Hasta La Vista, er, Vista

No, this isn't a post about the T2 blu-ray I was wittering about a couple of weeks ago (although it is rather good). You may recall I was in the process of fixing an old laptop for TotOne to learn to use the internet on, basic IT etc (and for Daddy to use when MeWife is allegedly 'social networking'). I had also been wrestling with reinstalling Vista on that laptop, which was itself an irreversible upgrade from Windows XP, so that once you install windows vista, something bad happens and you can't reinstall windows xp. Yeah, you can tell this is going to be a red-hot post already can't you?

Anyway, the thing was working but then kept dying after a while. So I'd curse the thing and reinstall it, but then as anyone who has 'upgraded' to Vista will know, you spend the next 4000 years downloading 300000 updates and getting any work done is secondary to installing windows vista security update eijrfioweurw4i9rulswef. And, inevitably, some of the updates didn't install properly or crashed.

And so it was at 3am earlier this week whilst tending to TotTwo that I decided to order a new hard drive and a copy of windows xp (the existing hard drive already had rather a lot of bad sectors on it anyway due to an incident involving an attempt to bash the computer into submission having gone slightly awry). Seems odd you can now get a 250GB hard drive for £40 but there you go.

48hrs later, the old laptop now works perfectly. No update problems, and it's waaaaay faster than Vista. So the moral of the story is, don't upgrade your OS to Vista, especially if the manufacturer certifies your laptop is ready for Vista. For Vista is evil. Like the water that escapes from a pipe in your kitchen, it is an uncontrollable force of destruction which must be destroyed.

By the way, to anyone who sees me in the next few weeks: my Latvian hairdresser recently misunderstood the instruction I gave her for a number 4 cut (despite me having four fingers to emphasise the four-ness of the four) and given me a number two cut. So the Klan look is not deliberate, OK?

James Cameron's Avatar

Some of my favorite films have been made by James Cameron and I imagine Aliens, Terminator and T2 are on a lot of people's groovy film lists (we'll ignore True Lies which was just, erm, odd). But has anyone else seen the plot for Mr Cameron's new film? If not, look here for a quick summary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)

This is the film, bear in mind, that he has spent umpteen years developing (according to Wiki, he wrote the first treatment in 1995) and which is due out in 2009. Now, maybe it's just me, but I got about as far as the bit about the hero "falling in love with a princess" before I had the overwhelming sensation to cry "OH GOD NO" a la Blackadder The Third..

I mean COME ON!! Didn't he get all this nonsense out of his system with Titanic?! In case you haven't noticed Jim, major blockbuster sci-fi films for the last..ooh...DECADE haven't needed some crappy love story to build a DECENT film around. At best all you need these days is Shia LaBoeuf cracking onto Megan Fox or a bit of flirty nonsense between Robert Downey Jr and Gwyneth Paltrow. THAT'S ALL. What gets me is that neither Aliens nor T2 were built around the sort of patronising and cringe-inducing dialogue these sorts of plots entail. And in Terminator, the love stuff was kind of integral to the plot.

You can tell me I'm overreacting, and maybe I am. Maybe the horror that was George Lucas' attempt to tell a love story in the Star Wars prequels has got me all shook up. But then I remember some of the worst bits of Titanic and I think...oooohh no.

So I don't have high hopes for this film, which is a shame. This is especially so when I read that ideas from the people doing the video-game cash in have been incorporated into the film. When the guy who gave us Aliens is taking ideas from Ubisoft, then as far as I'm concerned, it's probably going to be a pretty-but-dull washout.