Spaceballs

Last night I was watching the movie Spaceballs, directed by Mel Brooks, which is a pretty funny spoof on the Star Wars movies from 1987. 

I also saw an episode of Peep Show, a British comedy show starring comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb as a pair of losers living in London. The whole show is filmed from the perspective of the characters in the scene, with voice-overs revealing their innermost thoughts. I really like, although it is often pretty dark. They made a pilot for a US version, but it never got picked up. It was kind of similar to the original show, but not nearly as dark.

I was back at work today after my few days vacation. I was listening to the Robin and Josie's Book Shambles podcast where Robin Ince and Josie Long interviewed comedian Alexei Sayle. They discussed how people do seem to be becoming more engaged with politics and activism and are coming together and so on and so on, and how grass-roots creative culture can have an impact and provide a reason for hope even when things get really bad.

I got a take-out steak-pie and french fries, and I have got to 15,004 words on my NaNoWriMo novel.

Only Yesterday

I went out today to The Stand Comedy Club and saw Josie Long perform stand-up comedy. It was a very funny show.

Later on I went to the movies and saw Only Yesterday, a 1991 animated film directed by Isao Takahata. It tells the story of a bored, 27 year old Tokyo office worker who goes on a working holiday to her brother-in-law's family's farm to help out with the harvest. Along the way she becomes increasingly absorbed with memories of when she was ten years old in 1966. It's a beautiful, powerful, slice of life drama.

Book Shambles

It was a pretty long day at work. I listened to Robin and Josie's Book Shambles podcast, a show about books hosted by comedians Robin Ince and Josie Long, this week doing a horror special from the Latitude festival. It featured Reece Shearsmith discussing a horror story he had written, comedian Rufus Hound reading "The Outsider" by H. P. Lovecraft, and a piece on the cursed occult library of horror writer Dennis Wheatley. Dennis Wheatley was a massively popular writer back in the 1960s and 70s with books such as The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil... A Daughter (both of which were filmed by Hammer) and many others. He also wrote a series of non-fiction books about occultism and Satanism, and the person who owns his extensive reference library is claiming that they are cursed.

On my way home I stopped off at the supermarket to get my groceries for the week.

Dark Night

Last night I read a couple of short stories by Ray Bradbury: "There Was an Old Woman" was about an elderly woman who is tricked into dying and heads off to the mortuary to get her body back so she can come back to life, it was pretty funny, and "There Will Come Soft Rains" about a fully automated house, that still keeps running even after the family that lived in it have been obliterated in a nuclear war.

It was another long day at work. I listened to an interesting episode of the Short Cuts podcast, hosted by comedian Josie Long, about rivalries about the time Canada almost went to war with Denmark and a genuinely hilarious letter of complaint to a laundromat. I also heard a really good Nerdist podcast interview with comics and animation TV writer Paul Dini. 

This evening I downloaded onto my Kindle, the graphic novel Dark Night: A True Batman Story written by Paul Dini with art by Eduardo Rosso, an autobiographical comic about a time when he was mugged and savagely beaten to within an inch of his life and as he recuperates imagines conversations between Batman and the Joker (Dini wrote for Batman: The Animated Series for which he created the character Harley Quinn, Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs and many others, as well as writing the scripts for the Batman: Arkham series of video games).

I was really tired when I got in this evening and made half of a comic (I'll finish it tomorrow).