers who fire dozens of shots from close range but somehow manage to miss, the slight delay between hitting an enemy and the enemy reacting to it, the corpses that mysteriously vanish, the stream of identical bad guys...

Link via Jonathan Coulton.

I'm (re)watching the James Bond movies as research for BC:2007 and, mostly for my own benefit, am writing some notes about each one.

Bond movie no. 5: You Only Live Twice, released 1967. The screenplay was written by Roald Dahl.

( Notes, with spoilers, after the cut. )

I'm (re)watching the James Bond movies as research for BC:2007 and, mostly for my own benefit, am writing some notes about each one.

Bond movie no. 4: Thunderball, released 1965.

( Notes, with spoilers, after the cut. )

I was amazed to discover that the skyhook thing Bond and Domino used at the end of the movie actually existed: see this Wikipedia article. That is so cool. I want to try it!

I'm (re)watching the James Bond movies as research for BC:2007 and, mostly for my own benefit, am writing some notes about each one.

Bond movie no. 3: Goldfinger, released 1964. This film spawned two persistent myths that were debunked by MythBusters: that somebody whose skin is covered completely by gold paint will die of "skin suffocation" and that firing a gun through the window of an aircraft at altitude will cause explosive decompression that will suck out anybody who isn't strapped down and cause the plane to crash.

( Notes, with spoilers, after the cut. )

I'm (re)watching the James Bond movies as research for BC:2007 and, mostly for my own benefit, am writing some notes about each one.

Bond movie no. 2: From Russia with Love, released 1963.

( Notes, with spoilers, after the cut. )

I'm planning to (re)watch one or two James Bond movies a month as research for BC:2007 and, mostly for my own benefit, will be writing a few brief notes about each one.

Bond Movie no. 1: Dr No, released 1962. My Dad says he has fond memories of watching it in the cinema when it first came out. He must have been about 14 at the time.

( Notes, with spoilers, after the cut. )