The Sunday Talk: R.I.P.

It is with great sadness that I formally proclaim The Sunday Talk to be dead. Sadly, in the middle of last year I realised that I just didn’t have the time, patience or motivation to regularly blog in long-form. While I did enjoy it most of the time, I was finding it to be quite the chore the longer time went on.

So I gave it away 6 months ago, and honestly, I’ve not really looked back.

So while this blog might be dead, I am leaving it up for posterity’s sake. Not sure how long the posts will stay up here for - I’ve just renewed the blog and domain name for a further 12 months, I guess in a way to just put off making some sort of final decision. In the meantime, you are welcome to go back over the 18 months worth of writing that is here. Some of it is drivel, some of it is insightful (not much), but most of it is just my random thoughts on the events of the day.

I am still active on the Interwebs, however - you can find an aggregation of my outpourings in various forms at my new personal “web site” (such as it is), by clicking here.

Thanks for the page views - I hope everyone has an awesome 2012. See you around the Web.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers. More than meets the eye, as the old saying goes. The simple fact is, the classic 1980s cartoon series never had much depth going for it, even when it was at its most pure. It was merely one of a wave of cartoons designed to sell toys to kids. The only difference between now and then is that we’re able to have a heck of a lot more realism in what happens on screen. So as the new Transformers film series heads to its third, and hopefully final, cinematic outing, the question we have to ask ourselves is - was Michael Bay’s efforts here worth it? Was this a bold new cinematic adventure, or merely a messy tribute to nostalgia? Honestly, while it’s great hearing Peter Cullen back as Optimus Prime, the movie is just plain boring.

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Bridesmaids

I think that I am starting to turn into a bit of a grumpy old man, really. For weeks now I’ve been hearing about this amazingly funny movie, Bridesmaids, and was very eager to go and see it. I’d heard about how many great jokes were in it, and how wonderful the characters and central plot was. Having now seen the movie, I honestly don’t feel as though the hype matched the reality. While there were certainly some good jokes in it, they were few and far between - the film focussed on the wrong aspects of “nervous comedy”, and not enough on the more interesting dramatic material that the central character was going through. So am I right or wrong? Have a read on to find out my reasons for feeling the way that I do about this movie.

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The Sunday Talk gets a new look!

Howdy, all! I hope you’ve been enjoying the recent mid-year resurgence of The Sunday Talk, as I slowly get back on top of my blog postings. Been able to finally finish about 2 dozen articles from the last 2 months that I partially started, but sadly due to work commitments was never able to get around to finishing. While some of them are a little raw, I hope you’ve been enjoying my commentary on all things media and technology! Please feel free to sound out in the comments section on any article, whether you agree or disagree with anything I’ve said (or notice some sort of factual error, corrections of which are always appreciated!).

Something I enjoy doing with this blog is re-evaluating the look & feel, and indeed the content approach, every 6 months. While I have no immediate plans to change the content focus of the blog (it’ll basically match what I outlined back in January), I did feel it was time to make some visual changes to the blog, with the choice of a brand new theme to power all of the pages on the site. Gone is the clean white & cream look, and in is a much starker orange / black / white appearance. I think the new look is really quite nice, and I hope that you do too. As per my above statement, please feel free to sound out in the Comments section of this post with your thoughts if you feel that way inclined!

Anyway, here’s to another 6 months of what I hope is interesting and engaging content for The Sunday Talk - and Happy 1st Birthday to The Blog That Was Formally A Weekly Podcast!! Sip sip!

Thoughts on Apple's WWDC 2011 Keynote

Apple recently opened the curtain on the latest developments in its operating system world, and while I am no big fan of Apple by any stretch of the imagination, whenever they make an announcement I try to follow what is said. This is mostly to see what Microsoft’s biggest competitor is up to, but also because of how much industry-wide influence Apple have (for better or for worse, you can decide). Their annual WWDC is usually where the next generation iPhone is announced, and while there was no iPhone 5 announcement this year (latest rumours suggest that will be coming in September), a visibly ill Steve Jobs took to the stage to unveil the latest version of Mac OS X, code named Lion, along with iOS 5 and their latest attempt at a cloud computer service, iCloud (replacing the disaster that was MobileMe). So was what they announced as revolutionary and magical as indicated?

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