Battle Angel Alita

Finally got round to seeing this, as it was on Sky Movies, Friday, and all I can say is, wow.

Didn't realize it's a James Cameron film either, and after Titanic and Avatar which in my eyes are both abysmal films. This is a real revelation.

I won't spoil it and I've purposefully used the naming from the old Manga release we got here of the anime. It's something like Alita: Battle Angel (and GUMN in the original Japanese) but don't let that put you off. It's epic.

The plot, has her found mostly broken and tossed out on the scrap heap at the edge of town. Repaired by Dr Ido with the mech body that would have been his daughters replacement legs, she explores the world and learns that there is a big fuck off midgar style plate that serves as an upper city and that the world was plunged into a post apocalypse wasteland due to a war with Mars.

I will not spoil any more but will say this, it's miles better than Captain Marvel.  For one, when Alita fights, she gets knocked down, loses and picks herself up and fights again. She's flawed in a way that Captain Marvel isn't.

I know the MCU has its fans and that but I found the whole thing to be boring, she was a perfect superhuman and apart from smashing a blameless Streetfighter cab, largely a personality vacuum.

Alita isn't. She displays emotions, and acts just like a teenager would, which is cool and entirely in keeping with her character. I can't remember what emotions Captain Marvel did but I don't see her getting smacked around by the Kree and then coming back to wipe them all out. It just went on with her acting like a big space Karen, wanting to talk to the manager and that.

The only weak bit is Dua Lipa's track on the end credits, which although good doesn't really fit, would have preferred some sterling electro or synthpop maybe Luke Eargoggle or Analogous Doom as the outro, The main music is fine and is by Junkie XL which is cool he's done a lot of film work, think "Deadpoof" and you'll be halfway there as well as A Little Less Conversation by Elvis.

And yes before you as its set up for a sequel and you do get used to her big eyes in this.

Overall score. 9

We need to talk about Apu

So this has come around again, Apu from the Simpsons is apparently voiced by a white guy.  Specifically Hank Azaria who is the voice of chief Wiggum among others (Wiki says  Superintendant Chalmers too, he of the enjoyable luncheon meme) but not Mr Burns as I originally thought. Apparently being a white guy and voicing an Indian character is bad mmkay and you should really give it to an Indian guy because current year and such.

It was always an odd thing to see Apu growing up.   Him behind the Kwik E Mart counter was such an English thing, as there is always an Indian run Corner Shop here.  I never saw any Indians on US TV growing up (what imports we got back then), never any allusions to curry or any other south Asian cuisine and certainly never any Gurdwara or Hindu Temple let alone a small shrine to Ganesh that Apu has in his shop 

I didn't really care about this to begin with, as to be honest, the Simpsons has been dead to me for ages.  Its gone from a definite stop everything and tune in to Sky One at 6:30 to a gradual levelling off of interest, to plain indifference once the new season comes on Sky.  In fact replace Simpsons with Sky one and you'd have my reaction to the channel itself but that's beyond the point.

To be honest Apu was one of my favourite characters along with comic book guy and Lionel Hutz (voiced by the much missed Phil Hartman) he was always treated fairly and off all the characters seemed to have the better deal.  I grew up around a big Indian community and hung out with the kids at school and  no one really gave a fuck about his race or that.  (they mainly argued religion and the perennial shitness of the England cricket team as a bonus I learned a few curse words in Urdu which is nice).  Its only recently that its become a problem, and which I give you this conundrum.

Even if you get an Asian guy in to voice act, you'll have to keep his accent the same.  Because if you weren't born here (and I remember the episode where Apu takes his citizenship test) you'll keep your accent no matter what.   His kids though should be more American than the Americans as they're born here, just like it is in real life.

Ace(r) Camera

Here's something, we've found an old camera thrown out at work, so why not do some sort of review of it.

Its an... Acer CI-6330 from about the mid 2000s with a 6 Megapixel lens and 3x optical zoom plus 4x digital zoom. There's full details in that link above about its various stats and stuff but this isn't a bad bit of kit.

Like I say it was binned for reasons I suspect is entirely down to its absolutely brutal battery life. We road tested it today down by the riverside and got through 12 shots before it started moaning about low battery and shut itself down like a whiny little cunt, no amount of coaxing could get it to show another shot so we missed out on a classic image of  a badly painted knock off Barbie that looked like it had a cold sore, in Sams 99p store.

There are a few other niggles with it that means that I am definitely looking a gift horse in the mouth here. The first is that whenever you switch to a preview it spurts text all over image for a few seconds thus obscuring your view and the last is its finicky with its SD cards an old SD card works fine as does a Micro SD card in its adaptor, but anything else causes a card error especially when I've added some SDHC cards that I've had and used in other cameras.

The good points to this though are the absolutely massive zoom on it and the fact that its whisper quiet so you can take wildlife shots without alerting them.  If you want a massively detailed image from far away then this would be good to use it's a shame that it'll probably run out of battery life before you had a chance to focus on anything.

Incidentally image quality is rather nice on this as you can see if you scroll down (ignore the first two they were taken by the digital zoom) and its reassuringly heavy and well built. Which is another plus point to the whole thing.

In Conclusion.

A well built camera with a nice zoom and a few niggles let down by an absolutely brutally short battery life.
5/10

These Oystercatchers were a good 40 feet away.

Mud and general decay.

Little Dunnock tests the Digital Zoom.

Small Tortoishell out in the early March sun.

Do not adjust your eyes this is down on the Thames at Erith.

Hornchurch Junk Tour.

For the first time in ages I got to do a junk tour.  We normally head toward Romford or Walthamstow both places that have proven lucky in the past, this time though we decided to go off the beaten track. 

First of all though I've been to Hornchurch before its not really to look around and mainly for a nature walk around Elm Park which lovely though it is is in the totally opposite direction.  What I did notice from these ramblings of mine was a load of charity shops in the main town.  This is where we started.

I'm not kidding either there are something like 6 - 7 shops for such a small town, including a Sue Ryder and a St Francis Hospice.  Oh and for some reason when I went they decided it would me music day, so not only was there a pub with a live PA and a shouting clown, they had  a few bands out side the shops including an old man singing I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts for that extra surreal sensation. 

Transport links.
Hornchurch tube station is about a quarter mile outside town so beware of that if you are not used to walking or a just fat and lazy.  Thanks to planned engineering works I had to catch a train at West Ham instead of the tube and change at Barking to catch the tube onward.  Although in hindsight getting off at Upminster would have been better.  Fun fact:  Upminster is a place I was fascinated with as a child as well as Central Line stop Theydon Bois, sadly I've never been to either. Anyway back to the finds.

I managed to snag a few good books here too. We got Superfreakonomics and a Gary Larson anthology both highly recommeded especially if you have a fetish for cows in 60's glasses or odd economics (why is a $2 brass like Father Christmas*).  We also spied some non armada Hardy Boys Detective stories which I would have had if I didn't already have them.

But most strange of all we got a few games, they had a lot of PS1 titles and were pretty sure its where PS1 games go to die.  Along with the inevitable stack of  *FIFAs they had Pro Pinball the Fantastic Journey for just a pound, haven't tested it in EPSXE yet but shouldn't cause too many problems.  Finally we decided to have a nose around Romford and was overjoyed that nearly every bus went there.

Oxfam in Romford is a great place to buy CDs and we got the excellent Global Communication 76:14 and the not so excellent Sharon Stoned Sample & Hold album (despite it looking like it was all electronic its just a nancy boy Indie pop record). Plus some old Soma releases (Percy X) and that was the makings of a grand day out.

2oo, 2OO, 200, We made it to 2Oo.

Well this is our 200th post and before we get down to business I'd like to say thanks to all our viewers. 

Mostly you're here to complain about Freecorder and read our Xmas review of the year, but I hope at least some of you are tuning in for other stuff (even if it does not have many nice pictures like all the other blogs).
Anyway we have another disparate junk tour for you today.  This time we're back at Camden and have a brief pit stop at Ilford.

Camden

Camden is the best for thrift stuff.  There are a good few chains of Charity shops with an unending stream of worthy types giving away stuff and more importantly it has a chain of Music and Record Exchange which means it gets the cast offs from them as well as stuff from your more normal punter.

Case In point.  We managed to pick up albums by Like A Tim and Autechre and this is from a charity shop rather than some boutique record store.  Which goes to show you the power of Camden and their Middle class socialism centered outlook. 

You aren't here for the good stuff you want to know the absolute junk we got, and this doesn't disappoint. We picked up three tapes from a shop that billed itself as a Charity shop but has no overall charity it gives to.
It has a shed load of CDS and Vinyl as well as a small box of tapes.  After I had picked out some goodies and started looking fruitlessly through the vinyl an Irish Tramp came in and tipped up the whole box and began searching through the whole lot, even inquiring if they had anymore out the back.  Anyway we got...

Arvo Part. Tabula Rasa.

Not junk and certainly an aberration in classical music in that it is not readily pigeon holed into 3 catergories.
Advert music, rubbish that sounds like silent movie Music, and Unlistenable modernist rubbish.

In fact the best thing about this is that it was genuinely affecting, and full of emotion either that or I was knackered after a long day.  This is considered a highlight of the trip.

Nix Mix.

This is just a plain tape with a lot of acid jazz and old soul on it. Think Brand New Heavies and Incognito and you'll know what I'm talking about, its neither good nor bad just average.

Hypnotherapy Tape.

This is the real gold.  A tape of a hypnotherapist who sounds alternately gormless and creepy, complete with drops in audio and noise from being too close to the mic.  Its rather funny.

Oxfam.

These are the biggest scalpers going in the business, and consequently where I spent the most cash, we picked up a few records here including the aforementioned Like A Tim album and a few singles including Spectre dub a collaboration between The Orb and Manasseh.   We were also invited upstairs to check out more vinyl by the shop clerk which we readily did.  They have more books and a load more records  to check out.  The best thing I saw but didn't get was a graffitied version of Vanilla Ice's album with a speech bubble of him saying I suck Satans cock.  Someone obviously had a sense of humour and I'm a big enough Bill Hicks fan to get the reference.


Ilford.

There isn't much here but it did see the bizarre return of Japanese Saturn games in incongruous settings.  This time it was the turn of both the Dreamcast and Saturn versions of the Tomb Raider franchise.  Which is unsettling to say the least.  One of these days I'm going to turn up in one out of the way borough and find a lone copy of Radiant Silvergun or some such rarity up on the shelves (knowing my luck in Oxfam for £100).

We did  pick up Sounds of the Sea a flexidisc / Childrens book hybrid narrated by Michael Aspel and is some sort of promotional item for Ribena.  If you're a fan of Mr Scruff samples of this turned up on Ahoy There the last track on Trouser Jazz. Apart from that and the fact that they had a PS2 network disc in the local thief converters meant it was a good day out.

WinUAE

Been playing around with this for a week or so. In fact its more like the pure unalloyed joy of Winuae, plus Octamed 5 and a few sound samples and a throwback to the late nineties when I made Dance music just for me. Friday night I called MED night, an excuse to fire up Soundstudio on the Amiga and put some tracks together, in order to emulate my heroes (Largely Derrick May and Juan Atkins but latterly Electro, thanks to Dave Clarkes Electro Boogie X Mixes). Oh and some dub too we never released any of our stuff, although I did give a split tape of Music 2000 Tracks and Amiga hits to a mate. Depressingly none of the tracks convert well when transferring them across to MP3 file format on PC, and we did some corkers (as well as some right old shit).

Sadly WinUAE doesn't make it easy for you, and could really do with taking a leaf out of the Playstation Emulation scene, that relies on plugins for most tasks. There is a big fuck off list of things covering the likes of for various processors, Kickstart roms (Amiga BIOS, display options and Adf Files of old floppy games. Its frighteningly complete and at the same time arcane and obscure heres a list of stuff that I've come across.

Recording.

Getting a video or audio clip of anything is a prime example of the pure unfriendliness of WinUAE, something that is a simple dropdown menu command in Nestopia, actually takes numerous trips to various menus in WinUAE, specifying commands and resolutions and even then your never sure if it'll work. (In fact if it does, it'll run so slowly while doing this you'll wonder why you bothered in the first place). Adding a category to the side bar with a few output options and codecs could alleviate this a lot.

File formats.

Currently all you can run is ADF files which are copies of the Amigas floppy disk format, its the only format that WinUAE recognises and nothing else. Which is a shock because late in the Amigas life most stuff would have been released on CDROM instead of Floppy, and yet its not covered, no iso. or CDROM for you. Another shock is that there is a rival format called IPF international preservation format which covers disks too and yet requires a plugin (which despite following its instructions WinUAE will not recognise). Lastly Amigas use the lha. format to pack files (zip is never used - though lzx is). Look on Aminet and you'll see miles of lha. files without exception, and yet WinUAE relies only on ADF only.

ADF ADF (sorry Earth Defence Force).

The other thing with ADF files its that nothing and I mean nothing will open them or indeed create them save for a few transfer programs. While this isn't actually a problem for WinUAE indeed this is its strength that it can make new ADF files to store programs and files, its certainly needs looking at.

Stuff WinUAE does well.

F12 Program break.

This is probably the best of the lot you can exit the program at any time by pressing F12, to switch disks or generally fiddle with the settings. Remains a genuine feather in its cap and a true modern achievement.

List of stuff.

The big list at the side of WinUAE is not only baffling but counts as one of its most joyful things, finding the quickstart guide and everything else is a breeze because its all labelled correctly. Changing between Amigas and going from the and ancient A1000 to a no less venerable but capable A1200 with 060 processor and 128meg of ram.

Stuff I wish WinUAE did.

Used a folder on the desktop as a harddrive, because while most amigas didn't have them, they were more common during the late phase when Commodore went bankrupt and acutally became an necessity in the end.

Didn't distinguish between chip ram and regular ram, an A500 with 4GB memory, fuck yeah, make it so.

Use samples and stuff already on your desktop. Unlikely, it would take an awful lot of converting to IFF. or Raw format, to make this work.