Tag: comics

Comics Will Break Your Heart: the rise and fall of Ashes

Late last year I enthusiastically covered a Kickstarter-funded comics project by writer Alex DiCampi and artist Jimmy Broxton–a gritty SF tale called Ashes. The art and story looked great, and I happily put $30 down to support the book and snag a signed hardback when the work was done.

I wasn’t alone. Ashes hit its funding target with a week and a bit to spare, and earned another $6K in the process. It was a win for all concerned, a triumph of the self-funded, self-published model.

Yeah. About that.

Continue reading Comics Will Break Your Heart: the rise and fall of Ashes

Best of 2011: Rob’s Twopennuth

After sterling work from my guests, it’s my turn to talk up the work that floated my boat over the last twelve months. This is by no means a complete list, but we’d both be here all day if I went down that route. In no particular order, then, but sorted in terms of delivery vector, here we go. Titles are clickable and lead to further reading, viewing or listening.

 

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Probably, if I was to be brutally honest with myself, my film of the year. The triumphant return of Lynne Ramsay to the director’s chair, a career-best performance from Tilda Swinton and a new rising star in Ezra Miller made this brutal examination of a woman’s relationship with her bad seed son a must see.

Drive

Best soundtrack of the year, for sure. Nicholas Winding Refn’s homage to the driver movie gave Ryan Gosling the breakout role of the year, and provided some of the most powerful visuals of 2011. A touching love story and a chilly, unflinching crime film all at once. If nothing else, everyone has an opinion of the lift sequence.

The Woman

Best horror film of the year, hands down. Pollyanna Mackintosh astonished in the title role, never vulnerable, always in control, even when chained to a garage wall. The Lucky McKee and Jack Ketchum script explored issues of power, gender and the myth of normality in a world of Lynchian suburbia. Funny, thought-provoking and bloody scary.

Warrior

David A. Russell’s The Fighter was a remarkable and Oscar-worthy piece, but for me the fight film of the year was Warrior. Gavin O’Connor’s film gave the much-maligned field of mixed martial arts a sense of gravity and worth. Nick Nolte as an ex alcoholic boxer and Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy as his two sons who are pitted against each other in a winner-tale all tourney give riveting and utterly believable performances. A Rocky for 2011.

Rango

Animation of the year, in a tough field that included Miyazaki’s beautiful Arrietty. But Gore Verbinski’s loving and lunatic acid western was genuinely like nothing else on screen this year. Full of mind-boggling moments and set-pieces, screamingly funny and life-affirming, this was Pixar by way of Jodorowsky.

Inside Job

If there was one must-see film for all the wrong reasons this year, it was Charles Ferguson’s documentary on the collapse of the global financial markets. Flint-eyed with a righteous fury, Inside Job skewered the greed, venality and hubris of the men who believed they were too big to fail. Show this to anyone that thinks our financial woes are down to public sector pay or pensions.

13 Assassins

My foreign language film of the year. Shocking, brave and sumptuous, Takashi Miike brought us a work of astonishing grace and authority. Like Inside Job, this tells the story of powerful men who believe they are untouchable. Unlike Inside Job, those men face a town full of traps and the sharp end of a sword. There’s no justice anymore.

Elbow: Build A Rocket Boys!

Tender as a first kiss, heady as your first pint, Elbow’s 2011 album made friends with everyone and cemented their reputations as the country’s finest boozy balladeers. A big fat woozy hug of an album, that sticks to your ribs and will definitely keep you warm this winter.

Tom Waits: Bad As Me

Any year with a Tom Waits album in it is a year to celebrate, and 2011 saw the arrival of his best work in years. Perhaps not his most experimental work, but one where he hammered new fences in and prowled his property with a snarl and a shotgun. No-one else does it like Tom, and Bad As Me was the moment where he proved it. You will be satisfied.

Wilco: The Whole Love

This is an album that goes from minimal bleeps and drones to lovely, weary pop stylings to hammering motorik–on the first track. Wilco have never been more ambitious, more experimental, more widescreen than on The Whole Love. But they’re still accessible and effortlessly rewarding. There’s no art of almost here; this is the real deal.

The Decemberists: The King Is Dead

It’s been a grand year for folk-rock, and although a lot of people have been raving about Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver’s sophomore efforts, the more satisfying album for me was The King Is Dead. Filled with lovely ballads and proper stompers, this was a rich and enduring treat. A simpler album than their epic The Hazards Of Love, but that’s no bad thing when the end product is so uplifting and heartfelt.

Laura Marling: A Creature I Don’t Know

Miss Marling had always been an almost girl for me; great songs, but I was never quite drawn in. But A Creature I Don’t Know grabbed me by the lapels and yanked me in for a big sloppy snog. I finally figured it out: she’s embraced her inner Joni Mitchell, and grown up into a smart urban troubadour in one graceful move. There’s still mud on her strides, but she wears really nice boots now.

Manga Music

Hip-hop doesn’t get any more high concept than this. Geek MC and one-man music empire Akira The Don puts together a mixtape based around the soundtracks of all his favourite old-school anime, invites a ton of lairy rappers over to freestyle over the top, and comes up with an absolute gem. Why watch the throne when you can watch Fist Of The Northstar?

Game Of Thrones

Lazily praised as The Sopranos with swordplay when it first came out, the HBO version of the GRR Martin fantasy series is richly textured, strange and beautiful. The shocking plot twists and brutal deaths of central characters made the show one of my few TV musts of the year. Immersive and utterly addictive. And unlike The Sopranos, this has dragons.

Community

I’m late to the party, but a USB stick with the first two seasons has changed my mind. The most geek-friendly comedy on the box (those of you screaming for the I.T. Crowd or The Big Bang Theory need to watch this) is an extraordinary feat of sustained metatextuality and full of characters that change and grow and don’t again. Remarkable stuff that frequently has me snorting my morning coffee through my nose on the train into work.

Phoneshop

The surprise of the year. An unpromising pilot through the Channel 4 Comedy Lab last year and a late night Thursday slot rang warning bells, and I missed the first season. My mistake. This ensemble show on the life of the staff at a suburban mobile phone franchise has cracking performances and a part-improvised script that shows off a cast on top form. It’s consistently hilarious and deeply twisted.

Rev

Also back for a second season, this sweet-natured show featuring Tom Hollander as a put-upon priest in the worst diocese in London avoids all the cliches and comes up with a programme that works on all sorts of levels. Like all the best sitcoms, it’s part social commentary, part character study–and all funny.

SVK

More in the nature of an intriguing experiment than a success, Warren Ellis and Matt “Disraili” Brooker’s SVK is a book that quite literally works on two levels. The detective story, which Ellis described as “Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity”, ships with a UV torch that you can shine onto the page to reveal hidden dialogue and thoughts–a neat way of showing the lead character’s telepathic ability. A slim volume, but packed with ideas.

Casanova: Avarita

Speaking of books packed with ideas. Matt Fraction and Los Bros Ba return with a second run at the exploits of reality-shafting, universe-killing superspy Casanova Quinn and give the whole shebang a decidedly metaphysical spin. Darker and tougher than Volume One, there’s still room for Matt, Gabriel and Fabio to crank up the gleeful strangeness. Any riff on Kung Fu Panda is always welcome.

Hark: A Vagrant

I’ve been a fan of Kate Beaton since she had a madeonamac blog, so I’m enormously smug to see everyone else catch up this year. Her history-obsessed strips are effortlessly hilarious, and her comic timing is impeccable. She makes it look easy, damn her. Probably the purest and most talented cartoonist working today, and you need the collection of her strips on your shelves. She’s made Napoleon COOL again, dammit!

Habibi

This. Blew. Me. Away. Best graphic novel of the year by a light year, Craig Thompson’s massive tome takes ideas of love and loyalty, the language we use to express them and the way it both unites and divides us to create a story nested within a tale folded into a romance in every sense of the work. One to come back to and cherish again and again.

rediscovery: A Princess Of Mars

The upcoming live-action movie of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic led me to reread the original, which I remember loving as a kid. Yeah, sure, it’s rough round the edges, and a bit old-fashioned in attitude and language. But it’s also a proper no-holds-barred pageturner, stuffed full of imagination, action and adventure that starts on the run and just speeds up. It’s a fast read, and available for free on Project Gutenberg. Proper storytelling from a master of the pulp form.

rediscovery: John Lee Hooker

Goddamn, I love John Lee. Curmudgeonly, contrary, innovative. He shook off easy rhyme patterns in favour something twitchy, febrile and earthy (“I see my baby walking down the STREET/She looking good from her head down to her TOES”). Spotify are pushing John Lee a lot recently, and it’s given me the chance to reacquaint myself with an old friend.

 

in 2012 I’m looking forward to: Prophet/King City

Comics discovery of the year for me, shamefully, putting me back behind the curve, is the astonishing Brandon Graham. His loose yet detailed, cartoony yet precise art does my head in. A more relaxed Geof Darrow, his books are filled with asides, footnotes and rambling offramps. He has two big releases out for 2012. A writing gig with Simon Roy on a reboot of a cheesy Rob Liefeld Image book, Prophet, reads like the most excitingly French SF-style book of the new year. A survivalist-punk story of a supersoldier revived far too late for a mission that no longer exists, in a world that has evolved without him. A far-future Conan. Has a preview.

The BIG news is a proper release for his magnum opus, King City. A slacker Transmetropolitan. Frank Miller’s Hard Boiled without the bombast. It’s got all the side shenanigans, puzzles and games that were in the original flimsies. This will be one to stow alongside Habibi on your shelves and cherish, true believers.

also: GBV

I mean, we’re all excited about this, right? The return of the most clangularly tuneful hookladed beer-fuelled band on the planet! We’re all practising our Salty Salutes, yeah? To the band whose out-takes and bootlegs outnumber the official releases by a factor of fifteen and are frequently better than the real records? The glorious reunion of Pollard and Tobin Sprout? Anyone?

Fine. Be like that. But 2012 is all about Guided By Voices to me.

 

and: The Muppets

because The Muppets. Because. The Muppets.

 

We’ll be back after Conspicuous Consumption Day for the X&HT Review Of The Year. If you thought this post went on a bit, you’re in for a shock. Whoooole lotta stuff happened in 2011.

Happy Saturnalia, Readership.

Holy Heck: The Fall Of Frank Miller

It’s never good to watch your heroes fail. When you base your art and your writing style on the work of a man that you worship and respect, only to find that he is only human, and the sort of person you’d go out of your way to avoid at a party, then the hit is even harder. Somehow, his mistakes rebound on you. All of a sudden, people pop out of the woodwork, saying how they’d known that the guy was a jerk for years, how his work was a clear indicator of his inner malaise. All of a sudden, you look like a fanboy and an idiot.

That’s what I’m going through at the moment, Readership. Because my all-time comic hero Frank Miller has apparently just outed himself as a close-minded, ill-informed rightwing jagoff.

Continue reading Holy Heck: The Fall Of Frank Miller

Habibi: Tales Within Tales

Stories are the framework that we build our lives upon. Our beliefs, our fears, our relationship with the world, with birth, with death, with fate, all come out of the tales we whisper to each other, huddled round campfires in the dark. We have taught ourselves to respond to myth and legend, fable and saga. Fantasy used as a way to understand and codify the callous, bewildering universe around us.

In Habibi, Craig Thompson takes the idea of the story as key to survival and runs with it. Riffing on Islamic and Christian mythology, the Thousand and One Nights and the ways in which language can both divide and unite us, the book is an astonishing, bravura example of how the graphic novel can do things with a story that no other medium can touch.

Continue reading Habibi: Tales Within Tales

The Lady and The Father: Burma Chronicles

NewImage

Journalism in comics has a much greater pedigree than you might think. Political cartoons have been with us since the Romans, who daubed parodies of disliked senators on the walls of their cities. To this day, the form has the ability to shock, provoke and anger to the point of murder, if you consider the case of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist killed for his depiction of Mohammed.

Travel journalism is less well represented. You could argue that Herge’s Tintin took place in such carefully researched and exquisitely rendered locales that it equated to a kind of travelogue – although it would be decades before we could see how accurately he’d got the moon. For most people, Joe Sacco’s work in Bosnia and Palestine is the definition of travel journalism – angry, passionate comics that get to the heart of the conflict.

A different approach is taken by French-Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle, whose Burma Chronicles is out in a new paperback edition from Jonathan Cape in the UK. Delisle is married to Nadege, a Medicins Sans Frontieres administrator, and their journeys into strife-torn areas give him unprecedented access. The book tells of their trip to Burma at a point when the generals who run the show are beginning the next in a long series of clampdowns. As funding and visas are pulled, Guy, his wife Nasege and their baby son Louis struggle to find a life in a country that, officially at least, refuses to admit that they are needed.

NewImage

Delisle approaches his story from the opposite angle to Sacco. He is no journalist, and never agitates to get into the dangerous areas. He’s principally a house-husband, there to look after Louis, an adjunct to Nadege and her work. Tootling around town with Louis in a buggy, he becomes almost invisible, and is free to observe the everyday life of the people. He discovers that the place they have rented is just around the corner from the house where Aung San Suu Kyi has been held under house arrest for decades. He never sees her, of course, despite vague efforts to at least walk down her street (an effort that’s finally rewarded in an unexpected way). But, as in life, she is an unspoken presence, a thread running through everything, binding her people together in the face of crippling poverty and brutal repression.

Delisle has a simple, clean style that again is the polar opposite to Sacco’s pyrotechnic, fish-eye-lens freakouts. He draws himself as an abstraction, a simple collection of lines that reminded me a little of the 1992 Olympic mascot Cobi. Otherwise, his settings and characters are picked out with care and grace. As we follow Guy, Nasege and Louis through their year in Burma, we get to know and care about them and the lovely, punished country around them.

NewImage

The story unfolds quietly, and always with a wry humour. Guy is lazy despite his best efforts, his promises to do more frequently washed away in the everyday tasks of looking after Louis or getting some drawing done. But he does, gradually, come to an understanding with Burma. There’s a lovely sequence towards the end of the book where he finally tries a three-day meditation retreat (granted, just round the corner from his house). Burma Chronicles is full of moments like these – the wordless, 24-panel pages of his trips to tourist destinations are sheer, joyful cartooning at it’s purest and most skilful.

If you need an antidote to the DC Comics reboot sturm und drang, Burma Chronicles fits the bill perfectly. It’s subtle, sharp and intelligent comics work, an incisive commentary on the state of Burma at a low point in the country’s history. Moving, hilarious and insightful stuff.

DC: Dunces and Conmen?

Every time I think the comics industry can’t get any stupider, something happens to make me wonder how I got so complacent.

No, hang on, let me qualify that. Every time I think the American superhero-based comics industry can’t get any stupider, something like, well, this happens. DC are cancelling and rehashing 52 of their titles, starting them all back at no.1 with simplified back stories and in some cases changes to the origins.

Retcons. The curse of the American superhero-based comics industry. Ever since DC killed Superman, brought him back in a new costume before slowly reverting him back to the old blue-and-red romper suit, this nonsense happens on an annual basis. The claim is always that creators want to do something fresh and new with the old franchises. Rubbish. It’s all about squeezing a few more cents out of them. The new editions are scheduled to take place over the traditionally quiet sales period of September. No. 1’s of any title always sell, and all of a sudden DC are flooding the market with 52 of the buggers at once.

The argument brought forward by DC head Dan DiDio is that it’s a chance to make the books relavent for a 21st century audience who have little investment in the stories of the past. Which is, in it’s way, fair comment. Fifty years of character development and story cruft can leave any title in a funk, unable to properly innovate or tell tales in a fresh way.

But, as comics blogger and funny-book shop owner Mike Sterling points out, a jumping-on point can also be a jumping off point. The end of a story gives the bored reader who just wanted to see how things turn out the excuse not to bother with next month’s issue. Especially if it’s not the character he or she enjoyed reading about.

I’ve long been bored with the American superhero-based comics industry’s obsession with huge, multi-book events and gimmicky promotions, to the detriment of decent characterisation and storytelling. If this event doesn’t work, it could signal a reboot for DC as a whole, becoming a placeholder for superhero franchises, a brand name for movies, TV shows and lunchboxes. Which can only be bad news for fans and retailers again. Mike Sterling again:

“While I’m curious as a fan about what DC is doing, as a retailer I’m a little worried. Not just about the jumping-off point thing I noted already, but also about how I’m going to explain this to the customers who are going to be caught completely by surprise by DC’s plans. I know it sounds strange, since all of you reading this are plugged into the Web Matrix-style via interface ports at the bases of your skulls, but I have regular customers for whom their exposure to comics news comes from walking into the store and looking at the rack to see what’s new. I can hear them already: “Hey, why is Superman at issue again? And Batman? …And, hey, Legion of Super-Heroes? Again? What’s going on?” Which is fine…that’s part of my job, to explain what new dumb thing a comic publisher has done to confuse and frighten its readership this week.

But as a pal of mine noted to me in email, if this particular publishing initiative falls flat on its face, where does DC go from there? This is an awfully drastic and wide-ranging strategy that won’t be easy to reverse without some consequences. And not just of the “fans and Marvel Comics laughing at DC’s failure” kind, but having highers-up at Warner Brothers looking at the crash-and-burn and thinking “that didn’t work, so why are we bothering with these pamphlet-thingies? Let’s just do cartoons and movies with these characters, and make some real money on them.”

Yes, quite. Although I’m no fan of capes and masks any more, and will gleefully and at length point out how comics are so much more, I don’t want to see a huge part of the industry collapse into rubble. I can see DC’s core readership shrink rapidly as no-one wants to read crappy new interpretations of perfectly good characters, with no new fanbase to take over. I could be wrong. I really hope I am. But confusing and alienating your customers is no way to run a business.

However, there’s no reason you can’t have a little fun with the idea…

Oh, and if you want to know how to elegantly tell an origin story without letting it taking over an issue, Grant Morrison’s four panel recap that started off his masterly All-Star Superman is the way to go. Perfect comics work.

Four panels. Eight Words. Seventy Years Of Back-story.

*One last thing. The heads up/impetus/desperate steal of an idea at the end of a dry creative day for this one came from long time X&HTeam-mate, Rob May. His new geek-friendly website Cake And Lies is very much worth your time. And as he says here, there are prizes to be won.  

Blood In The Gutter: A Comics Noir Primer

If you’re a fan of noir, if you like your crime tales bleak and nihilistic, if you like your movies to be in black and white, and your morals to be all shades of grey, then there are some comics that you should know about. See, crime stories were a news-stand staple long before the capes and masks came over the rooftops and camped up the joint. You could get your fix of guns, broads and hard-faced men making bad decisions in the newspapers. The true crime comics vied with Warren and EC’s horror titles for pure visceral, authority-baiting thrills. And that tradition carries on today with writers and artists across the planet giving us stories that hit hard and stay put.
Continue reading Blood In The Gutter: A Comics Noir Primer

Gaddafi’s Role Models: Five SF & Fantasy Despots

As Libya is on the verge of shrugging off the chains of the most comic-book of the villainous Middle Eastern dictators, I thought it would be fun to look at some slightly more fictional varieties of Gaddafi et al. With his elite guard of female killers and penchant for a fancy costume and ranting speeches, I reckon he’d fit in nicely amongst this lot.

Continue reading Gaddafi’s Role Models: Five SF & Fantasy Despots

Some Stark Home Truths About Tony.

...and an extra $200 if you wear the helmet and call me Howard.

I dutifully trekked to the movies last week to check out Iron Man 2. Following the runaway success of the first film, and it’s winning formula of laughs, action and a fittingly dramatic tale of an arms dealer’s epiphany and redemption, expectations for the new one were high. There have been some poor reviews, and general complaints that in this movie you didn’t get to see that much of the armour. It’s a fair point, given that this is the first of the tentpole big bang movies of 2010. But I really enjoyed the film, for precisely that reason. The enduring fascination for me lies in the flawed, self-destructive character of Anthony Stark.

He’s based, according to Stan Lee, on Howard Hughes, the playboy billionaire technocrat turned paranoid recluse. Like Hughes, Tony Stark is a glamourous, globe-trotting ne’er-do-well. Like Hughes, he’s also fundamentally broken at base level. He’s bi-polar, alcoholic, has serious daddy issues and seems unable to have any real friends outside his staff. He’s dating his secretary, fercryinoutloud…

That Stark/S.H.I.E.L.D. consultancy - not going so great.

With this in mind, it becomes much easier to sympathise with the bad guys in Iron Man 2. Vanko has a very clear and obvious grudge against Stark, whose father used and deported his dad for pretty nebulous reasons. “He was only in it for the money”, we’re told. How vile, an industrialist trying to make a profit, never heard of such a thing. Similarly, Justin Hammer and Senator Gary Shandling have justifiable grievances against this raving narcissist who somehow has access to bleeding edge tech, is using it in one-man vigilante operations without any sort of international sanction, and keeps it locked down and proprietary. I can’t help but imagine that this is like Steve Jobs moving into weapons design. The implications for someone with Iron Man tech using it for means that are not US friendly are never really explored in the film. Sure, Vanko will probably sell his designs on (to the usual bloody suspects, Iran, North Korea et al, when he’d be much better advised simply undercutting Stark and Hammer and making a mint out of the US military, who have no bones about dumping manufacturers if they can make a saving) but his primary motivation is revenge. I’m lost as to why he doesn’t just sue Stark Enterprises for a half share of the profits. It’s not like he doesn’t have any evidence. It’s all a bit – well basic and unimaginative, really.

As befits the industrial espionage theme at the story’s core, most of the villains or opponents Stark comes up against are after the Iron Man tech, and it’s his refusal to hand over or share that causes conflict. The principal villains in both movies are industrialists first and foremost, and more honked off about Stark’s assault on their profit lines than anything else. His petulant outburst at the Senate hearing “It’s mine, and you can’t have it!” tells us everything. The guy simply cannot play nice with others. When you consider that the arc reactor at it’s heart wasn’t his idea in the first place, and that it’s his father’s blueprints for the new element Starkonium (as I’ve decided it should be called) that save his life, that petulance is a bit rich. Ivan Vanko has just as legitimate a claim to the tech as Tony, and yet somehow he’s the bad guy? I walked away from the film feeling that Vanko had been spectacularly hard done by, simply because he chose to deal with the grief of losing his father in a more direct fashion than might have been advisable.

Well, tell him I'm in a MEETING or... somethng *urp*

As ever with comic book adaptations, it’s better to go back to the source. Here we see some really interesting developments in Tony Stark’s character. For the last couple of years in the Marvel universe, he’s been effectively a villain. Heading up an initiative to unmask the superhero community that split them down the middle, taking over S.H.I.E.L.D. after an assassination attempt on Nick Fury, he has become an authoritarian stuffed-shirt with little of the joie-de-vivre that fans of Robert Downey Jr. would expect. He is trouble, pure and simple, melting down into a puddle of booze or paranoid delusion just when the planet needs him most.

He can be even more toxic to those around him. The moment when Tony, in an attempt to bring Pepper a gift to apologise, offers her strawberries, the one thing she is allergic to, says a lot about the character. The flippant comeback line, “I knew there was something connecting you and strawberries” is the capper. He doesn’t care about her. He only has a vague idea of her likes, dislikes and the fruits that could potentially kill her. I genuinely felt that he was closer to the robots in his lab than to Pepper, Happy or Rhodey.

But maybe there is another aspect to the character that needs to be tied into the mix. The Iron Man armour itself. A major part of the film is the hunt for a power source for the suit that won’t kill Stark (palladium poisoning won’t give you techno-emo tattoos, by the way. It’s nasty stuff). In the comics, Rhodey’s take-over of the War Machine armour nearly kills him too. The suit is dangerous. Stark has no qualms with flying unproven prototypes of the armour in to combat, regardless of the risks (and as the arc reactor generates almost absurd amounts of power, the catastrophic failure of that device could cause the end of everything. Imagine Iron Man losing containment over China, airbursting with a force equivalent to every nuclear weapon ever made at once. That, my friends, is an extinction level event. All because Tony-baby couldn’t wait to play with his latest toy.)

So, let’s sum up. Our hero is a narcissistic drunk, incapable of a meaningful relationship, and a hoarder of world-changing technology who has taken it upon himself to police the planet without any form of oversight or supervision. All it would take is one bout of alcoholic hallucinations leading him to believe that Kim Jong Il is actually a lizard from outer space and he could spark off World War 3.

I dunno about you, but Tony Stark flippin’ terrifies me.

Haters gonna hate.

(The Wizardworld photo is courtesy of Mike Bartolomeo.)

A Day Of Tweaks And Noodling

Off sick today, which is always a bore. I’ve been pretty much stuck upstairs, shuttling between the bedroom and the loo (don’t ask, really, unpretty situation.)

Which leads, of course, to a day of Rob’s favourite pastime, Fannying Around On The Laptop. Listen to the author’s squeals of joy as he archives off 10 gigs worth of ephemera to the external drives! Rejoice with him as he gets Last.fm working along with Growl, and spends the day watching a window pop up on his desktop every time a new song plays! Gasp in near-orgasmic wonder as he … oh, you get the idea. Geeking out is what I do, and it can sometimes be good to have the excuse to do nothing but for a day.

So, concerning the local amenities, I’ve juggled things around eso slightly. There’s now a Last.fm list widget, so that you too can enjoy my musical “tastes”. I prefer to call them eclectic, although the accusation often levelled is “schizophrenic.”

Philistines.

There’s also a Facebook widget, and updates to the blog will now appear as new Notes in my FB profile. Sharp-eyed readers may notice a change to the quote in the header, and really sharp-eyed observers will note I’ve tweaked the logo. Notice I have resisted the temptation to stick a lightning bolt in the middle of it.

There’s been a few updates to the growing pile of juicy content in the writing rooms. Satan’s Schoolgirls will always update on a Sunday, so Chapter 5 has just gone up. I upped a new short story Saint Charlie to the Short Fiction room earlier this week, and I’m rather proud of it. Any updates to the fiction or film room will always be noted in This Week’s Special, the text box to the top right.

A couple of interesting links, because obvs I sent a chunk of time hitting the feeds today.

The guys at scans_daily came up with the goods again, with a wonderful piece by Darko Macan, about a bookshop that has every volume in the world … excpet one. The ending is just heartbreaking.

"Mister Bookseller"

Finally, as a writer, I am by definition a language technician. My chosen language (or rather the one that circumstance and to a certain amount laziness has forced onto me) is one of the most illogical and eccentric on the planet. With a vaudvillian twinkle, Ed Rondthaler takes us through a few of the pitfalls and pratfalls that the English language has in store for us.

(Youtube vid, better quality here)