We're in the final big mudslide before a general election. Political fuckers from all sides are getting their licks in, trying to persuade us poor unejicated plebs what's best for us, in a particular tone taken by Westminster political spods. You know, the ones who are all tied to City of London vampires. The ones who don't want working people to get a fair shake because of some vague ideological standpoint that pay equality is bad.
Don't ask why, it just is. Shut up and keep watching Eastenders, Coronation Street and whatever the current reality TV is. BBC News will keep you informed of what we want to tell you and how you should think about it. We've also got The Sun and The Daily Mail for you to read. Oh, and by the way, inserting rusty pins into your genitals is a fucking fantastic idea.
But I digress. That's a conversation for another time. Or have I said all I need to on the subject already? DRAMATIC MUSIC!
That was an interesting digression. Right out the gate, whoosh, go off ninety degrees to where I wanted. Back on point, fucko.
Since the Scottish independence referendum there's been heightened political engagement in Scotland. We saw droves of people rush to join the SNP and the Greens. In the wake of a number of promises broken and others Satanically twisted in their fulfilment, we watched as Labour turned into a pariah party in Scotland. They and the Tories worked hard to stop people from voting for independence, and they succeeded, in an entirely, hilariously, pyrrhic way. Instead of a small portion of the Scottish population eyeing the Westminster lunch club suspiciously, now a big chunk of the country looking really closely at that prawn cocktail and wondering how many jobs were lost in order for the tubby MP to have it. Not that Westminster give a fuck, their most important voting demographic is also their biggest, funnily enough, and resides around the south east of England – right on their doorstep. Still, it's something of a worrying niggle to them I imagine, like those head aches and the voices. Oh, the voices.
No, Mister Stumpleflush, I can't possibly do that with a corkscrew...
So with all that as a wonderful background, with Scotland's populace suddenly more engaged and in a perfect position to turn the screws on Westminster. What do we start doing the moment we've got this level of engagement? What's the bestest idea you can think of with this all going on? Anybody? Nobody can guess?
We split into tribes. Yay! Something positive is taking place, let's suck all the fucking good from it and turn it into a Who Can Call Each Other Cunts Most contest. Yep. We'll erect tents at either side of a fucking ravine and scowl at each other. Get a nice big animosity inflation unit going to blow huge floats that hurl insults at the people on the other side. And possibly sprays cat piss at them while they're at it.
It's like a fight over territory between two factions of chimps, except without all the screaming, shit-flinging an– oh, fuck it I can't even finish that sentence. That level of lie would implode the entire fucking planet.
It's just really nasty. It's like there's something burrowed in human psyche that means we can't just be a majority on something. We have to schism down the middle and throw bodily fluids at each other. Nice foetid ones at that. The ones we've collected in jars over the years and let get good and decomposed.
There's nothing wrong with being at different side of a political discussion. That whole thing of robust political discourse being an important corner stone of democracy is a valid argument, but the problem is, in our fractious internet age, people retreat to be with people of the same political standpoints as them. It's natural. We don't want to spend every day being told we're wrong and it's good to be around smarter people who can give us ideas to defend our standpoints when we do encounter people who tell us we're wrong. The sticking point comes when we don't leave these groups and they become an echo chamber. Those conditions are arsehole ideology breeding grounds.
It also means when people of different political opinions come together from these places, dripping with the absolute smelly determination they're right, it turns into sloppy shit fight. You know what's horrible in a political discussion? I'll assume you actually want to know and haven't just wandered off with your fingers in your ears going, "I don't do this. I don't do this," like a cunt. It's when anyone, on any side, rolls their eyes and goes, "That's just typical of what your side says," as if to dismiss them. I do it when I'm reading shit the Tories are up to, and I'll probably do it a dozen times today, the difference being is that I'm not in discussion with someone with a differing opinion. Yet this is an accepted part of political discussion, even including the inevitable snorting.
It's not even isolated to internet or private conversations, it's used in the highest political discussions in the land. This is a response you'll see in assemblies and parliaments right across the land. Like it's some kind of all-powerful weapon against ideologies that will cut an opponent off at the knees without a response. They're right about one thing, it is hard to respond to, outside of 'you're a cunt'. Of course it's typical of what one political view would say if it aligns with their political view. Fucking morons.
It ties in with the whole thing of a misunderstanding of what robust debate actually means. Watching footage from the House of Commons is like watching a bunch of unsupervised and undisciplined school kids scream at each other from across the play ground. It's a football away from a couple of MPs rolling around on the floor punching and biting each other. It's rowdy, it's horrible, it doesn't get much done and that seems to be the way our political wanks want it. If that's how top level political discussion goes, what does that leave for the rest of us?
That's right. Festering penis scrapings.
For fuck's sake, we need to be a bit more mature about how we discuss these things. Yes, you disagree with what that SNP person or Tory person is saying, but outright calling them a cunt isn't going to get you anywhere, even if it is justified. Passion is good. Passion gets shit done. Foaming mouthed, eye-rolling raving makes people reach for the fucking cattle prod.
Pack it in you fucking idiots.
Will
Showing posts with label comedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comedy. Show all posts
Wednesday, 4 March 2015
Wednesday, 29 October 2014
Yes, We Do Have Priorities.
"Stop talking about this and think about this!" I've been seeing this sentiment a lot recently. My language might be vague and you're probably already wondering, after a whole sentence, why the fuck you clicked on this blog. You need to bear with me. I have a point, but I'm going to waffle a bit before I get there. Make yourself a cup of tea or relax yourself with some porn, whatever it takes, I'll be waiting*.
Done? Got yer tea and biscuits in comfortable reach. Cleaned up? Dribbled tea everywhere when you thought you'd be a smart arse and try to do both things at once? Sicko. We'll assume you've done whatever thing you needed to relax yourself and we'll say no more. Especially about the stains. Oh, the stains.
You know when you see something so odd that it stops you in your tracks? Sometimes you go, "Oh, right," and carry on with your day and pour out those cold beans from the can and shovel them into your mouth**. Sometimes that weird thing gets you thinking. It could be anything, but let's go with a celebrity's face suddenly changes to something unrecognisable†. It's obvious that's she's had work done. Enough to alter the way she looks so drastically. Now, I don't think it's fair to shame her, she's a victim of a hypocritical system that pulls women one way then another, mocking them for just about any decision they make.
The small rumble of interest caused a few people to start wailing about all the other things wrong in the world. Excuse me? "There are more important things in the world than Renée Zellweger's face!" No kidding, crazy person.
Even stranger, and more odiously, was when Nigel Farage waded into the vague nonsense that was the UKIP Calypso this week. Now, the song was an offensive piece of crap on a number of levels, and I'm not going to link it. But the pan-faced goblin that is Nigel Farage got on his high horse in the Independent. He does the same, "There are more important things to be angry about," rant and then points, obliquely, at Ebola and more blatantly at historical child abuse in Rotherham. In this article you can almost see the straining erection he has for getting more column inches and air time for such a stupid thing and then thrusts a veiny, probably corkscrew-shaped, stiffy in the faces of anyone close by. It was easy publicity for a racism-factory that runs on a sticky fuel of grubby attention‡.
This curious phenomenon of pointing at things that are more important to shift attention away from something seen as fairly trivial does a disservice to people in general. You are aware that we can give thinking time to other things, right? Some things make a bigger impact, and time does dull them – be honest, in a few months both of the examples above will be forgotten. By squealing about them you've got people thinking about them for longer and perversely taking attention away from the thing your trying to point out. People are weird, contrarian and arseholey about that.
People do need to think about other things than all the horrible shit that's going on in the world – even if it is a minor scandal or uproar – because we would become either fatigued or humourless existers who can't eat because they are stuck in constant sad face. It's like having a tiny bit of salacious gossip and screaming at the person, "I don't care if he fell into bed with his brother-in-law's wife, what about fucking PALESTINE§!?"
Yes, giving any thought to the small things is silly, and that's kind of the point. We're still aware of the giant ogres and injustices stomping around the world, we just need something to take the edge of or we'd go fucking nuts. I notice no one ever berates anyone for looking at cute animal vids on Youtube. Sometimes we need something less horrible to be able to deal with the nightmarish shit that's going on.
And then, of course, looking at my half-formed examples above more closely, you'll start to see that they're indicative of much bigger issues with society. Poor Renée Zellweger is a new poster child for our fucked up attitudes towards women – she shouldn't have felt the need to use surgery to look younger, but she conversely shouldn't be pilloried for doing it. Nigel Farage and UKIP are fucking cancerous political spectres, stoking hatred against certain demographics, giving voice to the worst kind of bigotry and polishing it up as mainstream politics. You know why Farage and his particular breed of ghoul are trying to do this? To line their already pretty money-padded pockets. They are an expression of our greedy-shit political system, amplified to a chinless, guffawing, hundred pound note-smoking, poor-mocking caricature straight out of a Dickens novel.
In Nigel Farage's case in particular, you have to ask who benefits from the distraction: the song itself was a distraction on its own, but still shone a spotlight on UKIP's spineless dickery, so Farage§§, the slippery fuck, did a bit of crafty sleight of hand. He got publicity for the party while diverting attention away from their abhorrent policies. He's clearly been getting lessons from David Blane§§§.
So, everyone, just calm the fuck down, take a deep breath and let's just agree that Nigel Farage is a cunt.
* Just keep thinking about that when you're trying to crank one out.
** Oh? That's just me. Okay. Fuck.
† I mean, seriously, if the captions and headlines hadn't said who she was, I wouldn't have known. No, Russell Brand, that's not a result of getting older. Ageing a few years in adulthood doesn't cause that level of appearance change.
‡ And, fucking hell, the BBC have been doing enough of that. How much of Farage's tainted champagne have BBC execs drank to constantly shove that cunt to the forefront of political debate in the UK when UKIP are still essentially a fringe party?
§ But really it's still fucking awful there.
§§ He might be a giant grinning thumb, but he's a sharp grinning thumb, that's why he's so dangerous.
§§§ Is that charlatan shithead still around? Levitation, fucking hell.
Will
Done? Got yer tea and biscuits in comfortable reach. Cleaned up? Dribbled tea everywhere when you thought you'd be a smart arse and try to do both things at once? Sicko. We'll assume you've done whatever thing you needed to relax yourself and we'll say no more. Especially about the stains. Oh, the stains.
You know when you see something so odd that it stops you in your tracks? Sometimes you go, "Oh, right," and carry on with your day and pour out those cold beans from the can and shovel them into your mouth**. Sometimes that weird thing gets you thinking. It could be anything, but let's go with a celebrity's face suddenly changes to something unrecognisable†. It's obvious that's she's had work done. Enough to alter the way she looks so drastically. Now, I don't think it's fair to shame her, she's a victim of a hypocritical system that pulls women one way then another, mocking them for just about any decision they make.
The small rumble of interest caused a few people to start wailing about all the other things wrong in the world. Excuse me? "There are more important things in the world than Renée Zellweger's face!" No kidding, crazy person.
Even stranger, and more odiously, was when Nigel Farage waded into the vague nonsense that was the UKIP Calypso this week. Now, the song was an offensive piece of crap on a number of levels, and I'm not going to link it. But the pan-faced goblin that is Nigel Farage got on his high horse in the Independent. He does the same, "There are more important things to be angry about," rant and then points, obliquely, at Ebola and more blatantly at historical child abuse in Rotherham. In this article you can almost see the straining erection he has for getting more column inches and air time for such a stupid thing and then thrusts a veiny, probably corkscrew-shaped, stiffy in the faces of anyone close by. It was easy publicity for a racism-factory that runs on a sticky fuel of grubby attention‡.
This curious phenomenon of pointing at things that are more important to shift attention away from something seen as fairly trivial does a disservice to people in general. You are aware that we can give thinking time to other things, right? Some things make a bigger impact, and time does dull them – be honest, in a few months both of the examples above will be forgotten. By squealing about them you've got people thinking about them for longer and perversely taking attention away from the thing your trying to point out. People are weird, contrarian and arseholey about that.
People do need to think about other things than all the horrible shit that's going on in the world – even if it is a minor scandal or uproar – because we would become either fatigued or humourless existers who can't eat because they are stuck in constant sad face. It's like having a tiny bit of salacious gossip and screaming at the person, "I don't care if he fell into bed with his brother-in-law's wife, what about fucking PALESTINE§!?"
Yes, giving any thought to the small things is silly, and that's kind of the point. We're still aware of the giant ogres and injustices stomping around the world, we just need something to take the edge of or we'd go fucking nuts. I notice no one ever berates anyone for looking at cute animal vids on Youtube. Sometimes we need something less horrible to be able to deal with the nightmarish shit that's going on.
And then, of course, looking at my half-formed examples above more closely, you'll start to see that they're indicative of much bigger issues with society. Poor Renée Zellweger is a new poster child for our fucked up attitudes towards women – she shouldn't have felt the need to use surgery to look younger, but she conversely shouldn't be pilloried for doing it. Nigel Farage and UKIP are fucking cancerous political spectres, stoking hatred against certain demographics, giving voice to the worst kind of bigotry and polishing it up as mainstream politics. You know why Farage and his particular breed of ghoul are trying to do this? To line their already pretty money-padded pockets. They are an expression of our greedy-shit political system, amplified to a chinless, guffawing, hundred pound note-smoking, poor-mocking caricature straight out of a Dickens novel.
In Nigel Farage's case in particular, you have to ask who benefits from the distraction: the song itself was a distraction on its own, but still shone a spotlight on UKIP's spineless dickery, so Farage§§, the slippery fuck, did a bit of crafty sleight of hand. He got publicity for the party while diverting attention away from their abhorrent policies. He's clearly been getting lessons from David Blane§§§.
So, everyone, just calm the fuck down, take a deep breath and let's just agree that Nigel Farage is a cunt.
* Just keep thinking about that when you're trying to crank one out.
** Oh? That's just me. Okay. Fuck.
† I mean, seriously, if the captions and headlines hadn't said who she was, I wouldn't have known. No, Russell Brand, that's not a result of getting older. Ageing a few years in adulthood doesn't cause that level of appearance change.
‡ And, fucking hell, the BBC have been doing enough of that. How much of Farage's tainted champagne have BBC execs drank to constantly shove that cunt to the forefront of political debate in the UK when UKIP are still essentially a fringe party?
§ But really it's still fucking awful there.
§§ He might be a giant grinning thumb, but he's a sharp grinning thumb, that's why he's so dangerous.
§§§ Is that charlatan shithead still around? Levitation, fucking hell.
Will
Wednesday, 26 March 2014
Them Ole Square Eyes.
TV. Teevee. Telly. Television. It's been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. As you can imagine I was the weird kid who would disappear home to watch television while everyone else was out playing. Drove my mother nuts, to the point where she would kick me out of the house so that I would get some fresh air.
As a teenager I was a bit of a recluse. Not terribly sure why. I would go to school and then go home and spend most of my time with the television on. Yeah, I'd sit and scribble things: stories, games and bad drawings. All the time the comforting grumble of the television going on in the corner of the room. Film and TV are, unsurprisingly, my biggest influences when it comes to fiction. My brain is full of flotsam and jetsam from years of watching some of the most obscure things because I couldn't bring myself to hit the 'off' switch. Oh, fucking hell, does late-night Channel Four programming in the nineties have a lot to answer for*.
So. Now you know what my viewing habits were like as kid**, you get to see the special relationship I've developed with it over the years. The magpie effect of flicking around when nothing was on means I know things about programmes I didn't chose to watch. It's had the dual effect of making me more discerning and more willing to try new things. I know, for instance, bone-deep, that I ain't going to sit through an episode of a soap opera; horrible cancerous things that choke out anything else that might turn up on the air.
In the interests of community-mindedness, I'll give you a little list of the current programmes I'm watching and enjoying. Should be fun. Might show you a shocking lack of taste in your eyes, and if that's the case: FUCK YOU, YOU MALICIOUS CUNT! HOW DARE YOU JUDGE ME! I'LL JUDGE YOU RIGHT BACK!
SEE! THAT'S ME JUDGING YOU! DON'T LIKE IT, DO YOU? NOOOoooOOO!
Ahem, anyway, onto the list.
Person of Interest. I'll actually start with a complaint about this – go me! Why are we in the UK a year behind on this? Not everyone has Netflix, motherfucker. Channel Five have to be applauded for showing it, but it's irritating having to avoid places because there are people who have to talk about what's going on twelve months ahead because it's so fucking good! I want to know!
The show had a bit of a slow start. The first half of the first series is almost a write-off. Then it hit its stride. It's a fantastic mix of conspiracy thriller, A-Team style good-deed of the week and comedy. It's exciting, dark and asks some big questions. Just don't tell me what happens in series three, I will have to have you killed or, at the very least, severely beaten.
The Blacklist is another bit of conspiracy and espionage, but it manages to be far darker and uncompromising than Person of Interest. We are introduced to the wonderful character Raymond 'Red' Reddington, a criminal facilitator and extremely bad man who drops himself into the FBI's lap telling them he'll give them access to criminals they haven't even heard of, the titular blacklist. Oh and he'll only talk to a particular analyst. It's murky in the best kind of way. There's no question about the people Reddington is handing over are extremely bad, but his motives aren't clear and as it goes on it's obvious a lot of the characters' motivations are uncertain. I don't know what the fuck's going on and I love it. You should jump in and not know what's going on either.
Talking about being reeealllyyyy behind on series, I give you Parks and Recreation, a comedy programme filmed in a fly-on-the-wall documentary style† and we're three series behind on this. This took even longer than Person of Interest to get into its groove, but in the third series the insanity set in and the documentary presentation gives great opportunities for characters to give silent reactions to the madness around them or getting little interviews to give their insights. For ages before BBC Four started showing it I was seeing things about Ron Swanson on the internet and got really annoyed, but now I see the appeal, he's a stand-out character in a programme of brilliant characters.
Without Community, I would never have tried Parks and Recreation. This is another one I'd been hearing about for a while and finally found the whole first series on catch up. That was a rewarding Sunday afternoon. For a while we were a year behind this one as well, but last year the Sony channel showed both series three and four. Four wasn't quite as good because Dan Harmon had been dumped as show runner, but it still managed some interesting episodes. Community relies on the interplay between the fantastic ensemble, guiding us through their time at a US community college. It starts off pretty grounded, with some odd moments, but by the end of the first series and the paintball episode it laid the groundwork for the strangeness to come. Then we have the references, you remember what I said about references, right? It's chock-full. A lot of it is self-referential, something a lot of people point out as a bad thing, but I think it's great and gets you invested in the strange family unit of the Study Group.
The most recent addition to my watching is Brooklyn 99. This is an odd one, because it has a bog-standard police procedural as its basis with all the beats and tropes the genre has, yet it's all wrapped up in a comedic skin. Yeah, I know a lot of police procedurals have elements of comedy in them, and Castle is even described as a comedy-drama, but the writers will ditch any semblance of comedy trappings in favour of a dramatic storyline. Brooklyn 99 is straight-down-the-line funny. Yes, there's a case of the week, and it forms a big part of each story, but the characters' eccentricities make up the rest of the bulk. It could have been fucking awful, but it, amazingly, works.
There are others, like the slew of crime dramas I watch, like Castle, Rizzoli and Isles, Elementary‡ and Bones, but the ones above are the programmes I feel most excited about watching of a week. I highly recommend them if you can get access to them.
* Now a bit of a sad imitation of its gloriously vibrant and mad landscape. Late-night television, in general has become a depressingly conformist precession of gambling shows. That made me a little sad, writing that.
** Or reiterated for some of you. Yeah, I'm looking right at you, dude.
† As pioneered in The Office. One I never did get around to watching in either its original UK run or its US incarnation.
‡ That I think in a lot of important ways is far superior to Sherlock, though I did enjoy that too.
Will
As a teenager I was a bit of a recluse. Not terribly sure why. I would go to school and then go home and spend most of my time with the television on. Yeah, I'd sit and scribble things: stories, games and bad drawings. All the time the comforting grumble of the television going on in the corner of the room. Film and TV are, unsurprisingly, my biggest influences when it comes to fiction. My brain is full of flotsam and jetsam from years of watching some of the most obscure things because I couldn't bring myself to hit the 'off' switch. Oh, fucking hell, does late-night Channel Four programming in the nineties have a lot to answer for*.
So. Now you know what my viewing habits were like as kid**, you get to see the special relationship I've developed with it over the years. The magpie effect of flicking around when nothing was on means I know things about programmes I didn't chose to watch. It's had the dual effect of making me more discerning and more willing to try new things. I know, for instance, bone-deep, that I ain't going to sit through an episode of a soap opera; horrible cancerous things that choke out anything else that might turn up on the air.
In the interests of community-mindedness, I'll give you a little list of the current programmes I'm watching and enjoying. Should be fun. Might show you a shocking lack of taste in your eyes, and if that's the case: FUCK YOU, YOU MALICIOUS CUNT! HOW DARE YOU JUDGE ME! I'LL JUDGE YOU RIGHT BACK!
SEE! THAT'S ME JUDGING YOU! DON'T LIKE IT, DO YOU? NOOOoooOOO!
Ahem, anyway, onto the list.
Person of Interest. I'll actually start with a complaint about this – go me! Why are we in the UK a year behind on this? Not everyone has Netflix, motherfucker. Channel Five have to be applauded for showing it, but it's irritating having to avoid places because there are people who have to talk about what's going on twelve months ahead because it's so fucking good! I want to know!
The show had a bit of a slow start. The first half of the first series is almost a write-off. Then it hit its stride. It's a fantastic mix of conspiracy thriller, A-Team style good-deed of the week and comedy. It's exciting, dark and asks some big questions. Just don't tell me what happens in series three, I will have to have you killed or, at the very least, severely beaten.
The Blacklist is another bit of conspiracy and espionage, but it manages to be far darker and uncompromising than Person of Interest. We are introduced to the wonderful character Raymond 'Red' Reddington, a criminal facilitator and extremely bad man who drops himself into the FBI's lap telling them he'll give them access to criminals they haven't even heard of, the titular blacklist. Oh and he'll only talk to a particular analyst. It's murky in the best kind of way. There's no question about the people Reddington is handing over are extremely bad, but his motives aren't clear and as it goes on it's obvious a lot of the characters' motivations are uncertain. I don't know what the fuck's going on and I love it. You should jump in and not know what's going on either.
Talking about being reeealllyyyy behind on series, I give you Parks and Recreation, a comedy programme filmed in a fly-on-the-wall documentary style† and we're three series behind on this. This took even longer than Person of Interest to get into its groove, but in the third series the insanity set in and the documentary presentation gives great opportunities for characters to give silent reactions to the madness around them or getting little interviews to give their insights. For ages before BBC Four started showing it I was seeing things about Ron Swanson on the internet and got really annoyed, but now I see the appeal, he's a stand-out character in a programme of brilliant characters.
Without Community, I would never have tried Parks and Recreation. This is another one I'd been hearing about for a while and finally found the whole first series on catch up. That was a rewarding Sunday afternoon. For a while we were a year behind this one as well, but last year the Sony channel showed both series three and four. Four wasn't quite as good because Dan Harmon had been dumped as show runner, but it still managed some interesting episodes. Community relies on the interplay between the fantastic ensemble, guiding us through their time at a US community college. It starts off pretty grounded, with some odd moments, but by the end of the first series and the paintball episode it laid the groundwork for the strangeness to come. Then we have the references, you remember what I said about references, right? It's chock-full. A lot of it is self-referential, something a lot of people point out as a bad thing, but I think it's great and gets you invested in the strange family unit of the Study Group.
The most recent addition to my watching is Brooklyn 99. This is an odd one, because it has a bog-standard police procedural as its basis with all the beats and tropes the genre has, yet it's all wrapped up in a comedic skin. Yeah, I know a lot of police procedurals have elements of comedy in them, and Castle is even described as a comedy-drama, but the writers will ditch any semblance of comedy trappings in favour of a dramatic storyline. Brooklyn 99 is straight-down-the-line funny. Yes, there's a case of the week, and it forms a big part of each story, but the characters' eccentricities make up the rest of the bulk. It could have been fucking awful, but it, amazingly, works.
There are others, like the slew of crime dramas I watch, like Castle, Rizzoli and Isles, Elementary‡ and Bones, but the ones above are the programmes I feel most excited about watching of a week. I highly recommend them if you can get access to them.
* Now a bit of a sad imitation of its gloriously vibrant and mad landscape. Late-night television, in general has become a depressingly conformist precession of gambling shows. That made me a little sad, writing that.
** Or reiterated for some of you. Yeah, I'm looking right at you, dude.
† As pioneered in The Office. One I never did get around to watching in either its original UK run or its US incarnation.
‡ That I think in a lot of important ways is far superior to Sherlock, though I did enjoy that too.
Will
Wednesday, 22 January 2014
Some Minor Points
There are loads of ways to improve our gaming experience. I’m sure there are more than a few out there who’ve happily guzzled some mind-altering drugs and freaked when they came across their first feral ghoul in Fallout 3. You’ve also got those people who like to immerse themselves in the game: from the people screaming sexist and racist insults over headsets while playing [insert FPS of your choice here] to the people who spend mortgage-sized chunks of money to bring their MechWarrior fantasies almost to sweaty life. That’s not forgetting the bunch of mates who get together, have a few drinks and gradually get more sullen with each other over Need for Speed or FIFA 2012*.
Just like any art form it’s as much about what we bring to the table that determines our level of enjoyment. I mean, studying a Matisse for colour and technique in a gallery is just as valid as sitting in your underwear of a night, playing Modern Warfare 3 and eating Doritos from your navel. It’s all about what makes you happy. The medium is there to form a framework on which you hang whatever experience you want to create. It depends on what that framework is and what you want it to do for you.
Of course that doesn’t divorce developers, creators and publishers from giving us, the average gamer, the framework and experience on which we base our leisure time. If they could get away with it publishers would release ‘games’ like The Life of Sticky the Stick in which the whole game is moving the eponymous character from one side of the screen for two thousand levels. No variation, other than which side of the screen you started on, for hours of mind-numbing fun. And they’ll charge you fifty or one hundred of whatever currency you use for the pleasure of doing it. If you don’t think this is true your cynicism is woefully underdeveloped and I suggest you go and read some comments sections and some forums. Once you’ve wept the first time things get so much easier.
Fortunately we don’t live in that alterna-world where consumer rights are so flagrantly disregarded, and we don’t have to suffer through games in which we convey simple shapes from left to right, right to left, endlessly and forever. It would make game pad design that wee bit simpler, mind you, only having left and right buttons. We live in a world of glorious complexity in which control pads consist of arrays of buttons, D-pads and analogue sticks promising to take us through adulthood with carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. The games we play demand this level of hand-crippling controller design in order to deftly or, as is often the case, not so deftly negotiate the games of the 21st century.
Humanity, however, has this habit of not being completely satisfied with anything. There had to be a few people who looked at Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and said, “Whoa! Do we really need to see that?” or thought that the Mona Lisa looked a little on the podgy side. Then again we have to thank the guy who looked at those early cars trundling out of the Ford factories and considered them a bit boxy. Without a bit of critical thinking nothing in the world would ever improve. We wouldn’t have dazzling games like Uncharted, Batman: Arkham City or the constant stream of indie games that challenge those who want to go looking for them.
With this in mind, I would like to offer some of my humble thoughts on what could be tweaked in order to make our mainstream games that little bit more enjoyable. Now, there are well-worn paths in this kind of thing: story, blah blah blah; mechanics, yada yada yada; and offensiveness, um, wibble, wibble, wibble. These are THE BIG ISSUESTM and I think I’ll avoid them as much as possible, because, frankly, they activate all kinds of crazy. I don’t want to get crushed under that particular juggernaut, thank you very much. My wife would be pissed at me, I’d never hear the end of it and I’m not a courageous man. What I’m going to suggest here are some minor(ish) things to perhaps make things better in just small ways.
Number one: Bigger, clearer text. Start with something small, shall we. Or something I perceive as small. We don’t all have wall-sized screens that show reality-altering vistas from the dimensions of sight, you know. Some of us semi-luddites still possess CRT televisions** that were once considered big. I’ve come to accept that sometimes not seeing a character because my TV doesn’t have the chops is going to happen. But the least developers could do is give us the option of larger text for those prompts or important bits of information that make the game go easier. My ambitions in this really are quite humble.
Number two: Let’s split off the hardcore gamers from the casual gamers. Yes, I’m using some quite fascist language there, just to get your attention. I love getting trophies on my PS3. I’m not afraid to admit that. It stabs at the poor, twitching OCD part of my brain when I can’t get all the trophies for one game. Batting all the arguments about challenge and playing games for fun aside, I feel somewhat downhearted when I see a trophy for something that I clearly will never have the skill to do pop up on the list. I’m not going to sit for hours or days vainly trying to perfect my skills in this area to get the trophy, even though I want to complete the collection sooooo much.
It’s crazy and is aimed at really good, often dedicated, gamers. My proposal is an alluring one for publishers: have two tiers of trophy, one of which you pay extra for. When you buy and install your game, you get a basic set of trophies or achievements to collect that are straightforward (but can still be weird and time-consuming) to do. If you feel you want more of a challenge spend a little bit more, something like a dollar or a pound or a euro to get those tougher trophies. People with the same head-sickness as me can sleep easy and the dedicated gamers can still have their prizes for having skills I can only dream about.
Number three: Graphics aren’t everything. Okay, thinking about it, I may be wrong, this does encroach on THE BIG ISSUESTM, I think. But does every game need to have such insane work done on the graphics? Realism doesn’t always improve a game. Take L.A. Noire, for example, it was an okay game with a lot of ambition. You can’t fault what they were trying to do with the facial motion capture business. It didn’t quite work. Trying to read the expressions in an interrogation turned into an excruciating exercise that makes you question just how far along the autism spectrum you are.
Graphics take up a huge amount of space that could be used for interesting game mechanics and more content. Squeezing in more realism doesn’t instantly make a more enjoyable game. It doesn’t even always guarantee greater immersion. Using L.A. Noire again, it could have been done with simpler, stylised cartoony graphics. I can’t imagine it would have taken more work than the hours of filming actors and then mapping their faces. Just imagine how huge and immersive games could be if developers had water thrown over them when they get too excited about the pretty, pretty visuals.
So there you go: three minor (or two minor and one not so minor) suggestions to make the world of gaming smoother for everyone – or perhaps just me. Perhaps these thoughts will become moot as the games industry evolves. Though that just means we’ll find different ways in which it can be further improved. And that’ll be nice.
* It kinda looks like I’ve got it in for these games, but I don’t really. Although, strictly speaking, I wrote this article first.
** Since upgraded to a big LCD, but the argument still stands.
Will
Just like any art form it’s as much about what we bring to the table that determines our level of enjoyment. I mean, studying a Matisse for colour and technique in a gallery is just as valid as sitting in your underwear of a night, playing Modern Warfare 3 and eating Doritos from your navel. It’s all about what makes you happy. The medium is there to form a framework on which you hang whatever experience you want to create. It depends on what that framework is and what you want it to do for you.
Of course that doesn’t divorce developers, creators and publishers from giving us, the average gamer, the framework and experience on which we base our leisure time. If they could get away with it publishers would release ‘games’ like The Life of Sticky the Stick in which the whole game is moving the eponymous character from one side of the screen for two thousand levels. No variation, other than which side of the screen you started on, for hours of mind-numbing fun. And they’ll charge you fifty or one hundred of whatever currency you use for the pleasure of doing it. If you don’t think this is true your cynicism is woefully underdeveloped and I suggest you go and read some comments sections and some forums. Once you’ve wept the first time things get so much easier.
Fortunately we don’t live in that alterna-world where consumer rights are so flagrantly disregarded, and we don’t have to suffer through games in which we convey simple shapes from left to right, right to left, endlessly and forever. It would make game pad design that wee bit simpler, mind you, only having left and right buttons. We live in a world of glorious complexity in which control pads consist of arrays of buttons, D-pads and analogue sticks promising to take us through adulthood with carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. The games we play demand this level of hand-crippling controller design in order to deftly or, as is often the case, not so deftly negotiate the games of the 21st century.
Humanity, however, has this habit of not being completely satisfied with anything. There had to be a few people who looked at Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and said, “Whoa! Do we really need to see that?” or thought that the Mona Lisa looked a little on the podgy side. Then again we have to thank the guy who looked at those early cars trundling out of the Ford factories and considered them a bit boxy. Without a bit of critical thinking nothing in the world would ever improve. We wouldn’t have dazzling games like Uncharted, Batman: Arkham City or the constant stream of indie games that challenge those who want to go looking for them.
With this in mind, I would like to offer some of my humble thoughts on what could be tweaked in order to make our mainstream games that little bit more enjoyable. Now, there are well-worn paths in this kind of thing: story, blah blah blah; mechanics, yada yada yada; and offensiveness, um, wibble, wibble, wibble. These are THE BIG ISSUESTM and I think I’ll avoid them as much as possible, because, frankly, they activate all kinds of crazy. I don’t want to get crushed under that particular juggernaut, thank you very much. My wife would be pissed at me, I’d never hear the end of it and I’m not a courageous man. What I’m going to suggest here are some minor(ish) things to perhaps make things better in just small ways.
Number one: Bigger, clearer text. Start with something small, shall we. Or something I perceive as small. We don’t all have wall-sized screens that show reality-altering vistas from the dimensions of sight, you know. Some of us semi-luddites still possess CRT televisions** that were once considered big. I’ve come to accept that sometimes not seeing a character because my TV doesn’t have the chops is going to happen. But the least developers could do is give us the option of larger text for those prompts or important bits of information that make the game go easier. My ambitions in this really are quite humble.
Number two: Let’s split off the hardcore gamers from the casual gamers. Yes, I’m using some quite fascist language there, just to get your attention. I love getting trophies on my PS3. I’m not afraid to admit that. It stabs at the poor, twitching OCD part of my brain when I can’t get all the trophies for one game. Batting all the arguments about challenge and playing games for fun aside, I feel somewhat downhearted when I see a trophy for something that I clearly will never have the skill to do pop up on the list. I’m not going to sit for hours or days vainly trying to perfect my skills in this area to get the trophy, even though I want to complete the collection sooooo much.
It’s crazy and is aimed at really good, often dedicated, gamers. My proposal is an alluring one for publishers: have two tiers of trophy, one of which you pay extra for. When you buy and install your game, you get a basic set of trophies or achievements to collect that are straightforward (but can still be weird and time-consuming) to do. If you feel you want more of a challenge spend a little bit more, something like a dollar or a pound or a euro to get those tougher trophies. People with the same head-sickness as me can sleep easy and the dedicated gamers can still have their prizes for having skills I can only dream about.
Number three: Graphics aren’t everything. Okay, thinking about it, I may be wrong, this does encroach on THE BIG ISSUESTM, I think. But does every game need to have such insane work done on the graphics? Realism doesn’t always improve a game. Take L.A. Noire, for example, it was an okay game with a lot of ambition. You can’t fault what they were trying to do with the facial motion capture business. It didn’t quite work. Trying to read the expressions in an interrogation turned into an excruciating exercise that makes you question just how far along the autism spectrum you are.
Graphics take up a huge amount of space that could be used for interesting game mechanics and more content. Squeezing in more realism doesn’t instantly make a more enjoyable game. It doesn’t even always guarantee greater immersion. Using L.A. Noire again, it could have been done with simpler, stylised cartoony graphics. I can’t imagine it would have taken more work than the hours of filming actors and then mapping their faces. Just imagine how huge and immersive games could be if developers had water thrown over them when they get too excited about the pretty, pretty visuals.
So there you go: three minor (or two minor and one not so minor) suggestions to make the world of gaming smoother for everyone – or perhaps just me. Perhaps these thoughts will become moot as the games industry evolves. Though that just means we’ll find different ways in which it can be further improved. And that’ll be nice.
* It kinda looks like I’ve got it in for these games, but I don’t really. Although, strictly speaking, I wrote this article first.
** Since upgraded to a big LCD, but the argument still stands.
Will
Wednesday, 15 January 2014
So, Your Favourite Feature's Gone...
There are some ways in which I envy developers: the money, the fame, the adulation. Mostly the money, though. However having the power to create worlds in which players can get lost for hours is a tempting prospect. Being a writer affords you a little of that, but there’s something mesmerising about how a good game can worm its way into your mind and you find yourself thinking about it at odd times*. A funeral somewhere has to have been inappropriately interrupted by some derp shouting, “Shit! That’s how you kill Crawmerax!”
Developers hold the keys to our gaming experience. You can see them as benevolent overlords, handing out nuggets of golden gameplay to while away your hours, with a beatific smile and generosity of heart. Or you can see them as cackling bastards, sitting atop their piles of shimmering experiences, demanding body parts for the privilege of just a few moments of rapturous joy and then peeing on our shoes and asking for a kidney when we want to extend the game**.
Whatever your view of developers, they are the ones who control the content of the games that we see on the shelves. If they so chose they could fill their game chock-full of whoopee cushions that every time you did anything in the game you made a fart noise. Actually, I think I’ve just created gaming perfection, go me! Just imagine it: the climactic fight between you and the Great Murder Soul Hellstomper and with every move the hilarious sound of a violent evacuation of gas from the backside. Thinking about it, it might be a bit crap.
We have to believe that the people who put together the games we buy have the best interests of enjoyment at heart (you know, outside of the fame and money) – though sometimes it’s hard to see it that way. When the developers look at a mechanic or option they have to make a decision about whether it’s right for the enjoyment and feel of the game. They are human and sometimes they make mistakes, after all there are lots of considerations to putting together a game, even with armies of people working on it, but they also quite often, through study and experience, get the decision right on the button, and we as gamers do a little happy dance – well I do anyway, don’t you judge me. Then there are the other times, the instances where you look at the choice that’s been made and you think, “Someone should have sobered up before they stuck that in.”
This is more of a problem, I suspect in sport simulation games. I read about people muttering about the loss of a mechanic from FIFA 12 or the latest Need for Speed. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, since sports games aren’t really my bag. Football’s never been of much interest to me and driving just bores the hell out of me – except maybe Chase HQ, I was crap at it, but it was fun. Having said that these games aren’t the only ones to suffer or gain from feature shuffling.
Games franchises where the basic gameplay elements never really change can live or die on what’s added and what’s subtracted. Up to a point for a lot of games it’s mostly about what’s added that makes them better and better games. Take Assassin’s Creed as an example. The first game in that franchise was okay, for about half an hour, and then the boredom set in. And what boredom it was. The same pattern of climb, do viewpoint then go to a dull mission, repeat. In Assassin’s Creed II (along with Brotherhood and Revelations) the addition of more flavourful and enjoyable missions made for a more interesting game. Yes, they maintained the same basic gameplay, but it was made more fun with the variety of what you got to do with the character. For me they did go a step too far in a desperate attempt to cash-in on the multiplayer market, but I seem to be the only one in the world who thinks multiplayer Brotherhood and Revelations are both as much fun to play as cornering a rabid rat.
Features are, of course, a hotly contested element of the super-money-spinning industry of FPS, whose multiplayer elements bring out some of the best and worst of the feature shuffle. You can see that these guys watch each other very closely and, quite often, you can see that they’re gleefully lifting ideas from their contemporaries. It sort of looks like they’re walking up to each other in the street, saying hello and then taking that packet of M&Ms right from the other’s pocket and grabbing a handful. That kind of handsiness makes me worry about ever meeting them – it could get awkward.
Arguably the most controversial feature in the recent Call of Duty games has to be the ‘quick scoping’ ability. This, for anyone who doesn’t know, is something that apparently predates Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but these games have run with it. In a nutshell it’s the ability for snipers to run around and shoot people at close range with a minimum of aiming. Since most sniper rifles in the Modern Warfare games are one-hit kills, you can see that some people can get a bit frustrated with it. I have to admit, it frustrates me too, even more so when I experimented and discovered how easy it is – I got a lot of kills and I’m a middling player at best. As you can imagine there are a lot of people who detest this feature’s very existence. So, when Call of Duty: Black Ops came out Treyarch decided to ditch the ability. Can you guess what happened next? Yes, in a fit of ‘oh dear, human nature’ there was an outcry; a huge vocal group started angrily asking what happened to their favourite annoying feature. And, like that, in Modern Warfare 3 quick scoping was back to test just how far a game can increase my blood pressure.
And then there are the baffling omissions. As annoying and unfair as quick scoping can be you can understand why it was put back in place. Insomniac Games, going a little crazy, did something that almost beggars belief. In Resistance 2, a game that a lot of people were lukewarm about, there was included a multiplayer co-operative mode. This was a huge amount of fun, if a tiny bit repetitive, with groups of players working together to complete missions of varying difficulty. It included three classes that could, in fine RPG style, be boosted the more you played. I sure, correct me if I’m wrong, this game managed to boost the life of a game that otherwise would have disappeared into dim memory by perhaps a year. I waited in patient hope when Resistance 3 was announced to see if they would update and expand this mode. When I got my copy and discovered there wasn’t anything like it available on the disc, there was a tear in my eye. Yes, they vastly improved the single-player experience, but they gave us a clunky and buggy multiplayer that was like everything else out there – don’t even get me started on the disheartening swarm mode, blech. Discovering, the other week, that Insomniac Games were finished with the Resistance universe I fell to my knees and bellowed at the heavens. They’ve moved on to the Ratchet and Clank games leaving no possibility of replicating that wonderful gaming experience from Resistance 2†.
Developing games is clearly a juggling act, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, why don’t you take to the comments and give an airing to the game features that you love, lament, mourn the passing of or would happily dance the grave of?
* Fuck that was prophetic, considering what I did last year.
** Or they’re a bit trollish and like to take this piss and frustrate players. They still giggle like the nasty cunts they are.
† Turns out Insomniac yoinked it for Fuse and kinda screwed up the experience by making it a deeply mediocre game.
Will
Developers hold the keys to our gaming experience. You can see them as benevolent overlords, handing out nuggets of golden gameplay to while away your hours, with a beatific smile and generosity of heart. Or you can see them as cackling bastards, sitting atop their piles of shimmering experiences, demanding body parts for the privilege of just a few moments of rapturous joy and then peeing on our shoes and asking for a kidney when we want to extend the game**.
Whatever your view of developers, they are the ones who control the content of the games that we see on the shelves. If they so chose they could fill their game chock-full of whoopee cushions that every time you did anything in the game you made a fart noise. Actually, I think I’ve just created gaming perfection, go me! Just imagine it: the climactic fight between you and the Great Murder Soul Hellstomper and with every move the hilarious sound of a violent evacuation of gas from the backside. Thinking about it, it might be a bit crap.
We have to believe that the people who put together the games we buy have the best interests of enjoyment at heart (you know, outside of the fame and money) – though sometimes it’s hard to see it that way. When the developers look at a mechanic or option they have to make a decision about whether it’s right for the enjoyment and feel of the game. They are human and sometimes they make mistakes, after all there are lots of considerations to putting together a game, even with armies of people working on it, but they also quite often, through study and experience, get the decision right on the button, and we as gamers do a little happy dance – well I do anyway, don’t you judge me. Then there are the other times, the instances where you look at the choice that’s been made and you think, “Someone should have sobered up before they stuck that in.”
This is more of a problem, I suspect in sport simulation games. I read about people muttering about the loss of a mechanic from FIFA 12 or the latest Need for Speed. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, since sports games aren’t really my bag. Football’s never been of much interest to me and driving just bores the hell out of me – except maybe Chase HQ, I was crap at it, but it was fun. Having said that these games aren’t the only ones to suffer or gain from feature shuffling.
Games franchises where the basic gameplay elements never really change can live or die on what’s added and what’s subtracted. Up to a point for a lot of games it’s mostly about what’s added that makes them better and better games. Take Assassin’s Creed as an example. The first game in that franchise was okay, for about half an hour, and then the boredom set in. And what boredom it was. The same pattern of climb, do viewpoint then go to a dull mission, repeat. In Assassin’s Creed II (along with Brotherhood and Revelations) the addition of more flavourful and enjoyable missions made for a more interesting game. Yes, they maintained the same basic gameplay, but it was made more fun with the variety of what you got to do with the character. For me they did go a step too far in a desperate attempt to cash-in on the multiplayer market, but I seem to be the only one in the world who thinks multiplayer Brotherhood and Revelations are both as much fun to play as cornering a rabid rat.
Features are, of course, a hotly contested element of the super-money-spinning industry of FPS, whose multiplayer elements bring out some of the best and worst of the feature shuffle. You can see that these guys watch each other very closely and, quite often, you can see that they’re gleefully lifting ideas from their contemporaries. It sort of looks like they’re walking up to each other in the street, saying hello and then taking that packet of M&Ms right from the other’s pocket and grabbing a handful. That kind of handsiness makes me worry about ever meeting them – it could get awkward.
Arguably the most controversial feature in the recent Call of Duty games has to be the ‘quick scoping’ ability. This, for anyone who doesn’t know, is something that apparently predates Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but these games have run with it. In a nutshell it’s the ability for snipers to run around and shoot people at close range with a minimum of aiming. Since most sniper rifles in the Modern Warfare games are one-hit kills, you can see that some people can get a bit frustrated with it. I have to admit, it frustrates me too, even more so when I experimented and discovered how easy it is – I got a lot of kills and I’m a middling player at best. As you can imagine there are a lot of people who detest this feature’s very existence. So, when Call of Duty: Black Ops came out Treyarch decided to ditch the ability. Can you guess what happened next? Yes, in a fit of ‘oh dear, human nature’ there was an outcry; a huge vocal group started angrily asking what happened to their favourite annoying feature. And, like that, in Modern Warfare 3 quick scoping was back to test just how far a game can increase my blood pressure.
And then there are the baffling omissions. As annoying and unfair as quick scoping can be you can understand why it was put back in place. Insomniac Games, going a little crazy, did something that almost beggars belief. In Resistance 2, a game that a lot of people were lukewarm about, there was included a multiplayer co-operative mode. This was a huge amount of fun, if a tiny bit repetitive, with groups of players working together to complete missions of varying difficulty. It included three classes that could, in fine RPG style, be boosted the more you played. I sure, correct me if I’m wrong, this game managed to boost the life of a game that otherwise would have disappeared into dim memory by perhaps a year. I waited in patient hope when Resistance 3 was announced to see if they would update and expand this mode. When I got my copy and discovered there wasn’t anything like it available on the disc, there was a tear in my eye. Yes, they vastly improved the single-player experience, but they gave us a clunky and buggy multiplayer that was like everything else out there – don’t even get me started on the disheartening swarm mode, blech. Discovering, the other week, that Insomniac Games were finished with the Resistance universe I fell to my knees and bellowed at the heavens. They’ve moved on to the Ratchet and Clank games leaving no possibility of replicating that wonderful gaming experience from Resistance 2†.
Developing games is clearly a juggling act, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, why don’t you take to the comments and give an airing to the game features that you love, lament, mourn the passing of or would happily dance the grave of?
* Fuck that was prophetic, considering what I did last year.
** Or they’re a bit trollish and like to take this piss and frustrate players. They still giggle like the nasty cunts they are.
† Turns out Insomniac yoinked it for Fuse and kinda screwed up the experience by making it a deeply mediocre game.
Will
Saturday, 11 January 2014
Staring at the Puzzle Cube (It is A Cube, Right?)
Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are a strange pair. They’ve got that thing about magic. Well, Alan Moore is a practitioner of Magic, while Grant Morrison is a man who goes in for Chaos Magick (pronounced Mage-ick, if my sketchy sources are to be believed, don’t put too much stock in it). I won’t go into what either of these things actually mean, because I don’t fucking know and I don’t have time to rummage around to find out. Actually, their interest in these similar-sounding esoteric pastimes is really the only strange thing about either of them.
Not being friends with either man and not even being acquainted with one, I can’t give any insights into their thought processes. You know, that whole having only a shallow exposure to them, so anything I were to say about what’s going on in their weirdly oppositely-haired domes is going to speculative at absolute best and spurious at worst. I hate spurious.
Fucking hell this is starting to sound serious. Lemme give some disclosure, I’m not an academic* or a journalist. Anybody who claims so is up to something and should probably be hunted down and forced to do something unpleasant, like watch nothing but Eastenders and River City for a week. Yes, I am a terrible man.
Anyway.
I find they both sound even-tempered and reasonable when they speak. The only anger I’ve ever encountered (in my limited experience, mind you, I have to stress that again for those gimps picking and choosing words to use against me) is from Grant Morrison when he talks about Mark Millar. A whooooooole different kettle of bile, there, and something I will never touch on again. Intelligence is the lasting impression from Morrison and Moore.
They are both also highly successful and influential comic story tellers with a background in artwork. Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell are some of the seminal comics works Alan Moore has graced the world with. Grant Morrison spent five years telling the story of The Invisibles. Both have done much, much more than I’ve listed and you have to whole internet right there to find out, you lazy fuck. They’ve both got something of a pedigree, in case you aren’t familiar.
There is also THE FEUD. Alan Moore doesn’t like Grant Morrison. At least that was the impression given for a long time and the best you could say was Moore wasn’t a fan. Then an interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid, claiming to be Moore’s last, swatted the internet in the buttocks a few days ago. And my, my did it get a squealy reaction. Moore hates, hates, hates, hates, HATES, HATES, FUCKIN’ HATES Grant Morrison. With a side order of hate**.
My understanding is that Grant Morrison, again, until recently wasn’t entirely in love with Alan Moore either. Again, this changed with an interview at the end of 2012 conducted by Laura Sneddon in which he showed some consternation and confusion about the tension between himself and Alan Moore, as well as the timeline and events†.
The comics internet was shaken to its core and turned a lot of people into fuckin’ Twilight fans – turning into Team Moore and Team Morrison with all the ridiculously juvenile and noxious bullshit that entails. Seriously I’m embarrassed for the comics community (and some of the industry) for the way this whole business has been treated. Them and us isn’t a healthy attitude in relation to a personal conflict like this, no matter if the participants want you to do it‡. It’s human nature to leap on a flaw of someone you aren’t enamoured with§, but I do wish more people, people who oughtta know better would take a step back and use the mushy grey stuff in their skulls. Oh, and engage the empathy bone. Essentially a lot of Forest Whitaker eye going on – and there was enough of that anyway.
So, it’s turned into a complete fucking mess with people making arseholes of themselves on either side of the argument. Though there have been some islands of sanity and sense in this lake of bubbling vitriol.
I was going to compare and possibly contrast their accounts of Morrison’s and Moore’s ongoing relationship, because relationship is what it is, one based on verbal swipes through intermediaries. It’s not a pleasant relationship, but there is a connection and it’s something they need to work out between them, without the braying peanut gallery of the internet inciting more from them, something that’s been absent from historical literary feuds. Looking at the two interviews (the Morrison one being a weirdly editorial affair with him adding changes in red and everything) it seems so tangled and twisted I’d just find myself in knots about them. It invites another one of those Can-Can moments, I’m afraid.
So, as I’ve written this, with an eye for looking at the affair, I find myself being distracted and disheartened by something that’s bothered me about the comics community for a long time: the vocal minority of arseholes it engenders. The unwelcoming trolls and ogres who have set themselves up at the gates of the community judging who is worthy, grovelling at the feet of people in the industry while preparing knives to hamstring and hack apart those same individuals. Seeing industry figures jumping in on this behaviour just makes me stand back in confusion and go, “Huh.”
There’s an ingrained aggression in the comics community. Nothing wrong with aggression, it creates energy and drives artistic expression. It’s when this aggression gets redirected at inappropriate sources like women, gays, creators and each other it’s done with all the grisly violence of a troop of chimps taking a baby, and it’s about as brutal and upsetting as that image conjures. It’s what taints the medium for people outside of it. And there’s a lot of writing on this behaviour, particularly the shameful treatment of women (and in the last year, incidentally, of women in the games industry), and I’m not the best source for it.
So what do we do about this handsy uncle no one talks about part of the comics community? Well we start talking about it, we engage it; see if we can change something about it. Not an easy task for the spittle-chinned glaring bastard, threatening us with death and rape, but in this case robust discussion needs to take place. Because (clumsily switching metaphors) cancer doesn’t go away by ignoring it. Treatment, that’s the thing.
It might not be so bad if the industry side of the didn’t foment it and encourage it. Pandering to the lowest members of a rich community is not the way to keep it alive–
Stop acting like cocks, is what I’m saying.
Fucking hell, that’s all it boils down to: stop acting like cocks. Think about what you’re going to say before you launch into a venomous tirade or write yet another story objectifying women and consider, perhaps there’s another way. Being a cock gets you attention but it fucks up the whole place for everyone else. This doesn’t mean disagreements aren’t going to happen, but perhaps it will create discourse a bit better than, “Youre a fucking fagot fucktard,” and it means we can have industry characters who aren’t misogynistic, homophobic narcissists.
Of course, yes, I’ll do the obligatory it’s only a minority of the community who behaves that way. And I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true, however it would be nicer if it were a dwindling minority. Let them be as vocal as they want, too, then we know who they are and point out to those who don’t know, that’s not the way to behave.
So, what was going to be a sticking my oar in to an argument I have nothing to do with (albeit, I was doing it dispassionately, with a hint of humour§§ and adopting the middle ground) has turned into a small attempt at weakening the hold on the comics community of the sweaty arsehole element. I think that’s in the territory of ‘win’, don’t you?
Now I’ll shut up for a few days.
* Y’know despite this little nugget of internet obscurity having an academic bent. Or it was.
** He’s no fan of Laura Sneddon, either, but that’s for someone else to blether about.
† The Alan Moore interview can be found here: Last Alan Moore Interview? this is a long article. The Grant Morrison interview can be found here: The Strange Case of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, as Told by Grant Morrison. I so wish these interviews had happened closer together. No doubt by next week there’ll be a new Morrison one.
‡ Which Alan Moore does and it disappointed me. Perhaps it was point-making hyperbole, but it’s so easy to misunderstand. And people did, wilfully and enthusiastically.
§ I’m guilty of it myself and it drives my wife nuts. Doesn’t mean I condone it.
§§ “Y’whut?” I hear you cry. Cunts.
Will
Not being friends with either man and not even being acquainted with one, I can’t give any insights into their thought processes. You know, that whole having only a shallow exposure to them, so anything I were to say about what’s going on in their weirdly oppositely-haired domes is going to speculative at absolute best and spurious at worst. I hate spurious.
Fucking hell this is starting to sound serious. Lemme give some disclosure, I’m not an academic* or a journalist. Anybody who claims so is up to something and should probably be hunted down and forced to do something unpleasant, like watch nothing but Eastenders and River City for a week. Yes, I am a terrible man.
Anyway.
I find they both sound even-tempered and reasonable when they speak. The only anger I’ve ever encountered (in my limited experience, mind you, I have to stress that again for those gimps picking and choosing words to use against me) is from Grant Morrison when he talks about Mark Millar. A whooooooole different kettle of bile, there, and something I will never touch on again. Intelligence is the lasting impression from Morrison and Moore.
They are both also highly successful and influential comic story tellers with a background in artwork. Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell are some of the seminal comics works Alan Moore has graced the world with. Grant Morrison spent five years telling the story of The Invisibles. Both have done much, much more than I’ve listed and you have to whole internet right there to find out, you lazy fuck. They’ve both got something of a pedigree, in case you aren’t familiar.
There is also THE FEUD. Alan Moore doesn’t like Grant Morrison. At least that was the impression given for a long time and the best you could say was Moore wasn’t a fan. Then an interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid, claiming to be Moore’s last, swatted the internet in the buttocks a few days ago. And my, my did it get a squealy reaction. Moore hates, hates, hates, hates, HATES, HATES, FUCKIN’ HATES Grant Morrison. With a side order of hate**.
My understanding is that Grant Morrison, again, until recently wasn’t entirely in love with Alan Moore either. Again, this changed with an interview at the end of 2012 conducted by Laura Sneddon in which he showed some consternation and confusion about the tension between himself and Alan Moore, as well as the timeline and events†.
The comics internet was shaken to its core and turned a lot of people into fuckin’ Twilight fans – turning into Team Moore and Team Morrison with all the ridiculously juvenile and noxious bullshit that entails. Seriously I’m embarrassed for the comics community (and some of the industry) for the way this whole business has been treated. Them and us isn’t a healthy attitude in relation to a personal conflict like this, no matter if the participants want you to do it‡. It’s human nature to leap on a flaw of someone you aren’t enamoured with§, but I do wish more people, people who oughtta know better would take a step back and use the mushy grey stuff in their skulls. Oh, and engage the empathy bone. Essentially a lot of Forest Whitaker eye going on – and there was enough of that anyway.
So, it’s turned into a complete fucking mess with people making arseholes of themselves on either side of the argument. Though there have been some islands of sanity and sense in this lake of bubbling vitriol.
I was going to compare and possibly contrast their accounts of Morrison’s and Moore’s ongoing relationship, because relationship is what it is, one based on verbal swipes through intermediaries. It’s not a pleasant relationship, but there is a connection and it’s something they need to work out between them, without the braying peanut gallery of the internet inciting more from them, something that’s been absent from historical literary feuds. Looking at the two interviews (the Morrison one being a weirdly editorial affair with him adding changes in red and everything) it seems so tangled and twisted I’d just find myself in knots about them. It invites another one of those Can-Can moments, I’m afraid.
So, as I’ve written this, with an eye for looking at the affair, I find myself being distracted and disheartened by something that’s bothered me about the comics community for a long time: the vocal minority of arseholes it engenders. The unwelcoming trolls and ogres who have set themselves up at the gates of the community judging who is worthy, grovelling at the feet of people in the industry while preparing knives to hamstring and hack apart those same individuals. Seeing industry figures jumping in on this behaviour just makes me stand back in confusion and go, “Huh.”
There’s an ingrained aggression in the comics community. Nothing wrong with aggression, it creates energy and drives artistic expression. It’s when this aggression gets redirected at inappropriate sources like women, gays, creators and each other it’s done with all the grisly violence of a troop of chimps taking a baby, and it’s about as brutal and upsetting as that image conjures. It’s what taints the medium for people outside of it. And there’s a lot of writing on this behaviour, particularly the shameful treatment of women (and in the last year, incidentally, of women in the games industry), and I’m not the best source for it.
So what do we do about this handsy uncle no one talks about part of the comics community? Well we start talking about it, we engage it; see if we can change something about it. Not an easy task for the spittle-chinned glaring bastard, threatening us with death and rape, but in this case robust discussion needs to take place. Because (clumsily switching metaphors) cancer doesn’t go away by ignoring it. Treatment, that’s the thing.
It might not be so bad if the industry side of the didn’t foment it and encourage it. Pandering to the lowest members of a rich community is not the way to keep it alive–
Stop acting like cocks, is what I’m saying.
Fucking hell, that’s all it boils down to: stop acting like cocks. Think about what you’re going to say before you launch into a venomous tirade or write yet another story objectifying women and consider, perhaps there’s another way. Being a cock gets you attention but it fucks up the whole place for everyone else. This doesn’t mean disagreements aren’t going to happen, but perhaps it will create discourse a bit better than, “Youre a fucking fagot fucktard,” and it means we can have industry characters who aren’t misogynistic, homophobic narcissists.
Of course, yes, I’ll do the obligatory it’s only a minority of the community who behaves that way. And I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true, however it would be nicer if it were a dwindling minority. Let them be as vocal as they want, too, then we know who they are and point out to those who don’t know, that’s not the way to behave.
So, what was going to be a sticking my oar in to an argument I have nothing to do with (albeit, I was doing it dispassionately, with a hint of humour§§ and adopting the middle ground) has turned into a small attempt at weakening the hold on the comics community of the sweaty arsehole element. I think that’s in the territory of ‘win’, don’t you?
Now I’ll shut up for a few days.
* Y’know despite this little nugget of internet obscurity having an academic bent. Or it was.
** He’s no fan of Laura Sneddon, either, but that’s for someone else to blether about.
† The Alan Moore interview can be found here: Last Alan Moore Interview? this is a long article. The Grant Morrison interview can be found here: The Strange Case of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, as Told by Grant Morrison. I so wish these interviews had happened closer together. No doubt by next week there’ll be a new Morrison one.
‡ Which Alan Moore does and it disappointed me. Perhaps it was point-making hyperbole, but it’s so easy to misunderstand. And people did, wilfully and enthusiastically.
§ I’m guilty of it myself and it drives my wife nuts. Doesn’t mean I condone it.
§§ “Y’whut?” I hear you cry. Cunts.
Will
Friday, 10 January 2014
Retro Money's Still Money, Boys.
I own a
PS3. Nothing remarkable there – that’s
me and about sixty-four million other people, then. When I’m not being terrible on some online
game or another, I like to go browsing through the Playstation Store. Like most people I do a little rooting around
for new DLC and perhaps some new game that might be good to have a look
at. This can make my poor hard drive
unhappy and my struggling bank account look nervous. Seriously, my bank account is a worried
entity, constantly sweating and sending me pathetically worded letters pleading
for me to stop spending money.
Much of the
time I don’t buy anything, but come away with some ideas for games I might want
to buy in the future and be awful at.
Sometimes, though, I feel a tiny bit disappointed. I get the feeling that there are games that
should be in the Playstation Store, but don’t make an appearance for one reason
or another. Old games. Though, not that old – my first computer was
a ZX Spectrum +2 and just about any game I might want from that era is easy to
get through emulators and such. The old
games I’m talking about are ones that I played on the PS One and Saturn back in
the heady days when I wasn’t crippled by poverty.
They do
have some PS One (and PS2) games in the store and my wife was very pleased to
get a hold of Theme Hospital a while back.
She got hours of fun out of that; it was great. Something bugged me, though. I’ve got Resident Evil: The Director’s Cut,
though it seems that the Saturn version of the game has been expunged from the
history books. There were lots of titles
that maybe should have been present, but there was no sign of them. Like someone had been blindfolded, spun
around in a room full of game titles and those they stumbled on were the games
chosen for the store.
I remember
getting quite excited when I saw that Golden Axe was available for purchase and
then almost cry-vomited when I discovered it was the crummy Mega Drive
version. I wanted the arcade version I
remember sucking my ten pences up like some kind of ten pence devourer when I
was ten or eleven or twelve! What’s
wrong with that? Why can’t we get
similar stuff to what’s on XBox Live Arcade, I cried through the few, errant,
chunks of eye-corn. I haven’t bought Golden
Axe, but I still felt cheated. How dare
they stop me in the desperate and intricate attempt to recreate my
childhood? No, I’m not going to buy an
XBox for that one thing, didn’t you read the first paragraph – I’m poor; it’s a
fucking miracle I have a PS3.
There’s no
R-Type, either. A game I possessed on
the Spectrum and then, some years later, when I had a PS One for a short
time. I’m not very good at it, but it’s
a fun little shooter and can whittle a few minutes of boredom. And it’s not an unpopular game. There are screeds of fond gamer memories
about the little blue starfighter that could.
Yet it’s not there. Sure, there
could be rights problems, but given the money Sony could make by making the game
available that’s something that could be recouped.
Then
there’s the little game, Dark Cloud, that I spent too many hours playing in
even more recent times. I don’t think it
would kill them to give this an airing on Playstation Store. If only just to salve my hurting nostalgia
bone.
A game that
might be less likely to turn up is Exhumed, an FPS in which you’re pitted
against aliens that formed the basis of ancient Egyptian mythology. There was a PS One version of this and I’m
sure it would be seen as a retro treat.
Though, I have to admit, I had the Saturn version of the game that was
considered far superior. What do you
reckon the chances are of that one appearing on Sony’s shop front? A clue: non-existent. That’s one I imagine trying to overcome
licensing wrangles wouldn’t be worth the effort. It’s nice to dream though.
And, really
that’s all this is, in the end, dream upon dream. There is money to be made in dusting down
these retro gems and many more on top of that, but it’s whether Sony, or anyone
else thinks the reward is enough that will determine if they are unearthed
again.
Wednesday, 8 January 2014
Hurrrk! Uuurrk! Urrrr!
This isn't another outpouring of my witty musings. I can't just pull those fucking things out of the air, you know. It takes all of an hour an hour to craft my postings for this.
No, this is a heads up for stuff coming next week – or the end of this week if I get bored.
Some background first. You might remember, in one of my last blogs, I was talking about doing articles for a computer games website. A wee while after that, and a few published articles, the people running the website stopped answering my emails and some time after that the site seemed to vanish.
A couple of months passed and my woefully slow mental processes pinged me an idea: since the articles weren't there any more why not repost the articles on your blog as a way of reinvigorating it? Fantastic fucking idea, there, brain, only three months late, but never mind. So, as due diligence I went back to make sure the site was, indeed out of commission, and what do my disbelieving eyes see*? Well the site's there again, but this time every single fucking one of the articles on the site are credited to the one guy. Naturally I was a bit confused by this, but I kept my cool and sent an email explaining how I wasn't pleased my articles were in someone else's name.
I bet there's a few people who can guess what my answer to the email was. Fuck fucking all. A shifty silence bounced back at me via the miracle of internet-particles. And you know what, I couldn't even get angry about it, I'd given the stuff away without any kind of contract, so I grumbled for a while and consigned the articles to the Deceased Pile**.
Until last week, that is, when I decided to see if the thieving cunt of a website was still there. And lo! The address takes you to a completely different site! I rummaged through the Deceased Pile and found the articles. I'm probably going to go over them, but these are the blogs I'm going to post starting next week (or Friday, whatever). And that's not all, I've got at least one that hasn't seen the light of day, so you should feel really special.
Now, off you go and sit in the limbo of non-existence that everyone I talk to on the internet I presume goes into when I'm not talking to them.
* And my bubblingly furious brain perceived. Does it feel like these footnotes are becoming a thing. It feels like a thing, but their so fucking addictive!
** Created because of this fiasco and pretty much unused since.
Will
No, this is a heads up for stuff coming next week – or the end of this week if I get bored.
Some background first. You might remember, in one of my last blogs, I was talking about doing articles for a computer games website. A wee while after that, and a few published articles, the people running the website stopped answering my emails and some time after that the site seemed to vanish.
A couple of months passed and my woefully slow mental processes pinged me an idea: since the articles weren't there any more why not repost the articles on your blog as a way of reinvigorating it? Fantastic fucking idea, there, brain, only three months late, but never mind. So, as due diligence I went back to make sure the site was, indeed out of commission, and what do my disbelieving eyes see*? Well the site's there again, but this time every single fucking one of the articles on the site are credited to the one guy. Naturally I was a bit confused by this, but I kept my cool and sent an email explaining how I wasn't pleased my articles were in someone else's name.
I bet there's a few people who can guess what my answer to the email was. Fuck fucking all. A shifty silence bounced back at me via the miracle of internet-particles. And you know what, I couldn't even get angry about it, I'd given the stuff away without any kind of contract, so I grumbled for a while and consigned the articles to the Deceased Pile**.
Until last week, that is, when I decided to see if the thieving cunt of a website was still there. And lo! The address takes you to a completely different site! I rummaged through the Deceased Pile and found the articles. I'm probably going to go over them, but these are the blogs I'm going to post starting next week (or Friday, whatever). And that's not all, I've got at least one that hasn't seen the light of day, so you should feel really special.
Now, off you go and sit in the limbo of non-existence that everyone I talk to on the internet I presume goes into when I'm not talking to them.
* And my bubblingly furious brain perceived. Does it feel like these footnotes are becoming a thing. It feels like a thing, but their so fucking addictive!
** Created because of this fiasco and pretty much unused since.
Will
Monday, 27 August 2012
Riffling some brain folds.
On the off chance it's escaped your attention, I like films. I like all kinds of films. Horror, action, comedy, fantasy, thrillers, dramas and on rare instances even a western. I have a curious relationship with the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Yes, that's a brave statement to make, I know, I'm a hero. You can sit down from your ovation now and let me speak so that you, too, may understand.
I'm also going to nonchalantly spoil the film here. In further addition I'm going to repeat some things that dozens of other people have gone over in the past, live with this, get through; I think you'll find it's worth it. If not the doors over there, you whiny cunt.
When I first saw the film, in my mid-teens, I thought it was a fantastic film about a teenager bucking the system and skipping school with his friends to live large in Chicago for one day. The ease with which he outsmarted anyone who dared get in his way (this wording is important) I found comedically and narratively satisfying. When it seems he's about to get busted by his jealous, uptight sister that satisfaction when she softens and realises he's not quite so bad after all (you, know after she hooked up with a grotty-looking drug dealer* in a police station) is a moment of dramatic tension that settles you in for the climax. I enjoyed the film, is what I'm getting at.
Now, fast forward the better part of twenty years. There I am, sitting in front of the television looking for something to watch and I stumble on the film in question. Now everything that I loved from my adolescent viewings is still there: the teen rebellion, the hapless determination of the teacher, the parking attendants fucking the trio over, the faint hope that one of Sloane's boobs will pop out in that hot tub bit. However something else started to edge its way into my adult brain, something that set the hackles of my grown up sensibilities quivering. I was still enjoying this film, but I couldn't shake the feeling of nebulous outrage that took me until the end of the film to pin down.
Ferris Bueller is a horribly entitled and over-privileged shitweed! The revelation was like being slapped in the face with the week old corpse of a dog. Almost everything he does in the film is hideously reprehensible in some way. The way he emotionally blackmails his best friend into going with him. Hacking the school's computer. He commits several kinds of fraud** including impersonating a police officer. Grand larceny and makes Sloane and poor, poor Cameron accessories. And he does it all with a cocksure smile on his face that says, "Yeah, man, I should be allowed to do this. Why should the law apply to me, I'm fucking awesome!" and lo, he gets away with every criminal act and every instance of horrendous psychological torture he inflicts on Cameron†.
My sense of outrage was only stoked further when I realised I still liked the fucking film! How can this be? My new viewing revealed to me that Ferris Bueller was a reprehensible slime ball who would happily destroy the lives of people around him as long as he got a laugh out of it. He's an avatar of the '80s yuppie culture and everything I hate about the modern world. I put it down to the charming storytelling of John Hughes (RIP) and the supporting cast of flawed and likeable characters. You know, with the obvious exception of Ferris Bueller and the need to tell us everyone likes him when there's really nothing redeeming about him.
As an aside, I was witness to one of the worst Freddie Mercury impersonators (or impersonator of any kind) ever this weekend. It got me wondering if the guy was taking some kind of bizarre revenge out on the late singer because of some kind of trauma. For some reason it got me thinking about this next bit.
In case no one's noticed, I consider myself something of a writer, these rambling, incoherent blog blabbings notwithstanding. I started thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and what could be done with a sequel. I'd had the same thoughts for another John Hughes classic: Weird Science‡. I've even gone in a similar direction.
For this little bit of speculation, we begin with Ferris Bueller, twenty-six years later. He's been to college, got a degree and gone into the same line of work as his father (whatever that was – vague business man?), got married to Sloane, had a couple of kids, got divorced from Sloane and is now living with his girlfriend who is still in college and looks almost identical to Sloane. He's got a good life.
One day he comes back from work to find his teenage son waiting for him in the flat. Ferris's son, let's call him Tom after Ferris's father, is a lot like Ferris, in that he's confident, successful and has wanted for nothing in life. Ferris knows something's up and his suspicion is horribly realised when he finds the raped and strangled corpse of his wife on the floor. Tom says she reminded him of his mother.
Ferris begins to help his son dispose of the body, but as he goes about this he learns more and more about his son's secret life of sneaking around without Sloane's knowledge and murdering hobos, as well as possibly Ferris's parents and dealing drugs. Ferris realises Tom's even more of a sociopath than he ever was and has to make the decision whether to put an end to Tom's murderous ways or cover up for his son. Then he realises he'll go to jail too and decides to cover up the murder and help young Tom in the future. Cos he'll be fucked if he goes down for someone else's murder.
There you have it a Ferris Bueller sequel fitting for the character. I didn't say it was going to be comedy, did I?
* Bonus! Played by Charlie Sheen!
** Admittedly one of the instances of fraud is down to the mass gullibility of his school-age contemporaries in what must have been the worst school of all time, but it still all stems from him being a dicky wad of manipulative shit.
† I can't really count poor Sloane, because, while she shows every sign that she should be very intelligent, for most of the film she wanders around with an empty-eyed grin, passively going along with whatever Ferris suggests.
‡ This one actually stands up to my recent viewings, probably because it's fucking bonkers and the Ferris Bueller-type characters are the utter bastards they should be.
Will
I'm also going to nonchalantly spoil the film here. In further addition I'm going to repeat some things that dozens of other people have gone over in the past, live with this, get through; I think you'll find it's worth it. If not the doors over there, you whiny cunt.
When I first saw the film, in my mid-teens, I thought it was a fantastic film about a teenager bucking the system and skipping school with his friends to live large in Chicago for one day. The ease with which he outsmarted anyone who dared get in his way (this wording is important) I found comedically and narratively satisfying. When it seems he's about to get busted by his jealous, uptight sister that satisfaction when she softens and realises he's not quite so bad after all (you, know after she hooked up with a grotty-looking drug dealer* in a police station) is a moment of dramatic tension that settles you in for the climax. I enjoyed the film, is what I'm getting at.
Now, fast forward the better part of twenty years. There I am, sitting in front of the television looking for something to watch and I stumble on the film in question. Now everything that I loved from my adolescent viewings is still there: the teen rebellion, the hapless determination of the teacher, the parking attendants fucking the trio over, the faint hope that one of Sloane's boobs will pop out in that hot tub bit. However something else started to edge its way into my adult brain, something that set the hackles of my grown up sensibilities quivering. I was still enjoying this film, but I couldn't shake the feeling of nebulous outrage that took me until the end of the film to pin down.
Ferris Bueller is a horribly entitled and over-privileged shitweed! The revelation was like being slapped in the face with the week old corpse of a dog. Almost everything he does in the film is hideously reprehensible in some way. The way he emotionally blackmails his best friend into going with him. Hacking the school's computer. He commits several kinds of fraud** including impersonating a police officer. Grand larceny and makes Sloane and poor, poor Cameron accessories. And he does it all with a cocksure smile on his face that says, "Yeah, man, I should be allowed to do this. Why should the law apply to me, I'm fucking awesome!" and lo, he gets away with every criminal act and every instance of horrendous psychological torture he inflicts on Cameron†.
My sense of outrage was only stoked further when I realised I still liked the fucking film! How can this be? My new viewing revealed to me that Ferris Bueller was a reprehensible slime ball who would happily destroy the lives of people around him as long as he got a laugh out of it. He's an avatar of the '80s yuppie culture and everything I hate about the modern world. I put it down to the charming storytelling of John Hughes (RIP) and the supporting cast of flawed and likeable characters. You know, with the obvious exception of Ferris Bueller and the need to tell us everyone likes him when there's really nothing redeeming about him.
As an aside, I was witness to one of the worst Freddie Mercury impersonators (or impersonator of any kind) ever this weekend. It got me wondering if the guy was taking some kind of bizarre revenge out on the late singer because of some kind of trauma. For some reason it got me thinking about this next bit.
In case no one's noticed, I consider myself something of a writer, these rambling, incoherent blog blabbings notwithstanding. I started thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and what could be done with a sequel. I'd had the same thoughts for another John Hughes classic: Weird Science‡. I've even gone in a similar direction.
For this little bit of speculation, we begin with Ferris Bueller, twenty-six years later. He's been to college, got a degree and gone into the same line of work as his father (whatever that was – vague business man?), got married to Sloane, had a couple of kids, got divorced from Sloane and is now living with his girlfriend who is still in college and looks almost identical to Sloane. He's got a good life.
One day he comes back from work to find his teenage son waiting for him in the flat. Ferris's son, let's call him Tom after Ferris's father, is a lot like Ferris, in that he's confident, successful and has wanted for nothing in life. Ferris knows something's up and his suspicion is horribly realised when he finds the raped and strangled corpse of his wife on the floor. Tom says she reminded him of his mother.
Ferris begins to help his son dispose of the body, but as he goes about this he learns more and more about his son's secret life of sneaking around without Sloane's knowledge and murdering hobos, as well as possibly Ferris's parents and dealing drugs. Ferris realises Tom's even more of a sociopath than he ever was and has to make the decision whether to put an end to Tom's murderous ways or cover up for his son. Then he realises he'll go to jail too and decides to cover up the murder and help young Tom in the future. Cos he'll be fucked if he goes down for someone else's murder.
There you have it a Ferris Bueller sequel fitting for the character. I didn't say it was going to be comedy, did I?
* Bonus! Played by Charlie Sheen!
** Admittedly one of the instances of fraud is down to the mass gullibility of his school-age contemporaries in what must have been the worst school of all time, but it still all stems from him being a dicky wad of manipulative shit.
† I can't really count poor Sloane, because, while she shows every sign that she should be very intelligent, for most of the film she wanders around with an empty-eyed grin, passively going along with whatever Ferris suggests.
‡ This one actually stands up to my recent viewings, probably because it's fucking bonkers and the Ferris Bueller-type characters are the utter bastards they should be.
Will
Friday, 17 August 2012
Go Slower Squiggles
Hello, friends! It is I, Fabrizio Giullare, your favourite author. Since I last spoke to you there has been a major development in my career: I've gone into writing movie scripts. Yes, you read that right, and I'm so pleased about it. Though, I'm not surprised; it was only a matter of time before someone recognised the genius of pieces such as Little Plants and Fluff and Corkscrew Bandana Dancers. It did take them longer than I'd anticipated, mind you.
What did take me by surprise was the direction that the production company wanted me to go in: horror. Now, I've never shied away from any genre, but I've never found myself dipping my toes in the same waters as Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft or anyone else with three names. The man from Broad Tedium Films is a very persuasive person and convinced both myself and my agent that my personal style fits and this would be a fantastic idea.
So this left me with something of a dilemma. I've never watched any horror films either. So I got down to my local rental place and picked up a few movies that sounded good. I didn't go for anything that had been given a theatrical release, as I thought that would just be vulgar, instead going for offerings that had gone straight to DVD. I watched several of them over the course of a most educational week and gleaned what I could from them.
I had the tools required to create a fantastic horror tale. Granted, some of the tools were already in my possession.
For example I'm a firm believer in 'Why have drama when you can have turgid sequences of nothing happening?' and it looks like most of these horror film makers have that same wonderful philosophy – Dread and The Broken being fine examples of this. My own fifteen hundred page novel Clogged Pores in Pall Mall is about one man staring at a drop of water going down a wall. It's something of a masterpiece and a personal triumph for me. Seeing that I could bring that kind of unrelenting lack of event to the screen filled me with a giant, quivering sense of excitement.
Then there's the greatly overrated trait of internal story logic. Why have a character do something that makes any kind of sense in favour of having them jump in random directions? I love to set up characters who, for example, clearly hate and fear cows to then have them go and purchase one as a pet, without one word of explanation. That jarring sense of confusion is just what the reader or, in this case, the watcher needs to make sure they stick around. It's one of my favourite writer's tools.
Of course I have had to wade out into the deep waters of brevity for this project, but then you can't have everything. I've just had to make sure the film seems like it's twelve hours long.
All in all I think I've done a damned fine job on it. I can't wait for Windmilling Arms to appear on the shelves of rental shops and music store chains.
Happy writing!
What did take me by surprise was the direction that the production company wanted me to go in: horror. Now, I've never shied away from any genre, but I've never found myself dipping my toes in the same waters as Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft or anyone else with three names. The man from Broad Tedium Films is a very persuasive person and convinced both myself and my agent that my personal style fits and this would be a fantastic idea.
So this left me with something of a dilemma. I've never watched any horror films either. So I got down to my local rental place and picked up a few movies that sounded good. I didn't go for anything that had been given a theatrical release, as I thought that would just be vulgar, instead going for offerings that had gone straight to DVD. I watched several of them over the course of a most educational week and gleaned what I could from them.
I had the tools required to create a fantastic horror tale. Granted, some of the tools were already in my possession.
For example I'm a firm believer in 'Why have drama when you can have turgid sequences of nothing happening?' and it looks like most of these horror film makers have that same wonderful philosophy – Dread and The Broken being fine examples of this. My own fifteen hundred page novel Clogged Pores in Pall Mall is about one man staring at a drop of water going down a wall. It's something of a masterpiece and a personal triumph for me. Seeing that I could bring that kind of unrelenting lack of event to the screen filled me with a giant, quivering sense of excitement.
Then there's the greatly overrated trait of internal story logic. Why have a character do something that makes any kind of sense in favour of having them jump in random directions? I love to set up characters who, for example, clearly hate and fear cows to then have them go and purchase one as a pet, without one word of explanation. That jarring sense of confusion is just what the reader or, in this case, the watcher needs to make sure they stick around. It's one of my favourite writer's tools.
Of course I have had to wade out into the deep waters of brevity for this project, but then you can't have everything. I've just had to make sure the film seems like it's twelve hours long.
All in all I think I've done a damned fine job on it. I can't wait for Windmilling Arms to appear on the shelves of rental shops and music store chains.
Happy writing!
Monday, 16 July 2012
Gaaaaasssssp!
And finally I re-emerge. Criminy, that was some hard writing. I've been crowing about this a bit elsewhere, but once more isn't going to hurt anyone:
250,000 words, motherfuckers! Ha!
I don't even know who that's aimed at. Maybe at the last person, other than me, who looks at this blog.*
The novel version of Crown Wearer has had a long, tough journey. It took me forever to get up off my arse to start the thing in the first place and then another aeon passed before I got organised enough to make a proper go of it. And that only happened once I stopped being intimidated by the length I initially thought it was going to be – a length it exceeded by about 70,000 words.
Now, to some people, all this talk of word counts is meaningless. I sympathise with you, I really do. Actually, I envy you. Not knowing the significance of word count would make my life a whole lot easier as a writer. I imagine being able to sit down at the computer, grinning from ear to ear, with my mug with the rainbow on the side, filled with more rainbows and clack out a couple of thousand words, no worries. There are some days like that, y'know, without that weird rainbow business, but a lot of days are wrangling and subduing words that end up not being right anyway. And, yes, that does involve a lot of staring off into the middle distance, it's an intellectual pursuit.**
So now I'm left with this manuscript, damp from brain juice and imagination placenta. What am I going to do with it? Who could possibly want this smelly, sticky brick of a manuscript from a writer who's never had a book published outside of a couple of disastrous Lulu attempts? Not my priority at the moment, is the answer (I bet you thought I was going to go on a rant, faithless bastards). For now what I'm going to do is follow the advice of every writer out there and leave it the fuck alone. That's right, it's going to sit on my various storage devices for a couple of months while I do other things and get a little distance between myself and it.
Unlike a good cheese, when I cut through the rind of the novel I won't be rewarded with the sweet nutty taste of aged milk, I'll be confronted by the horror of what I've actually written. Something riddled with spelling and grammar errors. Something that doesn't make a lick of sense because of a network of glaringly embarrassing plot holes. Hey, look at that, another cheese analogy.†
And I'll be lost again. Knee deep in the toxic porridge I've crusted the page with in hopes that some kind person will take pity on this mangled wretch and publish this monster of a book‡
For now, I'm back, ready to spew my neurotic semi-psychotic ramblings at your brain craters. We're going to have fun, dammit!
* The person who came back and thought this time it would be different. Sucker.
** Only geniuses and idiots claim they can bang out stories without thinking about it. If anyone you know says this and unless you know for certain otherwise slap that fucking idiot.
† I really want some Norwegian brown cheese. The stuff sounds amazing.
‡ It's only a partial monster. My research tells me it's at the lower end in length of one of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books. And less than half the length of things like War and Peace, The Stand and Atlas Shrugged, so there you go.
Will
250,000 words, motherfuckers! Ha!
I don't even know who that's aimed at. Maybe at the last person, other than me, who looks at this blog.*
The novel version of Crown Wearer has had a long, tough journey. It took me forever to get up off my arse to start the thing in the first place and then another aeon passed before I got organised enough to make a proper go of it. And that only happened once I stopped being intimidated by the length I initially thought it was going to be – a length it exceeded by about 70,000 words.
Now, to some people, all this talk of word counts is meaningless. I sympathise with you, I really do. Actually, I envy you. Not knowing the significance of word count would make my life a whole lot easier as a writer. I imagine being able to sit down at the computer, grinning from ear to ear, with my mug with the rainbow on the side, filled with more rainbows and clack out a couple of thousand words, no worries. There are some days like that, y'know, without that weird rainbow business, but a lot of days are wrangling and subduing words that end up not being right anyway. And, yes, that does involve a lot of staring off into the middle distance, it's an intellectual pursuit.**
So now I'm left with this manuscript, damp from brain juice and imagination placenta. What am I going to do with it? Who could possibly want this smelly, sticky brick of a manuscript from a writer who's never had a book published outside of a couple of disastrous Lulu attempts? Not my priority at the moment, is the answer (I bet you thought I was going to go on a rant, faithless bastards). For now what I'm going to do is follow the advice of every writer out there and leave it the fuck alone. That's right, it's going to sit on my various storage devices for a couple of months while I do other things and get a little distance between myself and it.
Unlike a good cheese, when I cut through the rind of the novel I won't be rewarded with the sweet nutty taste of aged milk, I'll be confronted by the horror of what I've actually written. Something riddled with spelling and grammar errors. Something that doesn't make a lick of sense because of a network of glaringly embarrassing plot holes. Hey, look at that, another cheese analogy.†
And I'll be lost again. Knee deep in the toxic porridge I've crusted the page with in hopes that some kind person will take pity on this mangled wretch and publish this monster of a book‡
For now, I'm back, ready to spew my neurotic semi-psychotic ramblings at your brain craters. We're going to have fun, dammit!
* The person who came back and thought this time it would be different. Sucker.
** Only geniuses and idiots claim they can bang out stories without thinking about it. If anyone you know says this and unless you know for certain otherwise slap that fucking idiot.
† I really want some Norwegian brown cheese. The stuff sounds amazing.
‡ It's only a partial monster. My research tells me it's at the lower end in length of one of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books. And less than half the length of things like War and Peace, The Stand and Atlas Shrugged, so there you go.
Will
Thursday, 14 June 2012
There's actual sunlight?
My, but I like my films. I enjoy sitting and letting myself be taken away by a story. Or failing that, I enjoy mocking the cack-fisted attempts at story thrown together, recorded and called a film.
In the last month or so I've been watching a lot of films. I've gone through more new (for me) films in the last few weeks than I've seen in the previous two years. It's left my head crammed with all sorts of silliness, so I thought I'd spray you with some nonsense about my film-viewing.
You won't be surprised to learn that a lot of this will be negative, with Viewing Joe that I am pointing and laughing at the pitiful abortions plastered on the screen in hopes of eking money from me. And they might want to entertain, too, but it's harder to prove that.
Micmacs is a prime example of a jolly good film. It has 'we are crazy French film makers' plastered all over it, but that's fine, because it's charming and you actually like this odd collection of characters and you can't help but applaud what they're doing.
Not something that can be said for Dread. I should have been on my guard the moment one of the half dozen or so producers was Clive Barker. Pushing aside my misgivings I watched and an age passed, humanity went extinct around me and a new civilisation of floating amphibious celeriac came to power. Then I look at the time: I'd been sitting for ten minutes. Arrrgh! What the fuck, man? Did you people set out to make the most boring, boneheaded film ever? You probably failed, but you weren't that far off. You didn't add any interest by tagging on a torture porn third act. Dead-eyed, humourless and boring are not how horror films should be. That's something you should've learned in primary school.
At least Rec. and Rec. 2 had a bit of life about them. They were still bunk, but they managed to make the 'found footage' film interesting to me. No mean feat after seeing the snooze-and-whine-fest The Blair Witch Project in the cinema (although, in fairness, it's a better experience on television, just). The films start off silly and just keep getting dafter as they go on. But they pull the case zero apocalypse thing that I find overdone and dull too.
Still, better than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. A whinging, creepy main character surrounded by annoying caricatures isn't an inviting premise. The saving grace of this film are the fight scenes, but you have to wade through dreary navel-gazing scenes of unfunny dialogue to get to them. If I wanted to do that I'd watch The Ultimate Fighter on TV. I wouldn't be quite so annoyed by this if there hadn't been months a couple of years ago of people dribbling about how fucking awesome it was. You were wrong, you bastards.
The same applies to Super 8. This is another film that commits the supreme sin of being fucking tedious. I had the curious feeling when it was being advertised with the desperation of a failed writer trying to get you to buy his wares (what the fuck are you looking at, shit clomp, go about your business). And yes. it was terrible, stupid and dull, just like a Tory MP. The best part of it was the intentionally shit film they showed over the credits.
Weeks before I sat down to churn my way through Super 8 I'd decided to give Salt a go. I was presented with the world's longest pilot for an '80s television pilot, right down to setting up a baddie of the week structure. Clearly this was both fantastic and horrifying to watch in equal measure.
I've watched a lot more than that, but I'm not Rotten fucking Tomatoes, you want recommendations, go there.you bastards, stop expecting me to do WORK!
Will
In the last month or so I've been watching a lot of films. I've gone through more new (for me) films in the last few weeks than I've seen in the previous two years. It's left my head crammed with all sorts of silliness, so I thought I'd spray you with some nonsense about my film-viewing.
You won't be surprised to learn that a lot of this will be negative, with Viewing Joe that I am pointing and laughing at the pitiful abortions plastered on the screen in hopes of eking money from me. And they might want to entertain, too, but it's harder to prove that.
Micmacs is a prime example of a jolly good film. It has 'we are crazy French film makers' plastered all over it, but that's fine, because it's charming and you actually like this odd collection of characters and you can't help but applaud what they're doing.
Not something that can be said for Dread. I should have been on my guard the moment one of the half dozen or so producers was Clive Barker. Pushing aside my misgivings I watched and an age passed, humanity went extinct around me and a new civilisation of floating amphibious celeriac came to power. Then I look at the time: I'd been sitting for ten minutes. Arrrgh! What the fuck, man? Did you people set out to make the most boring, boneheaded film ever? You probably failed, but you weren't that far off. You didn't add any interest by tagging on a torture porn third act. Dead-eyed, humourless and boring are not how horror films should be. That's something you should've learned in primary school.
At least Rec. and Rec. 2 had a bit of life about them. They were still bunk, but they managed to make the 'found footage' film interesting to me. No mean feat after seeing the snooze-and-whine-fest The Blair Witch Project in the cinema (although, in fairness, it's a better experience on television, just). The films start off silly and just keep getting dafter as they go on. But they pull the case zero apocalypse thing that I find overdone and dull too.
Still, better than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. A whinging, creepy main character surrounded by annoying caricatures isn't an inviting premise. The saving grace of this film are the fight scenes, but you have to wade through dreary navel-gazing scenes of unfunny dialogue to get to them. If I wanted to do that I'd watch The Ultimate Fighter on TV. I wouldn't be quite so annoyed by this if there hadn't been months a couple of years ago of people dribbling about how fucking awesome it was. You were wrong, you bastards.
The same applies to Super 8. This is another film that commits the supreme sin of being fucking tedious. I had the curious feeling when it was being advertised with the desperation of a failed writer trying to get you to buy his wares (what the fuck are you looking at, shit clomp, go about your business). And yes. it was terrible, stupid and dull, just like a Tory MP. The best part of it was the intentionally shit film they showed over the credits.
Weeks before I sat down to churn my way through Super 8 I'd decided to give Salt a go. I was presented with the world's longest pilot for an '80s television pilot, right down to setting up a baddie of the week structure. Clearly this was both fantastic and horrifying to watch in equal measure.
I've watched a lot more than that, but I'm not Rotten fucking Tomatoes, you want recommendations, go there.you bastards, stop expecting me to do WORK!
Will
Wednesday, 23 May 2012
Sore wrists, swollen thumbs.
Yep, I'm back for a ramble, deal with it.
I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry. Let's throw that one out there. I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot. As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.
What I do have is a long history with computer games. I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted*. I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer. Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play **.
Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time. Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other. It was a golden, very pale time.
The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC. All dependent on money and my interest. Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life. At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend. Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!
My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games. After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.
It happens. Although I've felt it more with modern games. Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in. These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off." These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game. And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).
I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three. It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure. This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years. And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game. Pretty cool.
And I want in on that, man.
Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game. A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game. One can always hope, though.
* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers. Screw that shit. The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.
** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was. Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded. And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too. I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised". Gaaaah!
Will
I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry. Let's throw that one out there. I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot. As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.
What I do have is a long history with computer games. I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted*. I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer. Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play **.
Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time. Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other. It was a golden, very pale time.
The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC. All dependent on money and my interest. Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life. At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend. Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!
My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games. After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.
It happens. Although I've felt it more with modern games. Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in. These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off." These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game. And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).
I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three. It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure. This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years. And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game. Pretty cool.
And I want in on that, man.
Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game. A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game. One can always hope, though.
* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers. Screw that shit. The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.
** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was. Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded. And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too. I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised". Gaaaah!
Will
Monday, 16 April 2012
Got Any Spare Paragraphs, Mate?
Hello, I'm Fabrizio Giullare, and this is another of my long-running series on writing dos and don'ts.
Just for those who need a little bit of a catch-up, and can't be arsed looking back over the rest of my posts. I'm the writer of a number of novels and comics. My biggest novel has been Shepherd With Some Straw, that's currently in the process of being turned into a movie. While my most recent novel is Claiming Benefits from the Wrong Window. Both of which are available on Amazon.
My highly acclaimed comic work includes Little Dots, my collaboration with famed Japanese artist Yuudi Maeda and my work at Marvel on the Drooling Slugs crossover event.
Now that we've got the re-introductions out of the way, lets get down to what you're here for. In the past I've talked about the importance of having too many paragraphs on the page, it's an annoying habit that lots of writers have that puts readers off. I know my editor gets quite ratty when I hand her a manuscript with more than four paragraphs on a page.
"Fab," she says to me. "Why do you need to clutter up the page with so many different paragraphs. I've come to terms with your overuse of sentences, but this is almost too much for me."
And I have to agree with her and I find myself putting the offending clumps of words together into that glorious pattern of monolithic blocks of text that I know people love so much. Bear in mind, this only happens three or four times in a nine hundred page manuscript – my editor is an exacting woman, and she hates to see a page with too much white space. That's free space in which you can be telling the reader about the character's favourite hat. It all adds up to that wonderful power of narrative that you're building.
"But, Fab, surely it doesn't entirely matter! Surely you need to let the work flow as freely it obviously needs to!" I hear you cry. And I answer by saying, "Watch the adverbs, buddy, there are ladies present."
I know it may seem like it's a completely arbitrary thing to fixate on, but you need to wake up and smell the bergamot, my friend, this matters. It's on a par with naming characters Beryl or Angela – who the fuck does that any more? It brings people out of the story that you're creating and makes them think about old ladies who smell of lavender and pee. The same goes for too many paragraphs, except without the lavender and pee, it makes your reader start to wonder if you know what you're talking about. A good, confident writer knows that a strong block of text on the page tells the reader this guy knows what he's talking about and makes them more eager to read what you give them. Heavy slabs of text give your reader something to hold onto and strengthens your narrative.
I've come to terms with my editor's hatred of the full stop and she's come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to stop using it. We both agree that plants should never be involved in a story, for any reason whatever. This is just lazy writing and your readers will forget what their names are and probably start selling their bodies for Victoria sponge. That's how serious getting the writing correct is, you'll ruin human civilisation. I know you don't want to do that, you're a nice guy, so behave.
Until next time, I'm Fab Giullare, saying write well!
Just for those who need a little bit of a catch-up, and can't be arsed looking back over the rest of my posts. I'm the writer of a number of novels and comics. My biggest novel has been Shepherd With Some Straw, that's currently in the process of being turned into a movie. While my most recent novel is Claiming Benefits from the Wrong Window. Both of which are available on Amazon.
My highly acclaimed comic work includes Little Dots, my collaboration with famed Japanese artist Yuudi Maeda and my work at Marvel on the Drooling Slugs crossover event.
Now that we've got the re-introductions out of the way, lets get down to what you're here for. In the past I've talked about the importance of having too many paragraphs on the page, it's an annoying habit that lots of writers have that puts readers off. I know my editor gets quite ratty when I hand her a manuscript with more than four paragraphs on a page.
"Fab," she says to me. "Why do you need to clutter up the page with so many different paragraphs. I've come to terms with your overuse of sentences, but this is almost too much for me."
And I have to agree with her and I find myself putting the offending clumps of words together into that glorious pattern of monolithic blocks of text that I know people love so much. Bear in mind, this only happens three or four times in a nine hundred page manuscript – my editor is an exacting woman, and she hates to see a page with too much white space. That's free space in which you can be telling the reader about the character's favourite hat. It all adds up to that wonderful power of narrative that you're building.
"But, Fab, surely it doesn't entirely matter! Surely you need to let the work flow as freely it obviously needs to!" I hear you cry. And I answer by saying, "Watch the adverbs, buddy, there are ladies present."
I know it may seem like it's a completely arbitrary thing to fixate on, but you need to wake up and smell the bergamot, my friend, this matters. It's on a par with naming characters Beryl or Angela – who the fuck does that any more? It brings people out of the story that you're creating and makes them think about old ladies who smell of lavender and pee. The same goes for too many paragraphs, except without the lavender and pee, it makes your reader start to wonder if you know what you're talking about. A good, confident writer knows that a strong block of text on the page tells the reader this guy knows what he's talking about and makes them more eager to read what you give them. Heavy slabs of text give your reader something to hold onto and strengthens your narrative.
I've come to terms with my editor's hatred of the full stop and she's come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to stop using it. We both agree that plants should never be involved in a story, for any reason whatever. This is just lazy writing and your readers will forget what their names are and probably start selling their bodies for Victoria sponge. That's how serious getting the writing correct is, you'll ruin human civilisation. I know you don't want to do that, you're a nice guy, so behave.
Until next time, I'm Fab Giullare, saying write well!
Tuesday, 10 April 2012
Flicky-clicky! The Art of Intolerance.
The last couple of posts have been very writer-centric. I may have already alienated folks. Now I reckon I'll alienate a couple more. Now, how can I do that?
It's a love/hate relationship I've had since I was young. Like most people of my generation, I suppose, but being the introverted antisocial troll that I was, I took it a bit further. I won't go into just how insular I was, you might cry and I don't want anyone getting their keyboard all soggy on my account.
As I've got older though, I haven't watched quite as much television. Other diversions have vied for my attention: computer games, writing, reading, going out to (hey look at that, finally!) socialise and, of course, women. But I always go back, quite often to disappointment and repeats.
My current deep disappointment is aimed at programmes like Jersey Shore and The Only Way is Essex. These are programmes that I'm put off of the moment I see trailers for them, as they look like the most vapidly lazy programming. They all centre around the worst that humanity has to offer, which wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the feeling that the characters (because let's all be honest here, that's what they are, there aren't any real people, just actors looking for an easy break) are being held up as role models. Now, I can't say for certain (and I'm not some big city lawyer), but I'm sure that the original intent was to mock these orange caricatures. Instead what we have is a world in which Snooki (urg, can't people see the producers are taking the piss?) has a lucrative book deal. Yes, a woman who is supposed to look and act like she has trouble reciting the alphabet has a book deal, and I can't get la- er, published*.
Yeah. It annoys me. They clog up the airwaves with as much mediocrity as soap operas. We all know the reason for it, smart arse. I know why I don't like having my toe crushed by a mallet, doesn't change my opinion on it.
Another kind of 'reality' television that I have less intolerance for are cookery programmes (take a look at this for more on my cookery programme fascination). I can hear you smirking, fucko. Nothing wrong with enjoying cooking and eating. It's life enriching. You should think about that the next time you're choking down a sausage supper with enough cholesterol to clog the London Underground Central Line.
But, in this, dear reader I have my prejudices. Let us take the sainted (or at least ordained) Nigella Lawson. I used to quite like Nigella as a programme host, outside of the weird, fetishy sexualisation (and that her father is a Tory and she followed suit, boo! Hiss!) of food she seemed quite personable. Then I started noticing something, something that made me blink in slight confusion and now it makes me want to attack the TV with a fucking tenderising mallet: snobbishness. There's always room for a bit of snobbishness in life, but not if it's presented as THE ONE TRUE PATH. Ingredients that seem innocuous to the layman become a benighted spectre to Nigella Lawson. Use the wrong (read: least expensive) kind of capers and pal you better have a good fuckin' excuse. It's infuriating and quite often it's utterly arbitrary. Use what you can use and fuck what some rich woman on the TV says.
Speaking of crazy women cooks. My wife and I have been watching the The Little Paris Kitchen which involves woman-child eternastudent Rachel Khoo proving that she's almost mental enough to start throwing buckets of molten butter over her balcony onto any heathen who deviates a tenth of an iota from TRUE FRENCH PATISSERIE. Seriously, this woman is bonkers. She lives in a Paris flat that's barely large enough for an adult and runs a restaurant from her optimistically named front room. A lot of her cooking looks rather nice, but her style gives an over-romanticised view of France and Paris in particular that doesn't quite match up to the living quarters she has. Perhaps she's deluded or perhaps she really is happy there; all I know is I'd be gnawing my arms off because of the claustrophobia.
Or maybe I'm deluded and should step away from the remote, verrry slowly...
*(Yes, yes, I understand that there's a demand for it. I'm not ignorant of these things. I'm still allowed to rail and have the opinion that it's peddling mediocrity and general human shittiness.)
Will
Television!
As I've got older though, I haven't watched quite as much television. Other diversions have vied for my attention: computer games, writing, reading, going out to (hey look at that, finally!) socialise and, of course, women. But I always go back, quite often to disappointment and repeats.
My current deep disappointment is aimed at programmes like Jersey Shore and The Only Way is Essex. These are programmes that I'm put off of the moment I see trailers for them, as they look like the most vapidly lazy programming. They all centre around the worst that humanity has to offer, which wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the feeling that the characters (because let's all be honest here, that's what they are, there aren't any real people, just actors looking for an easy break) are being held up as role models. Now, I can't say for certain (and I'm not some big city lawyer), but I'm sure that the original intent was to mock these orange caricatures. Instead what we have is a world in which Snooki (urg, can't people see the producers are taking the piss?) has a lucrative book deal. Yes, a woman who is supposed to look and act like she has trouble reciting the alphabet has a book deal, and I can't get la- er, published*.
Yeah. It annoys me. They clog up the airwaves with as much mediocrity as soap operas. We all know the reason for it, smart arse. I know why I don't like having my toe crushed by a mallet, doesn't change my opinion on it.
Another kind of 'reality' television that I have less intolerance for are cookery programmes (take a look at this for more on my cookery programme fascination). I can hear you smirking, fucko. Nothing wrong with enjoying cooking and eating. It's life enriching. You should think about that the next time you're choking down a sausage supper with enough cholesterol to clog the London Underground Central Line.
But, in this, dear reader I have my prejudices. Let us take the sainted (or at least ordained) Nigella Lawson. I used to quite like Nigella as a programme host, outside of the weird, fetishy sexualisation (and that her father is a Tory and she followed suit, boo! Hiss!) of food she seemed quite personable. Then I started noticing something, something that made me blink in slight confusion and now it makes me want to attack the TV with a fucking tenderising mallet: snobbishness. There's always room for a bit of snobbishness in life, but not if it's presented as THE ONE TRUE PATH. Ingredients that seem innocuous to the layman become a benighted spectre to Nigella Lawson. Use the wrong (read: least expensive) kind of capers and pal you better have a good fuckin' excuse. It's infuriating and quite often it's utterly arbitrary. Use what you can use and fuck what some rich woman on the TV says.
Speaking of crazy women cooks. My wife and I have been watching the The Little Paris Kitchen which involves woman-child eternastudent Rachel Khoo proving that she's almost mental enough to start throwing buckets of molten butter over her balcony onto any heathen who deviates a tenth of an iota from TRUE FRENCH PATISSERIE. Seriously, this woman is bonkers. She lives in a Paris flat that's barely large enough for an adult and runs a restaurant from her optimistically named front room. A lot of her cooking looks rather nice, but her style gives an over-romanticised view of France and Paris in particular that doesn't quite match up to the living quarters she has. Perhaps she's deluded or perhaps she really is happy there; all I know is I'd be gnawing my arms off because of the claustrophobia.
Or maybe I'm deluded and should step away from the remote, verrry slowly...
*(Yes, yes, I understand that there's a demand for it. I'm not ignorant of these things. I'm still allowed to rail and have the opinion that it's peddling mediocrity and general human shittiness.)
Will
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Hellooooo, Mister Whitescreen!
It's a common complaint amongst writers about that moment when they sit in front of the computer (or if you're archaic or doing some weird back-to-basics exercise, in front of the typewriter*) and they're faced with the blank white screen (or page, to the troglodytes).
They talk in hushed whispers, from behind the pint they're nursing, about the way it just stares at them, taunting them, sapping the very marrow from their souls. They feel terror and apprehension as they try to urge words onto the glaring whiteness before them. It breaks them, just this part of the process, you can see the hollowness in the eyes where a bright intelligence used to be. Even when they manage to splatter their creative cum onto the screen (page, goddamn Luddite) some fundamental part of them lies in bloody tatters around their feet, whimpering its last pitiful breath.
And it shouldn't need to be this way. For all that every writer's process is different to one degree or another, this grisly, demeaning part of writing shouldn't even feature. You should look at that screen and shake its shake its fuckin' hand and say, "Hey, man! Nice to meet you, we're going to do cool shit together, you and I, so lets get down to it." And you whack a word on that damn whiteness; could be anything, could be what you had for breakfast or how hard you want to punch a member of your most hated political party, hell you might even want to go out on a crazy limb and write the first word of the story or novel or script you're planning to do.
Writing has enough hardships as it is (and yes it has some astoundingly easy things, but that's not what we're discussing here, concentrate) without adding the prospect of the opening salvo of sticky, sticky creative goo to the list. That right there, in case you missed my subtle suggestions, should be one of a series of wonderful orgasmic releases, and not the shameful ham shank while no one's looking. Remember, this is likely to be a first draft, you can always go back and change it – no biggie, it's part of the writing process.
For me, starting isn't a problem, my greatest bugbear is word count: am I doing enough? Am I just vomiting description onto the page just to change another digit in the thousands column? Should I just hit delete and consign the whole mess to the thing to the attic of my mind where it will be fed nothing but cat litter and Rizlas? At the moment this is hitting me harder than ever; I'm in the middle of a book that, by my calculations is going to be – forgive the technical term – fucking huge and those are just the worries that plague me every time I open up the file to add more of my mad or mediocre ravings. That's perhaps a discussion for another day.
* I don't get the freakish romanticism associated with typewriters, particularly the monstrosities people like Hunter S Thompson did his work on. These aren't mystical machines that will help you channel the ghosts of literary greats past, all they'll do is channel your inner pretentious twat. I used a type writer once, in the misty past, it was an electronic thing and I can tell you this, since using a word processor, it adds more complexity and frustration to the process than is needed. So fuck that jive, man.
Will
They talk in hushed whispers, from behind the pint they're nursing, about the way it just stares at them, taunting them, sapping the very marrow from their souls. They feel terror and apprehension as they try to urge words onto the glaring whiteness before them. It breaks them, just this part of the process, you can see the hollowness in the eyes where a bright intelligence used to be. Even when they manage to splatter their creative cum onto the screen (page, goddamn Luddite) some fundamental part of them lies in bloody tatters around their feet, whimpering its last pitiful breath.
And it shouldn't need to be this way. For all that every writer's process is different to one degree or another, this grisly, demeaning part of writing shouldn't even feature. You should look at that screen and shake its shake its fuckin' hand and say, "Hey, man! Nice to meet you, we're going to do cool shit together, you and I, so lets get down to it." And you whack a word on that damn whiteness; could be anything, could be what you had for breakfast or how hard you want to punch a member of your most hated political party, hell you might even want to go out on a crazy limb and write the first word of the story or novel or script you're planning to do.
Writing has enough hardships as it is (and yes it has some astoundingly easy things, but that's not what we're discussing here, concentrate) without adding the prospect of the opening salvo of sticky, sticky creative goo to the list. That right there, in case you missed my subtle suggestions, should be one of a series of wonderful orgasmic releases, and not the shameful ham shank while no one's looking. Remember, this is likely to be a first draft, you can always go back and change it – no biggie, it's part of the writing process.
For me, starting isn't a problem, my greatest bugbear is word count: am I doing enough? Am I just vomiting description onto the page just to change another digit in the thousands column? Should I just hit delete and consign the whole mess to the thing to the attic of my mind where it will be fed nothing but cat litter and Rizlas? At the moment this is hitting me harder than ever; I'm in the middle of a book that, by my calculations is going to be – forgive the technical term – fucking huge and those are just the worries that plague me every time I open up the file to add more of my mad or mediocre ravings. That's perhaps a discussion for another day.
* I don't get the freakish romanticism associated with typewriters, particularly the monstrosities people like Hunter S Thompson did his work on. These aren't mystical machines that will help you channel the ghosts of literary greats past, all they'll do is channel your inner pretentious twat. I used a type writer once, in the misty past, it was an electronic thing and I can tell you this, since using a word processor, it adds more complexity and frustration to the process than is needed. So fuck that jive, man.
Will
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