I always won­dered why Aus­tralian TV shows started later than the adver­tised times. Chan­nel Nine being the worst offender in recent years. But now, thanks to Max Barry’s abil­ity to read the truth is now out there:

“Pre­cise start times would allow peo­ple to burn DVDs of our pro­grams like crazy and push them out over the internet.”

After read­ing that para­graph a tiny vent opened on the side of my head and half my brain floated out of my skull in atom­ised form.

Today it occured to me that a cou­ple of games I have in my rota­tion have a sim­i­lar theme: active engag­ment of the mind. I’ve found that F.E.A.R. and Brain Train­ing both tend to push and expand my mind in very inter­est­ing ways.

With Brain Tran­ing I’m make a con­scious effort to expand and improve those parts of my brain that are becom­ing slug­gish and dor­mant (well that’s the the­ory any­way). In terms of mem­ory recall and basic maths skills I’ve seen a huge improve­ment after play­ing it for just a few weeks, but I’m not sure what else I should be look­ing for. Brain Train­ing has also cemented the fact that I just plain suck at Sudoku. I tried a few of them and failed miserably.

What F.E.A.R does pull my mind out of it’s com­fort zone and forces me to face creepy, spooky and unerver­ing images. And it does it all within a lin­ear game mechanic. I’m forced to view and deal with hal­lu­ci­na­tions and “blink or you’ll miss it” ghostly appari­tions, amongst other things. The game has you inter­act­ing with this visual and audi­tory input in such a way that I don’t think it would’ve had quite the same effect, had I been given the oppor­tu­nity to to choose a “run away” option.

I guess it’s true. You really do need to open your mind up to new things in order to grow.

I’ve been hav­ing a lot of fun with my Flickr account lately. Most of that fun I can attribute to actu­ally util­is­ing the website’s com­mu­nity. Groups like Score Me and Crit­i­cal Masses have been a great learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me, and the feel­ing you get when your first photo breaches 100 views is just great.

On the other hand all this learn­ing seems to have made me a lot more crit­i­cal of my shots. I took 27 shots on Thurs­day and Fri­day as I was up in Dayles­ford on a retreat. I can hon­estly say that not one is good enough to go up on Flickr. Whether I’m just being too hard on myself is just some­thing to ponder.

I know I’ve been quite remise in my post­ings of late, but I’ll try to do better.

Rather than do a brain dump (which is what I’d usu­ally do after such a long time between posts) I’ll just write about Fri­day night.

For the longest time I’ve wanted to try chur­ras­caria: many types of meat cooked on a large skewer. As luck would have it, there’s a num­ber of restu­rants in Mel­bourne that serve it. The more famous being Blue­Fire Grill. I went into the Mel­bourne Cen­tral fran­chise with high hopes (at $50 a head you’d want to), but in the end I wasn’t really that impressed.
Ser­vice took a long time to get started, but once it was on a roll I didn’t have an issue. The meats them­selves weren’t exactly up to par. i.e. beef should be pink, not grey. The lamb and “sausage” made up for the “too-fatty” chicken and the “what the hell hap­pened to this?” calamari.

With spir­its and stom­achs hang­ing low we wan­dered next door to Hoyts and took in Super­man Returns.
It speaks vol­umes that for two hours after the movie ended I was unable to sleep. After read­ing a few reviews I’m glad nobody has said “Oh, but Super­man doesn’t do that”, and I’m glad that Bryan Singer was able to cre­ate such a good film con­sid­er­ing all the on– and off-screen bag­gage he had to carry with him.