Film review: Eddie the Eagle

Missus Dom and me have an arrangement: one of us gets to pick a movie and then the other picks the next one. I squandered my turn on Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, and I’m still wondering if Eddie the Eagle would have been  a better choice…

Eddie-the-Eagle.jpg

Some of you might remember Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards: the British ski-jumper who entered the 1988 Winter games at Calgary. Eddie had very little going for him aside from iron gonads and a ‘must try’ attitude. He didn’t do very well of course, but the world loves an underdog, so for most of 1988, the world loved Eddie the Eagle.

So much so, it appears, that someone decided that a biopic based loosely around Eddie’s adventures at the Calgary Games might be a bit of a seller.

Continue reading “Film review: Eddie the Eagle”

Welcoming our new robot author overlords

Ignoring everything they’ve seen throughout the Terminator franchise, a group of  Japanese researchers have come up with a computer that writes short stories… and it’s actually produced a piece of work that got through the first round of a literary competition.

AI-written novel passes literary prize screening

Creative writing as a manufactured commodity – that’s a scary thought, but perhaps it’s inevitable. Companies love automation: feed a few instructions in one end and get a finished product out of the other. It’s always been a popular notion that there are only a handful of stories and that everything written is a variation on those; if that’s true then why can’t a machine just write a half decent story?

Continue reading “Welcoming our new robot author overlords”