Note: this contains minor plot spoilers.

After many mixed reviews from friends, I thought I’d better see X-Men 2 for myself. So I did. Today.

Although it wasn’t as bad as the first film (which had a wafer-thin plot, badly written script, wooden acting etc), it was hardly ground-breaking or fantastic. More mutants from the comics were paraded around (for future usage), plot lines for future films were wedged into it in unsubtle ways (anyone who has seen either the cartoon series or read the comics will know what happened to Jean Grey), dialogue was poor, and Halle Berry gave another wooden performance (how does she get work?).

The good points? Nightcrawlers attack on the White House at the start was a stunningly executed sequence. Thinking about it, it went downhill after that and never recovered. A shame.

All in all, a passable film.

There’s a moderately old article called “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You” that I was thinking about recently.

A lot of programming languages allow for classes, generic classes and beyond. In the real world, companies insist on using object-oriented programming. Why? So they can re-use objects and methods at a later date. Now, outside of the codebase that the objects were originally created for, how often do you think they’re used? That’s right: close to nil.

Now, why have I been thinking about it recently? Because I’m being forced to use “generic classes” AKA “one layer of abstraction too far”. The chances of reusing a generic procedure in the real world? Absolutely nil. The things are too generic (you can basically only do assignment operations on them) to be useful for anything.

Abstraction is all well and good, but only if there is actually a need for it rather than when it could be implemented (i.e. all the time).

The film Dreamcatcher is bad. Words can’t possibly sum up the badness. In fact, I’ve done my absolute best to wipe most of it from my mind.

It starts out reasonably: 4 friends reunite and reminisce about how they got super-powers from a mentally handicapped boy they saved from bullies. Yes, that’s the reasonable part. After that, all manner of bizarre (read: shit) plot contrivances make it laughably bad.

I would recommend people see it, if only for the short film they’re showing before it: “Final Flight Of Osiris”, part of the Animatrix films (no direct link). Now that’s how you make a film.

This has got to be possibly the funniest crash bug for IE. Basically, by having an input element (used in forms) with no body tag, IE dies on its arse.

I voted for the first time yesterday. It wasn’t a very overwhelming experience. Nobody that I really wanted to vote for.

What’s the point in a democracy that does such a poor job of representing the people? As far as I can tell, no party fully represents a single person (other than the party themselves). The normal voters have to pick the closest fit; Everyone compromises and hopes for the best.

Of course, the best never comes. The various political parties don’t put their real agendas on the table. No sir, can’t have the people getting what they wanted.

Excuse the cynicism of this post, it just seems that our countries are far from what they could be.