Going off to Winchester and waiting for everything to blow over

Feels like home already.

Oh blimey I have been neglecting this, haven't I? I guess that review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes never fell through (short version: it's great, go see it on DVD) and since my rant on the big steaming turd that was Transformers: Dark of the Moon, things have been pretty quiet. So to the attention of all one of you who still read this, time for a quick catch-up, or as quick as I can make it since this is a lot of ground to cover.

I have been a student of the University of Winchester for nearly seven weeks now, and I've been studying Creative Writing and Film Studies for slightly less than that. It's been going well so far - my flatmates have all been kind, funny, brilliant people, and the people on my course (well, both of them) are dedicated, like-minded and charming. You don't know how weird it is to find someone on your course who's as big a soundtrack geek as I am, or to be able to go down the stairs to chat about A Clockwork Orange or David Mamet - just knowing people who pick up my geeky references is amazing in and of itself.

This is my friend Phil. As you can tell, he makes a very good Doctor, and he says more morally bankrupt things than I do. It's good to have him around.

The courses themselves have been going swimmingly, although I find myself preferring Creative Writing just a tad more. Maybe it's because we're creating something new every week - in both Fictional Writing and Scriptwriting I have written about, in no particular order: 

• A man becoming increasingly cyberized by his mobile phone
• The galaxy's largest library
• A miniature dog that considers itself some sort of canine god
• Living in a world that just missed the apocalypse
• A prequel to Jaws following Quint's days aboard the USS Indianapolis
• Death being predetermined and mandated by the government

And I've read a lot of excellent short stories, so that's all been fun. I do have problems with Scriptwriting tutors constantly talking about the three-act structure, though. Film Critic Hulk has talked about this in great detail already, so I won't repeat too much, but when writing a script, all the three-act structure is, is a summary of a story. It doesn't help you write a story, and it's certainly not useful when writing characters, since so many screenwriters consider an act break the point where one act ends and another begins, regardless of what the little people you control in your story actually do...but I digress. I can work around this.

This isn't to say I'm not enjoying Film Studies, because I am; all of the films I've seen I've liked, with the exception of La Haine (seriously, I've seen this fucking film so many times I now have a valid reason to shoot the director. Aside from him directing Gothika), and I enjoy being challenged, being stuck for words, having to think in new ways. The problem is my tutor Imruh's lectures.

Now Imruh is clearly an intelligent man. He has a mind like a steel trap, he forces you to think about film in a new way, and he knows a lot about the subject. But dear God in heaven, his seminars are painfully boring. He reads aloud from a pre-written script, and I think it might be from a thesis because it contains some complex technical vocabulary, not just in cinema but in philosophy, language and sociology. Combine that with dull PowerPoint presentations with thick detailed quotes and not a lot of time to get them down in, and you get me playing Bejewelled Blitz on my iPod to make it pass. The weird thing is that he's much more engaging in a seminar, when he doesn't have a script, and I don't get why he doesn't just go with that.

Seriously, this fucking game plays itself.

Speaking of iPods, if you have ever said at some point in your lives that Apple is simpler and more user-friendly than Windows, I WILL FIGHT YOU ON THE SIDE OF THE STREET. It's like ever since Steve Jobs' untimely demise the bigwigs of Apple have suddenly realised that without him, then what they thought their beloved Midas had turned to gold was rapidly turning into rusty tin. iTunes 10.5 was dropped on us a month ago and it is crippled. I have never had this much of a problem with any piece of software before on my computer. Don't get me wrong, iTunes has always been skull-splittingly horrible, but it worked. It started up. It barely managed to do so, but it was there. 10.5 has honestly made me want to tear my hair out and form it into a noose with which I can strangle every single Apple employee.

It all started when I decided to put some music on my iPod. The device wasn't being recognised in iTunes, so I figured it needed a software update. It wasn't working out, so I decided to uninstall the program, then reinstall the new one. Uninstalling was an uphill battle already, since there was one component that refused to budge (oh yeah, and Apple asks, nay demands, you uninstall everything in a specific order or else "who knows what might happen? Not us, shithead, that's your problem"), and I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get rid of that.

That done, I re-downloaded but, wonder of wonders, iTunes just didn't feel like doing it. Due to some unspecified flaw, either in my laptop or in the program (more likely the latter, considering the amount of Windows 7 users also complaining about it), it would always roll back several times and when it did finish, iTunes wouldn't open. I have spent hours and hours trying to find a solution and there has to be something wrong with my laptop, because otherwise it should be working fine. Said laptop has ventilation problems anyway, so I've asked for a fresh one for Christmas. I could get it fixed, but to solve the overheating, I would have to pay £45 and wait ten days while they disassemble everything.

Click for animation. Prince does not approve.

Yeah, fuck that noise.

It's not as bad as it could be. I still have my iPod, which I just need to keep charged; I can buy music and comics off of there, and there's always Spotify. Even if I do have to convert all my iTunes stuff into standard MP3's, which is still joyless work. I just need to wait until Christmas before I can use in on a computer proper. I'll probably get a new iPod at some point in the next month anyway; this one has become more sluggish and the screen has cracked (not much, thankfully), and all new ones come with iOS5 already on there. I'll just have to save up my birthday money.

Oh yeah, it's my birthday in two days. I've been promised/threatened with a week long birthday by my flatmate Becci. Gosh, time has gone quickly.