Cynergist

Photos added to album

Back in the distant past of the internet I used to have a personal web site. You can probably still find remnants of it by using the wayback machine at the Internet Archive. It only contained a few details about myself and linked through to some of the websites I have worked on.

A few years later I started a Livejournal. But this was more to enable me to easily compile and read friends journal entries, than for me to post my own journal.

My main hobby is photography, and I decided that I would quite like to share my photos with friends and family, so earlier this year I looked around for the best method to deliver what I was looking for. Eventually I settled on using this blog.

Leeds International Film Festival

I had the pleasure of watching Paprika during its UK premiere at the Leeds International Film Festival.

I must start by saying that I am already a fan of Satoshi Kon's work. Films like Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfather are amongst my favourites in any medium, not just anime.

I sometimes feel that much of his work could just as easily have been performed in live action features as anime, but this isn't the case with Paprika. One of the main aspects of this story is the way in which the dream world intrudes on the real world, and how it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the two - until something totally bizarre appears. Many of the images just wouldn't work in any form except anime.

While the story itself follows an investigation into the theft of three devices that enable users to drop into people's dreams, the movie is also a homage to both films and television. In dreams we see everything from Tarzan to Monkey, and film posters to several previous Satoshi Kon films.

Shopping In Manchester

Julie (my sister) joined me last Friday for a weekend. We ended up spending most of the time shopping.



In the video clip we are inside Manchester's Arndale shopping centre, looking out to the big wheel.