CHONGLAND

Upcoming at 7fifteen this week James Warren will be preaching a sermon entitled Technology, Twitter, TiVo and iJesus. It shall be interesting to hear his take on this silicon age that we live in, where everything seems to be about social connection with a strange isolation spin…

We seem to be feeding on so much information from a vast variety of sources, not only is it delivered straight to us in the form of television, radio, email and rss, to name a few, but we can also go searching for it through search engines. People are eager to find out what’s happening in the world. Take the death of Michael Jackson on Friday. There were so many searches on Google that it thought it was being attacked by hackers.

As a Christian, I find it kind of hard to be in amongst it all. I mean it’s great to be able to go and look at different recipes when I want to cook something, or at a tutorial site if I want to learn something that I don’t know, BUT the huge catch is that, more often than not, it distracts me from the thing that really matters: Christ. I’ve found myself jumping on the computer, or flicking on the TV or PS3 instead of opening my Bible and seeing what God has to say.

Do you have any hints, tips or tricks on technology?? If you’re free on Sunday night, drop along about 7:10 to St Paul’s Carlingford at the corner of Vickery Avenue and Moseley Street, Carlingford.

Today is the last day in the Financial Year. Working in a bank has enough pressures at end of month, so today should be a real corker…. Yesterday afternoon I was plenty stressed out, so today should be even worse…. I cannot wait for the end of the day.

I wish, I hope, I pray that you ALL would have such eagerness for the end of Days when Jesus returns to judge all. Are you standing in the light? Or are you quaking in the darkness?

I’ve just finished watching this and it was a great movie!! More transforming robots thrashing and trashing each other as in the first outing, and also some awkward comedy and gorgeous Megan Fox loving.

We had a pretty big group of people from St Pauls come along: Gaz, Nat, Geoff, Lairdy, Andrew, Trevena, Tim, Jack Day and Magee. The first Transformers movie, we went with an even larger group and unfortunately lucked out on sitting in the front row, with the exception of 4 people. This time we were in the back row. I was surprised at the apparent number of females in the audience too, at least 1/3 if not more….

Shia LaBeouf does well as Sam, a convincing performance with intensity and comedic elements thrown in. Megan Fox is needy, gorgeous, strong and sweet all at the same time. She does seem to sprawl herself all over the screen, camera and whatever else is in her path, showing plenty of flesh, which I’m sure was meant to drag the male population in. Isabel Lucas, the Aussie who used to be on Home and Away, is really sexed up, but does well, although she looked a little off for me; possibly a bit skinny and orange?? I can’t talk too much more about her character, otherwise this would count as a spoiler for those that haven’t seen the movie.

The storyline wasn’t too bad, but it could have been stuck together alot better… There seemed to be too many elements that were put in out of convenience, or didn’t have enough background. It was also good to have elements from the cartoon series in there, but I’m not particularly sure of the history behind the story… I don’t recall this Fallen ever being around (do you??).

There were plenty of moments throughout the film which made me gasp with excitement in either special effects, or storyline/character developments or revelations. The bad thing for me was the lack of character development, especially with the transformers themselves…. At the end of the last movie, we were introduced to Jazz, so you would have, or I was at least, expected to have seen more of him, or at least have his character developed. The two major developments were Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, and even those were pretty pathetic. One trouble was that there were soooo many transformers, both Autobots and Decepticons that it was particularly hard to keep track of them, and sometimes even tell one from the others.

There’s been quite a bit of buzz around racism within the movie… I guess it could be taken that way, but it’s a little extreme… there’s a lot of stereotypical portrayal of different cultures, but I’m not sure how racist it is…. There’s other movies which are worse.

Definitely a movie to see for the amazing special effects with giant robots smashing each other with some well choreographed fight scenes, a bit of crude humor, but not if you’re expecting a well written storyline and great camerawork, or aren’t keen on seeing alot of female flesh.