Rachel's Blog

Fri, 23 Apr 2004
Donnie does not shoot first

I haven't been in favour of Director's Cuts in general - I believe that once a film is out there, it's out there and that's that. (I mean you George Lucas!) I've always maintained that artists don't get to touch up thier paintings once they're hanging in a gallery, in fact they'd probably get arrested for it, so why should a film director get to re-visit his or her work?. (There's probably a whole "ownership" argument in there somewhere.)
Anyway, director Richard Kelly is preparing for a theatrical re-release of Donnie Darko and he has some compelling reasons to do so:
It will expand the meaning of the film and offer more clues and more solutions to the puzzle and create an additional layer of mystery for the audience. There really is a tremendous amount of new material - some of which will surprise even the most die-hard fans.
So I'll reserve my judgement until I see it. And I will.

Wed, 21 Apr 2004
Imprisoned minds and bodies.

Norwich Bulletin reports that:
Prison officials destroyed computer files containing inmates' personal writing days after a prisoner won a national writing award, best-selling author Wally Lamb said ... 15 women inmates lost up to five years of work when officials at the prison's school ordered all hard drives used for the class erased and its computer disks turned over.
This makes me sick. (via Bookslut)

Sun, 18 Apr 2004
sessylU s'ecyoJ semaJ

There's a line in one of the episodes of DAAS Kapital (Pride) that Paul McDermott sings:
If you're happy and you know it, give dyslexic children copies of James Joyce's Ulysses to read. Backwards.
I would like to state for the record that this is totally unnecessary. Forwards is confusing enough. After 40 pages I have given it the flick. Not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because I was frustrated at the number of references within the text that I simply didn't get. Even the notes at the back of my copy were woefully inadequate, despite their being 200 pages long.
Take for example the sentence:
Agenbite of inwit.
There's no note for these three words. None of my dictionaries shed any light. Fortunately Google leads us to an explanation. But I'm not going to take my computer to bed just so I can look up archaic phrases.
It's a shame because I could follow the story just enough to realise that it was really interesting and just enough to make me feel thoroughly uneducated. Perhaps when I retire I'll spend a year studying it.

Amazonian Warrior Woman

I think in an effort to make my wishlist look a little less juvenile and nostalgic for my childhood, I've set Abbey up with her own. It's just a list of stuff folks, you don't have to buy anything and you especially don't have to buy it from Amazon.

Sat, 10 Apr 2004
Blood's Orkut Criticism

Rebecca Blood has written a well considered article Thirteen Ways To Save Orkut.
I particularly like her graduated friends scheme and the obvious use of Google's search capabilities.

Tue, 06 Apr 2004
Study until your head falls off.

Master of Creative Writing at the University of Canberra
Hmmm. Tempting. Because my PELS debt was looking a little thin. :-/