Jul. 16th, 2012

Twilight

Jul. 16th, 2012 09:56 am
jack: (Default)
I finally saw (most of) Twilight. I found it so-so, nothing I especially loved but nothing I especially hated (although there's stuff I probably would have hated, but I used up all my hate when people were telling me about it :)).

I find it funny that Edward is so good at some things, but after eighty years is still socially clueless and still going to school -- I guess that's partly what you get when you have to live in seclusion.

He really is a total tool to Bella, but I guess that's what you get as a teenager. It's the sort of "act deliberately enigmatic and tell her what she ought to think" that comes naturally if you think you're a superior species to someone and (somewhat reasonably) self-tasked with keeping them safe without telling them why. But the thing is, it's the sort of interpersonal behaviour that can be really enticing as long as you can both pretend that he really does know better (I certainly get swept along by people who are super-confident in conversation) but also comes off as really jerkish if you stop to think that every time he tells her what to do, he really DOESN'T know better than her if it's a good idea, and it might actally be really dangerous, but he just says "trust me" because he assumes he's right.

The baseball is awesome. It's a bit ridiculous -- what would an American teenager's ultimate fantasy be if they had lots of superpowers? Use them to be super-awesome at baseball. Not think "hey, there's a reason humans don't play baseball with a two-meter baseball diamond, it would be a better game if we spaced it out appropriately to our physical speed and strength". But it's really, really lovely to see the supernatural characters just having some fun, so few books actually have that for more than half a page every few books. And nice that they have a family at all.

Other than the film being about romance, Bella is not actually an awful character: she's a bit bland, with no other great personal ambitions shown, but there are snippets of her relationship with her friends and her parents, that are not great, but show her as a person. Something else would be a much better rolemodel for empowerment, but she chooses the relationship with Edward more than he does. She even advocates her friend persuing the boy she's interested in rather than the other way round.

Some nitpicks )
jack: (Default)
Last week I started learning python and seeing if I could code a proof of concept for a tile-based adventure[1] game with a branching undo and redo tree.

So far I'm liking python and pygame a lot :)

I'm slightly embarrassed, I spent essentially all this weekend hacking on it, which is a lot of time, and although a bit was spent on sunshine, shopping, tidying, and replying to emails, I should have made sure a bit more was. And it means that my estimates for "how much work there is to do" are still off. I spent most of the weekend tweaking interface stuff, which now looks quite good but always absorbs a lot of effort.

But hearteningly, I think I'm getting better at leaving stuff in a working state so it's easier to leave it for a bit then pick it up again.

It's surprisingly theraputic to be able to refactor as much as you want without any fixed deadlines, so the code is the way it "ought" to be.

I don't know if the project will actually go anywhere, but for the record, what's complete is:

Read more... )

Active Recent Entries