nixsight

In #MOMBcast 17, we talked about the following comics:
@RichMOMB
18:00 Die Hard Year One #4
23:10 Daytripper #2

@JaneMOMB
30:30 Talisman #3
33:00 Dingo #1 & #2

@nixsight
44:00 Invincible Iron Man #22
51:00 S.W.O.R.D #3

@JamesMOMB
01:02:00 Weekly World News #1
01:12:00 Punisher@ Get Castle

01:35:00 45 Blue Spear one-shot chat.
01:40:00 The Siege#1 & Siege Embedded #1

MOMBcast 17 and all other episodes are available here: http://dimitrimomb.libsyn.com/

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The post I sent out yesterday, about my problems with the way articles about gang-rape and prostitution were being written at both the BBC and The Guardian, was more controversial than I had intended, garnering a comment from a gentleman I hadn’t heard of before, Julian Real, which sought to come down quite heavily on me over some perceived issues with my argument.

Though I was initially quite shaken by the comment – aggressively worded criticism always gets the adrenaline flowing in uncomfortable ways, after all, especially when you’re too responsive to verbal bullying like I am – and people told me not “to feed the troll”, in Real’s arguments I actually saw some places where I could make my points more clearly, and also gained a little more confidence in the points I was initially hoping to make, as well.

I know I sometimes appear quite opinionated, but personally at least, I’ve always seen an initial statement as a jumping off point, from which all the people in a discussion can inform, correct and self-correct, and my opinions, though idealistically quite consistent, are always fluid where details, clarification and validation are concerned.

So Mr Real’s comment gave me the opportunity to look over what I’d written, and explain what I meant on the bits he disagreed with, and that’s been a fun exercise. I don’t think I will have changed his mind, but then, that’s not really what I hope to do to people. I barely know my own mind – it’d be a bad idea to try and change anyone else’s.

Anyway, I was quite happy with my response to his comment here, but then I realised that I didn’t know what he’d said over at his site. If he’d pointed his readers at my post, and his comment, I didn’t want my clarifications to pass them by. So over I went.

The first paragraph said this:

I found this silly blogpost today. And I responded. The the post by nixsight follows, and where I found it can be seen by clicking on the link in this sentence. On his own blog, his words are not so rudely interrupted by mine. But that was then, and this is here.

Things kind of went downhill from there.

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“Mars Attacks!” was on TV tonight, and I mentioned on Twitter that I have a favourite cinema story that relates to the movie, but that it was too long for a Tweet. The lovely Lulu immediately suggested that I blog it.

It was at this point that I realised that while the story isn’t really short enough for a Tweet, it is probably not quite long enough – or interesting enough – for a blog post. But here we are, and here it goes:

Back in early 1996, when I was only 23, I had a friend called Cass. Cass and I were firm friends, sharing many interests and yadda yadda yadda, none of which are pertinent to this story except for two:

We both liked unusual movies.
We drank. A lot.

Parts of my relationship with Cass have made it into some of the stories I’ve written, here and about – we spent a lot of time together, and shared adventures, most of which began at the beginning of a bottle of wine or can of lager in his flat, and ended at the end of a different bottle of wine or on a pile of crushed cans in the same flat, and actually can’t really be called adventures, in the strictest sense – but this one you’re getting here, exactly as it happened, without fictionalised names or overwrought metaphors, because well, this story is just too stupid to dress up or hide behind.

So, okay. Two young men. No longer under the yoke of University courses they didn’t take seriously enough. The beginning of the weekend, I think, so neither worrying about the jobs that they didn’t really care about. Unburdened of girlfriends at that particular time. As most times.

And Tim Burton has a new film out, which for some perplexing reason is only blessed with a midnight showing at the multiplex across town. (At the time, Southampton only had one multiplex. Now it has two. Progress!)

The film was “Mars Attacks!”, and all we really knew about it was that it was going to be awesome. Though it’s possible we didn’t really use that word all that much back then.

And what with the screening being at midnight, and the cinema a walk away, we decided to drop in to our favourite pub first.

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I love a good musical, me. I also really like Girl One’s family, and having stuff done for me.

A couple of weeks back – on Saturday 16/05/2009 – I experienced a perfect confluence of these three things, when Girl One and I went to London on a day-trip – long arranged by the Girl herself, and all but forgotten by me – to see Les Miserables at Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue with her parents, sister and brother in law.

It was a relatively early weekend start for us – and coming just a week after the lack-of-sleep fest of the Bristol Con the week before, I’ve found I’m still recovering a couple of weeks later. Still, early or no, we managed to get to Waterloo around 10.30, only a little bedraggled and hungry.

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I’ve read a couple of write-ups about the Bristol Comic Expo 2009, & I’m sure that between them, & the various podcasts around covering the event, they’ll give a better reckoning of the event than I could, but the con each year is a big deal for me so it seems odd not to mention it.

The convention was reduced from previous years, from two and a bit days to two, and from the previous quite large railway station hall & Ramada Hotel to just the hotel.

I think people were expecting the event to be disappointing, especially with the limited amount of space and subsequent small number of available tickets, but with the Small Press Expo (SPExpo) taking place at the Mercure hotel just around the corner on the Saturday, and hastily affiliated with the main event, I was cautiously optimistic.

(This is of course all bullshit. The fact is I knew that people I enjoyed drinking with would be there, and a late night hotel bar, so it was always going to be groovy.)

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Dan Lester – Author of “Bell, Book & Handlebars”, an account of his cycling tour of the UK’s supernatural hotspots – has returned to Elephant Words, after a triumphant six month engagement in the colonies.

His first new piece is a deceptively simple piece of faked-up ephemera that has one absolute killer idea at it’s core. It is called “The Museum Of July 22nd, 1987″, and exists here.

This seems like as good a time as any to take a look at some of my favourite moments of Mr Lester’s previous run at Elephant Words. His first post came on 29/07/08, but his first appearance came a week earlier:

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Very quick “state of the nation” post…

I’ve taken a six week stretch off from Elephant Words contributing, to try and get a breather and get on top of the other stuff that I need to get on top of, such as this site, the novel, my birthday and actually running Elephant Words – a role that I’ve been performing only very badly for the last few months.

Dan Lester, of “The Incredible Lesters”, will be returning to Elephant Words to cover my absence. You may know him from such websites as “Forever Golden – The Official Bea Arthur Fansite”, “Cyclops Fun Hour” – still the only blog discussing accessibility and disability awareness in comics – and “Monkeysmightpuke.com“. He is also the author of “The Monkey E’er Spanked – Being An Exhaustive History Of Onanism In Web Poetry” – still looking for a publisher, folks! – and “The Dan Lester Mysteries“.

If you didn’t read him before, you should definitely read him now. His first new post was up today, and it’s here: “The Museum Of July 22nd, 1987“.

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A bit of a diversion this week, because… well, because the urge took me, and I had to take it back…

I’ve loved They Might Be Giants for such a long time, but it’s a peculiar kind of love. They are the loyal, cute and intelligent friend that I forget about from time to time, but when something reminds me of them, I have to seek them out instantly, nervously concerned that they won’t remember me. A quick search reveals that so much has changed in their lives – like a new album that I knew nothing about. I wonder how much they’ll have changed.

Then, of course, it turns out that they do remember me. And even though they’ve got more stories to tell, we easily fall into the same old conversations.

Oh, god, They Might Be Giants are my Cookie.

Anyway, people know the band for a lot of things that the band aren’t. It isn’t their fault, or the band’s, really. The closest they ever got to fame were with two songs that could easily be described as novelty hits, and that’s the sort of peculiar celebrity that can kill an otherwise long-lived group.

In fact, those two songs – “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Istanbul” – though characteristic of the band’s output musically, and a lot of fun, aren’t typical TMBG tracks, though Birdhouse comes close. If all of their output had that same crowd-pleasing infectious appeal, and that was all they had going for them, I would have loved them for the length of the glorious summer of 1990, but I don’t know if they’d still resonate with me as much as they do today.

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I’ve not been very productive writing-wise this last week or so. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but key among them are:

a) We’ve been really busy socially.
b) I’ve been very sidetracked by PC gaming.
c) I’ve been utterly failing to complete – but preoccupied by – the Nanowrimo Challenge for this year.
d) I am terribly, terribly lazy. 

Not only have those four things been getting in the way of blogging, but they’ve also been getting in the way of doing the things that I blog about – that’s exponential procrastination right there.

Being socially busy is kind of nice, once in a while. We’ve had two or three very cool evenings with friends – though we’re a couple, we don’t often do the “couples night” thing, but we’ve had two this last week, and the parents-in-law were down for the weekend, and that’s kind of coupley. The “girlfriend’s parents” might not normally count as a proper couple, but Girl One’s associated grown-ups are pretty cool, and I don’t have to be on best behaviour when they’re around, so it’s kind of like just hanging-out.

Which is good, because I don’t know if I even have a best behaviour any more.

I’ve been playing a lot of “Call Of Duty – World Of War”, after a brief dalliance with “Farcry 2″, and that’s just been far too addictive. If I get the chance, I may post a review of both games next week.

And Nanowrimo was a bit of a downer for me, as I consistently failed to get much done, but at the same time, I at least started doing a bit of work on the novel, and that’s cool, because it’s been fucking ages. But the side-effect of course was that because I knew I should have been writing the novel, I task-avoided doing pretty much anything else.

The only thing that’s really taken a hit has been the SD/RM posts, mainly because I just haven’t been finishing any of the stuff I’ve started reading over the last few weeks. I failed to do SD/TT last week, but that’s because I have a double-sized “They Might Be Giants” post percolating for tomorrow.

I’m also thinking that I might change the headings to the “Seven Days” categories to better indicate what they actually are, like Music, TV and Movies. I think the format and weekliness of them is still a smart idea, but I think that my category headings in general don’t really help with the coherence of the site, unless you already know what I’m doing…

Anyway, so that’s that. A lunchtime well spent. Catch you later on today for a “Requiem For A Dream” meander!

Continuing to stretch the concept of what “Reading Materials” are, as I fail to finish a book or much of anything else, but keep on playing games.

This Sunday, Girl One picked up the card-game “Fluxx”, and here are my first few thoughts on it:

Compared to other games that we’ve bought and played recently, “Fluxx” is a fairly simple one, with nice, clear design and presentation. The cards are pretty and easy to read, anyway.

The principle of the game is that the players are in a constant state of flux – because the game forces them to be. So with every player’s turn, and almost every new card drawn, both the rules, and the winning conditions, change. This is only manageable because it happens within a very basic structure – there are only three types of cards, and only three stages to each turn cycle. As such, despite the difference in consistency of each game, we picked it up almost immediately, and played with ease.

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