Xmas it is here by golly, deck the halls...

[ffutures]

It's taken me FOUR bloody hours to get my presents wrapped today. Admittedly part of the reason is that I watched a couple of DVDs I haven't previously viewed while doing so - verdict Master and Commander 8/10 (it manages to cram a lot of the O'Brien feel into a couple of hours), Hellboy 6/10 (seems to be more about style than actual plot, and it's the third film I've seen recently with a fight / death trap on a CGI collapsing bridge, which is perhaps too much of a good thing - and there was another similar thing on Shrek, which the BBC showed earlier in the evening).

For some reason nearly everyone is getting blank DVDs, CDs, minidisks, video tapes, etc., vouchers for various stores, books, etc., plus stocking filler oddments of negligible value. Anyone who guessed that I ordered the media on line might not be entirely wrong... since I'll be eating at my sister's and don't have to cater for anyone except myself I managed to get the rest of the Xmas shopping done in about four hours, so I'm feeling reasonably pleased. And broke, of course...

Apart from that I've spent most of the day converting Guy Boothby's novel Pharos the Egyptian into an e-text; it was serialised in six parts in 1898, and it's a splendidly silly novel along the lines of The Mummy etc., with a dash of Dr. Phibes. Got the initial OCR done reasonably easily, it was fortunatly printed on good paper, now about a third of the way through correcting, formatting text, and scanning the illustrations. With luck it'll be finished some time next week, and if nothing goes wrong I'll be putting it onto the FF CD-ROM. After Christmas I'll start posting chapters for comments, always assuming that people are interested.

And so to bed, I think, tomorrow's probably going to be a long and moderately tiresome day.

BAH HUMBUG and a happy new year.

Comments

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I agree that Master and Commander is massively cool.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Having read every one of the books it needed to be EXTREMELY good to impress me.

[dungeoneer.livejournal.com]

Can't say I rated Hellboy that highly either. Had a way of jettisonning characters willy-nilly that annoyed me.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

The lead American hero assigned to be Hellboys assistant was the greatest problem with the film I thought, for so much screen time, he was almost entirely peripheral to everything of interest.

[dungeoneer.livejournal.com]

Pretty much devoid of characterisation as well. Just a walking plot device.

(goes back to his ragged reprints of Seed of Destruction and sulks)

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I assumed he was maybe supposed to lead the audience into the fantastic world of Hellboy, but, to most audiences these days, the world of Hellboy isn't all that difficult to grasp, we're familiar with the lexicons, and we don't need a clueless guide to help us.

The ending of the movie was rather disappointing too. I'm all for Cthulhu-esque beasties, but, it felt rather more like an exercise in pointless CGI for the purposes of having a big ending to the movie.

[houses7177.livejournal.com]

What an adorable picture. Is that snake one of yours?