Again, not much on the server front. But it’s world backup day today!

So for all the things for which I do not already have automated backup I made an effort, so now there is a snapshot of the Anaflabet.net VPS, and i have made an Image of my work computer. Corvo.se already runs automated nightly backups so it should be fine.

This weekend I will do some of this for my home environment as well

Besides that… I’ve watched a lot of movies, and I had some thoughts on each.

Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor
I mentioned this weeks back, and finished watching it weeks back as well. It’s good! It seems with anime there is quite a lot of effort given to flesh out the characters, this anime in particular.
The anime is a little slow to get of the ground, and feels very weird with how all the parents on the island are actually military officers and the island is essentially a big underground military base… and no one seems to have suspected a thing. And no Festum seems to have attacked the island since before the first memories of the eldest child, begging the question “Why now?”. The middle of the series is seriously good though! There is one story arc that is particularly heart-warming, when one of the kid pilots finally gets to ride a mecha and he insists on wearing a toy helmet and using the nickname of his favorite manga character, later we find out that this manga is written by his dad. Sadly, the episodes at the end and near the end feel like they were given less effort. You have learned to root for the protagonists and they have finally started to work well as a team and then yet another new type of Festum shows up and is even more overpowered than those that came before, it causes irreparable damage because this is the third from final episode, it feels like both the enemy and the writer was cheating at this point. The military-style leadership also seems especially lenient of insubordination. Most of the kid-pilots do something like this at some point, usually with dire immediate consequences, Kazuki, our main protagonist is a repeat offender but is only told off the first time.
There is also a recurring scene, a “loading-sequence” of sorts where the mecha is hooked up to a plane and prepared for launch. It is a neat “this is how the stuff works” and “get pumped, time for battle” scene early on, but it gets old quick and feels much too long after a few episodes.
All in all. I strongly recommend Fafner if you like Anime, Mechas, Sci-fi or Drama.

Mad Max: Fury Road
This one was a pleasant surprise. The trailer (you know, the thing that interrupts your YouTube pleasure for 5 seconds every now and then) made me think that this movie was not jut stupid in a bad way, but pretentious. What with the sandstorm and the talk about redemption respectively.
After having seen it, I think thirty seconds of this would make for a much better trailer:

Of course the entire movie is not like that but enough of it is! And it is glorious!
But the movie is smart too, and risky, and had a female protagonist that did not seem forced. I also don’t think I’ve seen so many bad-ass grandmas in the same movie before, nor played straight like here. In fact, I think this movie did a good job with all of it’s cast except perhaps for Max himself, who has surprisingly few lines for being the main protagonist.
It’s a clever dumb movie made of awesome!

I re-watched The Crow. The old movie with Brandon Lee. You know, the guy that died just before his most famous movie was published.

No, not him.

That guy.

I’m not an actor, but if I was, with the current sampling I think I would stay far away from taking a role with makeup like that. Just to be safe.

So this movie is supposedly one of the main inspirations for the World of Darkness roleplaying games, and I can tell. Even during daytime, the world seems foggy and rainy, and satanist criminals rule the night and burn buildings on halloween for the lulz.

Is the movie good? Yes it is. Definitely.

James Bond: Skyfall
Unlike fury road. I had some expectations from this movie, because it is a Bond movie.
It feels schizophrenic in its message. They seemed to want to play the “Bond is old now” angle, what with having an aged and wounded Bond being criticized along with M as being relics from another age. The new Q, a stereotypical nerd, does not give Bond any gadgets of the sort we expect either, saying “we don’t do that stuff anymore”, and states that he can do more damage with a laptop than Bond could do in a lifetime. It feels wrong, and there are many things like this that makes it not feel like a bond movie, and the writing seems to prime the series for another reboot. But at the same time, the movie tries to cash in on nostalgia, especially at the end where they play the classic main theme, on a set that strongly resembles M’s office from the early movies, while introducing the new Moneypenny and M. It felt quite forced. Which is odd because they successfully played on nostalgia just a few scenes before the climax, when they reveal the Aston Martin. And later when they use its machineguns to simple yet great effect.
They kill off Judy’s character M, she slowly bleeds to death throughout the climax of the movie and only once the villain is defeated does she die. This felt lame. If they were going to kill her off anyway, why not have the villain shoot her, or trying desperately to keep her alive so she could die by his hand or something, as it stands, she was killed by a nameless mook with a secret..
The villain also feels undercooked. We get to understand that he felt betrayed somehow, but he never connects the dots as to why and how it is specifically Ms fault. He goes to quite some lengths to take revenge on someone with whom he has about as much relation as Bond has. Also, I have not seen every Craig Bond-movie yet, but this is the second MI-6 agent gone rogue right? That’s that’s one more than too many.
All in all, the movie gets a passing grade. It was entertaining, but i expected more.

I re-watched Postal by Uwe Boll
It’s one of the movies that had its bar set so low that it can not fail. I remember watching it and not being impressed however, and that was not too long ago either, but i must have been half asleep because the movie is actually more clever than I remembered it. Of course, if it cut some of the worst excesses such as on-screen genitalia and blood then it would be a pretty good comedy film.

I also re-watched Tintin
I first saw this in a theater in 3D, and it was the first movie I’ve seen to make somewhat good use of the 3D effect, what with walking sticks sticking out of the screen and vast deserts and oceans having actual depth.
Story-wise though, I was not that impressed. It’s obvious that they had to pad the story a bit to fill out the running time. But at the same time the story always seems to want to rush to the next thing. One moment the scene is about the pickpocket, then in the very next shot but still in the same scene, Tintin gets kidnapped.
Most egregious, and I can’t tell if this is stupid or ingenious, is the curveball of Sackarin. In the comics, Sackarin is just a collector, he comes across as possibly a bit rude but is shown to be innocent, and a victim of the villains just like Tintin. Here he is introduced faithfully, but he is soon revealed to live in Moulinzart. this is the first major departure from the comics, where the Vogel brothers were the villains living in Moulinzart. The Vogel brothers are not in this movie at all however, and after Tintin is kidnapped he is brought onto a ship instead and we enter The Crab with the Golden Claws for a while. To get back on point however, Sackarin is the antagonist in this movie, the genius being that he very much resembles Red Rackham and therefore it is convincing to say that he is a descendant. The stupidity of this inherited family feud between Rackham and Haddock is ‘why would the grand-children should still care’ about said feud, and is it not conveinent that there is only one living descendant in either family? Sackarin seems to take the feud very personally too, like the haddock in the distant past actually wronged him in some way, not that it is explained how Sackarin found out about the clash between the grandfathers. A clever move nonetheless, just with some stupid implications but it works well as entertainment and keeps fans of the comics guessing.
Other than that, Tintin and Milou are close to the uncanny valley, which is unfortunate because most other characters avoid this quite well, including Haddock and Sackarin who have their fair share of close-ups.
It is definitely a faithful Tintin movie, it’s good!