Everybody's gotta grow up sometime, bum, bum, bum

I've moved in with my significant udder, got a permanent job and have governance, both physical and spiritual, over the cat. It's all competing for geek out time. I've even started to contemplate some sort of geek schedule.

Fitting in an hour of Battlestar every week shouldn't be too hard. And, lets Cylon it, once that's over I'll have already rounded up all the episodes of Deadwood and tapped every series of The Wire. Maybe I could buy the Cracker DVD box set? After all, I was only a wee one when the series originally aired. The only episode I can remember, with any clarity, starred Robert Carlyle as a Liverpool supporter who moonlighted as an anarchist bomber. I still duck and cover whenever I hear a scouse accent.

Graphic novels: a friend of mine works at Forbidden Planet, so there's a social excuse to fit that in. I've got some time before the next volumes of The Walking Dead, Fables and Ultimates get released. There's no rush to venture into the BO steeped caverns. They really need to give out deodorant to the more 'special' patrons.


Films: I watched Iron Man on das interweb recently. I also made the mistake of going to see the latest Indy film at the picture house. I thought this time, this time it'll be different. No idiots' mobiles going off in the back row, no middle class twits mindlessly twittering away (in the old fashioned sense) about the price of organic Soya beans. But every time, every bloody time. Cash and time I'll never get back. Still, the significant udder has a free pass to the Mezzanine. I'm gonna go all art house on your asses.


That leaves games. Its officially my job to keep up with what's going on in the gaming world, so maybe a new console isn't such an outlandish concept. I dunno, maybe I should wait till winter and then I can justify staying in with the sweet sounds of the console fan, as I shower fiery death on whatever.

That was scary

I met a friend today in (achingly trendy, thanks a lot Simon Pegg, you’ve ruined it) Crouch End. We went for tea at Hot Pepper Jelly, one of the last bastions of non-smugness left in the area. Apart from nearly exploding after drinking, what was advertised as a ‘large pot’ of green tea but turned out to be a bladder and half worth’s, we reminisced about stuff we’d watched as mere amoebas.

I confirmed I'd watched Dark Crystal by involuntarily shouting ‘Gelfling’ really loudly, in what is a fairly small café. The Storyteller with, (how many fingers am I holding up?) John Hurt and sibling rivalry taken to the extreme with Labyrinth. What have they all got in common? That’s right, nerd herd, twas Jim Henson.


The Dark Crystal is still a pretty scary film even now but Jim Henson’s works are darker than the endless dark that occupies the void under the garden decking. You can discount the Muppets obviously, unless you have an irrational fear of talking animals and who doesn’t, have you ever seen a furry up close?

Anyway, my friend and I both admitted to being scared if not unsettled by watching these puppeteered performances as children. Which lead on to another question. What will I show my own hell spawn? I settled pretty quickly on Miyazaki over Disney. I think Miyazaki has just the right level of poo your pantsness but deals with adult or what are essentially real life themes like, love, death, taking a stand, fighting monsters both metaphorical and physical, in a universal way that both adult and child can understand. After all, none of us really grow up. So, big love to Jim Henson and Miyazaki (his son is a bit rubbish though)

I just discovered that Genndy Tartakovsky is making a sequel to the Dark Crystal. Geek out!

Hearts and minds: Death Note, Samurai Champloo and SAC

They are juvenile, sexiest and derivative. So said my significant udder of comics and anime. Like some crazy eyed profit or oil hungry, industrial-military complex spokesman, I managed to convert her, on the first one at least. It’s the same for everything you care to think of; some people just don’t get poetry, others football, some, God. The old strategy of, ‘try it, you might like it’ or ‘all the cool kids are doing it’ doesn’t always work. Instead you need to think deeply about what peoples' conceptions are and how you can offer them something unexpected.


Comics:

Full of spandex wearing, self righteous, never doubting, muscle bound idiots. This is still the case, you need only venture to the subterranean, B.O den, that is the Forbidden Planet in Soho to see that the best selling comics are still the ones that would make anyone except an adolescent boy, shudder.

However, there is many a comic that is the polar opposite. Alan Moore’s, Watchmen or the same panelled smack I got my significant udder hooked on, Fables, are both examples of what this medium can achieve. I highly recommend the later, for its wit, post-modernity and incredible artistic style as penned by James Jean. These two titles combined should be enough to shift the opinion of even the most entrenched book burner.



Anime:

Spiky haired, shrill voiced, large breasted, cretins. It’s a cliché because there is some truth to it. Three animes that are, if not completely removed from this stereotype but still manage to stand out: Death Note, Samurai Champloo and Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is based on the feature film from back in the cyber day. It’s still essentially a cyber punk, neo noir, set in a post World War IV Japan. It’s like a cop drama with sharp dialogue and a mastermind villain that uses 'people hacking' and the web itself to inflict terrorism.


Death Note is the typical story of a seventeen-year-old boy. Light is the number one student in his country, bored with his mundane life and sickened with a world he sees as falling into depravity. Who hasn’t been bored or sickened? Thing is, we didn’t find a notebook which was dropped by a Shinigami or death god, that resembles an emancipated Goth.

The deal is you can kill whomever you like as long as you know their name and can picture their face. Just scribble it down in the Death Note and they will die in the next forty seconds. For our anti-hero this a god send, literally. He begins a reign of righteous judgement on criminals with the intention that a new world will be born out of his actions where only the pure of heart will live and he shall preside as a God.


Things are never that simple and soon enough, the MAN in the form of the police, start to see a pattern. Unable to gleam any leads they hire the mysterious L, a freelance detective that has solved some of the world’s greatest crimes. And so the stage is set for a battle of wits that will ultimately end in the death of one of the combatants. Death Note has some of the best deductive thinking employed in a drama I have ever seen. It sets a new standard for what we consider a horror/thriller. Talk about moral ambiguity.

Like a rapper armed with a katana, Samurai Champloo slices its way through Edo period Japan. Samurai Champloo is considerably lighter hearted than the other two. It’s the story of a criminal that employs break dancing into his fighting style, a ronin samurai with verbal barbs that cut as deep as his blade and an ever-loveable protagonist in search of ‘the samurai that smells like sunflowers.’





Champloo, means mash up or mix up so that the title translates as Samurai mash up. This is as good an indication of what the format of the show is than anything. Despite, the technology and architecture both being strongly entrenched in the Edo period of Japan, the language, characters and society is an amalgamation of modern day Tokyo and West Coast hip-hop culture. This connection can be over used at times, like when a scene shakes with the accompanying sound of a record scratching as a means to cut to another character somewhere else. Still, funny lines, excellent action scenes as timed to a hip-hop soundtrack all amount to an nteresting amalgamation. Lets go win some hearts and minds.

An ode to Genndy Tartakovsky

I was going to write a lengthy essay on how Genndy Tartakovsky’s (creator of Dexter’s Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars) imagination and love of brickolages makes him a real inspiration. He’s made cartoons more cinematic, poignant, funny and entertaining than I thought possible, blah, blah, gush, gush. Anything I write amusing, insightful, fanboyish or otherwise will only distract from this man’s genius. I wouldn’t do it justice, well, not judicial justice.

Instead it’s an ode the Tube way:

The Powerpuff Girls are unlikely heroes. Their accidental creation at the hands of Professor Utonium through a concoction of sugar, spice, everything nice and Chemical X is what makes them pocket sized punchers. They constantly have to ‘save the day,’ sometimes against the green super chimp, Mojo Jojo, the yokel with a death ray, Fuzzy Lumpkins and the nefarious cross dressing devil, HIM.




Tartakovsky’s use of sound, light and colour:



Three blind jackals guard a wishing well. Despite being blind the jackals have an acute sense of hearing with deadly bows to match. Jack realises he can’t defeat them with all his senses intact so he blindfolds himself to gain the same sensory advantage. Once blindfolded the screen turns black and you are treated to flashes of a foot fall crunching against the snow or a whirling noise as one of the arrows passes overhead. This all combines to convey Jack’s heightened sense of hearing in a remarkable way.



Tartakovsky always manages to weave new and old, mythology and technology into all of his works:




Tartakovsky never fails to inject some humour:

Attention deficit

Wow, with cartoon promos like these, its no wonder I turned out the way I did.

Myth and Legend

I’ve expressed my massive love for the Myth series of games several times before but today I was reminded, yet again, of its genius. The video below includes all the animated cut scenes from the second instalment Myth II: Soulblighter. Myth, in my opinion, still has one of the best narratives found in any game to date and that’s quite an achievement as the game industry has had nine years to supercede it.


The rights to Myth are now owned by Take 2 Interactive, so if you’re reading Take 2 (which is doubtful) I’ll write the animated series of Myth for free! No joke. Anyway, if the video below makes no sense (which is probable if you haven’t played the game) this link will take you to the compelling and very well written ‘journal entries’ that act as the main plot driver for the game.