Review on Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

Puzzle-urile Noriel: par faine, sunt frustrante

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 06:36:46 +0000

Cred că am mai zis în câteva rânduri că am o pasiune pentru puzzle-uri. Dimensiunea standard pe care o prefer e de o mie de piese: distracție de vreo zi sau două, numai bună pentru un weekend în care am chef să ascult o carte audio sau podcast-ul ICR (nu, nu cei finanțați de Stat).

Am și câteva puzzle-uri mai mari, de exemplu un Clementoni de 1500 de piese cu poza asta cu turnul Babel:

Mi-a luat o săptămână să-l fac. Mai am și unul de la Clementoni, cu 4000 de piese, podul din New York, poza asta:

Mi-a luat câteva luni, în care l-am mai și lăsat în pace pentru că n-am mai avut chef, sau alte asemenea.

De curând am luat puzzle-uri și de la Noriel. Mai exact, unul din colecția Vintage, cu o reclamă făinuță la Coca Cola. Am o măsuță în sufragerie care e perfectă pentru puzzle-uri: e ceva mai mare decât un puzzle de 1000 de piese (de dimensiuni standard), are roți și are marginile un pic ridicate, numai bine să nu împrăștii cu piese în toate părțile.

Așa, am scos puzzle-ul pe masă și dă-i. Și dă-i. Și la un moment dat mă prind că e cam al naibii de greu și că-mi ia mai mult decât altele de 1000 de piese, că nu găsesc nimic și că tot pun piese aiurea.

Prima problemă: piesele sunt făcute pe un tipar cam asemănător, așa că se potrivesc dintr-o parte în alta. Vedeți zona de jos, cu decorațiunile ovale? Acolo, de exemplu, nu mă prindeam decât când încercam să pun piese în jur că ceva nu bate și că iar e o piesă greșită.

A doua problemă: poza e neclară. Știu că nu pare la dimensiunea asta, pentru că și pe cutia efectivă pare în regulă. Însă, dacă ai un puzzle de 50 x 70 cm, se vede brusc rezoluția proastă. Până la urmă am renunțat din pură frustrare să mai încerc să fac puzzle-ul.

Însă mai aveam încă un puzzle de la ei, acesta cu Tokyo-ul. Bine, când zic „Tokyo”, vreau să spun că e de fapt Hong Kong, doar cutia e indecisă.

Ce vedeți aici e luat de pe site-ul lor, pentru că mie mi-e mai peste mână să-i fac o poză clară. Pe cutia mea, pe față, scrie „Hong Kong”, dar pe spate scrie că ar fi Tokyo. Până la urmă am căutat pe net poze cu districtul de afaceri din Hong Kong și am găsit imagini cu clădirea din fundal din stânga, cea cu zig-zaguri luminate, care e, se pare, de la chinezi, nu de la japonezi.

E un început prost, dar să zicem că e scuzabil să încurci două poze cu orașe.

Așa că m-am apucat de el. Și, ce să vezi? În afară de liniile luminoase roșii și galbene, care erau suficient de ok în felul lor, iar nu reușeam să găsesc mai nimic. Iar era poza neclară, iar păreau să se potrivească piese unde nu se potrivesc de fapt.

Uite o fotografie cu trei piese de puzzle pe spatele cutiei în sine:

Una dintre piese nu se potrivește acolo, sau cel puțin nu cred că se potrivește. Detaliile sunt dintr-o zonă în care totuși pot fi distinse cât de cât, respectiv sunt din clădirea „lipită” de cea cu zig-zagul din stânga, care e încă mai clară decât negreala din centru sau din stânga-jos:

Efectiv impresia mea e că n-au folosit o poză cu o rezoluție suficient de bună. Am făcut puzzle-uri alb-negru care erau mai ușor de asamblat datorită texturilor din diverse zone, a luminozității și a unor linii clare.

Spre comparație, din puzzle-ul de 4000 de piese de la Clementoni de care ziceam mai sus:

Se văd detaliile ferestrelor, unele sunt mai îngrămădite și galbene, altele sunt alungite și palide, altele sunt pătrățoase. Și zona cu podul, dificlă de felul ei, are nuanțe de maroniu sau gri, linii destul de clare:

Poate că la un moment dat m-am plictisit de puzzle-ul respectiv, dar când mai mergeam prin camera cu puzzle-ul, mai puteam să pun 2-3 piese, pentru că era relativ clar pe unde erau, datorită gradațiilor de culoare și a micilor detalii. Și vorbim totuși de o imagine de 4 ori mai mare decât cea de la Noriel, în care nu prea vezi mare lucru.

Da, îmi plac provocările, dar vreau să fie provocări plăcute. Până acum, Noriel s-a dovedit mai degrabă o frustrare, de parcă n-ar înțelege exact calitățile unui puzzle bun. Le-am dat două încercări, mi-am pierdut răbdarea în 2 rânduri – e suficient, gata. De acum încolo îi ignor pe rafturi.

(iar dacă se ambiționează careva să-mi demonstreze că greșesc, îi fac cadou puzzle-urile astea, atâta timp cât le ridică din Brașov, că n-am chef să mă complic cu poșta.)

P.S. Că tot e momentul… Mi-am găsit ceva pentru suflețelul meu de Black Friday.

Doctor Who – Christmas special 2013 review [spoilers]

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 19:39:04 +0000

Warning: this review contains spoilers. And it also doesn’t make any sense if you haven’t seen the episode. Or the series. If you don’t watch Doctor Who, or if you haven’t seen „The Time of the Doctor” yet, go back. I mean it.

To start this off: I am not mad at Steven Moffat. I remember all the cool episodes he wrote for Doctor Who, I remember Sherlock and Coupling and Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death and hell, even Press Gang. But sometimes I can’t help but feel that he’s bitten off a bit more than he can actually chew. Some episodes of Doctor Who are sheer brilliance and they make me jump around in excitement and shout „This! This is Doctor Who, dammit!” while others make me nearly apologize to people.

There might be something about Doctor Who and that show’s writers. They all try so damned hard, you can feel it. They know they’re making history. They don’t want to ruin it. They want it to be Epic. And sometimes Epic means ‘Bad Wolf’ with its subtle hints all over the place and that wonderful ’the drums, the never-ending drums’ (saying nothing of ‘don’t even blink’)… while at other times we get Jesus!Doctor resurrected by good thoughts from the whole of humanity or something like that.

That being said… I liked the way in which „The Time of the Doctor” started. I really did. My buddy Linda said she was really disappointed with the episode, but I couldn’t see it: Clara was having Christmas dinner with her family, the Doctor was off investigating a mystery with a Cyberman’s head by his side… Sure, all sorts of alien ships gathered around a planet had the potential for corny plots, but it wouldn’t be like that, right? Right? Wrong.

Problem number one: too many things. The Cyberman’s head. The Church of the Silence. Clara’s family. Time Lords. The answer to the crack in the universe (what’s behind it). The answer to what caused the crack in the universe. Weeping angels. Supposed nudity. Tasha. Tasha flirting with the Doctor. The fact that the Doctor is at his thirteenth incarnation. Do I go on?

Look, I don’t mind a lot of details in my stories. I’m a fan of details! But too many things thrown in at the same time make things messy. And do you know why? Because of Problem number two.

**Problem number two: **Rushing. Ruuuuuuuuuushhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing. Was I supposed to feel sad at the Cyberman’s head dying? Because I didn’t. Do you know why? Because he was introduced this episode and got five minutes of screen time, at most. I know that the Doctor spent hundreds of years with it, but… no. I can’t bring myself to care.

What about the answer to the crack in the universe? It’s just thrown in there! Seriously, I was very curious about that, but the show went all „Yeah, it’s because we tried to blow up your TARDIS so you wouldn’t get here, and the Time Lords are on the other side.” Really? It sounds like something Moffat thought up after a day of pondering how to write this episode. There’s nothing much leading up to this.

Problem number three: forgotten plot threads. We were led to believe there’s something very scary on the other side of the message. But Time Lords? What the hell, are they chanting that message in Tolkien’s orc language for ominousness? Also, the Weeping Angels. You know they’re there because they have fans. There isn’t much of a reason for them to be there otherwise. You get a scare, you think you know where all this is going… and then the Weeping Angels vanish.

The truth field is another problem of the sort: it serves very little purpose except having the Doctor tell the truth a few times. Why’s it there? In-universe, not story-wise, I mean. Story-wise it’s there to further the plot. But why the hell would the presence of the Time Lords create a truth field?

Problem number four: running gags outstaying their welcome. You know them – Doctor Who, Doctor Who? Yes, we know! It’s the bloody name of the show! Move on!

Or the thing about the Doctor snogging people. He’s doing it with everyone these days – it’s gotten to the point where if I were a random sexy woman in the Doctor’s world, my expectations of Doctor-snogs would be at about 50%.

Problem number five: cheap storytelling. The narrator’s voice is meant to be magic and stuff, but it really kind of isn’t. I suppose this might be more of a director-thing than a writer-thing, but it doesn’t work so well. We don’t really get sucked into the Doctor’s life and aging process because it’s all too fast (see problem number two). I understand 60 minutes aren’t enough to really show everything you want to show, but here’s an alternate way of doing it: no narrator’s voice. Follow Clara, follow her back home, then she puts the key in the TARDIS and flies back. When she gets there, the Doctor is old. We felt that just a minute passed, too. We can empathize with Clara much more than we can with him. Yes, we miss the part with the Doctor kicking ass with that ‘reversed polarity’ thing, but maybe that time is best spent elsewhere? Eh, whatever. There are many ways of telling a story. I’ve already gone too far with the speculation here.

Also, the Time Lords are calling to the Doctor through the time crack? As my friend Linda pointed out, we’ve kind of heard that one before, but they were doing it to the Master, with the sound of drums. Except it worked better in that episode.

To sum it up: I’m sorry to see the Time Lords show up again so fast. We didn’t get to wish for them for too long. We didn’t get any buildup. They’ve technically been there since the fifth series (or the first, if you think about it), but now they’re up and kicking as if they knew that everything was fresh for the Doctor, that he’d only just saved them and it’s time to pop back into his life.

The whole episode is rushed and it answers questions in what I feel to be unsatisfying ways. Moffat seems to want to cram the world into an episode sometimes, but it doesn’t always work. Several things seem to not be very well thought through.

The most disappointing part, to me, is that I feel that it all started in a good, fun way.

Working with the Big World Network

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 09:20:34 +0000

Flight from Hell is well into its second season by now – the fourth episode is out today and episodes 5, 6 and 7 are ready for when their time will come. 8 has been written, 9 is being written.

And the one thing I keep saying this morning is that I have awesome publishers.

First of all, the reason why I decided to get a novel published with them is that I absolutely loved the concept. I come from the wonderful world of fanfiction, where you wait for a new episode and you text your friends things like „Holy fucking shit! Beside You in Time was just updated :-O It’s alive!” Or you run around and tell people in Canada that silverkytten updated, or that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality just got a new episode.

Literature can be a domain where you eagerly wait for more, where you can get involved, speculate, hope for more. We’ve kind of lost that in the mainstream when serial novels stopped being published – but fanfiction, where the chapter is the default posting unit, brought the excitement back. The only problem being that many, many series lie abandoned, maybe never to be finished (such as some of my own, actually… hiatuses just keep growing)

The Big World Network publishes one chapter/episode per week, though, so you’re ensured against heartbreak of looking at series that will never be finished. And I love that. It’s brilliant.

And of course, they publish audio episodes as well. Which is lovely, I adore audiobooks.

But. Part 2 of the story of my love for the Big World Network is the unseen one: what happens behind the scenes. After all, sometimes the books that are published can be lovely and so can the concept, but when you end up working with the people who make the magic happen, you can feel like crap (I’ve been in that situation before).

The truth is: I absolutely love the BWN team from this point of view. I’ve been working with them for some months now and they are awesome.

Here, let me bullet point the neat stuff you don’t see from the outside:

They’re great with planning. They take their time to come up with solutions, set deadlines which allow for unforeseen delays and think things through before they act. They know the extent of their abilities, and they know what to expect of the average author. In other words, they don’t rely on optimism and improvisation to get things done – which is a nice change from some of the artistic teams I’ve been in. „Better early than on time” is a decent standard to function by, no? And you always have time to notice whether anything needs more work that way.
They’re transparent about what they do. We get team updates regularly, in which we find out what the Big World Network is planning: site changes, convention participation, events, plans for certain events, what is going on with other parts of the Big World Network. Technically, I don’t need to know some of that (e.g. changes in the way the site looks like), but it does make me feel like I’m welcomed into their home. Which is great. I get to know who I work for and what they do.
They listen. I’m a nitpicking sort of person, and a lot of people grumbled over how evil and criticizing I am (I don’t mean it in a bad way, though). But the BWN guys don’t grumble. They check, explain, fix, improve. Is there a typo anywhere on the site? It will be fixed. A broken link, an audio glitch, anything that falls under the category of „you missed a spot”? That spot will be checked ASAP. And I’ll get replies to things like „Have you tried selling your books with X, Y or Z?”
They also dialogue. Let’s hit the full spectrum of communication here: I can discuss the merits/downfalls of an idea concerning either the novel or the site with them and some solution/compromise will be reached. And they’re polite, nice and assume you’re (trying to be) the same as well (which really helps people like myself, who can put their foot in their mouth regularly).
They try new things: today they’re at a convention, tomorrow they’re finding people on the net who will promote them, yesterday they talked to some people about promoting your work for some time to come, at some point they will do something promotional and neat God knows where.
I should’ve mentioned this above, but it’s obvious from the way the site looks: they’re very skilled at what they do. Novel covers look great – and they look different. My banner is very different from Thralldom’s banner, which in its turn is very different from the banner for Billie vs the Unseen. Perhaps some are less impressive than others, but you can see a personality in them, professionalism. The same goes for editing: Amanda and Wendy (yes, I have two editors) find typos and problems easily, fix my convoluted sentences, tell me when something is wrong and, all in all, save my ass every once in awhile. And, of course, everything runs smoother than smooth on their side.

They make you feel like you’re part of the team and, overall, they make my life a bit more cheerful than I’d expected it to be. Which is why I’m writing this post.

And it isn’t just me saying it, either.

Doctor Who – The Day of the Doctor [first impressions, no spoilers, no coherence]

Sat, 23 Nov 2013 21:32:25 +0000

…and it was everything that I remembered Doctor Who being, because it was awesome and plot-filled, humor-filled, and with loads of adventures and running about through time and some aliens and huge decisions to make.

And several Doctors!

Really, I missed David Tennant and it’s wonderful to see him interacting with Matt Smith.

And Billie Piper! I mean, sure, at some point most of us thought that Rose Tyler was getting a bit too much of a ditzy blonde, although she was nice, but right now Billie is just perfect and I was, like, wow. Hello, you. Missed you and didn’t realize it until now! You are FANTASTIC!

Clara was nice, but somehow I feel like she’s getting the short end of the stick as a companion now. But seriously, with three Doctors around, everything else was bound to be in the background. But she was still useful and cute and she reminds me of a sparrow, as always.

Which reminds me that we did get cheesy aliens and some cheesy lines, but somehow that’s part of Doctor Who. Good ol’ British cheese, different from American cheese because it’s less pompous and more in good humor.

Which, in its turn, reminds me that they didn’t miss the chance to throw in a joke at the expense of the US XD They keep doing that. But, hey, of course they would.

I’m just squeeing and running around like a proper fangirl now and going „Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!” all over the place.

Tomorrow I might actually catch my breath (and my brain) and write a proper damned review.