hestia8

First, a couple of links:

evolver.fm/2013/04/30/how-a-17-year-old-girl-won-a-hackathon-and-what-it-means-for-women-in-tech/

Seventeen year old girl enters Hackathon, wins with hack that kills spoilers on twitter. (from geekfeminism.org/)

champagneandsocks.com/2013/05/05/through-splintered-walls-art-exhibition/

Book launch goes wrong when the top line of each page doesn’t print, so they turn the books in to art (from www.galactisuburbia.podbean.com/, which is a podcast I’ve started listening to recently)

And now, things I have watched recently:

( The Raid, Foyle's War, In The Flesh, Scott and Bailey, Murder on the Home Front )

Wow. I am surprised that I had this much to say, hahahaha.

FYI tonight on ITV there's Life of Crime with Hayley Atwell and one Sunday The Suspicions of Mr Whicher with Paddy Considine and Olivia Colman. 

Well. Today I watched a very, very odd film. So odd that I'm actually posting about something I've watched twice in two days. It's like it's 2009 or something. 

(as per usual, this is not a review but more a ramble)

Blitz is a film adaptation of a Ken Bruen novel. I have tried to read a Ken Bruen novel in the past - possibly this one - but did not finish it as I just could not get on with the style. It stars Jason Statham as DS Tom Brant, who is a massive cliche. MASSIVE. CLICHE. It's amazing how many stereotypical tough, gritty London copper elements are packed into this one guy. 

Also in the cast are Paddy Considine, David Morrissey, Zawe Ashton and Aiden Gillen. 

Spoilers beyond the cut...

( Spoilers )

So, all in all, I would recommend this film. The first part of the film was over the top gritty nonsense, but once the film gets over needing to establish Statham as the lone cop with no limits blah blah blah and just gets on with the plot it improves massively and actually does some unexpected things with its characters. I'm also tempted to give the book another try... 

ps I thought this Mark Kermode review made some very good points: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaiNU-1wMA8
pps just realised in this whole thing I haven't mentioned the action scenes: the film is fairly violent and the Statham fighting is not quite as good as in The Transporter (which is fair enough), but the action scenes are nicely put together and there's only one point where I thought it got too violent. Actually on the whole there are some really good shots where things are implied rather than shown full-on.  

I am super behind on recipes and photos (as well as the current stuff, I found the rest of my photos from Cornwall - I thought they were on the nearly-dead HD!), but they will have to wait until late tomorrow/Saturday morning as I am out tomorrow evening with delgaserasca. We are going to see Chicago where Raza Jaffrey will give us the old razzle dazzle, be still my beating heart.

The second episode of Line of Duty was amazing, and I really enjoyed the first episode of Blackout, which managed to do something different with a fairly traditional basic plotline. Sadly telling you anything about it would be a massive spoiler. I would recommend it though.

(both shows are currently on iplayer)

I have missed a week of Holby that I want to watch for canon reasons, so that is on iplayer desktop (I have had iplayer desktop problems recently – if anyone has a dl link to the Julius Caesar with Paterson Joseph etc that was on recently, could you let me know? I missed it and am v sad about that). This week’s Casualty was there briefly but has disappeared :/ I do not like being behind on Holby/Casualty.

I have downloaded the Richard II thing with skinny Ben Whishaw but have not watched it yet.

In other news, Dear and I watched Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows at the weekend and felt it was subpar and had way too much stuff onscreen that was supposed to look cool but didn’t go anywhere. Ah well.

Last night I watched The Guard, which I loved. Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong. Excellent, dark and funny. Mark Strong is ace.

I am still working on fics and getting closer to finishing some of the long AUs. And some of the shorter fics \o/ No promises on dates but I hope to post something before the end of the month. I made the mistake of getting some SOE books out of the library so maybe I will finally start work on that WW2 Spooks AU I’ve been thinking about forever.
At some point I intend to read and comment on Spooks fic because I know there is stuff about I haven’t read. Ditto Lewis (I still have to watch the last ep of that).

My Paralypmics tickets arrived the other day \o/ Exciting!!

Incidentally, I’m sure most of you know but just in case, Spooks has recently been recced on crack_van. I haven’t actually had a chance to go through the fics to see if I’ve read them (I’ve mostly been skimming my flist lately, I need to cut down on the comms), but they’re there if you’re interested.