TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Flying over WA 2007 trip. Booking any kind of cross border travel in today's not quite post COVID-19 world is a bit of a gamble. Almost a month ago my partner and I booked airfares to travel from South Australia to Western Australia for a five day holiday to attend a 70th birthday, visit family I hadn't seen since 2016, and so my partner could spend her birthday in one of our favorite places, Fremantle. We booked the tickets because the week before they were half the price we paid, and we didn't want to hold off any longer in case the price went up yet again to a potentially unaffordable amount. In the meantime all the state governments of Australia were making plans for when to reopen their borders to general travel, based upon the number of fully vaccinated people in each state. SA settled on 80% fully vaxxed before we would open our border to states that were still battling COVID-19 lockdowns, primarily New South Wales and Victoria. While I decided to get myself fully va...

Based on the early reviews I was expecting this movie to be just fine. While it's the worst rated Marvel movie to date it's a bit like saying plain chocolate is the worst chocolate. There may be better chocolates out there but it's still chocolate. While Eternals does slow down a little through the middle with quite a few dialogue heavy scenes, overall it's still a solid movie that held my attention all the way through. I kind of suspect it'll be a little like Thor The Dark World , the previous contender for worst Marvel movie. More people will start to come around on re-watches as we see how the events of this film affect the wider MCU going forward. The basic story is that the Eternals have been tasked with keeping humans safe from some fairly horrendous creatures, known as Deviants over thousands of years. Having completed their task many years ago the Eternals have been living on Earth awaiting further direction, when suddenly Deviants begin to appear again. I ...

I actually saw Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in theatres a few weeks ago and only just now realized I never wrote a review. So, in the interest of being a Marvel completionist, here's my late review of the film. The basic storyline is Shang-Chi, now known a Shaun (Simu Liu), seemingly an average guy with a regular job in San Francisco, is forced to confront his past when his criminal underworld father (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung) and leader of the Ten Rings Organization seeks to bring him back into the fold. The one thing that really stood out for me in this movie is that it is definitely not the movie I thought I was getting based on the trailers, which make it look like a straight forward, Marvel origin story. It is so much more than that, but at the same time, I don't really want to tell you about it in any great detail, because it was quite amazing to discover there was more to this world than I expected. At the same time I was pleased to see that some of the flash bac...

You may have heard about NFTs and understand them to be a way for individuals to own the original copy of a digital image, most commonly an artwork. For the most part your understanding is correct, except it's not actually the digital image you own as such, it's the right to be recognized as the owner of that image by absolute proof of ownership through purchasing it as a non duplicatable NFT. An NFT, or Non-fungible Token, can be linked to any media, not just art. Any kind of digital file. They can even be linked to physical media (possibly less common but I've seen it done). NFTs are a piece of data stored as a digital ledger entry, using blockchain technology, similar to that used by cryptocurrencies, but every ledger entry represents a unique item. You don't need to understand blockchain technology other than it's what makes it possible for you to be the actual owner of a digital file in the same way an art collector can be the actual owner of an original Da Vin...

Image by Paul Birman from Pixabay It's 2021 and, with the pace of technology, you're ready to upgrade to a second generation flying car. Unfortunately a trip to your local car dealer doesn't go as planned because flying cars in 2021 still aren't a thing. One wonders, if Elon Musk wasn't so focused on space travel, would we have flying Tesla cars by now? Hopefully that may be his next big push considering he's pretty close to fully self driving cars - technology that is probably essential if flying cars are to work in urban environments. When I last checked in on the state of flying car development in my post from 2017, Revisiting the 'Flying Car' - How Close Are We? the focus was very much on drone/quadcopter configurations, with nothing you could really call a 'car'. Unfortunately we haven't really progressed from there. The closest we have to a consumer model flying car is the Jetson One , which was launched in October of this year. Made ...