This blog is essentially a collection of posts I used to write on Facebook combined with my travel blog and expanded to make a very public forum of my thoughts regarding Pop Culture, The Interweb, Cartoons, Comics, Ultimate Frisbee, Absurdity, Life, Travel and whatever else captures my attention long enough to write about it...

Enter at your own peril!
Showing posts with label Nerdy things. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nerdy things. Show all posts

30 August 2011

Super Powers

So this is flowing out of a couple of discussions I've had with people about "what super power would you have?" (shock horror that I've had that discussion) with a few people over the years.
Basically it comes down to a discussion of 5 powers for me with a pros and cons thing

I generally ignore all the super strength/fighty type powers, I wouldn't want them or use them given I'm not a very fighty type person. So none of those will really be covered, just the powers I like, starting with;

  1. Invisibility- My favourite power and totally underused in comics. How can the bad/good guys stop the guy they can't see? Yeah yeah Wolverine could smell him or Spiderman has the spider sense thing... but seriously no faceless grunt could stop you and you could steal all sorts of stuff... And the potential for mischief is huge. But then you have the downside of just what can you turn invisible. Is it just you? Your clothes? Things you're holding? What if you're wearing/holding to much? Do you have to nude up each time you're going invisible? If so it's kinda losing the edge there.
  2. Immortality- Think Ra's Al Ghul or the Highlander. Upside you don't die... downside everyone else does... Upside years to horde weath etc (there's a reason those guys are rich)... downside you have to "reinvent" yourself every generation which would have to be getting trickier. An extra personal downside for me was pointed out by my brother, my complete lack of an attention span would probably only get worse and I end up developing some weird international conspiracy to keep myself busy... but it would serve no purpose other than the extermination of Justin Bieber/Reality TV/whatever else I've decided I don't like that decade.
  3. Super Speed- Again a favourite of mine, mainly because I like the flash. You'd be super hard to beat in combat because you're so much faster etc and the commute to work wouldn't be terrible. But the thing is, just because you have super speed people assume you have the implict super fitness. All super speed means is you run QUICKER not FURTHER. A 30km run to work is still a 30km run no matter the speed you are running... Sure you'd get fit, but you're still not going to swim the pacific (or run on top of it) not matter how fast you go...
  4. Teleportation-  I do love Nightcrawler... And the ability to instantly teleport places would be awesome... However teleporting loses out massively in upside/downside. The assumption with teleporting are generally that you can't teleport into something (that would suck), you can do it to locations you can't see despite the earth turning however fast it turns blah blah blah and that you can teleport more than just yourself... Otherwise you'd arrive naked without any of your fillings... which would be awkward and ouchie... Solve all those probs and I'm all for teleporting, but I'll hold off risking it until that time...
  5. Flight- I like flight, completely useless in comics but imagine being able to fly to work. And in the upside/downside discussion it has very few downsides. You don't have to nude up for it, you should be able to carry at least a backpack of stuff with you. You might not be able to go super high due to the oxygen concentrations but you could easily get a couple of hundred metres up and fly off to work... Fun... Definitely the power I'd end up choosing I think.
There you go, choose flight =P
Love, Hugs and Kisses
ANt

17 August 2011

Terminator vs the Matrix

So having recently watched the Matrix trilogy back to back and then Terminator salvation it occurred to me just how similar they are in storyline... indeed they could almost be the same

I'm going to assume everyone has seen all these movies (if not this will make very little sense) but here's a brief rundown of the pertinent facts (adapted from wikipedia).

Terminator Movies
The central theme of the franchise is the battle for survival between humans and a self aware AI (Skynet). Skynet is positioned in the first film as a US defence computer system by Cyberdyne Systems which becomes self-aware and, on perceiving all humans as a threat, seeks to wipe out humanity itself. It initiates a nuclear strike against Russia (the first movie came out in '84 so the Russians were still a legit movie plot threat), ensuring a devastating counter strike and nuclear holocaust, wiping out much of humanity instantly.

In the aftermath, Skynet builds up its own machine based military capability, which includes the (movie namesake) Terminators used against individual human targets, and proceeds to fight a war against the surviving elements of humanity, some of whom have organised militarily into the Resistance. Then to complicate things even more at some stage in the future, Skynet develops the ability to time travel, and both it and the Resistance seek to use it to win the war by preventing or forestalling their present timeline.


'Judgment Day' is referred to as the date on which Skynet becomes self-aware and decides to exterminate. Due to the element of time travel and the consequent ability to change the future, several dates are given for Judgment Day during the movies. Terminator 2 (made 1991) gives the date as 29/8/97 (the future... woooo spooky). However, in Terminator 3 (made 2003) shows that the Judgment Day holocaust had been postponed to 25/7/04. In the TV show this was later delayed to 21/4/11 (so we missed THAT one too) due to the attack on Cyberdyne Systems in T2.
Complicated much? But the basic principle is pretty simple... Skynet is a computer system with AI, Skynet becomes self aware (alive), Skynet is bad and attacks people and people fight back. Skynet makes robots to kill people.
The tricky stuff is where the time travel comes into it... There are huge interweb debates/discussion about the paradoxes and various issues with the terminator timeline... but here is a reasonably succinct version. I do have a chuckle about when John Connor meets/sends Kyle Rheese back in time with instructions to protect his mum... "You need to go back and protect my Mum... by the way take these flowers... Dad" AWKWARD!

The Matrix Movies
Trilogy of movies between 99 and 03 (so entirely completed between T2 and T3). The series shows Earth dominated by sentient machines (AI), who have turned on humans and forced them into slavery. At one point, humans believed they could wipe out the machines by "scorching the sky," as they thought solar energy to be the only life source of the machines. However, the machines devised a way to extract the bioelectric and thermal from the human body (which is really not practical from a scientific point of view... but whatever I didn't poke holes in Terminator's science) by growing humans in pods connected by cybernetic implants to an artificial reality called the Matrix, which keeps their minds under control.
The virtual reality world simulated by the Matrix resembles human civilization around turn of the 21st century, chosen because it is supposedly the pinnacle of human civilization (and when humans "gave birth" to AI... can someone say Skynet?). The majority of humans connected to the Matrix are unaware of its true nature. Most of the central characters in the series know that it is not 'real' and as a result can partially bend the simulation's physical laws in order to perform superhuman feats within the simulation.

As Morpheus says in the movie "A singular entity that spawned an entire race of machines" (sounding like skynet yet? There is no mention in the movies of how the war started (in fact they try to emphasis the fact that the humans don't know who struck first) but I'm sure this is explained in all the extra stuff that has no doubt developed (but I haven't looked at). What is mentioned though that the machines are up to their 7th version of the matrix, inferring that this is 700 or so years AFTER the humans blotted out the sky during the war... Putting the year around the 28th Century (not 2199 as Morpheus believes).

My personal grudge with the matrix is a bit disconnected from this and centers mainly around the 3rd film ruining everything. First matrix pretty good, original and kinda kickass... Second matrix was less original but had more kick assyness (the fight scene in the weapon room at the Merovinigian's house is still a favourite). The third just kinda sucked... the whole Neo is just some combination of Jesus and a Cyberpunk Ninja who can control machines with his mind doesn't sit well with me. I would've much preferred if he was just an average man outside the matrix and part of the adventure was getting him into the matrix and keeping him safe while his does his thing in there... Basically I would've preferred that if instead of at the end of the 2nd film when Neo shuts down the sentinels it wasn't because he was Jesus... rather because the "real world" was simply another matrix designed to trap/control the rebellious ones (woooo layers upon layer upon layers Inception style). Then the third movie could've been them breaking out rather than some bibilical sacrificial showdown type thing... Oh well...

Anyway... back to this post
Terminator vs/is the Matrix
If you look carefully, nothing here outwardly contradicts anything else. The Terminator world (which is generally set in the next few decades... hundred years tops) simply evolves into the matrix in the missing 700 years or so between the films timelines (hopefully Skynet learns its lesson about time travel when John Connor became his own grandpa).
So your timeline would go
  • "Mankind marvels at the birth of AI" in the 21st century (Matrix)
    • Just not calling the AI Skynet. The date is undefined because of all the timeline screwing around and shifting in Terminator about the exact date Skynet becomes self aware and judgement day in the Terminator movies. (Matrix and Terminator)
  • Nukes fly, general unhappiness (Terminator) (so machines shot first... just like Han... but that's another rant)
  • Terminators built, war starts, terminator designs start to get more and more complicated and killy (Terminator)
    • Eventually evolving over 700+ years from the humanoid shape of Terminator to the Squid style shape from the Matrix (how is that aerodynamic?) (Matrix)
  • Events of the Terminator series, humans always seem to win however they can never seem to stop Skynet (Terminator)
  • War with Machines (Matrix) and humans nuke out the sky to stop the solar power (Matrix). 
    • Clearly after the events of the Terminator movies the machines switched to solar power, I guess Peak Oil is an issue to be considered even in Sci Fi movies... No more coal fired Terminators (FYI Arnie is TOTALLY a coal fired robot)
  • Matrix is built and rebuilt and rebuilt for the robots to be able to power themselves (Matrix)
    • 700 years of intermittent resistance coupled with an 1 in every 100 year ass kicking of Zion by the machines
  •  Events of the Matrix Movies
The end... Boom

There you go, totally the same movies with even less stretching required than for Aliens vs Predators (which by the way is bullshit... aliens is in the future and Predators are drawn by heat and conflict... why the fuck are they fighting in Antartica... FUCK THAT SHIT)

Love, Hugs and Kisses
ANt

10 July 2011

Comics, part 3

The "Rest" (aka smaller publisher stuff)

When I started buying/reading comics again it was finding smaller publisher stuff on the web that started pulling me in... So this topic is quite close to my heart. I was quite big on Devils Due stuff for ages there (and bought a fair bit online till their webstore and I had a "disagreement"). I can't remember how I got into Devils Due but I think it was through Tsunami Bomb (yeah that band I like). As best as I recall I found Tsunami Bomb in a random free mp3 search of the web in the early 2000s (or perhaps I was searching elsewhere and linked to them from another band?)... regardless of how I found them I think the next step was a Tsunami Bomb blog post or something like that to the fact that they'd got a reference in Josh Blaylock's new comic Misplaced (yes the same Josh Blaylock on my blogs I read list there --> )... Which I then checked out, and ended up buying and the rest they say is history...

So we will start this post with

Misplaced
Alyssa is from another dimension or something and can kick ass (very little is specified as to why). But the art is very pretty and the heroine is quite endearing in her naivety. It's a little bit of a standard "oh I come from a super obey the rules society and now I'm on Earth I can be free to punk up etc" story... but with the added bonus of crazy super powers and weird slug alien type things... and jetpacks!

The tattoo marks on her head are cool too...
One point of difference here is I actually have the comics for this not the graphic novel... I should get the graphic novel...

It also has a great line about drinking... Alyssa (bless her naive non matching socks) having gone to her first bar and having her first drink gets kinda drunk and quite enjoys it... Then a "frat boy fuck up" spikes her drink and she ends up booting after kicking everyone's ass. Lying back afterwards she says "I feel terrible, you know what I need? More Beer! That stuff made me feel great".

Dead @ 17
From Misplaced the logical segue is to Dead @ 17 (obviously due to the crossover "Misplaced @ 17" that they did about Alyssa and Nara moving in together.
Anyway once again this is a Josh Howard thing centered around a hot punk(ish) indy chick fighting bad guys with super powers (note the theme here so far)... The twist being this time said chick (Nara) has been killed and come back to life to fight demons and zombies etc... all the time struggling to pay rent and what not. Again the artwork is pretty kick ass (most of these smaller publisher stuff seem to have cooler artwork than what Marvel/DC put out).

Hack/Slash
Continuing the trend you find yet another "hot chick fighting bad guys comic" initially from Devils Due (but now Image or something). Tim Seeley this time is the dude responsible and somehow this comic was even adapted as a stage play.
Anyway this time Cassie is a hot goth chick who travels around fighting slasher killers (like the bad guys from dodgy b grade horror movies), all the time trying to pay rent and etc (damn there's that pattern again). Cassie works with Vlad (big scary guy who kicks the shit out of everyone/thing) and a few other people "backstage" who they saved... It's actually pretty cool with a bit more to it than the other two (maybe because it's been running longer) and it even comes with tender moments. Cassie isn't invincible and she gets stressed and even struggles with the fact she can't get a date... It's an interesting diversion from the standard buffy influence "hot chick kicks ass" story and definitely worth a read.

And the artwork is AMAZING...

Mercy Sparx
Josh Blaylock, Devils Due publishing, hot (demon this time) chick kicks ass... blah blah blah... Seeing the pattern?
Actually this one varies slightly from the pattern again, with Mercy being a demon hired by heaven (or is she... cliffhanger in the plot) to kick 666 types of shit out of rogue angels. Again the plot is ok, nothing amazing like Sandman or the like but the artwork is pretty sweet

Too Cool to be Forgotten
In a massive turnaround here is a comic NOT about a hot chick (as the main character) and NOT about ass kicking (especially not by the hot chick).
This story is about a dude sent back in time to his high school years and reliving things again... I guess that's nothing amazing but it's a pretty sweet story about getting closure (and quitting smoking). It's a pretty sweet story story I think most people could relate to (I'm sure we all wouldn't mind doing something different... although I did write a tentative post about "if I could do it again" and I realistically wouldn't change many things... just one thing...) and if you're still in high school maybe it'll make you think about things a bit differently.
Lost at Sea
Another comic featuring a teenage girl, however this time she's not kicking the ass of beings from hell/another dimension/undeath/etc, instead it's a sweet "coming of age" style story... about making friends and life and blah blah blah. It's by the guy who did Scott Pilgrim so the artwork isn't amazing, but the story puts me in mind of a couple of friends (whom I won't name here, but they need to read it).


Lost at Sea also segues nicely into the last comic I'll be writing about, Scott Pilgrim. But (perhaps unsurprisingly) this isn't all my comics, just all the ones I feel like writing about at the moment. Maybe one day I'll write a part 4 to this including some of the ones I skipped, but I'll just do a short list here for things you should look out for
  • Johnny the Homicidal Maniac- Yes there is a lot of hype, I'm not sure it lives up to it all. The art is pretty crazy (so is the story to be honest) and if it wasn't for the fairly decent conclusion at the end I wouldn't be sold on this at all
  • Ghost World- I remember loving the movie, the comic is ok but a slightly less "happy" story... pretty pics
  • Madman- Insane... Lots of fun... he has a yoyo... that is all
  • Invincible- Fantastic cross of superhero pisstake and superhero coming of age... read it
Scott Pilgrim
To finish up I thought I'd write about Bryan Lee O'Malley's more famous book series.
6 books (of varying quality), a kick ass (pun intended) computer game, a fairly shoddy movie and an awesome movie soundtrack mean that if you're reading this you probably should've heard of Scott Pilgrim.
The artwork is nothing special, there are some good individual lines and characters and a quite amusing central idea (the video game style escalating bosses, enemies turning to coins etc) make this something you should try and read. It's very accessible, but nowhere near as heart lifting as stories like Lost at Sea or Too Cool to be forgotten.
Anyway, rather than a blow by blow write up I'd just write about some of the things that bug me a little... some of you may know how horrifyingly emotionally involved I can get in this comic, I think mainly due to the fact it doesn't turn out how I think it should... It's taken me a while to work out why but I think it's because Ramona is a massive bitch, and Scott is a bit of a tool...
It's more obvious in the movie where Ramona and Scott can't act, and Ramona totally appears to not even like Scott making the movie about a pretty pathetic guy beating the shit out of a bunch of pretty cool guys to then go out with a chick that doesn't seem to like him...
Similar issues occur in the comic, but it's a bit more subtle. Basically Scott was a bit of a fuckhead in his past; see his relationship with Kim (beating up her bf, then moving without telling her), Knives (ditching her for a chick he didn't even know, and not even telling her) and even Envy Adams (yeah she was a bitch, but the fight she dumped him in he started).
Ramona is a bitch, but she at least appears to like Scott (at least some of the time) but she's pretty flakey any hypocritical... Getting angry at Scott for staying at Lisa's after she kicked him out, is a bit rough, especially given that she then had her ex stay over and they were making out.
ANYWAY, Avoiding those two main characters and you will find that the secondary characters are a lot nicer and you generally feel like it would be nice something good happened to them. Look at Kim or Steven Stills (although he does end up with that dude at the end)... Even Knives... Young Neil or Stacey... All those characters seem so much nicer than Scott and Ramona (admittedly Kim does keep telling Scott he's a dickhead... turns out she's right).
I think the thing that bugs me most is how Scott treats Lisa Miller. The artwork isn't amazing so it's hard to tell but she seems to be no more or less attractive than Ramona (maybe not as "hipster cool") but she was his best friend for years and they obviously like each other (more than can be said about Ramona) and when Lisa finally confesses to Scott he runs away to Ramona (who at the time DOESN'T EVEN LIKE HIM).

I dunno... frustrating... I guess it would've been a hard series to finish keeping it unexpected which is why the first few books are better than the later ones, but once again something you should read

That's enough about comics for now...

Love, Hugs and Kisses
ANt

27 June 2011

Comics, part 2

The "mainstream"

So continuing from last time I figured I'd write about other comics, only this time just focus on the main marvel and DC lines. Of course rather than talking about individual comics like last time I'll be talking about characters in these "universes" on top of specific story arcs...

Starting with Marvel and their more commonly recognised stuff that I like... The Xmen... Who I like particular individuals in but tend to avoid the whole group just because it's confusing and to much happens. I never liked Spiderman, Ironman is a douche, Captain America is a SUPER douche and the Hulk just sucks (so I won't talk about them). I do like Mister Fantastic from the Fantastic Four, mainly because his advantage is being smart and not his power of being stretchy (on that note did we all notice the Incredibles basically just had the Fantastic Four's powers with speed instead of fire?). Another cool thing from the F4 is they introduced Galactus and the Silver Surfer. The surfer rocks, even if his comic is a bit "woe is me I'm marooned on a planet of savages etc"

So Xmen I like are Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde and Archangel (interestingly 2 of those 3 where in Xcaliber). Nightcrawler is just a good character, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't like him (a blue skinned swashbuckler who can teleport was never going to fail), similar to Kitty Pryde (but with WAY cooler powers). Archangel however is up there with the coolest powers around, true he's kinda rubbish in a fight compared to most of them, but he's super fit (without any effort) and can FLY... Everyone would like that power. There are other Xmen I don't mind (Beast, Iceman, Psylocke etc) also but more important are the ones that are annoying... I won't go Wolverine bashing (it's not his fault he's over exposed), he was a good idea when he started, it's just the fact that every second character SINCE has been just a copy of him. Cyclops is a douche, 'nuff said there. Jean Gray is/was also annoying. Storm shits me to tears and wtf is the point of Jubilee?

Stretching from Xmen you get Exiles, I picked up a whole collection of their books from a mate when he moved back to the states. I probably wouldn't have bought them myself but they were a decent price and turned out to be none to shabby. Somewhat standard "traveling through alternate dimensions and trying to get home" plot that included Nightcrawler's daughter from another dimension, the good Sabertooth from Age of Apocalypse and Blink.
Funnily enough it was supposed to be a story removed from the main Marvel universe, but of course when any character begins to gain popularity they need to find themselves relocated to the main universe (as happened with Nocturne). It did provide Marvel another outlet for "alternate universe" versions of popular characters too, like the evil Daredevil and whatnot on the Weapon X team. All without having to go to that "what if" comic they used to do... plus if they proved popular *zip* over to the main universe...

Another "alternate universe" marvel story that's worth looking at is Marvel 1602, basically it's the base marvel universe in the 1600s, weird idea but works pretty well. But I think the main reason it works is NEIL GAIMAN wrote it (more on that later).

The Earth/Universe/Paradise X series is also more of the same "alternate timeline/universe" stuff that Marvel do so often (you think the terminator timeline is complicated, you should look at the marvel universe). Anyway in this one everyone has superpower (cool!) but noone can have kids (???) and there's captain marvel and the avengers are dead and the xmen have scattered and Peter Parker is exposed as Spiderman and blah blah blah... Interesting idea, just draws out for to long and gets way to complicated. Killing death and Galactus and all these other key godlike characters gets tricky but Fat Wolverine (how?), Deadpool/Daredevil, Female Thor and Loki being the only Asgardian who understands what is happening are all amusing though.


Finally we have my favourite character from Marvel... Deadpool... Now I hate to say it but I totally liked Deadpool before it was cool (I've even got one of his standalone comics from the 90s still... It was in a showbag). Essentially he started as a copy of Deathstroke from DC (costume, skills even weapons) but he slowly warped into a pisstake of the 90s "violent antihero" schtick (think Wolverine, Punisher and even more Wolverine). Basically he was in the same Weapon X program that Wolverine was in where he got given the stock  standard super healing power, but he had cancer and something went funny and etc etc... Basically he's covered in horrible scars and it's fucked his brain so he's batshit insane. The most obvious part of this is he knows he's in a comic and noone else does (he even answers his own letters page), so all the other characters think he's an idiot and don't understand him. He doesn't know what he's going to do next, so noone else can predict him and in the last few years (powered by the interweb) he's shot up in popularity to the point where he's basically in every comic Marvel do and his refreshing differences are now annoyingly everywhere... He's still funny, just over exposed (much like Family Guy).


Connected to Deadpool comes a comic character I've never actually read a comic of, but have read about and seriously wish I could get copies of their stuff... Squirrel Girl and the rest of the Great Lakes Avengers... I hate the Avengers, and the spin off West Coast Avengers just seem even more pathetic... But the spin off spin off Great Lakes Avengers seem quite amusing, someone dies in every issue and at one stage they met Deadpool and he moved into their HQ and wouldn't leave. He killed one of them for the remote. Google them for the full story.
Squirrel Girl is probably their most famous member, however she's a little bit all over the shop, her power is she can talk to/control squirrels and she has claws a tail and climbing skills and most importantly hazelnut flavoured lips. She also has an entire collection of "Iron Man Vs" collector cards, giving her background info on bad guys... using these abilities she's managed to bring down some of the biggest bad guys in the marvel universe... Apparently some writers hate her and keep trying to "but no" her accomplishments and others love her and keep making her beat bigger and badder people... Much more amusing than Spiderman or the Captain America.

Providing a lovely segue is the Marvel Vs DC collection I have, average kinda comic but interesting in that they used reader votes to determine the winners. Batman vs Captain America, Superman vs Hulk, Spiderman vs Superboy, Flash vs Thor, Silver Surfer vs Green Lantern etc... The coolest part of this clearly being the weird amalgam universe, a Batman/Wolverine Hybrid chasing a Sabertooth/Joker Hybrid with an incredibly annoying Captain America/Superman hybrid etc...
Comics being comics and Marvel/DC being Marvel/DC nothing that is even remotely popular is let go, so that means Amalgam Comics was setup to do 24 comic run of stories about the heroes/villains from the merged universe (never let storyline get in the way of potential profit). A list of comics to think from this would include
  • Legends of the Dark Claw (Wolverine/Batman)
  • Bruce Wayne, Agent of Shield (Bruce Wayne/Nick Fury)
  • Iron Lantern (Iron Man/Green Lantern)
  • Lobo the Duck (Lobo/Howard the Duck... WTF is right)
Now we move into DC land... As mention previously I was never into DC as much as Marvel (although Watchmen is officially DC, and V for Vendetta is Vertigo which is a DC imprint)... Basically I HATE Superman and Batman, I really really hate the pair of them. The Joker is an awesome villain, but Batman sucks, so unsurprisingly the coolest DC comic I own is a Batman story with no Batman in it till the last couple of pages. It's just the Joker leaving Arkham and going on a bit of a rampage, then finishes with Batman coming from nowhere and kicking the fuck out of him.

But that does mean we can segue straight to Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, initially DC and later Vertigo this is one of the most awesome comics you can ever read. Neil Gaiman would have to be one of my favourite writers (of anything... yes there is man crush there) so his most kick ass of kick ass comics is pretty freaking awesome. I've read his short stories, kids stories, comics, novels and watched the damn movies and they're all awesome. I won't bother trying to summarise the series, just read it... read it all.

So that's the two big publishing houses covered, next up is the smaller stuff...

Love, Hugs and Kisses
ANt

23 June 2011

Comics, part 1

So looking over my previous posts I've found very little reference to comics on here. Now I'm not quite a "comic book" person like you imagine when you hear the term... There's no collection of air tight plastic bags holding issue 1 of anything, in fact there's very few actual comics in my collection, it's almost exclusively "graphic novels" (big comics for those who don't know what that means).
Anyway I guess when I first started paying any attention to comics it was in the 90s and mainly Marvel stuff... But that was mainly due to the toys and the tv shows and not actual comics... Although I do have one (somewhere) where Magneto rips out Wolverines adamantium and then Prof X vegetables him... So in the Marvel vs DC debate I'm pretty heavily on the Marvel side (on that note I did have a couple of the Marvel vs DC comics they did... and years later picked up the collection). When I started looking at them again a few years back (coinciding strongly with the appearance of a disposable income) I drifted away from the Marvel/DC "mainstream" and started looking at other publishers like Devils Due and the more obvious Image, Dark Horse etc...
So I was shifting around my collection to new shelves and I thought I'd write something about it... but I couldn't quite come up with anything that worthwhile... So I thought I'd just write about comics/characters I like or own and why...

Starting with the "classics" (most are movies now too)


Watchmen
THE comic that everyone tells you to read. Alan Moore (a name you need to know to understand comics today... but a bit of a douche... more on that later). Award winning (and not just in comic categories, but actual "real" books too) and quite worthy of said awards. Complex story with lots of morally grey areas and a quite good movie too. Read it more than once... Although the artwork is nothing special (Alan Moore is pretty boring in his layouts...) Committing comic book heresy here, but I actually like the movie conclusion a lot more than the book, (spoiler time) but Dr Manhatten going rogue and threatening earth seems much more realistic (within the bounds of the story) than other dimensional aliens... Although it sucked they took out the pirate story. Also interestingly was meant to be set in a "universe" of another publisher that DC "acquired" and then be killing off established characters with history, rather than newly developed ones.
V for Vendetta
Again with Alan Moore, this time indulging in his pen chant for anarchism and revolution (rather than sex and conspiracy that Watchmen covered). Interesting enough story with boring as art (although no thought bubbles is new). A semi decent movie adaption that Alan Moore seems to hate (basically he's a douche and hates anyone doing anything with his work). He can blather on about trying to make his work unfilmable and wanting comics to be special... but that's not ever going to happen dude... get over it...
V is harder to read than Watchmen mainly due to all the hoo hah about anarchy and the completely unrealistic end game of V... People ruling themselves nicely? Dream on... I quite like the anti authoritarian stance, getting upset because the words "anarchism" and "fascism" aren't used is pretty silly IMHO

Sin City
Another classic turned into a reasonably popular film, this time however it's NOT an Alan Moore work but Frank Miller. A series of very awesome looking comics held together by a very tight (if somewhat over the top) story. And because Frank Miller had a bullshit time making Robocop 3 (basically he got fucked by a studio) the movie is pretty close to the comics too.

300
What? Frank Miller again? Yes much like Stan Lee invented 90% of the Marvel universes characters a surprisingly large proportion of really kick ass (more on Kick Ass later) comics come from a surprisingly small portion of writers. Funnily (yet unsurprisingly) enough Alan Moore had a whinge about this comic (and probably the movie too)... Apparently there wasn't enough homo in it for him... I get the feeling Alan Moore is kinda a epic douche as a person.
The art is once again quite awesome (and different to the "norm" or Alan Moore's "extra boring" style) and again the movie (the "this is Sparta" one) turned out to be quite popular (at least on the interweb) and quite close to the original comic.

Moving on from "classics/must haves", but continuing the "recently filmed" trend and you have

Kick Ass
Not Frank Miller or Alan Moore, but once again comic bigwigs (kinda) and you get a relatively new comic being developed almost alongside its movie. Substantial differences exist between the comic and movie (not the least being the reaction by the chick when she finds out he's not gay) and whilst you might think the movie is a little fucked up, it's got nothing compared to the comic. And most amazingly the comic writer is quite ok with the differences between the movie and the comic, with the reasoning being comic audiences and film audiences are different and film audiences wouldn't be able to deal with the less than happy things that happen (because they're pussies essentially). Think of Kick Ass the movie as the "chick flick" of the comic.
Bright colours, over the top storyline and gore make this comic most amusing to read... and I can't wait for the next two installments (comic AND movie)

The Mask
Yes it was a comic first, no the movie has nothing at all to do with the comic... Well they both have green faces, that's about it... I do like the Jim Carey vehicle, however comparing it to the comic is possibly even less reliable that comparing the Starship Troopers book to the movie.
Crazy over the top stories and violence makes the looney tunes copy cat mask from the movie appear like a total pussy... Plus the mask is actually a BAD guy in the comic...

I dearly dearly dearly want to read the Lobo/Big Head crossover and the Big Head/Joker crossover.

That's about all I can be bothered writing for the moment, but I do have more to write about (Scott Pilgrim, Hack/Slash, Dead @ 17, Marvel stuff, not to mention Neil Gaiman) so I'll do that whenever I get around to doing it

Love, Hugs and Kisses
ANt

30 May 2011

Things and Stuff

I haven't written for a while, and sure as hell don't feel like doing assessment stuff at 11pm so I thought I'd jump on here and have a play around.

So I had a look at the stats for this thing and apparently people still view it (I dunno about reading it, but they view it). Unsurprisingly the majority of page views come from Australia (artificially increased by this 'puter and my desktop... especially from when I want to link to Greg or Max's much more interesting blogs) but second place is the US, that's a little odd... Norway comes in at 7th (unsurprising given I started this thing properly when I was there) but 3rd through 6th are a MYSTERY... Slovenia comes in just behind the US with a BIG margin over the 4th place Germany... Now I've been to Germany, written posts for this blog in Germany and blogged about German things here, so I can see why German computers might link here... But Slovenia? WHY? I've never been there, never written about there and to the best of my knowledge never even met a Slovenian... The closest thing I can think is I've probably bad mouthed their Eurovision entries a few times... This is born out by the fact that of the 290ish views from Slovenia 200 were this month (surpassing my Australian audience by over 2 views to 1)
Next up is even MORE of a mystery... IRAN... WHY? SUPER WHY? How is there any content on here that would even come up for google.iran? Close behind that is Russia... Sorry boys you can't get my credit card details from here

Rereading some of my older posts though I worked out why people managed to find my blog by searching "White Rabbit Dynamite" before I made that a tag (because I couldn't work out why people would find me that way). That was the name of the band I saw on my pub crawl in Berlin (interestingly the "alternative berlin" tours I did and then blogged about are another way people find this... btw if you're ever in Berlin, google "alternative berlin" and do their pub crawls/walking tours).

Anyway to give this blog post some content (other than the bollocks about stats) I thought I'd talk about the lego digital designer and the things I've made with it

For those not in the know, Lego Digital Designer (or LDD for short) is a program that lets you build lego on the 'puter and if you do it in the right mode you can then buy said model complete with custom box and instructions... Needless to say I've spent a LOT of time on it and built some quite bizzare things. I've got 43 models of various sizes and themes

Anyway here was one of my first (and to date most excessive) creations
1500+ Pieces, near on $700 and a build guide of over 400 steps... It would probably top out at 60cms tall...

Bigger isn't better though... some of the smaller scale things I've made look much nicer

It "almost" looks like a realistic castle

As opposed to these



I don't just do castles though, I do other weirder things


The Dragonfly Copter

The Spider Bot
 The Copter Boat
 
Whatever this is...

I tried making a normal house once... I ended up with this

In fact this is the most "normal" model I have
(It's a space station btw)

And this is to just prove I can use real lego too


Love, Hugs and Kisses
ANt

5 May 2011

The worst story known to man

So a couple of days ago Mel posted a link to the 56 worst analogies of high school students (in America). It was speculated if you could use them all in a single story... The answer is yes, but not a good one... The blue bits are the quotes

Enjoy (or not)


Bob blinked, the revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge free ATM.
“But why?” he asked as his thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without cling free.
“I’m unhappy” Mary answered. This was true, she was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can’t sing worth a damn. Of course she couldn’t say it like that because her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quickaaakk/ch@ung by mistake. “so you’ve been cheating on me?”
“Just the once” she answered with a lie, because in reality she was as easy as the TV guide crossword. “But that was just because you’re lame and you smell”. Oooo, he smells bad, she thought, as bad as Calvin Klein’s Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances.
“At least that’s true” Bob though, he already knew he was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something. He was bald as one of the Three stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo Bob took one last look at her as she stood up to leave the table, .her pants fit her like a glove, well, maybe more like a mitten actually. Her eyes were shining like two marbles that someone dropped in mucus and then held up to catch the light. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser, her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist.
As Mary left she reflected on what had just happened. It was unlucky that her husband had interrupted her on that date, especially given the date wasn’t that memorable in any other way. Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “second tall man”.
“What I really need” she thought “is someone to find that baseball player I had a fling with, for me”. She remembered when she first saw him, the baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas. His name was Jason McBride, that’s when it clicked with her, Bob’s friend John was a private eye who could find anyone for anyone. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met. But John and Bob had met, they were friends, they were as good friends as the people on “friends”. Maybe John could help.
So that’s how she met me, John the Private Eye. Interrupting my lunch . She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs. She caught you eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center, her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like the sound a dog makes just before it throws up. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan might just work. She was going to pay me to find her long lost love Jason McBride the Baseball guy. I looked at my lunch and my desk lamp, the sardines were packed as tight as the coach section of a 747, the lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object. So I agreed to the job.
3 Days later I found Jason watching the sunset in a park complete with a pond and a single dandelion, the sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black. But it was cold, you know how in “Rocky” he prepares for the fight by punching sides of raw beef? Well, yesterday it was as cold as that meat locker he was in. And today was even colder than that. At first Jason was unconvinced, he didn’t want any more heartbreak, he spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. A little bit of persuasion from me however and she grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef, and then eventually he fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River. It was a beautiful moment, The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium and the little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
The arrangement was that they would meet at the ballet, it was Mary’s idea, her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. As Jason and I walked into the ballet we looked to the performance where the ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant. Realising that Mary wasn’t inside we left to wait for her at the park nearby. That is where Jason and Mary saw each other, long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced towards each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6.36 pm travelling at 55mph. the other from Topeka at 4.19 pm at a speed of 35mph. She looked at him, he was as tall as a 6’3” tree “Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
They moved in together and they lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth. The red brick wall the colour of a brick-red Crayola crayon.
And that’s where the story could have ended happily ever after, if it wasn’t for Bob’s revenge. It was an American tradition, like Fathers chasing kids around with power tools. Bob asked to borrow my Grandfather’s revenge book to summon a revenge monster, a dicey proposition because even in his last years, Grand Pappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
A full moon later and I heard a knock at the door. It was a stormy night, the thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease. It was McBride and Mary, soaking wet, her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze. Jason told me he felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs I suppose. This is obviously different to fishing, fishing is like waiting for something that does not happen very often.
Suddenly from the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7.00pm instead of 7.30. Then I realized that Bob must’ve summoned the fighting politician monster from the revenge book. It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before. I felt nameless dread. Well, there is probably is a long German name for it, like Geschpooklichkeit or something, but I don’t speak German. Anyway it’s a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don’t know the name for those either. It was a young monster with a gun and a knife too. The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating in a while. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do and I was hit. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidently staple it to the wall. Then it hit McBride up through the roof high into the air, so high that McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
Mary screamed and ran to Jason’s aid, and I looked on in terror, but with Bob’s revenge complete the politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

Then End

Love, Hugs and Kisses
ANt

31 August 2010

Back to the Blog...

So I've been exceptionally nerdy recently... Besides the whole Scott Pilgrim fest and whatnot, a couple of weeks ago I went to see Neil Gaiman (of Sandman, Coraline, etc fame) at the Opera house. He was doing a live reading of a (decidedly average) short story of his accompanied by the fourplay string quartet. That was very cool... I need more books read aloud with a string quartet in the back ground...
The day after I then went to see Akira with a live music score played by the Gurge! That was awesome. The gurge did an AWESOME job... the music was bang on and not intrusive at the least... You'd forget you were listening to a live band... and they went NUTS during the fight scenes which also kicked ass. I'm not the biggest anime fan in the world (is there any anime in the world that doesn't leave you thinking "that was really fucking weird") but I'd watch more if there were live bands playing the music score...
And Last weekend I went back to the Opera house (the first two where there if I didn't mention it earlier) and saw Joss Whedon (Of Buffy, Firefly and Dr Horrible fame) just talking... It was kinda interesting, but clearly I'm not the tragic fanboy that most of the audience was. I did like the jokes Wil Anderson and Joss where making about the "Dick and Balls" comic they made up there... I think that would work surprisingly well as a webcomic... On the vein of that lame dinosaur clip art one. So not just dick jokes but rather the joke is in the inane banter with the extra kick coming from the fact it's two crudely (pun not intended) drawn dicks talking... This is the interweb and I'm sure there is a market for it.

On top of that I've bought/read a LOT of comics recently (and have a list of more to buy... added at the bottom if you really care). I've also finished the Scott Pilgrim game twice and Fallout 3 once (again).

This is all instead of doing my uni work... not that there is much of that yet... I'll start it tomorrow I promise. I've also not done the photo sorting from my trip or the scrapbooking I wanted to do... Oh well.

The other thing I've been doing since I got back is frisbee and training (pissweak) for frisbee... My favourite thing about this (which will be my last AUGs) is that we (mac uni) have gone the full circle and are back to playing in Red... Officially this time. To get the full story you'll need to jump into my time machine with me...
Back in the day (my first Uni Games, circa 2003) Mac Uni played in red... because we'd "ALWAYS" played in red. No other reason (although Liz Drummond does have a blue mace shirt with the same rear design as my first red one and a different front... pre dating red perhaps?). This was pre dating all this "frisbee shirt" crap when we just played in screen printed cotton tshirts (or spandex for the girls) and had the Goodies font on the back. Anyway some clown from the sports association turned up to watch frisbee being played by mac uni (for the first time probably) and said "why're you all in red?"
"we're ALWAYS in red"
"But Macquarie plays in Green and Gold"
"But we play in Red"
"The uni colours are Green and Gold"
"Oh... Did we mention these are the shirts we ALWAYS play in and they're red?"
Fast forward to 2004 and someone at the sports association decided that we needed to have a GREEN uniform so they gave the team some surplus soccer or hockey gear (one of the REAL sports)... We didn't look AWESOME, but we were finally the "correct" colours.
That started a pattern (for the years I had off... aka the "Matt Dowle" years) of Mac playing in red (because we ALWAYS play in red... See the ultra cool hayley drawn barbarian shirts) all the time except at Uni Games themselves. Then last year in a fit of brilliance (or we need to burn some money) Mac uni hired a VERY VERY VERY expensive consultant to "change/fix the corporate image". Apparently the lighthouse upset people because we're not near the beach... Part of this involved a change of colours from Green and Gold to Burgundy and Charcoal... Which meant new uniforms for all the sports teams (sucks to be in the hockey club that just bought new kits less than six months before this). This is why last year Mac took to the field in the Rory organised (praise be unto him) White and Charcoal numbers (that took a LOT of dicking around to get approved). So what is happening to Mac Uni this year? Well in my last AUGs mac uni is back to a Red shirt with black shorts... just were I started... what a nice complete circle.

The other thing I'm going to write here (for those who read it) I'm seriously thinking about getting a tongue piercing this Friday... Or Microdermals behind my ear... or both (dependant on cost and feasibility). Anyone have any thoughts?

Love, Hugs and Kisses
ANt

PS. Comics I want to buy (presents for me if you want =P)
  • Box Office Poison
  • Too Cool to be Forgotten
  • The Goon (maybe)
  • Bone (maybe)
  • Zombies vs Robots
  • Mercy Sparx (maybe)
  • Death the High Cost of Living
  • Possessions (maybe)
  • Lost Girls (maybe)