Weeknotes 11 Apr 2019

Other than a few movies I've seen, I've mostly been spending free time helping my wife with her yoga teacher training. By helping her as she recites her class instructions, to being an actual test student.

The top photo is special this week. A picture of an incredibly large black hold as photoed by the Event Horizon Telescope. Amazing.

Movies

• Battlefield Earth isn't a good movie at all. I had seen it, out of curiosity mostly, after it had originally come out on video way back when. On April 1st, the joke was on the Secret Screening audience at the Alamo Drafthouse as this film started playing. At least it was fun to laugh along with the movie with a bunch of other film buffs. And to learn some technical details of how the film was shot that make it worse on a whole new level.
• Shazam! was a fun surprise. I'd been a fan of the comic book when I was a kid, and the Saturday morning live-action show in the 70's, so I at least knew some of the history of the character. Really loved all the characters. Fun, fun movie. Planning to catch this again when I get a chance.
• Hellboy (2019) isn't a film I was particularly looking forward to but I'm a big fan of director Neil Marshall's other films like The Descent, Dog Soldiers, and Doomsday. While it had some okay moments, I was a bit disappointed overall. I don't feel like I really got into any of the characters at all to care about them. Mostly a bunch of one-liners and quick transitions to the next action scene.

The Castles of Burgundy iOS app

The board game gets high praise but I'd never played it, so I took a chance on this iOS version that just came out.

I went through the tutorial which was a little confusing. Then a friend who has the physical game coincidentally put out a call to play it, so I watched a few how-to videos which were good, but it was this one from Rahdo Runs Through which made everything make sense and allowed me to just start playing the app.

Having seen that, the rules just seemed so much simpler. I think it was seeing the physical game board made things easier to understand than how they had to re-envision the layout for the iOS app.

Once learned, it is quite a fun game and I'm looking forward to playing the physical board game tonight!