Ian Robinson's Soapbox

2016 Freelance Writing Statistics

By Ian Robinson on January 5, 2017 in Writing

I wrote a post about my freelance writing output in 2015 a year ago. How did the 2016 writing output compare?

I wrote 50 new articles in 2016. As compared to 48 in 2015.

I edited, and rewrote, 16 articles by others. As compared to 24 in 2015.

I haven’t counted the words this year. It’s a meaningless metric. Articles are as long or as short as they need to be to get the ideas and information across.

I didn’t hit the 25% target for income from writing that I wanted to. It delivered 18.8% before Tax. I didn’t do as much writing as I’d hoped for a few months from May to July due to some very early starts. Getting up at 03:30 four days a week turns your brain to mush! Want to hit 25% at least in 2017.

Thanks again to those who asked me to do writing for them. Let’s create all the content in 2017 🙂

Favourite films from 2016

By Ian Robinson on December 31, 2016 in Films

I saw 55 films in the cinema this year. Here are my top 6 from this years selection:

Room – This is not the film you would think it is from the description. It is not a horror film. It is not a explicitly sexual or violent film, although there is some of that. It is about a 5 year old boy, and his mother, discovering the world after she was held captive for 7 years. So the boy has always been a captive. He only knows about Room where they live. Until he turns 5 and his mother starts to tell him about the outside world. I cried, laughed, and at one point my heart rate must have been up about 140 bpm. The performances by Brie Larson as the mother and Jacob Tremblay as the boy are remarkable. I was fully invested in the characters. Hence the heart rate thing. The supporting cast are also good. It was easy to rate this 9/10. Came very close to being a 10. Once again, it’s not the film you think it is.

The Big Short – Can a film make you root for the financial traders and market analysts who foresaw the 2008 housing crash in the USA, and who bet that it would happen in order to short the market and make money? Turns out you can. Bankers don’t rate too well in opinion polls about professions. But at the end of the day they are just people. And if they are interesting people then their story will be interesting. The characters in this film are interesting. I really liked it. It breaks the fourth wall quite a lot and this usually makes me twitchy. But it works in this. I thought Steve Carell’s character and performance was great, although the whole cast is good. Vinnie Daniel politely asking the auditors to leave Mark Baum’s office is brilliant.

Maggie’s Plan – If you showed this film to someone without credits and told them it was a Woody Allen film they would believe you. It’s actually a Rebecca Miller film and its better than the film Woody Allen released in 2016. I loved it. Have watched it several times since seeing it in the cinema. As good every time. The whole cast are brilliant. Julianne Moore especially so.

The Neon Demon – What to say about The Neon Demon. It is sharp edged, stylish, colourful, beautifully shot, has a great score, and a set of background songs. It tells the story of a teenager who moves to Los Angeles to pursue a modelling career. She very quickly gets booked by some big photographers and fashion designers. Much to the chagrin of a group of existing models and fashion industry insiders. Who then take some extreme measures. It’s a wonderful film covering ego, jealousy, shallowness of people, and obsession. One of the best films I’ve ever seen.

The Meddler – Another film with a Woody Allen vibe. Which is a lazy description. It’s much more. Susan Sarandon plays a widow who moves from New York to be near her daughter who is a screenwriter in Los Angeles. She can’t help getting involved in her daughters life, and when rebuked, her friends lives. Great script and performances from Susan Sarandon, Rose Byrne as the daughter, and J. K. Simmons as a retired cop.

Me Before You – There was a lot of negative flak about this film before it was released. People said it promoted the idea of euthanasia for people with disabilities. Turns out the film isn’t pushing that agenda. If anything most arguments in the film are against doing that. I’ve never watched Game of Thrones so hadn’t seen Emilia Clarke in that, but I had liked her in the latest Terminator reboot. I liked Sam Claflin in The Hunger Games. Both are brilliant in this film. Emilia Clarke has one of the most expressive faces I’ve ever seen. Her eyebrows seem to have a life of their own. She is awesome in this. Sam Claflin is also great, and he is only using his head to act as he’s playing a character paralysed from the neck down. This film raises several important issues, and deals with them responsibly. At the same time it is a funny and poignant story in its own right.

Favourite books from 2016

By Ian Robinson on December 31, 2016 in Books

I only managed to get through 16 books in 2016. I had to do some very early starts (03:30 four days a week) in day job for a few months and it turned my brain to mush. That’s all sorted now, so hopefully I’ll get more reading done in 2017. From the books I did read here are my top five. These would have been up there even if I read 50 books this year.

Speak – Louisa Hall. View on iBooks – Amazon – Audible

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street – Natasha Pulley. View on iBooks – Amazon – Audible

Join – Steve Toutonghi. View on iBooks – Amazon – Audible

The Big Picture – Sean Carroll. View on iBooks – Amazon

Europe at Midnight – Dave Hutchinson. View on iBooks – Amazon

Favourite tracks from 2016

By Ian Robinson on December 31, 2016 in Music

Here are my favourite new tracks released in 2016.

Mr David – Laura Doggett. Listen on Apple Music or YouTube.

Scars – Tove Lo. Listen on Apple Music or YouTube.

Interlude: I was Never Here – The Glass Child. Listen on Apple Music or Soundcloud.

Perfect Illusion – Lady Gaga. Listen on Apple Music or YouTube.

Growing Pains – Birdie. Listen on Apple Music or YouTube.

Here is an Apple Music Playlist with the 5 tracks.

Sully film review

By Ian Robinson on December 4, 2016 in Films

I liked Sully: Miracle on the Hudson a lot more than I thought I would. It’s a dramatisation of the events that happened in January 2009 when US Airways Flight 1549 had to land on the Hudson River in New York after a bird strike damaged both engines shortly after takeoff. The actual flight time for Flight 1549 was only 208 seconds (3 minutes and 28 seconds), and the film is 96 minutes long. The flight scenes are repeated several times, but even so, there is a lot of additional time to fill.

The bulk of the film is taken up by the National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) investigation, flashbacks to when Captain Chesley Sullenberger was learning to fly (including a similar incident in a Navy Phantom jet), and the reaction of Sully and the crew on being thrust into the national spotlight. I thought the flashbacks and the scenes were Sully was thinking about what might have happened if he hadn’t decided to ditch in the Hudson River were great. All the flight scenes in the film are excellent. Including those showing crashes that Sully imagines. I want a flight simulator that’s as good as that! The only disappointing part was the CGI of the water splash on one shot of the plane skidding on the water.

The NTSB investigators are depicted as very aggressive and as if they are looking to blame the pilots for the loss of the aircraft. I don’t know if the original investigators were that aggressive. I doubt it. But it probably had to be done to inject drama into the film for the non-flight scenes. Sully is worth seeing. See it in iMAX or MAXX if you can. Just for the flight scenes over New York alone. I rated it 8/10.

We need to fight for the future

By Ian Robinson on November 26, 2016 in General

It’s been a weird year from a politics point of view. The Brexit vote was a disaster for the UK and the world in general in my opinion. That was followed up by Trump winning the USA Presidential election. Both results allegedly due to people feeling left out of the way the modern world is changing. So they voted for campaigns led by two groups of mostly rich white men who couldn’t be more removed from the people affected by globalisation. The blue collar jobs that have moved from the UK and USA to Asia are not coming back. They will be taken by machines. Irrespective of where they happen to be situated.

It’s striking that many of the hangers-on and fellow travellers of the Brexit and Trump camps are anti science, anti women’s rights, evidence deniers, who promise the Earth then deliver little. They must be resisted.

I’m an internationalist. The Brexit supporters may get the UK out of the EU, but they’ll never get the European ideals out of me. The values of the European project and the Enlightenment are worth fighting for and will triumph in the end. But we must do it by educating people for the 22nd century and the change that ubiquitous smart manufacturing and machine learning will bring in. People will need to do other jobs that the machines will not do better. We should start by giving everyone a good basic income that they can live comfortably on. Then they can work on things that make them happy. Including looking after the planet and other people.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children film review

By Ian Robinson on October 2, 2016 in Films

Loads of spoilers below.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is pretty standard stuff. All competently done if familiar to films that have gone before. The most interesting aspect was how existing in the 1 day time loops where the children live for protection means that they never get to grow up and experience life. I’d wonder if it was worth it. Samual L. Jackson does a lot of monologuing and I couldn’t help thinking about Frozone talking about that topic in The Incredibles. There is also a nice Jason and The Argonauts fighting skeleton section done with modern techniques. I rated it 6/10.

It’s worth getting an AppleTV just to run Magic Fireplace

By Ian Robinson on September 25, 2016 in General, Technology

Magic Fireplace icon

You can’t beat a good fire as the nights draw in. Unfortunately I don’t have a good fire. I do however have an AppleTV, an HD television, and a good sound system. So I can have a digital fire. Using the fabulous Magic Fireplace App from Jetson Creative. It displays one of 20 different HD videos of fireplaces. With a pleasing wood burning sounds. Perfect for dark evenings on the sofa with a book and a big mug of tea. Video below.

Testing Ulysses posting to WordPress

By Ian Robinson on September 24, 2016 in Writing

Ulysses is a nice macOS and iOS application for writers. I prefer Scrivener myself for writing articles and fiction. But Ulysses can also post to WordPress Blogs. I’ve recently been having a few niggles with Blogo my WordPress posting app of choice. Weird text editing glitches and stuff. So I’m thinking of starting to use something else. So this post is a test to see what posts with images and links look like when composed and posted from Ulysses.

The Girl With All The Gifts film review

By Ian Robinson on September 24, 2016 in Films

The Girl with All The Gifts film poster

Spoilers aplenty below.

I never jumped on the zombie apocalypse train when it left the station a few years ago. It was fully laden though as plenty of others did jump on. Witness the popularity of TV shows like The Walking Dead, and films like 28 Days Later and World War Z. I did jump on the zombie comedy film train though, with the films Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland.

It won’t come as a surprise, after that preamble, that The Girl with All The Gifts is a film in the zombie genre. Although the zombies are called hungries in the film, and the book. The book is how I came to the film. I read it last year after it was highly recommended on several Sci-Fi blogs. I liked it a lot. Both the book and the film script were written in tandem by M.R. Carey. They tell the story of Melanie (played by Sennia Nanua in the film), who is one of a group of children being held in a military base and research centre in England. Here they are taught, while strapped into wheelchairs that are pushed into the classroom, by a sympathetic teacher called Miss Justineau (Gemma Arterton). They are also used in medical research by a team led by Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close) who are trying to find a cure or vaccine for the fungal infection that turns people into hungries. Turns out the children are from mothers who were infected before the children were born, and have a less damaging version of the fungal infection. A sort of symbiotic relationship with it. So they are neither human or hungries. But something different, and new. Melanie is very smart and quickly learns and remembers things she is told or sees.

The military base they are in gets overrun by hungries and Melanie, Miss Justineau, and Caldwell escape in an armoured truck with two soldiers, Sargent Parks (Paddy Considine) and Private Gallagher (Fisayo Akinade). They plan to drive towards another military base but the truck is damaged and they have to continue on foot through the hungries’ infested suburbs of London. Melanie starts to play an important role in helping the group navigate the dangerous streets. The hungries don’t attack anyone already infected with the fungus, so Melanie is able to move amongst them safely. The film is actually a coming of age story as Melanie comes to realise that she, and other feral children who are like her, are the future of humanity as they can coexist with the fungal infection. She takes actions to ensure that she and the other children survive.

I liked the film a lot. The book has more detail and exposition, as you would expect. But the film is good in its own right. The performance by Sennia Nanua as Melanie is fantastic. And she is ably supported by the four other principle cast members. The depiction of post-apocalyptic London is very well done. As are the hungries. The music is very suspenseful. In lots of scenes it is just shifting harmonic tones, but it’s very effective. I loved the ending to the book, and it’s there unchanged in the film. You should definitely go see this, then read the book if your haven’t already. I rated it 8/10.

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