I wanted to put some of my original fiction and poetry up but I can’t for the life of me find any digital copies and my notebook is at my other house. Hopefully I’ll get round to doing that.

Boudica aka Warrior Queen was both very cool and utter pants. I still can’t make up my mind whether I liked it or not. I liked the costumes (what? I’m a LARPer…I made notes and everything), I liked the way they did their make-up for battle, I liked most of the script, and the acting from the three main women (Boudica and her daughters) was always satisfactory, occasionally excellent. I liked that Boudica was still womanly in the way she acted and reacted; not just a bloke with breasts. The interweaving of magic was a bit pants but mostly bearable. The ending was horrendous, and utter tosh. I’ll probably watch it again, if only to get screencaps of how Boudica’s vambraces were attached.

WALL-E was fantastic, as I knew it would be coming from the same director/writer who did Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo.

WALL-E is a Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-Class, the last surviving robot on earth which was abandoned 700 years previously when it could no longer sustain human life thanks to the rubbish produced by mankind. The film takes a very hard look at how we treat our planet and for much of it, pulls no punches in painting the human race as cowardly; choosing to run away sooner than take responsibility for problems of our own making. A nation of obese, uniformed slobs - their bone structure weakening with every generation - is waited on by robots which show far more personality than any of the humans and it’s only when WALL-E arrives, that they begin to wake up from their virtual worlds and realise that there’s more to living than food that comes in plastic cups.

Despite the bleak beginnings, WALL-E is full of optimism. It doesn’t hammer home the environmental message, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t need Pixar telling me we’re wrecking the world, and anyone who does need telling that, wouldn’t get it if they’d written it in great big letters on every single bit of footage. Go see WALL-E, it’s the best thing to come out in ages.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, written by the guy who did Knocked Up and directed by someone I’ve never heard of, is a rom-com that I was fully expecting to be crap. I was pleasantly surprised. OK, so I wasn’t crying with laughter but I chuckled a lot and may have even guffawed once or twice. Peter (played by the guy who wrote it) is an unusual choice for a male lead, being pretty plain, but he was endearing, loveable, and yet normal. Mila Kunis, who’s the voice of Meg in Family Guy, is freaking gorgeous. I don’t know how I missed that fact. And Russell Brand played Russell Brand. As usual, I couldn’t help but like him anyway.

There was no message, it wasn’t trying to be big and clever, it was just enjoyable and uplifting. The unrated version also had full frontal male nudity, Mila Kunis’s breasts and some entertaining sex positions from Russell Brand. Winner.

So after some good films, it was King Arthur that was the let down. I cannot see how the man who wrote Gladiator, one of my favourite films of all time, wrote this. The script wasn’t appalling, but it wasn’t fantastic either. The acting, from people who I usually adore, was wooden and just generally pants. Every time Clive Owen started making a speed, I cringed. His knights were decently written but badly acted, and his speeches to them just seem so forced because they weren’t the type of men to listen to them. It was like someone had said ‘It’s an historical epic, we need an average of four inspiring speeches per hour whether they’re appropriate or not.’

On the plus side, the cinematography wasn’t half bad and I did enjoy the battle scenes (I was watching the Director’s Cut so they were probably longer). I just didn’t really care who lived or died. If I’m perfectly willing to go away and get a drink, without pausing a film, in the middle of the climatic battle scene, there’s something very wrong with your character development.

I now have cramp in my hand.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull does a decent job of making reference to the old films; it felt like it could have been made twenty years ago along with the rest of them. But therein lies the problem. The special effects were pants, the script was as cheesy as ever, and there were plot holes galore (oh right, he couldn’t get into the temple before but while being insane he figured it out as if by magic: bollocks). Twenty years ago, we didn’t care because it was Indy. Not so anymore.

I loved Rambo 4, another throwback to twenty years ago. They kept the Rambo format, there was loads of awesome action and it did exactly what I expected it to do. Perhaps the difference is that I loved the old Rambo films whereas Indiana Jones is something I watch if it happens to be on TV on a Sunday afternoon and I’ve got nothing better to do. I don’t love the old ones, so it’s impossible for me to love the new one. Especially when the usually awesome Cate Blanchett keeps getting the accent wrong (every time there was a ‘oh’ word, like ‘Jones’ or ‘know’).

Another film for which I had huge expectations, and which I have also watched today, is the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. I love that book so much that I was pretty much planning on never seeing the film in case it sucked. Fortunately, it didn’t.

The start was slow going but then adaptations generally are a bit slow off the ground in the eyes of people who’ve read the book enough times to be able to quote it in general conversation. But about half an hour in, I was laughing out loud, had tears in my eyes and even found myself saying ‘Aarrrgghh’ along with Robert Di Niro. The cameos were perfection itself, and the acting in general was magnificent - even from people the critics weren’t so sure about (Michelle Pfeiffer for a start). I loved it, I want to watch it again and I’m frantically hunting for my copy of the book so I can reread it. I’d call that a success.

Time to re-establish my work base at the desk, rather than the sofa, I feel.

I’ve spent hours agonizing over names for a number of business I’m involved in. I mentioned yesterday that a bad business name immediately makes branding more difficult; as it is branding which will help people find and remember your business, that’s a serious mistake to make. Below is a list of the articles that I return to time and again when I have to come up with a name. It doesn’t matter if you’re naming your cosy coffee shop or an online community aimed at millions, these articles will help make sure you don’t stumble at the business naming hurdle.

1. The Art of Self Branding is a series of articles and presentations by Lea Alcantara of LeaLea Designs, a successful web designer and maker of ‘creative solutions’. She focuses on branding yourself as an individual and freelancer but her process of breaking down exactly what you want your name and brand to convey will help even larger scale operations.
2. Name Creation at The Branding Blog offers 68 tips (and rising) for naming your business. There’s a heck of a lot of advice in there from a branding expert so it’s worth reading them all as the posts are all short and to the point.
3. Choosing a Niche and Choosing a Domain Name have some excellent ideas. Have you tried using Google adwords’ search functions to help you with finding words and phrases relevant to your business? It could really help get the brainstorming going. And don’t let the title fool you; some of the advice is equally important when choosing any sort of business name - online or off, community or otherwise.
4. How to Name Your Company offers a step by step process for naming your business. Michael gives several tips that I haven’t seen suggested elsewhere including to use a crossword puzzle dictionary which lists words by length!
5. Building the Perfect Beast: The Igor Naming Guide to Creating Product and Company Names is a free PDF download from a company who name things for a living. It’s long, it’s detailed and it’s not for the faint-hearted but it is pretty much the definitive guide to naming anything (except children and pets…unless you’re inclined to brand and market your babies). If you want the short version, Startup Spark has a minimalistic breakdown of Igor’s key points.

Got any favourite resources or tips to share? Let me know!

There’s some debate about whether or not contests like these ‘devalue’ designers. Sitepoint has an article praising design contests which is no surprise since 99designs spun off from their site. For the record, I agree with Sitepoint’s article; if designers want to increase their value, then they shouldn’t enter the contests for low prizes (which isn’t quite the point I think they intended). Of course amateurs still will but then it’ll be a case of ‘pay peanuts, get monkeys’. Which is a shame for some of the really small, local outfits who simply want a nice logo to put on the shop.

What bothers me most, however, is the number of contest holders who seem to have put little or no thought into their business names or what they want their branding to actually achieve.

Take, for example, the recently launched contest for crankybear.com’s logo. Can you guess what they sell? I bet you can’t. And since the brief asks for inclusion of bear elements rather than anything to do with their goods, the logo won’t leave you any the wiser either.

Crankybear.com will sell women’s lingerie. Right. ‘Bear’ is slang for a butch homosexual man like the blokes from Bearlesque (marginally not safe for work - they’re a burlesque troupe). ‘Cranky’ mostly means ‘odd’ or ‘erratic’ and, in this country at least, is best used to describe a woman with PMT/PMS. It makes no sense. They have immediately given themselves an uphill struggle to attract and maintain customers.

Then there’s a logo contest for Aggregated Media and it does exactly what it says on the tin. They offer tools that are supposed to make it easier to get to content: Quick, easy, simple. Try saying Aggregated Media five times, heck, try spelling it right five times. It is neither quick, easy nor simple. You know what is quick, easy and simple? Fark. Twitter. Digg. Seeing a pattern?

That’s two examples taken from the latest contests and they’re not alone in their lack of forethought. Usually when a company seeks branding, they talk to a branding consultant but not everyone can afford that. However, if they’re competent enough to use an online contest to get their logo, they should also be capable of using their search engine of choice to read up on business names and branding. The examples above are rookie mistakes that stem from picking a name out of the air without properly researching it but by using a design contest. These are mostly start-up companies for whom it would not be impossible to simply change their name but by using a design contest rather than a branding professional, they’re bypassing the one person who could help them with that.

Starting a business yourself and don’t want to make these mistakes? I’ll post some resources tomorrow that you should read whether you’re looking to brand yourself, your offline shop, a potentially massive online community or something else entirely.

Personally, I find that weighted tag lists give an immediate idea as to what someone blogs about the most and whilst a list with post counts, as he recommends, gives the same idea, it’s not as obvious. People who tag, rather than using a hierarchal structure, tend to use far more tags that they would categories which would mean scanning down a list and comparing post counts. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t fit the Don’t Make Me Think mantra. Do you agree with Atwood? Or do you, like me, find weighted tag clouds useful?

Got any other clichés you think should have made the list?

The Big Bang Theory is an American comedy about two physics nerds who have a beautiful girl move in across the hall from them. She’s played by Kaley Cuoco of 8 Simple Rules fame and I suspect I’m her, except less attractive.

The show is, quite simply, hilarious if you’re any kind of geek or if you fail at being a geek but surround yourself with friends who watch Doctor Who or play D&D or are sometimes too intellectual for their own good.