Alden Bates' Weblog

The results of the "Anti-Smacking referendum" were published in the paper this morning. Summed up, they are:

1. Sue Bradford thinks New Zealanders are stupid and were confused by the question.


2. Jonkey is going to have another coffee and let a committee consider the ramifications.


3. Oh, and one bunch of idiots wrote abuse on the ballots, which would have only been read by the electoral counters who had nothing to do with the referendum in the first place.

Another triumph for democracy!

I'm not saying it was a total waste of time, as it does prove once again that politicians only care what the public thinks if it's an election year.

Because the Transformer Wiki has a lot of articles on real people, not all of them complimentary, so occasionally the people turn up and try to edit their articles, as Frank Milkovich apparently did today.

Hilarity ensued!

I wonder how often that happens on Wikipedia.

Making a Doctor Who anime, part 2:

Smashing work!

So Burger King, though they have the Revenge of the Fallen toys here, haven't introduced the BBQ Double Stackticon. Luckily my favourite burger chain Burgerfuel have come to the rescue with BURGERTRON.

The primary ingredients are a 1/3 pound Optimus Prime beef patty, Philadelphia cream cheese, mango, and prosciutto. I'm... not quite sure what those ingredients in particular have to do with Transformers, but what the hey. They're tasty.

I noticed that ever since I upgraded Firefox to 3.5, it would refuse to shut down properly. The Firefox window would disappear, but when I went to shut down my PC, it would report that Firefox was still running and "not responding".

So I tried a bit of an experiment — I started Firefox up, and then tried to shut it down again. Watching the process in XP's process manager, I could see that it had jumped from using 40MB of memory to 160MB, and hadn't shut down.

I then tried turning off extensions one-by-one. The problem persisted until I disabled Google toolbar. With that disabled, suddenly Firefox began shutting down properly again. "AHA!" said I.

So then I re-enabled Google toolbar, expecting the problem to return. It didn't. I re-enabled my other extensions. No problem, and now Firefox 3.5 seems to be behaving itself. That's mighty strange. Mighty mighty strange. I guess I'll keep an eye on it and see if the problem comes back.

I have found something awesome.

The 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Already I have learned:

In New Zealand "The Public Health Department has exerted itself to improve the sanitation of native villages and combat the mischievous trickery of Maori wizards and "doctors"."

Of Maori: "That they were not indigenous, but had displaced an earlier Melanesian or Papuan race, the true aborigines, is certain."

London is: "the capital of England and of, the British Empire, and the greatest city in the world"

Obviously this is all true, because it was in an encyclopaedia.

I have a strange fascination with the season 3 Transformers episode Fight or Flee, not because it's a well written episode, even though it is well written, but because the variations in animation are so extreme. You'll go from a dynamic heroic shot of Rodimus Prime standing in front of explosions to a shot of a bunch of generic block robots all in the same colour. It appears as though an animation studio, possibly Toei started animating it, got about half of it done, and then ran out of either time or money. It's hard to say if the lower-quality animation that crops up in a couple of shots was done by another company, or it was just temporary animation intended to be replaced later when the proper stuff was done.

But I've found what I believe to be the worst shot in all of the original Transformers cartoon. Here we see Cyclonus welcoming his leader, Galvatron, to a newly conquered planet:

Unfortunately it appears it's not Galvatron at all, but merely a cardboard cut out.

I upgraded to the latest version of FireFox the other day. Unfortunately, as is usual with these major updates, one of my favourite extensions — Tab Mix Plus — hasn't yet been updated to work with the new version.

Using FireFox without it makes me wonder why the FireFox team made some of the decisions they did. Like new tabs opening at the far right of the current tabs. I find that behaviour confusing and conter-intuitive, and without Tab Mix Plus there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to alter it. Nor can I find a way to have newly opened blank tabs automatically show my homepage.

I presume there's good reasons for both those choices, but I have no idea what they are. I guess in the meantime I'll have to wait for my extension to be updated. :)

Having seen Revenge of the Fallen at long last, I can see that Michael Bay has taken on board a lot of the criticisms from the first film:

• We complained that there wasn't enough screen time for the Transformers, so the sequel has a lot more screen time for the Transformers


• We complained that there wasn't enough interaction to establish personalities in the Decepticons, so there's a lot more Decepticon interaction.


• We complained about the rampant comedy, so the sequel has a lot more comedy.

Oh wait, that last one isn't a positive. The first ten minutes of the film is a great action sequence, as Autobots and humans hunt Decepticons together in Shanghai. Then we cut to the Witwickys' house, and are hit with the sight of Mojo taking his new pal doggy-style on the Witwicky sofa.

COMEDY GOLD!

Yes, if you loved the scene in the first movie where Bumblebee pees on Sector Seven agent Simmons, you're sure to love the humour in Revenge of the Fallen. If not... well, they don't raise the bar. At all. It's sad when Transformers Animated, a cartoon aimed at children, is more mature than the live-action movie series.

So, anyway, ROTF is two and half hours of robots beating the crap out of each other while the humans have comedy antics and occasionally some plot happens. There's an even better, though spoilery, review on io9.com, but it's very spoiler. Speaking of, the plot left me with some lingering questions, which I'm putting under the cut to avoid spoilering anyone who lands on the main page.

Continue reading "Wednesday Night Movie: Revenge of the Fallen"

Hey! Which movie sequel featuring giant transforming robots smashing up cities come out later this month? That's right, it's.... TRANSMORPHERS: FALL OF MAN.

No, it doesn't have Shia LaBeouf, but it does have Bruce Boxleitner! And it's coming out on the 30th of June! What an amazing coincidence!

You can watch the trailer here (I'd embed it, but new wide-screen YouTube is too wide for my blog).