| This is Hallowe'en, everybody give a scream |
[Nov. 1st, 2009|08:22 pm] |
I call this my 'Tim Curry in Rocky Horror' pout
This week, I are been mostly gettin' eaten by my dead wife
ZOMBIE WIFE LIKE CHICKEN
TASTES OF HUMAN
I have a Ph.D in Mad Science and enough Boston Lager to drown a small nation. Excelsior! |
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| Pope throws toys out of pram over Hallowe'en |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|12:00 pm] |
Halloween is 'dangerous' says the Pope as he slams 'anti-Christian' festival.
To sum this article up for you: dress-wearing old man urges parents not to allow their kids to dress up as ghosts and goblins for Hallowe'en, ignoring that spooky demon/monster mask he wears all the time.
A quote from Aldo Bonaiuto, head of the Catholic Church's anti occult and sect unit (because yes, the Catholic Church has an anti-occult and sect unit):
'Halloween pushes new generations towards a mentality of esoteric magic and it attacks sacred and spiritual values through a devious initiation to the art and images of the occult. At best, it gives a big helping hand to consumerism and materialism.'
Good point, I suppose. Let's go watch a bloke in a dress say magic words that turn bread and wine into flesh and blood and then eat the flesh of our dead lord while gazing reverentially at paintings of him nailed on a cross. And pass the collection plate while you're at it. Don't worry if you've only got small bills, we take cheques. |
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| Cold are the crabs |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|12:46 am] |
Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills,
Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath,
And colder still the brazen chops that wreathe
The tedious gloom of philosophic pills!
For when the tardy film of nectar fills
The simple bowls of demons and of men,
There lurks the feeble mouse, the homely hen,
And there the porcupine with all her quills.
Yet much remains - to weave a solemn strain
That lingering sadly - slowly dies away,
Daily departing with departing day
A pea-green gamut on a distant plain
When wily walrusses in congresses meet -
Such such is life -
Edward Lear |
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| Calvin & Hobbes & Garfield & Faith & Hope & Sue & King Tutt & Andy Capp & Rupert Bear & Fred Basset |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|11:20 pm] |
Re-reading the complete 'Calvin & Hobbes' collection, I think it's clear that there's a lot of these comics I didn't appreciate when I was six. Or eight. Or eleven. Or fifteen. Or any other age at which I read them.
Calvin & Hobbes, you understand, was the first comic I read religiously. I was six, and I toted a stuffed tiger toy around with me; my parents, reading the dailies in the newspaper, started picking up the reprint collections. They still have them, in a shoebox. The first few are thoroughly trashed: read and re-read enough times that the print should have started to come off the page by now. The newspaper they bought when I was growing up didn't carry Peanuts, that other great gateway strip (indeed, Watterson's own inspiration, alongside Herriman's Krazy Kat.) The Daily Express, if memory serves, carried Garfield, Faith Hope & Sue, King Tutt (a kind of ancient Egyptian Andy Capp) and Rupert Bear, which isn't even technically a comic strip. You can see why Calvin & Hobbes is the one to which I clung, besides the kinship I felt with a small child and his toy tiger.
I haven't, however, read Calvin & Hobbes in several years now, probably since I came here for good, so that's at least three years and more like five if you figure reading old comic strip collections wasn't high on my priorities whenever back in England.
What amazes me most, besides the technical proficiency required in creating something just jaw-droppingly fantastic day in and day out, is how many strips I must not have properly understood. There's a really early one, possibly the first 'Spaceman Spiff' strip, where the punchline is an oblique reference to committing suicide. There's no way I got that at six! And that's the beauty of the strip: when I was a kid, there was a level I could appreciate it on by empathising with Calvin's childish outlook. When I got older, I started to see things from the older viewpoint expressed in the more philosophical discussions between Calvin and Hobbes. (And no, I don't care that I'm now old enough to know that the philosopher's name is pronounced 'Hobs'. I still pronounce it to rhyme with 'hoagies'.) Re-reading it now, I'm seeing it from the point of view of a slightly more pragmatic twentysomething who works for his money and pays his rent and is responsibly married. I'm sure that one day, I'll be reading it from the point of view of a parent* and will gain an entirely new appreciation for it in a kids-do-the-darnedest-things/oh-my-god-it's-so-true light.
Right now, it's a lot like hearing old jokes I haven't heard in years and getting in touch with old friends, but at the same time going back to what I thought were simple childhood things and discovering layers of complexity in them that I never imagined were there.
Of course, it's also like coming home again and being a bright-eyed kid spending his weekend waking up early to watch cartoons and reading comic strips and laughing like a twat and eating junk food and not thinking about school being less than forty-eight hours away, and even if I only feel like that for a few seconds, it's nice to not always be the guy who gets up when the alarm goes off for the third time to eat a sensible breakfast and always be aware of how much time before he's back in work.
The being married bit is good, though. I'd say that if I could be an eight year old who was married I'd be totally happy, but then it would be like 'Love Is...', and that isn't good for anyone.
In summation, I'm just surprised I made it through a whole post about newspaper comics without mentioning Fred Basset.
* when you leave your toddler unattended in Wal*Mart, you leave your child alone with me. |
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| Difference in perception |
[Oct. 6th, 2009|02:01 pm] |
There was just a post-menopausal woman visiting the lady in my neighbouring cube who was very proudly describing how she reamed out an Ikea manager because of their poor customer service.
The more she talked, the more apparent it became that she'd actually thrown a rather embarrassing tantrum in front of an entire line of people because the returns line was too long for her liking. She was trying to make it sound like she'd started yelling not because she didn't want to wait but rather that the line was inconveniencing everyone else and making them waste their Sunday. After all, she explained to my cube-neighbour-lady, she was only trying to return curtains. It's not like she needed the money, but she was just thinking of all those poor people who were returning big-ticket items and really needed that money, who couldn't afford to just step out of line and forget it.
Riiiight.
One of the details that came out was that she hadn't even started off complaining to the manager - she'd simply started screaming about how ridiculous it was that there was only one person on the customer service desk. It was only after an employee had tried (and failed) to placate her that a manager came over to try to talk her down. This is where the next telling point comes in: she wasn't interested in having anyone listen to her or try to resolve the problem she had: she just wanted to scream at someone, which she continued to do until the manager flat-out told her that if she didn't stop screaming he'd have to ask her to leave. Quite reasonably, she yelled 'You can't throw me out! I'm throwing myself out!' and hurled her bag at the floor for emphasis. She then picked the bag up again - she was trying to make a point, but wasn't about to sacrifice $15 of curtains for the privilege - and proceeded to... not leave, instead deciding to stand there and continue screaming the same point over and over: 'You have hundreds of employees in this store, and only one person on customer service?'
You can tell if a person has never worked retail when...
Finally, the manager ordered her out, so she stormed off repeating the 'I'm throwing myself out!' line a few more times. Outside, one of the employees was taking a smoke break.
"What was that about?"
"Out of the hundreds of employees in this store, you only have one on customer service!"
"Yeah, they're probably on lunch."
As if she hadn't made enough of an idiot of herself, she then had to go back in the store to find the friend she went with to tell her they were leaving.
Honestly, why is she boasting about any part of this experience?
Also: my favourite part of her story was her comparison terminology, which told me a lot more about her than anything else: "It's a huge store! It's, like, the size of six JC Penneys!" |
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| It's because I was exposed to Uncle Quentin at an impressionable age |
[Sep. 30th, 2009|12:24 am] |
Why is it that out of all the scientific genii in the world, none of them have built a volcano lair and declared their intent to take over Western civilisation? Why are dictators always odd-looking specimens in ill-fitting clothes who seem to rule by force of personality rather than the threat of a death ray they keep in their pocket?
Or failing that, is it too much to ask that we get insane billionaire genii who do crazy things like build rockets to explore other dimensions or fight crime in long underwear or custom-made mecha-suits? Trying to fly a balloon around the world just doesn't cut it. I bet Richard Branson doesn't even have a quirky butler who presses his underwear with the same level of competence that he displays while sewing up his master's wounds.
In short, why isn't the world more like a comic book or a James Bond movie? We could get a big red clock that counts down to zero from an arbitrarily short time period for no discernible reason a la 'Don't Say A Word' and put it in a room with a couple of biologists trying to cure cancer, or AIDS. That always helps in the movies!
In closing, if I was some kind of genius-level physicist as opposed to someone who has trouble adding real numbers to each other, I would take all of your minds off your woes by teleporting hamburgers into mailboxes and firing a wave-motion gun with the energy of a big bang at neighbouring star systems just to see what would happen and otherwise wasting trillions of dollars doing superfluous but really cool-looking things.
This is what I think about when I'm at work. I push buttons and I dream of being a mad scientist. |
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| Epenthesis |
[Sep. 28th, 2009|12:12 am] |
Epenthesis is a wonderful term referring to the addition of extraneous sounds to words. This is most noticeable as the schwa thrown into the middle of certain words: to get all 2007 on you, Rihanna employed epenthesis in the title word of 'Umbrella' in order to convert a three-syllable word into a four-syllable word. (Interestingly, in unplugged versions she can sometimes be heard using the three-syllable pronunciation, which, although it doesn't break the flow of the song, nevertheless just sounds weird. It's also worth noting that the much older song 'The Umbrella Man' does the same thing to the word, toodle luma luma, toodle oh lay.)
I bring this up apropos of nothing. Once you start thinking about it then you'll notice it in speech a lot more often. Mary and I have a running joke about the pronunciation of her mother's workplace, Acme, since although it seems to be a fairly common regional pronunciation of the store to call it 'Ack-uh-me', her mother is the only one in the family to do so.
As to my own linguistic tics, I occasionally get pulled up on my use of the pre-vowel rhotic ("I was drinking soda on the porch" would become "I was drinking soderon the porch", for example). In this country I most often garner derision for repeated casual use of the glottal stop. I'm often broken off mid-utterance when somebody decides to ape the way in which I allow certain sounds to drop into the folds of my glottis and become stifled there: for example, the 'tt' in 'glottal stop' would become the difficult-to-reproduce-in-text 'gloh-uhl stop'.
And I'm polite enough not to bring up the bad Yanqui habit of flapping their Ts into Ds (writing/riding, metal/medal). Although I do always suppress a Beavis and Butthead-style snigger when somebody says 'duty' and it sounds like 'doody'.
Which isn't that much of a change for me. I don't think there's ever been a point of my life when I've had the same speech patterns as those around me; even in school people tended to describe my speech as 'posh', despite my many obvious shortfalls in the department of BBC English.
The other big problem I have with speech right now is that nobody hears what I say in a lot of cases, which is to do with mumbling and speaking too fast and speaking too quietly/softly, all of which are social rather than linguistic issues. About the only time people can clearly hear what I'm saying is when I'm piissed off and I start swearing. I'm a brilliantly eloquent foulmouth. I'm like the great orator of the profane. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 12th, 2009|12:16 am] |
John Allison's 'Scary-Go-Round', consistently the best webcomic out there in both writing and art, ended its seven-and-a-half year run today. Even though Allison's follow-up project is due to start in a little over a week, I can't help but mourn the passing of what has been a huge inspiration to me creatively and a joy to read on a daily basis. The world may never see its like again.
In closing, I leave you with the wisdom of Amy Chilton, mediated by the ever-lovely Miss Shelley E Winters:
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| Labour Day weekend 2009 |
[Sep. 8th, 2009|12:49 am] |
This weekend consisted mostly of Ninja Warrior, Smash Bros Brawl, the movie 'Gaslight' and a whole bunch of Sam Adams Octoberfest (my favourite of their four seasonals, and the one that lasts the least amount of time.) I think I also drank two pots of coffee every day by myself.
Tuesday is back to work day for a four-day week. The problem with the four-day week is that it invariably feels longer than the five-day week. Anyone that was going to be off will come in, so there'll be a full complement of staff for the whole week -- and the more people that are around, the harder it is to slack off. I keep meaning to invest in a pair of those glasses that have eyes printed on the lenses so I can sit at my desk and sleep and everyone will think I'm really intently staring at whatever-it-is-I-do-there-since-no-one-really-knows. I'll just have to set it up beforehand.
"Yes I have a terrible awake-apnea problem that sometimes makes my breath sound heavy and rattling when I'm awake. Almost like I'm snoring in fact. It is not very common but fortunately not at all harmful. It's just I'd rather if you hear me doing it you not mention it to me as I'll be terribly embarrassed. In fact, if you hear me doing that, you'd be best of just leaving quietly and waiting until you see me walking around later on. Also, I may occasionally drool on myself. This is also perfectly normal and a side-effect of the medication I'm taking for my awake-apnea, so you can go ahead and ignore that too. If you see me face-down on the keyboard making these noises, don't worry. I'm merely trying zen programming: becoming one with the computer. The hunched-over position where I appear to be completely prone is also good for clearing my airways during my bouts of awake-apnea."
Now I just need a completely unscrupulous doctor with no moral qualms whatsoever about writing completely fictional medical notes for me when I grease his palm with enough cash. |
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| Disney buys Marvel |
[Aug. 31st, 2009|10:37 pm] |
The best thing Disney can do is install their own editor-in-chief and maintain hands-off management of the company; trying to change Marvel comics to make them more accessible to a typical Disney channel viewer probably isn't going to do much other than alienate the existing audience.
However. The smartest move Disney can make right now? Smack out a line of tween comic books, with a Hannah Montana book as the flagship title. Get a rotating crew of three or four artists and get that thing out biweekly -- or two different monthlies based around the character and publishing on an offset schedule to put a Hannah Montana book on the newsstand every fortnight, if you prefer -- and give the sucker a good page count. Two comic book stories in each issue, plus backmatter/magazine-style insert. This is a good time for Disney to do this: launch the issue during the final upcoming season of the show, then carry on the brand via comic books to keep milking that cash cow.
This is now entirely within their reach, since they have a production stable set up with which to publish their franchise efforts. It has the benefit of a tween audience that will be hungry for anything Hannah Montana-related that they can get hooked on that comic book drug. Let's face it: pre-teen girls aren't exactly the target audience of comic books right now.
And that's why if you're Disney, you later launch a line aimed solidly at teenage girls to which the tween readers can graduate once they decide they've outgrown Hannah Montana. The teen line is more along the lines of Grey's Anatomy or Ugly Betty-style drama/comedy semi-soap operas. Fashion would play a pretty big role in the teen line, because that's an easy way to do ad placement deals, and successful books would form a springboard to Disney channel pilots for a TV series adaptation. It's cheaper to run a couple of comic books up the flagpole and see who salutes them instead of building a bunch of sets and filming six episodes of a TV series to see how audiences react.
Of course, I realise that people might be worried that a company like Disney that makes money profiting off the continued use of beloved characters created decades ago might jive with Marvel comics' long-held tradition of profiting off the continued use of beloved characters created decades ago. I mean, it takes a lot of business skill to put Wolverine on eighteen different covers a month. I can see how a company like Disney might screw that up, and how they might be tempted to interfere editorially and put a stop to storylines like Spider-Man making a deal with a devil to trade his marriage for the life of his decrepit, heart-attack-prone aunt. Imagine if the editor-in-chief was just handing down storylines against the best advice of the people actually writing the books!
So, in summation: if I was Disney, I'd let Marvel carry on with 90% of their profitable titles and use the company to whore out comic-book versions of Disney Channel products to an audience share that usually wouldn't touch comic books with a ten-foot barge pole.
And make Wolverine a featured character in 'JONAS'. Obviously. |
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| Effinitup |
[Jul. 20th, 2009|10:03 pm] |
Finally, an honest politician:
"The reforms we seek would bring greater competition, choice, savings and inefficiencies to our health care system," Obama said in remarks after a health care roundtable with physicians, nurses and health care providers. "And greater stability and security to America's families and businesses."
Read more: at this link that the source site tagged my clipboard with when I hit ctrl+C. Awesome! How do you do that?
After working at Medicaid for eighteen months and getting to know people in quite a few of the units around there, then yeah: what he said about government-run healthcare is absolutely correct, with no need for backpedaling or hasty corrections. |
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| Drumroll |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|11:01 pm] |
There's a theory of game design that says if you punish players arbitrarily than they will hate you, but if you give them a narrative element that punishes them in the exact same way, no matter how flimsy the narrative explanation, they will hate the narrative element for the perceived 'unfairness' and be much more likely to accept you screwing them over.
This is probably true. All the times I was supposed to shepherd my cohort through a drug deal gone bad in Vice City, I never blamed Rockstar for coding a character's AI in such a way that he would stand perfectly still while being shot repeatedly: I blamed the character, because clearly he was an idiot. When I play any of the Zelda games and get snagged by a Like-Like, I don't get mad that Nintendo saw fit to create a monster that exists only to deprive you of a vital piece of equipment and make you waste time and resources finding a store to buy a new one: I'm mad at the Like-Like, and, to a lesser extent, the moron in green who won't go where he's told.
So it's hardly surprising that I spent twenty minutes of my half-hour Wii Fit session today cursing out the Auton-looking personal trainer every time he said anything. It wasn't the fault of the exercises themselves, or me for being in worse shape than Mickey Rourke's face. It was the creepy plastic mannequin calmly telling me you're doing great, just three more to go, hold that pose! and return to your original position.
As with these other cases, the transference is a good thing. If I got pissed off at the game itself -- say, a disembodied voice, or just some text on the screen telling me what to do -- then I might be more likely to turn off the game altogether. It's much easier to carry on if you think one character within a game is against you, instead of thinking the entire game is against you (as opposed to many 8-bit games back in the day, where the entire game was against you. The only helpful person you meet in the entire first Zelda game is the old man that gives you a sword right at the beginning, and I'm pretty sure he's only doing that because he just killed Link's family.)
The same rule carries over to other forms of entertainment. Jar Jar Binks, while a terrible character, does not deserve the epic level of hatred he garnered. But many people did not want to accept the movie they'd waited sixteen years to see was a big pile of animal droppings, so they transferred that ball of rage and confusion and disappointment onto the most glaring example of why The Phantom Menace was like finding out that Santa is real but that instead of bringing presents he steals your TV and licks all your cutlery. I mean, just think about that: a movie in which future badass Darth Vader is shown as a whiny, bratty kid delivering such classic lines as 'Oops!' and 'Let's go LEFT!', and collectively as a culture we somehow decided that the only thing wrong with the film was a barely offensive racial stereotype playing the only slapstick role in a movie otherwise cast entirely out of plywood.
Once you realise the power this effect brings, you can consider how it might have practical applications away from covering up gaps in game mechanics. If you're making unpopular political decisions and you're in the cabinet, blame tends to defy the usual way of things and roll uphill to your superior, leaving you largely out of the firing line and free to continue making unpopular decisions. If you're a company with a call centre of any kind, mandating that your workers all state their names and are encouraged to inject their own personality into their work is a good way of making sure anyone dissatisfied with their service will blame that girl Alex they just talked to who seemed more interested in asking how the weather was than extending their credit limit, and not blaming the big faceless company that makes the formula by which you're deemed eligible or not.
Something to consider the next time you have trouble at work: how can you make sure you're a part of the faceless system that's screwing someone and not the face that they think is screwing them? |
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| Chekov |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|01:02 am] |
Latest comic is taking longer than expected because I appear to have had all the Art punched out of me. Drawing basic things like two people in a room is a daunting Herculean task where I have to redraw every line five times to get it in place. Photoshop isn't helping by refusing to run properly when I have anything else open, because dammit Adobe products need 100% of your processor time, not 95%. This will become a bigger problem tomorrow when I start colouring the thing, because the act of converting one of the greyscale comic pages into RGB immediately makes the machine stutter to a halt and causes long, Kasparov-like pauses between each action.
In other news, I finished reading 'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini today. It's not bad. Not as good as I was led to believe, but not bad. I think a large part of its success is owed to cultural slumming, whereby middle class white intellectual idiots like me read books about other cultures and horrible poverty before fluttering our lashes, cow-like, and imagining that we're somehow attuned to a more noble culture than this horrible Western capitalist materialist society we despise and depend upon so much. The worst part of 'The Kite Runner', without a doubt, is the story's climax in which a story about a weak-willed, shy chap trying to come to terms with never living up to his father's expectations while struggling with the discovery that his father did not live up to his own expectations suddenly takes a left turn and spends three scenes as a Hollywood blockbuster in which astronomical coincidence and cosmic irony draw multiple threads together. It's such a jarringly badly-written plot point that it completely brings you out of the story and destroys the emotional intimacy you've made with the characters.
It's not so much Chekov's gun being brought out of the drawer as it is Chekov's desk being bought by someone's uncle while simultaneously an orphan girl who found the key to Chekov's desk drawer grows up and marries the nephew, at which point a wild tiger attacks the nephew only to have him realise that not only is he holding the key, but is standing in his uncle's study, with just enough time to get the gun out of the drawer and shoot the tiger. Well, okay, maybe it's a little less blatant than that, but it's really just an improbability too far to maintain suspension of disbelief.
Tomorrow: a new book, and colour for the comic. |
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| Abstruse |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|10:54 pm] |
Having been reading David Foster Wallace's 'The Infinite Jest' since, oh, last September/October or so, it's a relief to finally finish. Admittedly, I took several months off in between when we were doing the comic a couple of times a week so I really didn't have free time. Now I can read some of the shorter, less dense works that have been piling up in the meantime: 'As I Lay Dying', 'The Kite Runner', the dictionary...
Perhaps the biggest problem the Infinite Jest has is that it doesn't quite make it to the end without tipping its hand and letting you in on the joke, or, indeed, the jest. It's got some great concepts, a lot of comedic scenes, and some major foreshadowing of the depression and eventual suicide that was apparently eating away at Wallace like a cancer for much of his life. It poses more questions than it ever answers, yet still probably answers more than it should. A large amount of effort is put into deliberate attempts to disorient the reader, be it with the shifting/overlapping mass of the hundred-plus characters, or the intentional obfuscation of the timeline via 'subsidized time', flashbacks, dream sequences, hallucinations, or the copious amount of footnotes that serve to jag you back and forth from the narrative to the endnotes of the book like a literary tennis match.
I'm left with the overwhelming impression that this is the kind of book that grows on you, and once it gets inside your head you're doomed to have it gestate in there until one day you can't stop yourself from picking it up and, provided your spine can hold out, devouring the whole thing in a fraction of the time it took you the first time around. |
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| Commenting on LJ does not give any app access to all of your personal shit |
[Jun. 30th, 2009|12:06 am] |
Hello! Some of you might remember me from such times as When I Used To Post and When I Used To Be Funny.
Here is a meme; feel free to comment with your answers, or not. All comments screened unless specifically requested otherwise. If screened, the only one that will see them will be me. Well, I'll probably read any funny bits to Mary, but you should expect couples to talk about you behind your back by now anyway, and if you're anything like me you find it completely impossible to write anything anywhere without assuming some audience is reading it and, like Tom Cruise, silently judging you.
( This shit is memetic, M - E - M - E - T - I - C. ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 17th, 2009|11:25 pm] |
Twitter has a chequered history of breaking the second the wind blows too hard; how the hell has it managed to stand up to the last three or four days of mass usage and remain intact? Especially given that they put off scheduled maintenance in order to act as the de facto pigeon post of Iran's post-election blowup?
Also:
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