A bit more papercraft engineering
Published at 9:47 pm on December 5th, 2020
Filed under: Photobloggery, Dear Diary.
The Child Who Likes Animals is a great devourer of television, particularly documentaries, and can recite great swathes of the hours of television he has watched. Usually this involves things about his usual interests, such as animals, or palaeontology, or Brian Cox talking about planets. Recently, though he’s rediscovered a CBBC series from a few years ago that has recently been repeated: *Absolute Genius with Dick and Dom*, in which said presenters learn about great STEM figures from history. He was rather taken with the episodes on Darwin (naturally), the Herschels, and Delia Derbyshire;* but became particularly obsessed with the inventor of the photographic negative, Henry Fox Talbot. In that one, Dick and Dom build a pinhole camera out of an industrial-size wheelie-bin, making it into a binhole camera; the episode is worth it for that pun alone. The Child Who Likes Animals, naturally, wanted us to build our own.
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Keyword noise: The Children, photography, pinhole cameras, Dick and Dom, BBC, analogue, camera, film, film photography, papercraft.
In which we ponder why both serious historians and the entertainment industry were dealing with the same subject at the same time
Published at 10:46 pm on July 7th, 2012
Filed under: Artistic, In With The Old, Media Addict, Unbelievable.
There’s a lot of pressure on the Symbolic Towers bookshelves at the moment, stacked several deep with books falling off the ends. The pile of books-to-be-read is growing, too, with books arriving on it faster than I can read them. Frankly, the cause is obvious – apart from me not spending enough time reading, I mean. The cause is: shopping trips to Whiteladies Road and Cotham Hill, and to the charity shops thereon. Several are specialist charity bookshops, and all seem to have a better quality of book stock than charity shops elsewhere in Bristol, presumably because of the university being close by. Recent selections have included God’s Architect, a biography of Pugin by Rosemary Hill; 25 Jahre Deutsche Einheitslokomotive*; and a classic historical work from 40 years ago: Religion and the Decline of Magic by Sir Keith Thomas. I’ve just started making my way into the latter, and it has started a few thoughts going round in my head. Not because of the book itself, interesting though it is, but because of other things that have coincidentally come together alongside it.
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Keyword noise: 1970s, belief, Blood on Satan's Claw, Bristol, Cry Of The Banshee, The Cube, cultural history, film, folklore, Keith Thomas, magic, paganism, religion, Religion And The Decline Of Magic, Ronald Hutton, Vincent Price, Wicca.
In which we discuss the Scott Pilgrim movie, one case of a comic-to-film adaptation that keeps all the spirit of the comic it came from.
Published at 8:18 pm on September 5th, 2010
Filed under: Media Addict.
Back, back in the mists of time — well, in December 2007 — I posted a review of Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, the fourth, and at that point, the latest, book in the Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O’Malley.
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Keyword noise: adaptation, books, comics, film, literature, review, Scott Pilgrim, Scott Pilgrim vs The World.
In which we watch some films with sex in
Published at 3:55 pm on June 28th, 2009
Filed under: Artistic, Media Addict.
It’s been a quiet month on the site this month, as regular readers might have noticed. There have been plenty of things to keep us busy, firstly; and the hot summer days leave me feeling rather drained each evening, not in a mood to sit down and write something. Not to mention that we spent three successive evenings this week going down to the cinema. We heard that The Cube was showing a mini-season of Japanese “Pink Cinema”. Reading the descriptions in the programme, we couldn’t resist any of it.
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Keyword noise: A Lonely Cow Weeps At Dawn, Behind The Pink Curtain, Bristol, The Cube, film, Japan, Japanese cinema, Jasper Sharp, New Tokyo Decadance, pink cinema, pornography, Sachiko Hanai, sex, Sexy Battle Girls, The Glamorous Life Of Sachiko Hanai.
In which we compare analogue and digital
Published at 10:23 pm on June 5th, 2009
Filed under: Geekery, Photobloggery.
It took me a while to catch on to the idea of digital photography. “Bah,” I thought, “you can’t spend hours in the darkroom with a digital photo. And I’ll always need to keep buying more and more disk space.” Both slightly false excuses, to be honest: it’s years since I’ve had easy access to a darkroom, and the disk space doesn’t get burned up that quickly. Generally, though, it was a good thing that I didn’t rush into it; I saved up, until I could afford a good camera, rather than jump in at the cheap end. And I’m pleased with what I got.
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Keyword noise: camera, digital camera, film, London, photography, Smithfield, Smithfield Market.
In which we go to the cinema
Published at 9:44 pm on May 1st, 2009
Filed under: Media Addict.
A trip to the cinema with Mystery Filmgoer the other week, to see *Let The Right One In* (or, rather, Låt den rätte komma in) the Swedish vampire movie which has been going down very well lately. As I haven’t seen any Swedish films since I was a student, as usual I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Raw meatballs? Home-assembly furniture dripping with blood? Bat-haunted forests with man-eating elk?
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Keyword noise: cinema, film, horror, Let The Right One In, review, vampire.
In which we go all grand guignol
Published at 11:16 am on February 6th, 2008
Filed under: Media Addict.
Before going off on holiday, we popped down to York to see *Sweeney Todd*, the new Tim Burton version of the Sondheim musical. It contains, as you might expect from a Tim Burton film, a lovely, dark, damp and grimy version of 19th-century London, albeit one with a rather anachronistic Tower Bridge opening near the start.*
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Keyword noise: Alasdair Gray, film, Fleet St, grand guignol, Johnny Depp, Lanark, London, musical, review, Sacha Baron Cohen, Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton.
In which we become scared of fields
Published at 12:45 pm on October 24th, 2007
Filed under: Media Addict.
“That’s two hours of my life that I’ll never get back,” said one of the women in front of us, as we left the cinema* I thought she was being slightly unfair. The film had only been 87 minutes long, after all.
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Keyword noise: Black Sheep, comedy, film, horror, movie, mutant, New Zealand, review, sheep, zombies.
In which we wonder what the filmmakers were thinking
Published at 6:32 pm on August 5th, 2007
Filed under: Media Addict.
Every time I’ve been to the cinema recently, I’ve had to sit through a trailer for newly-released film *Evan Almighty*. And it makes me slightly uneasy. Because – if you’re lucky enough to have managed to avoid the thing – it’s a lighthearted family comedy based on the story of Noah And The Flood, from Genesis. God comes down to Earth, visits an innocent politician, and tells him to build an ark because he’s decided to do the whole flood thing again.
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Keyword noise: Biblical, Christianity, comedy, Evan Almighty, film, god, Judaism, Noah, politicians, religion, unfunny.
In which the end of a series is within sight
Published at 5:25 pm on July 20th, 2007
Filed under: Artistic.
No, not the book. As I reviewed film number four for this blog, back in 2005, I thought I may as well review the fifth one too. I still haven’t seen any of the earlier films.
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Keyword noise: books, children's books, film, Harry Potter, Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, J K Rowling, literature, movie, review.
In which we detect a foul-smelling villain
Published at 8:44 am on November 30th, 2005
Filed under: Artistic, Media Addict.