Diary of an up and coming sociopath

It might not be new to you, but it’s so bad, I think it gave me cancer. This thing should come with a public health warning.

Okay, so I’ve procured a copy of Ben Folds’ new album, and as I once did back in the day, I’m going to do a “first impressions” review. This involves me typing some thoughts that occur to me as I listen through the album, organised by track. It’s certainly not a properly considered opinion, and will almost definitely not reflect my thoughts in a few days once I’ve had a few listens to it all. It’s certainly not supposed to be a guide for anyone else to judge the album by, because it’s specifically down to my tastes and logic (or lack thereof.) In an effort to give some quantifiable judgement for anyone interested, I’m going to rate each track on the highly original scale of whether I consider it an instant “hit” or “miss.” The criteria are totally arbitrary, so don’t expect much logic.

I get sick of writing disclaimers so that I don’t receive tonnes of abuse like the last time I did a review in this style, so I’ll instead say that if you’re going to leave a comment, then at least try and comment on the review or the album, rather than threatening to break my face if you disagree.

With that thought in mind:

Ben Folds - Songs for Silverman

Bastard - It’s not the same excellent start “Annie Waits” was on the previous album. I’m not especially taken in by the subject matter or the style. It sounds not unlike the theme tune to a 60s sitcom or something, actually. Feels like a weak start. MISS.

You to Thank - This one’s a bit better. The instrumental stuff is quite nice, but I’m not really getting into the vocals and lyrics much. For some reason, I think it’s a little too simplistic in places. MISS.

Jesusland - That beginning confused me a bit, until I realised what track it was. I’m expecting big things of this, because it seems to imply some political sentiment. Sounds a bit mundane at the moment, though. Hmm. I’m still not getting the same vibes of excellence that Rockin’ the Suburbs gave me in this album. This track is picking up towards the end, but it’s still not so great. Political slant I expected not present in any explicit sense. MISS.

Landed - I’ve heard Landed before, since it’s the single. It’s a really good track. Stylistically, it’s sticking out a bit from the other three tracks. It’d be a bit cynical to think that this was probably written as an intended single, but it’s certainly a little less subdued than the others, and is such is a natural contender. Natural, that is, if any other tracks are remotely in the same vein. HIT.

Gracie - Ah, like this. Things are picking up with the last couple of tracks. Haven’t got much to say about it, but it’s surprisingly short. HIT.

Trusted - Okay, this sounds more like the kind of track I was hoping for. Well, maybe not. It’s certainly more in the right direction for me at least. The lyrics on this album seem like they’ve really been mashed in over the melody in places. The hook line on this song is a good example of this. Ah, really picks up at the three minute mark. Definitely strong start and end, dodgy middle. HIT.

Give Judy my Notice - This is a re-record of a track off the EPs he released over the last year or two. I think I prefer the new version, because it’s a bit fuller. The original was quite a slow soulful song and it benefits from being picked up a little. HIT. Even before I’ve reached the end. Choral parts are maybe a little dubious in places, but that’s a small flaw in an otherwise good version.

Late - I’m quite liking this so far. Listening to the lyrics, I think this might be written for Elliot Smith. I think I remember there was going to be one on this record. I am enjoying this, especially with the contextual meanings. It’s erring on the right side of tasteful, without getting too “Candle in the Wind”. HIT.

Sentimental Guy - The start reminds me of “All You Can Eat,” which isn’t necessarily a good thing. I’m not a fan of the faux-lounge style of that song. It’s not really repeated on this track, thank god, but the shades of it are all over this. There’s some dodgy falsetto about halfway through, which has always been my least favourite of Ben Folds’ many modes. I think, at two thirds in, the verdict will have to stand. MISS.

Time - A nice opening, but if it doesn’t do something in a minute it’s going to get a bit too samey. It’s feeling like a buildup, but there’s no payoff forthcoming. Hmm. Ah, here, we go. Took two minutes, but it’s worth it. The first half of the song is almost justified by the second half. HIT. Just.

Prison Food - Sounds like a good track to finish on so far. I like the instrumental stuff a minute in. It’s reminding me a bit of thirteen senses, who I am also listening to a lot at the moment. That’s a favourable comparison. Hmm. Some weird chorus vocals at the halfway point. Some good drumming stuff after that, though. This track’s structurally all over the place, which I like. The ending of the track is a little weaker than I’d expect for an album closer, but taken on its own it works. HIT.

Final Impression: 4 Misses, 7 Hits. Definitely a good album, but I’m not so sure it’s as good as Rockin’ the Suburbs, which utterly opened my eyes the first time I listened to it and transformed me from a casual fan into a true believer. I expected a little more, really, but the rate of songs I like to those I don’t is about equal to the average on the EPs, so it’s not unexpectedly bad or anything, I just hoped for more. The EPs were quick releases, I wondered if the album would be meatier in sound and subject, but it doesn’t seem to be by much. I’ll be interested to see how much of this holds up live. I’m not as impressed by the writing on this album, it feels lethargic, both lyrically and musically. Landed is really the only track on there I expect I’ll still be listening to in a few years, but even that’s only comparable to some of the weaker moments on RTS. As before, maybe i’ll come back to it in a week or two and see how my opinion has changed.

Now, I’m not a Doctor Who fan. This is most acurately articulated if I were to say that almost all of my knowledge comes from the Dr. Who Board game I played once as a child, and from TV Offal’s “Gay Daleks” sketches from the fertile late 90s channel 4 friday night era of TV. Oh, and all the Memorabilia guest stars who have “Dr. Who” under their name. Like many, I know what A dalek is, and that Tom Baker is involved, and that there’s something about Police phoneboxes and TARDISes and stuff, but it’s really rudimentry knowledge at best. I am, however, a Sci-Fi fan and nurse a fierce hatred of reality TV and light entertainment. From that perspective, I felt literally that I would be betraying my own ideals if I didn’t watch it. So, from an outsider’s perspective, I would consider that what we’ve ended up with is easily and most appropriately described as “A solid foundation.”

The CGI is pretty ropey, it’s true, but it’s almost forgivable entirely because it seems that dodgy effects are a prerequisite for Dr. Who. It’s no worse than say, Red Dwarf ever got, that’s for sure. I’ve seen some clips from later episodes involving CGI aliens which are about as good as Star Trek ever did with full-CGI creatures, so it’s not too bad in that respect. The main thing is that the CGI isn’t so terrible that it snaps you out of the disbelief suspension. Character-wise, Eccleston’s Doctor is great to watch. Since he’s an alien (didn’t know that about the character until tonight) they’ve done well with making him seem both genuinely confused and enamoured with earth and humanity. He doesn’t seem to understand it all, but he cares for it nonetheless. He’s intriguing to watch, with a fair amount of humour and drama being shown all while keeping the audience guessing at what’s really going on beneath the lid.

Billie Piper’s character, Rose, isn’t bad to watch. It was a little contrived the way they engineered a situation in which the doctor was stuck in such a way that she, somehow, had the necessary gymnastic skills to help out with, especially since it only took a slight push off a ledge to get it the evildoers dispatched. Hint: Don’t make your main character look like an idiot by having him captured and saved by the person he’s supposed to be saving if you want him to look cool. However, I understand why it’s necessary to do what they did. Having her around is a prerequisite for the series and the character the audience are going to identify with. They need to make her look good, though, better than the Doctor? Maybe a little /too/ good. Still, much like how when they introduce a new transformer in the cartoon, they’re ultra-powerful for an episode then suddenly get relegated to second fiddle (or third trombone) she’ll probably get nerfed a bit in upcoming episodes and the focus will be put back on the Doctor being the heroic one. As well as those reasons, it takes out the humanity a bit to have her swinging around on chains like Tarzan (She-Tarzan?) so I’m hoping that Rose will be a more realistic compared to the Doctor, who’s the one I really expect to be the more fantastical of the two.

I loved the plot, though. I have no idea whether living plastic is an idea previously explored in Dr. Who or not, but it was sufficiently creepy. They did some serious hinting at a backstory and motivation for the character of the Doctor towards the end, which made me, continuity and factoid whore that I am, positively clamour for some background. Again, no idea whether this is new or established stuff, but I’m going to enjoy finding out.

There were a couple of great lines and exchanges, delivered perfectly. It’s a toss up between, and I’ll try to be accurate, but it is from memory:

“I’m in my dressing gown…”
“Yes.”
“There’s a strange man in my bedroom…”
“Yes.”
“Anything could happen..”
“…No.”

and:

“Nice to meet you Rose. Now, run for your life.”

Can’t remember any more, but there was some decent stuff in there that made me laugh enough that I’d consider it the right side of funny and nothing too cringeworthy. Even the purposefully bad jokes and clunky exposition infodumps didn’t drag it back.

Overall, it was an encouraging start to the series. It could’ve been shite, but it managed to hit “above average” so, combined with the clips of future episodes which promise to ramp up the action and scale, I’ll be glad to keep watching. I can’t say how utterly great it is to see some actual quality (hell, any…) original Sci-Fi come out of the BBC, especially after crappy sitcoms (’My Hero’, anyone? Thought not.) and reality shows and formulaic dreck seem to have been the staple for years now. Dr. Who looks to be starting off strong, and for what it represents as much as what it is.

Hmm. Lost a bit of momentum over the past day or two. Thursday was my last day at work this week, because of the bank holiday, so I celebrated by removing any restraints I had imposed on my free time and staying awake until half three in the morning watchign cartoons and plying emulated games, the usual kind of thing that I used to do a lot but now have little time for.

On Friday I spent the morning tidying up (and when I say Morning I mean the first couple of hours after I woke up, in the afternoon) and then drove up to Nikki’s. Except, she wasn’t back, so I went and picked up my vast amounts of post from home. It’s the usual stuff, credit card bills and bank statements which the internet has already rendeed obselete. Kind of ridiculous really. I got an Egg card to other day so that I could effect a 0% balance ransfer because the interest on my current credit card is cripplingly high. It’s only about £20 a month, but unfortunately, when you’re having to pay it off in £30 chunks, that’s what I call cripplingly high. Once the transfer goes through I’ll have a few months to really take a chunk out of it without the “two steps forward, one step back” mentality that interest brings with it. Also I got a free tenner for using Egg’s suspiciously unassuming money manager. It’s so useful there’s got to be a catch. If it’s just detail harvesting I can manage, but if the leaders of Egg take to the stars in their giant spaceship with all my money in tow, then I’ll feel like a moron. Or a scientologist.

Actually, same thing.

Today Nikki and I went shopping, wandered around leamington looking for a birthday present for Pad, and decided on some garden lights working under the assumption that even though he had some, he’d like more. Either it was true, or he feigned it well because he seemed pleased with them. It’ll go with all the soil he asked for. i find my grandparents especially hard to buy for. With Dad I can at least go for a CD or DVD if it gets dire, but by the time you reach about 70 pop culture is so far behind you that it’s pretty useless going that route. I think a DVD player might be an idea next time I’m stuck, because then they can a least have DVDs of films I know they like.

Went up Josh’sfor a bit because there weren’t enough people around to go properly out, and in what can only be described as gross revisionism, I totally thrashed him and Sam at Soul Calibur 2 and Mario Tennis. I once considered Gamecubes to be shite, but I realise now it was just the N64 that was making me think that. If I was going to buy a console these days, it’d probably be a Gamecube. Maybe I’ll wait and see how much money I’ve got free when the next generation of consoles arrives. (Hint: I am Betamax Man. If I buy the nintendo next gen console, you can be sure the price halves the week after, or that nintendo collapses within the year. Every time I waste money on consumer electronics, catastrophies happen. Do the opposite of what I do. I predict that the nintendo DS will be considered a relative failure wihin a year, and mostly because I keep thinking of buying one…)

And, finally for now because I’m getting tired and I’m already going to backdate this post to account for the gross gap in updating and/or conversion to BST, I wanted to chime in with the obligatory Doctor Who post. Coming next, though you’ll probably have read it before this one.

Paul asked me to mention a magic show in London. This is me doing it. I can’t say much else about it because this machine doesn’t have flash installed, but it appears to be some kind of Webbed Site on an Internet.

I ended up late for work this morning, following the disposal of a “suspicious package” at Hammersmith which kep tthe train we were on stuck on the line for 40 minutes while they presumably carried out a controlled detonation of someone’s forgotten lunchbox. To be fair, most of the time was spent waiting for the emergency services to turn up, so it’s a good job there wasn’t a short timer on those sandwiches, else they might’ve gone off. The helpful train driver, who was about as confused as any of us, told us after twenty minutes that he had finally got confirmation that we were stopped because of a suspect package, and that the police had been called. He later informed us that the police had arrived and immediately called the bomb squad. I wonder, personally, why the police took almost thirty minutes to get there when all they had to do was go “yep, looks suspicious alright.” and then call for someone else. Surely there was someone qualified to do that closer than thirty minutes away? The driver kept us up to date with frequent announcements and suggestions. “Open the windows and let some air in,” he said, as well as “Try to let anyone who needs to sit down have your seat.” We were waiting for him to suggest that “Attempt to sate your hunger by cannibalising a fellow passenger,” or to “Avoid the urge to drink your own urine, at least for the first hour.”

Far more interesting, with the Pixies confirmed at Reading, all that’s left is for me to buy a ticket. Except I already did it! Take that, causality. It cost me something like £268 for two tickets. I can’t help feel that the price is way higher than it needs to be. I believe they saw the prices tickets were going for on eBay in recent years and said “dammit, why aren’t we getting in on that scam!?” Remember when tickets were like, £90? Because I do. I was pleased to see that the Pixies are headlining, but also annoyed that Kasabian are on opposite them. I would’ve like to have seen Kasabian, but it doesn’t look like I’ll get the chance if I want to get anywhere near the stage for the Pixies. Which I do. I’ll probably go an see the Killers, because they appear to be on before the Pixies and I guess I like a couple of their songs, but i’m quite surprised that they’re so high up. I’m torn about whether to go see Babyshambles, because while I can honestly say I’m not the least bit interested in the music, they’re opposite Kings of Leon, who I actively despise and I’d be quite interested to see if Pete Doherty actually turns up. I’ve got what I wanted though, and that was the Pixies, so anyone else is a bonus. It’ll be good to get back into the festival saddle after last year’s gap.

Edit: Morbid link of the day, here’s what I understand to be the livejournal of that guy who perpetrated the most recent school shooting in the US. You have to admire the conviction of the people who are leaving messages to him despite the fact he’s quite certainly dead, and thus unlikely to read them. It’s an interesting phenomenon, death on the internet. That journal could be there for decades to come, depending on Livejournal’s policy.

Edit #2: I’ve just read a few of the comments. It’s depressing that even school shootings aren’t getting across the message these days. Given the responses the journal’s getting, I can understand why he did it. Sample quotation: “You spineless turd of a humanist”

Finally went and Saw Constantine this afternoon. Can’t say I was too impressed with it, as I suspected it’s a good film, but it’s not necessarily a good Hellblazer film. Actually, it was a half decent film. I can’t imagine I’d watch it again under many circumstances, but it was entertaining enough that I didn’t feel like I’d wasted my time and money. A hit, no doubt, but not a very convincing one. The special effects for the depiction of hell were utterly great, it’s easily my favourite visual from the movie. Character wise, it’s good that he didn’t “get the girl” because it’s not that kind of film or character, and it shows that despite the blood-curdling gum scene at the end, shows they half understand what they were working with. The scene where he’s firing his holy shotgun reminded me of Crimsonland, and wasn’t half as bad as it could’ve been. That’s probably the running theme for the film, actually, ‘not as bad as it could’ve been.’ Make no mistake about what I’m saying though, it wasn’t great by any stretch. I didn’t realise John Constantine was supposed to be so confused all the time. Keanu is definitely missing the punk edge that the character has. The plot is all normal enough pseudo-christian symbolism that’s fair enough for the genre, but they had way too many people trying to get screentime, including the most bizarre Gavin Rossdale appearance ever.

So don’t like, run out to see it. It’s definitely a situation where I’d say to people, don’t waste money on the film because the comics are exponentially better, but I’m trying to avoid comparing mediums and judging them on their own merits (which is fucking hard to do in a case like this, or LoEG…basically any time you’re dealing with Alan Moore, and by god, there’s still Watchmen and V for Vendetta to go, and christ help us if they get their hands on Miracleman… it just doesn’t bear thinking of) so instead I’m going to say if you only see one comic book movie this year, do yourself a favour and wait for Sin City instead.

On my personal spectrum of new-wave (defined as post-X-Men) comic movies (best at top, worst at bottom) I place it thusly:

Spider-Man
X-Men 2
Spider-Man 2
X-Men
The Punisher
Constantine
Daredevil
Hellboy
LoEG
Hulk

There are a few more additions there since I last did it actually, since I decided to include non-marvel movies and I’ve seen a bunch more since I last did it, but this is how it stands.

Yesterday I went into London to get some comics, and noted that not only has Spring arrived, but Summer came with it. I only needed a T-Shirt to be warm enough, which is quite odd considering how it was snowing like a month ago. Very strange. One problem with buying comics and riding back on the tube is that I can sometimes find myself having finished them before I get home. In this instance I purposefully avoided doing so and instead spent so long staring blankly out the window that it was only when the doors closed that I realised I’d just been through the station I wanted, so I had to get off at Baron’s Court and come back. Baron’s court is about equal walk away from here, but it’s in zone 4 so I’d have had to pay just to leave the damn place. This wouldn’t have been half as dumb if I hadn’t made the mistake earlier in the day of thinking “yes, Piccadilly Circus, that’s the stop I want!” and getting off the train when I did, in fact, want Leicester Square. Not my most successful of journeys.

I am currently looking forward to a 4-day week. Two in a row, in fact. It’s surprising how much that seems to shave off work. And I’m getting paid this week! Nothing like a customary pay-day reward. I have my sights set on all 4 Azumange books which can be purchased for under £20. THat should keep me going and simultaneously prevent me from spending yet more money on transformers and red dwarf DVDs and gig tickets like last month. Though, there is the car tax…

I was surprised to discover earlier this week that my suspicions the weather was about to become warm enough for me to stop wearing my coat to work were justified, in spades. Today it was almost too hot to be wearing more than a T-shirt. Three weeks ago it was snowing. Just what the hell’s up with that? It’s not making me overly optimistic about the chances for a clement summer, but then on the bright side if that’s the case, then going to Reading should at least be a pleasant enough experience. Nothing ruins a festival like rain, it has to be said. I have the money for tickets secure. Let’s just hope the announcement on Monday is sufficiently good, and I’ll be getting a pair for me and my woman. If not, i’ll blow the money I saved on useless crap. Hurray!

(or credit card repayments)

Speaking of buying stuff I don’t need, I’ve been watching Red Dwarf VI with meals, my latest purchase of superfluous pop culture effects. I’m starting to understand why there are people out there that dislike Series VI. It’s not holding up for me as much as the others did when I rewatched them. It’s almost as if they had a large whiteboard (blackboard, back then?) which had a list of mandatory joke sto include, namely Cat’s “We’re deader than…” Rimmer’s insulting of Kryten as “something-head,” The Space Core Directive back and forth which seems to occur twice in every episode, and other such observable patterns. That’s not to say it’s bad by any means, there’s still some good character stuff in there, but for the first time I’m sensing that series VI really was the start of the decline which leads to the 90% horrible series VIII. The DVD package itself is an improvement on the previous, as is ever the case. They’re really hitting all the right notes with the DVD sets, it’s practically the model to follow for any self-respecting TV show. If only the animated menus were avoidable, they’d be damn near perfect.

Series VII will be a good test of what they can do though. I remember series VII being bad at the time, but since VIII came out I’ve been looking back on it with rose-tinted fondness. I don’t think I’ve had the chance to rewatch it practically since it came out on VHS, so I’m quite looking forward to it. I wonder if they’ll put the extended versions of the episodes they did for one of the VHS releases on, because while they’re bound to include the scenes, it’d be nice to have them in the actual episode. Cat’s speech about how he’s the most important guy in the universe is probably the best thing I’ve seen which didn’t make the cut, and it’d be a shame to hide it away in the features section when they already put it back in the episode at least once.

We’re considering going to see Contantine on Saturday. Apparantly it’s not as bad as it could’ve been, but probably only in the sense that it’s not a bad film, just a bad hellblazer film. One thing I’ve read about the ending [one large-ish plot spoiler if you’ve not read the comics, and another tiny yet character-destroying spoiler for the film]where, after his cancer is cured, he reaches into his pocket as if to remove a cigarette and…takes out a stick of FUCKING GUM…[end spoiler] makes me shudder in disbelief that they would be so insane as to hideously rape the work like that. It might be a good film, but it’s not going to be John Constantine on the screen. That said, I’m going into it with an open mind. Ish. Far more concerned about the imminent release of hitch-hiker’s guide to be honest.

Token update. I find myself currently bemused by:

The Michael Jackson trial. Possibly it’s the amount of coverage that’s bemusing me rather than the trial, I’m not sure. We all know he’s screwed up, but is he screwed up enough that they can send him down the river? Does anyone even care at this point? I’m starting to suspect this is going to be just a big exercise in why a fair trial and expensive lawyers won’t do jack for you when the public opinion is heavily weighted against you, but only the kid and Jackson know the truth, and their versions of it don’t really agree. It’s impossible to tell from the outside what really went on.

Axe murderers and cannibals in London I’m happy to see that despite all our modern ideas about civilisation, we’re still basically animals. Nothing like getting hacked to bits by your enemies and/or eaten to remind you of that.

Yet more shootings in the US. Of course, across the pond they do things properly. In one week a gunman goes nuts in a church, a judge is shot on the steps, and a toddler shoots his younger brother in the head. Now that’s civilisatio. I can think of worse places for a killing spree than a church, though.

The new Stereophonics single. Nikki and I only just realised the other day that the song we’d been hearing was actually the stereophonics. It’s not great, but in a rare departure for the band it’s not making me want to tear out my own eyeballs so I can plug my ears with them. Surprisingly refreshing to see them trying to do something that isn’t shite.

The Mars Volta eponymous “decoder track” for Frances the Mute. Received it in the post the other day (it’s the B-Side of “The Widow”) Haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on, but I’m convinced it’s a work of genius. Either that, or the band are sitting in a pile of money laughing about what they can get away with. Certainly a soource of much bemusement.

The Nintendo DS. ‘Third pillar of gaming’ my arse. I suspect the DS stands for “Desperate.” If it plays GBA games (I hear conflicting reports) it’s clearly the successor to the GBA SP. If it doesn’t, then surely it’s bound to die out when Nintendo releases the actual GBA follow up at the end of this year. The only reason I don’t think it’ll be a disaster is because Nintendo are a big company with a huge R&D/marketing team and they clearly know something about what they can sell that I don’t (though, this is the company that bought us the Virtual Boy.) However, it can’t be half as bad a flop as…

The GIZMONDO! What a name. If The GIZMONDO! turns out to be remotely competitive, then I will personally buy an N-Gage. I don’t see why they think they can edge into the handheld market when industry leaders like Neo Geo and Nokia had such a hard time of it. It’s easy to tell whether you should try to get into the handheld business: First, check if your payslips say “Nintendo” on them. If they don’t, see if they say “Sony.” If not, then you have your answer. Of course fucking not.

Final source of bemusement for the last week:

It’s now light when I get home from work. Barely saw it coming, but these days when I get out of the tunnel just before Baron’s Court, it’s still ight enough to see stuff. It reminds me of when I was unemployed and used to ride the tube at all hours of the day, when it was actually quite light instead of the dim morning/evening hues. Truly, summer is on its way. I can just imagine what it’s going to be like riding the tube an hour each way in the blistering heat.

Amidst all this molesting of pop culture it occurs to me I’ve not given any substanced updates in some time. Today I’ll take steps to rectify that.

I spent last weekend recovering from the cold I had the week before. Imagine, then, my suprise, when on Tuesday I found my health deteriorating, and how annoyed I was to wake on wednesday with a terrible sore throat. My good humour ocntinued further when on Thursday I awoke to find myself almost entirely unable to talk, mustering up just about enough vocal capacity to tell Ian I was going back to sleep and to press on to work without me. I think I get three sick days before anyone starts getting upset, and it was with reluctance that I took this, the first. Mum and Terry visited me in the evening on their way back from Paris (they parked the car outside the house and took the tube into central london, then got the eurostar or whatever it’s called these days) but I wasn’t in much of a position to hold a conversation. Even as I write this I’m being reminded that the human body is truly an amazing thing to be able to produce so much viscous slime from so little input. I suspect, from what’s been oozing out of my head, that most of my innards must be composed of the stuff.

Nikki came up this weekend and did some Uni work, so we stayed in and relaxed in each other’s company. We bought a Nandos takeout (did anyone else know they did takeouts? Nikki did, but no-one else seems to have known until we actually got one) and watched the really excellent episode of Alias where SD6 gets what’s coming to it, and then I showed her an episode of Genshiken to little success. I’ll try again when a dubbed version comes ou. It’ll pain me to hear the horrendous voice acting that’s bound to be in it, but I can understand not wanting to read the screen over watching the action.

In other news, I was horribly disappointed by this week’s comics. Ian picked them up for me when he went to meet his brother in London, and I read them when I got home today. Age of Apocalypse #2 was confusingly drawn, full of needless character redesigns and contained very little plot, where Thunderbolts #6 was well-drawn, but brought a plot that otherwise seemed to be going full steam ahead to a spluttering halt with a stunted and senseless reveal, which, if you haven’t read it, goes as follows: “I, the villain, created your team of heroes in order to foil my own plans so that it would be even more devastating when I defeat you!” Naturally, he then goes on to get totally thrashed and you wonder what the hell his plan had to do with anything anyway. I love the Thunderbolts characters, but writing like this (on the first arc of the relaunch, no less) isn’t going to inspire confidence or bring in new readers, I fear. It’s no surprise superhero comics get a bad name when this is the output. Next week I’ll get to see what it’s really like in the comics scene, because I’m pretty sure I’ll be going, on saturday, to the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing . I’m not entirely sure what to expect, but I’m sick of just reading about the breakout stars of minicomics (Mahfood, Wood, Cloonan…some of my favourite writers/artists, really) and I want to see what the scene itself actually has.