In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

33. Anna and the Apocalypse (2017), dir. John McPhail

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 20:50:43 GMT

I saw this with lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House shortly before Christmas. It's basically Glee in a British small town school with a zombie apocalypse and a keen awareness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh, and it's also a Christmas film, because that's when it is set. As you might imagine, this adds up to a great deal of fun, although it does also involve quite a lot of gore and a surprisingly-high death rate for well developed characters. It has something it wants to say about modern communications technology. On the whole, this is portrayed negatively, for example though a song about how the surviving characters are desperate for a human voice rather than something on a screen (full lyrics here), by drawing attention to the self-absorption and distorted priorities of selfie culture through people posting their zombie escape selfies to Instagram, and by having the zombies themselves easily distracted by TV screens. But then again, it's clearly a disaster for the human characters when they lose their mobile phone signals and internet connection, and we are invited to feel great sympathy for one character who, knowing he has been infected by the zombies, helps his daughter to escape and then lies gazing lovingly at her picture on his mobile phone screen as he dies. So it's a bit mixed. The songs were generally pretty good, with an absolute highlight being an upbeat dance number sung as a duet between Anna and her best friend John as they leave the house for school and work their way across town to meet one another, so wrapped up in their own determination and sunny outlooks that they don't notice that zombie-induced carnage has broken out all around them. That said, I personally found that my enjoyment of the songs qua songs dropped off rather as the film went on, partly because I'm not very keen on musical-style music anyway, and partly because they just began to sound a little samey. So I won't be buying the soundtrack, but I would recommend the film.

Well, that about wraps up my film reviews for 2018 - hoorah! I've just got to get started on the four films I've already seen in 2019 now...

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New phone, who dis?

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 21:27:34 GMT

So I got a new phone. My last two have been Samsung Galaxies (first an S4, then an S7), but after I had owned each of them for about two years, the microphone on the first started to fail and the battery on the second went rapidly downhill, so that recently it hasn't been able to make it through a full day without needing a booster charge. Nonetheless, I was familiar with what Samsung had to offer, and liked in particular their high-quality built-in cameras. That meant I did look pretty hard at the S9, and especially the S9+, on which the various extras include a larger battery. But then when I actually logged into EE to check out their upgrade deals, they recommended a Huawei P20 Pro as the closest replacement for the S7 I had, so I looked into it to find out more.

The real clincher for me was the 4000 mAh battery (as compared to 3000 mAh for the Samsung Galaxy S9 or 3500mAh for the S9+). But then it also turned out to have twice as much storage capacity as the S9+, to be available in a very pretty ombre colour called Twilight shading from dark blue to rich purple, and to have one of the best cameras (or actually set of cameras) currently available in a mobile phone. So I have kissed goodbye to Samsung and made the move.

This in fact turned out to mean I was setting up the new Huawei on Thursday evening while listening to news stories about their chief financial officer being arrested for breaking US sanctions on Iran and fears about them using 5G kit they have supplied to spy on western countries. I do wish I had known about any of that before I bought the phone, but it's rather too late now - I already own it, and besides I don't think there is really any such thing as an ethical high-end smartphone.

I've been getting used to it, and setting everything up the way I want it, over the last couple of days. All my contacts and apps transferred over very smoothly via my gmail account, despite the move to different hard-ware, although a lot of the apps have taken the change as permission to switch back on all the annoying notifications which I'd spent ages hunting down and switching off on the old phone. So I had to redo a lot of that, and I'll need to put my music back on it and make a new set of lockscreen pictures for it at some point - all Dracula-related, of course, just like on the old phone, but they need to be different dimensions now.

I hadn't quite got round to the camera until this evening, but I realised when I began thinking about it that I had an excellent opportunity to test out its supposedly-excellent low light settings. Just over a month ago (in fact specifically on Halloween evening), there was a power-cut in Headingley, which hit around 7pm and last for about half an hour. It was fully dark outside by then, so I lit some candles to provide at least some light in my lounge, took a picture with my Samsung Galaxy G7 and tweeted it:

Actually, power-cuts have been a major feature of this week too, but only at work, so I didn't actually need to dig out the candles at home. But I realised that recreating the picture above, with the same conditions of five tea-lights and no other illumination, would be an excellent way to test out my new Huawei's capacities. So that's what I've just done and here is the result:

It did something quite different from the Samsung while taking the picture, announcing that it was 'processing' for about four seconds and taking what I think were actually a series of shots that allowed it to calibrate and perhaps even stitch together the best overall picture by using different lenses and settings on different parts of the scene. Anyway, whatever it did, the results clearly are in a different world from the Samsung equivalent. Much better colour balance between the candles themselves and their surroundings so that they don't just look like balls of white light, and then much better colour and detail on things like the round table-top, the carpet, the items on the mantelpiece, the chair and the cupboard behind.

Oh, and meanwhile the battery is currently sitting on 56%, whereas by this time on a similar day I would have expected my old S7 to be plugged in getting a second charge. So apart from accidentally supporting China's efforts to destabilise the west (whoops!), I guess I'm pretty happy. Definitely looking forward to seeing what else the camera can do at least.

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Reading an academic book on Kindle

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 20:59:25 GMT

Last year, before I went to Australia, I bought a Kindle so that I could load it up with books for my trip and thus reduce the weight of my luggage. I've found it very amenable for leisure-type reading, but today for the first time I tried to use it for academic reading, and found the experience utterly frustrating and tedious.

Reading in a linear fashion is fine, but of course that is not the reality of much academic reading. Kindle books are well set-up to support footnotes - they pop up at the bottom of the screen, and you can also move back and forth between the 'page' you are on and the footnotes section with a single click each way.

The problems kick in when you want to flick back and forth between the text and the bibliography (e.g. to check the full title of an abbreviated reference in the notes) or between the index and the text (e.g. to see what the author has to say on a particular topic). I do understand that I can move back and forth between different parts of the book either by memorising a location number and using the 'go to' function, or by using that view where you can see nine pages at once and there's a slider at the bottom. But both are much slower and more cumbersome than the traditional method of having one finger in the bibliography / index and the other in the text.

For similar reasons, I also struggled to get an overall sense of the shape and trajectory of the book. I could see the table of contents, but without page numbers I couldn't see how long each chapter was, so it wasn't easy to see how much space the author had allocated to one or the other topic. Nor could I find the plates referred to at various points in the text. Plates aren't usually paginated, so wouldn't be listed in the table of contents or list of illustrations, but at least in a physical book you can see them, just by looking at the fore-edge.

Theoretically, the Kindle's capacity to highlight passages and annotate them should be super-useful for academic reading, but again in practice I found both processes so cumbersome that I stopped bothering, and just took notes on my computer, the same way as I would while reading a paper book. It did occur to me at the very end of the day that that particular problem might have been resolved by using the Kindle app on my tablet, rather than my actual Kindle, since the tablet has a much more responsive touch-screen (which would have made the highlighting easier) and the keyboard which pops up when required is larger (which would make the annotating easier). But even then, the other frustrations described above would still remain.

If you've used a Kindle for research-focused reading, what have your experiences been? Are there hints or tips which I'm missing, or is it just always like this?

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