When my parents first moved into their home, it lacked a sufficient degree of indoor-outdoor flow. After many years, several major extensions, a new deck and big glass doors all along the back, the success of their efforts to remedy this situation is represented by the fact that Frank now flies into the house four or five times a day in search of insects, with the casual insouciance so typical of fantails. He has shown complete disinterest in our attempts to shoo him back outside. In fact, he has taken to bringing other fantails into the house, where they swoop and caper and trill.

Traditionally, the entry of a piwaiwaka into a house is generally considered an omen of death. Some say it just means visitors, but mostly it is death. Hopefully the dread qualities of such an omen are diminished by repetition. Since there has not been a mass outbreak of death in the family or the neighbourhood, I suspect that the amount of death is inversely proportional to the number of visits. It is probable that two visits mean half as much death, and so forth. At Frank’s current rate of visitation, it seems that the family will soon have visited upon it a small paper cut or slightly upset stomach.

Here are a few photos of the preparations for my cousin Nathan’s wedding.

Having informed those people who ought to be informed personally, and discovered that others are already hearing about it through the bean vine or from the loose talk around the municipal molasses well, it is now well past time that I committed the following piece of information to my blog, in case there are people out there who would want to know, but haven’t developed the necessary taste for molasses beans.

Later this year I shall be returning to Christchurch for residing purposes. The exact date is yet to be determined, but it should be sometime in early July.

Apologies to Darren, who I shall be kicking out of my preferred bedroom.

Welcome to the world, Tamati Freeman.

You’ll find it’s quite spacious, so there’s lots of room to keep your stuff in.

Why is it that when my neighbours have friends over, they all seem to hang out in their garages with the doors open? Why not go inside where there are comfortable sofas? Or if they want to be outside, why not the other side of the house with the grass and the patio?

Is this an Auckland thing? Something I don’t get because I’m insufficiently interested in cars?

My best guess is that they’re all smokers, whose rental agreements don’t allow them to smoke indoors. But they don’t want to go all the way outside, so they have come up with the theory that the garage counts as outside if the door is open.

When they encounter a big item of news, people who write blogs about technology seem to have a special penchant for writing posts that begin with some variation on “in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last week…”. I believe this is a sort of disclaimer you use when you feel you need to say something about the big news, but you expect that your readers will probably already know about it. You’re late, but at least you admit it.
In my case, I do not write a blog about technology. I write a blog with no theme whatsoever, on a wildly sporadic basis that pretty much guarantees I have nothing but particularly determined readers, or at least ones who have at some point been interested enough in something I wrote to subscribe via RSS or LiveJournal. If anyone has been under a rock it is me, and for a considerably longer period than a week.

The other day, in the single unlikeliest move since their last extremely unlikely move, Apple released some software called Boot Camp that lets you run Windows on the new Intel-based Macs.

Even by Apple’s standards, this is a risky move. On one hand, lots of people say they would like to use a Mac, if only they didn’t have to test websites on the Windows version of Internet Explorer, or use a specialised application at work that doesn’t have a Windows version, or play whatever the cool game is now. I don’t know, I don’t follow the games so much. Based on what people say, there would appear to be a large market of people who would like to use a Mac most of the time, but have to use Windows for a few things.

On the other hand, there’s a very real danger that if you can run Windows software on a Mac, in a couple of years’ time software companies will decide it’s not worth making Mac-specific versions of their software. That happened to the Commodore 128, which never got much software written for it because it could run Commodore 64 software, and to IBM’s OS/2, which in practice mostly ran Windows applications. From now on, if people are going to keep writing Mac software, Apple’s going to have to provide them with pretty convincing reasons.

Apparently they’re pretty confident of this. It makes me nervous.

In other news, I shall be in Christchurch for a couple of weeks starting from… about halfway through April… and staying until… about the end.

I would be more precise, but for the fact that my laptop is currently in the shop, and it has my calendar on it. My back-up hard drive also has my calendar on it, but the only computer I currently have at home runs WIndows 98, and I suspect the chances of getting it to read an HFS-formatted disk are negligible to negative.

A good thing to know is that if you ever drop a laptop, but it seems to be working fine, there may be a couple of months’ delay before it suddenly stops being able to recharge the battery. This may happen on a Friday shortly after the close of business, and shortly before you urgently need to edit a video on it.

In any case, the video got made by slightly more painful means, and the world (or at least the Eurographics Sketch Tools conference) may now see the glory of InkKit recognising sketches of diagrams in real time. After a number of very long days working on this and related matters I now have a few weeks’ freedom to mostly pursue other matters, like tests and assignments for the courses I’m actually taking.

But anyway, I’ll be in Christchurch in the second half of April. My sister is having a baby, and my cousin is getting married, and I hope to be doing some more development work, but if you’re going to be in Christchurch around the same time, the chances are good that we could, if you like, meet. Or, if you don’t like, I hope you will at least appreciate that I gave you fair warning.

The level of enjoyment I experience in watching a film is usually not directly correlated with how good I find the film itself, but instead with the difference between how good I thought it was and how good I expected it to be beforehand. I am more disappointed by a mediocre film I thought would be excellent than by a film I thought would be abysmal but which turned out to be merely bad. Therefore, in order to maximise my viewing pleasure, I try to keep my expectations to a sustainable level. Thus I was a little concerned when I found myself looking forward so much to seeing V for Vendetta. I did my best to imagine it being a disgraceful mess like every other adapatation of an Alan Moore comic thus far, but I kept hearing good things about it. I expected disappointment.

As it happened, I need not have worried. It was a faithful adaptation of the comic, and also an excellent film. And given recent political trends, the temptation to compromise what is basically a story about a heroic terrorist bringing down a corrupt government by blowing up symbolic buildings must have been difficult to ignore. But they didn’t compromise, and with any luck that decision will pay off in marketing terms.

Some of the narration was a clunky and redundant, and I thought the start was too abrupt, but these are minor matters. For once in what seems a very long time, the producers actually understood their source material. The adaptations to shift the setting to the near future of today’s Blairite Britain instead of the near future of the Thatcherite Britain in which the comic was written were made with good sense.

There were even some areas in which I thought they improved on the comic, and at this point I feel I must provide a

Spoiler Warning.

I like that they de-emphasised the question of whether V is Evey’s father. It’s still there in the background of the film, but it’s only actually mentioned once, and then indirectly. Since both versions are ambiguous, and it would diminish the story to be given an answer, I thought this was a good way to go.
I also liked the Benny Hill sequence in the middle. In fact, I thought they did an excellent job adding humour to what is otherwise a very grim story. Unsettling dark humour that served only to exentuate the grimness. V wearing an apron would have been funny, but not in keeping with the mood of the story. V wearing an apron, listening to Cry Me A River, making Eggy in a Basket in a frying pan, with his horribly burnt hands revealed in the first and only time we see any part of his body, was a different matter. It’s all in the details.

One might criticise the film for being melodramatic, but I wouldn’t be that one. V is basically the Phantom of the Opera as anarchist revolutionary, and he’s supposed to be melodramatic. It is, from his perspective, just what the world needs.

In any case, I didn’t actually sit down to write a review. Mostly I sat down in order to put off doing more marking, an endeavour at which I am succeeding splendidly. But I had a plan in mind, and I have drifted away from it.

There was one other change from the comic that stood out for me.

In the comic, there is a scene, missing from the film, in which V is dying, and Evey has to wear his costume and go out so that the general public may believe that he is still alive. Having established in this way that she is to inherit his legacy, V later defines for her the nature of her task. Whereas his role was to destroy the old order in a colossal act of revenge, hers will be to facilitate the formation of a just new utopia. Somehow. Up to her how she does it, not his problem.

As far as the film goes, it was probably wise to leave this out. It’s already clear that the motive for V’s revolution is at heart a selfish one, and only secondarily about liberty for the oppressed masses. Hence the name of the film. He’s both a monster and a hero, and emphasising that he really doesn’t have any ideas beyond smashing the State tips the balance a little too far towards the monster.

But leaving it out is also dishonest, because a revolution is a kind of fairy tale. There’s an exciting story full of action, then the villains are defeated, then everybody lives happily ever after. Forever. Shut up, they just do.
In reality, violent revolutions seldom, if ever, have happy endings. They have the Terror, and the Purges, and the Civil War between the factions who are no longer united against a common enemy. The revolutionaries become Stalin, or Napoleon, or Cromwell. The government, if there is one, forces disastrous upheavals on the population on ideological grounds, without reference to prior experience or basic common sense. Generally, the best thing that can happen to a revolution is that it be comprehensively defeated in an utterly demoralising fashion, so that its remaining leaders can go back to the planning stage and figure out a better way to change the world.

Clearly this is not the story the Wachowski brothers set out to tell, and neither did Alan Moore. The more productive alternative to revolution – carefully planned incremental change, at a pace slow enough to take people with you – is difficult to develop into anything stirring and powerful. An V for Vendetta is both stirring and powerful. But there’s a lie at the heart of it, and it’s not the lie that an artist tells to reveal the truth. It’s the lie a revolutionary tells to hide the emptiness behind the zeal.

Anyway, good film. Makes you think. Makes you write about it in your blog.