New Year, clean hard drive...

So my computer died last night. More accurately I killed it. Through a combination of my PC being generally rubbish, me trying to sort it out late at night, being very impatient and panicking because I needed to send an important e-mail.

I am really bad with computers, because I make the mistake of thinking I'm actually really good with them. So I meddle with things I shouldn't meddle with in an attempt to get them to do things they should, in theory, be able to do. Then they die.

In the early hours of this morning I brought it back from the dead. The reanimated zombie computer seems to be working okay and actually even slightly better than before. It has come back as a running zombie, rather than a walking one. Well, jogging at least. It has also lost its memory.

This is okay. I had a bit of a sleepless night trying to decide whether this was okay or not, but I have managed to convince myself that it is. I back up all my finished scripts, and luckily it occurred at a point when I'd finished everything I was working on so didn't have any works in progress. I've lost a lot of notes I made for myself but again with everything up to date that's not so bad. I'm sure there are things I'll be annoyed about losing when I come across them, but so far I think it may genuinely not be the tragedy I initially thought it was. As always there is a lesson here that I never learn properly.

Speaking of zombies, while in the process of resurrecting the computer I was dipping in and out of a film and suddenly recognised a reanimated corpse as someone I've met. The film was Dark Corners, another one where a loony woman hallucinates a lot while trying to figure out some secret or other. Someone needs to coin a term for that sub-genre of horror. This one was made more nonsensical by being set in America but filmed in England. Much like the Kubrick films in which this is also the case, there is something oddly distracting about it. It was also rather more obvious here - the buses were instantly recognisable as ours, as was the side of the road said bus was driving on. Plus the houses/streets didn't look at all Amercian. And the accents were pretty exagerrated and occasionally just rubbish which didn't help. Then again, this made much more sense than the huge-interiors-not-enough-extras Eastern European America seen in Bloodsport 4 which I also watched yesterday - that was just weird.

Anyway, the point of all this is that there was a scene in Dark Corners in which Thora Birch is embalming a corpse when it gets up and comes after her. The corpse, I realised eventually, was played by Glenn Beck who was in the still-in-post-production short film I wrote Hit the Big Time - I talked about meeting him here (with another, more interesting Kubrick link). Okay, it's not that weird - I now remember him telling me about the film as he had photos of the make-up effects with his eyes and mouth sewn shut. What's weird is that I didn't make the connection straight away, so found myself recognising a reanimated corpse as someone I knew I'd met in real life but was unable to place exactly where.

Perhaps the real lesson here is not to carry out PC maintenance whilst watching confusing films in which the zombies are people you know...