Author: Sarah Northway

Some friends lent us a copy of “eragon” (subtitle: The First Chapter of the Inheritance Trilogy), which we were bored enough to watch tonight. We probably wouldn’t have even bothered, but the pirate dvd packaging made it sound just too good to miss. The quote on the back:

The things that Eragon has going for it don’t count — once again, the difference between a good film and a bad one is almost always the script. And the book is just too derivative to take seriously. – David Bezanson

It was indeed one of those “so bad it’s funny” movies, ala Battlefield Earth or The Mummy. We spent the entire time calling the characters by their Star Wars alternates, because in every case there was one. Betcha it turns out Luke (I mean Aragorn.. err, Eragon)’s boistrous princess love interest is a blood relative. The culture, sets, races, costumes, etc, are all ripped from LoTR.. except for the dragon which would be straight out of the Pern books if you added an “-eth” to her name. Terrible directing and just shit-poor dialogue; even Jeremy Irons as Obi-wan and John Malkovich as Emperor Palpatine couldn’t do a thing for it.

The only good thing about this movie is that for once the rest of the world saw what was obvious to me & Colin. It scored a whopping 15% on Rotten Tomatoes and just about every critic panned it. Yay! Kids deserve better than such terribly written recycled crap. Warn your little cousins and neices and nephews: Eragon SUX!

Aww, I just read the author was only fifteen when he started the first book. Well, I guess it’s hard to blame him then; everybody writes dumb derivative junk when they’re fifteen. But how did it get published?? Oh, his parents own a publishing company! I guess the movie producer was some college buddy of his dad’s, and his richass uncle shelled out a few mil for marketing. For shame people! Hopefully the author’s writing improves in time (or he gives up; yes they put out a movie and he’s not even done writing the third book). It seems he’s destined for success with or without any real talent.

Seafood
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Yesterday I had my first go at *squeaks* topless tanning!. Well yeah, we’ve seen ladies going it ‘european style’ on just about every beach, but to the Thais this is unimaginably rude (and illegal) behavior; misewell go take a shit at a shrine.

So we found a nice secluded beach near Thongsala to go swimming. It’s one of the few undeveloped beaches left on this half of the island, and the land is for sale, or rent or something. (Sure it’s way out of our price range, but its hard not to at least think about it.) We swam and played around the gorgeous big boulders there, and I’m now the proud owner of some borderline-sunburned titties!

Colin’s out kiteboarding again after a few days of no wind, and I’m back to the Beebles. The game is coming along steady but there is still so much to do; I’m worried I might run out of dev time before I get it to a showable state. At Colin’s suggestion I’m switching to a 100% Flash interface (admin tools are still in JSP). Flash Remoting’s kind of a dream to use; you can call Java functions and synch up ActionScript objects with your Java ones. I even found an open source connector (OpenAMF) to use instead of Macromedia’s pricy solutions.

Colin said the other day that he envies my ability to rewrite things. Usually I that’d be like saying I’m good at fucking up, but this game is such a learning excerise that it doesn’t feel like time wasted. Plus, jumping in without spending a month planning (which would have been the right move, obviously) means the project couldn’t get caught in the planning stage like so many things I do. ;)

Oh yeah and we added seafood to our cooking finally. The lady in this picture is picking out some prawns for us, that I foolishly left until the next morning to clean. Still turned out okay but I won’t make the same mistake next time. Today for lunch I made rice-cooker-curry; just threw it all in there together and let’er rip. Could have used some raisins but I don’t think Colin will agree.

Hey hey.

This is a map of the internet in Thailand: http://iir.ngi.nectec.or.th/internet/map/current.html

See all those blue circles (there are 20 blue circles with a bunch of lines comming in and out of them for those too lazy to click on the link) those are proxies where ISPs are legaly required to route all Thai traffic in and out of in order to censor (mildly) the intertubes.

See wikipedia uses your proxy ip to enforce bans. Consider this fact and the fact that everyone in Thailand is split among 20 proxy servers and guess how long my IP stays un-banned at a stretch. Shitty.

On the bright side the talk page for my IP is pretty amusing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:203.147.0.48

Also, quickly: I haven’t updated the flickr page in a while. This isn’t because I haven’t been taking pictures. It is because I have been taking shitty pictures.

note: this is not a blog

I am now the proud owner of one very large kite (actually two).

After spending some time thinking about the possibilities for the future I bought a rig. Among the key considerations: kiteboarding beaches in Tokyo are accessible via public transit, there are large and active communities in Van and Vic, February is the best month for kitesurfing on Koh Phangan, and whenever the wind is up my heart starts to beat out of my chest until I strap a kite to it.

So Woot Woot. I spent all day hangin under my kite. Well, I spent more time walking up the beach because I still suck at kiteboarding and can’t go upwind yet. But after a solid 4 or 5 hours today I have improved an order of magnatude. I predict in the next few days I will be riding upwind and that will be awesome.

Although I find being bad at something is often as fun as being good at it. Especially when that thing is really hard. It’s kind of nice having that clear goal ahead and knowing you just have to put your head down and try and try and try until it starts to work.

In fact I have a theory about why sucking at something is so much fun: because the best part of games, sports, whatever is learning them and getting better. And when you’re really bad at something you’re usually learning at a tremendous rate.

So yay for sucking at things because every time you fail you get to have the fun of guessing why.

A bird
Originally uploaded by Daveybot.

No, we didn’t take this picture… I’ve been trying to get a shot of the Mynas who are scoping out our gutters for possible nesting sites, but they’re all agitated and flighty these days. They’ve been so vocal lately as they fight over nesting territory; really the most beautiful and diverse bird calls. I’m not sure why everyone here keeps Red-whiskered Bulbuls in cages for their pretty songs (they even have singing competitions!). In my opinion the so-called pests, the Common Mynas, sound just as interesting.

You could say Colin has also been flitting around various activities. He has taken up bouldering, as much as one can do it without climbing shoes anyway, and he’s starting to build up calouses on his fingertips for the first time in years. Photography is still going strong; he’s even started referring to the Flickr account has his portfolio. :) And today he’s out kiteboarding again and thinking about buying the equipment now that the season of optimum wind has started.

And I’ve been… writing a game! You may remember Beeble World, a webbased game that Colin and a few friends worked on several years ago. Well this is a webbased mmorpg of the same name, but is otherwise completely unrelated. ;) This is something I’ve always wanted to do and is even more fun than I’d imagined. Plus I’m learning a lot about Java, Flash and game design. I’ll let you know when there is something to show.

Lastly, the dogs live! Well most of them do; sadly Rope was killed by a truck a few weeks ago. But I thought they’d all been poisoned or something when they disappeared in mid-January. Turns out a visiting French couple have taken on the duty of feeding and caring for them. We went up to their place last night and practiced our French; it’s remarkable how much harder it became as I got tired; maybe this is why I did so poorly at French in High School?