Cartoon Exhibition

Last night was pretty quiet. The clocks went forward one hour last night and then I was playing Uncharted 2: Among Thieves on the PlayStation 3 for a while. It is a really fun game. This morning my Dad came along to pick me up and we went along to the Gyle Shopping Centre. We had a coffee and a scone before going our seperate ways. I got two books: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon and Blue Blood by Edward Conlon. I also got a magazine about emigrating to Canada. We went along to my parent's house, where the new issue of Fortean Times had arrived. The main features this month were about weirdness in Victorian times. For lunch we had chicken with lemon and bay leaves along with fried potatoes, onion and red peppers. In the afternoon my Mum and I went along to the Gallery of Modern Art to see an exhibition by Jeff Koons, an American artist who uses advertising style photography, coloured mirrors in the shape of cartoon animals, and lifesize sculptures of cartoon characters. It was pretty good.

Thaw

Last night was pretty quiet, and I spent most of the time watching TV and playing Heavy Rain on the PlayStation 3.

Today I went out and bought a bunch of comic books. Afterwards I went over to Burger King and had the Big King meal, which was pretty good and headed home.

I've also ordered the DVD of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

Assassin's Creed II

Last night I decorated my Christmas tree, and it does look pretty nice. I'll try and remember and take a picture at some time. I also played about an hour of Assassin's Creed II which is a really fun game, with an interesting storyline.

It was another very quiet and dull day at work. Not much happened. Most of the ice and snow has melted now, although when I left work it was really freezing cold. On my way home I got a steak pie supper to eat.

A Life Unmasked

Last night I watched the latest episode of Peep Show, which was very funny, and a documentary called John le Carre: A Life Unmasked, about the acclaimed British author of spy thrillers. The show was basically a long interview with le Carre, who is famously quite reclusive and claimed that this would probably be his last interview.

Today I went out to the stores and got a couple of PlayStation 3 games in the sales, namely Assassin's Creed II and Bayonetta. I also got a couple of audio CDs of the radio adaptations of The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. Both of them are based on John le Carre novels.

On my way home I got my groceries for the week.

Games and Beer

Last night I watched the final three episodes of the second season of Blake's 7 on DVD. It was pretty good, with a good cliffhanger climax.

Today I went out to the city centre and walked around for awhile. I bought a couple of games for my PlayStation 3, namely Red Dead Redemption and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. I think they're both supposed to be pretty good games, so I'm looking forward to playing them.

On my way home I went and got a few bottles of beer, just because it is so hot outside today and I don't have many cold drinks at home.

Let It Be

Lasy night was pretty quiet again. I was playing some of Heavy Rain on the PlayStation 3 which was a lot of fun and really involving. In a weird way it does remind me a little of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books that I used to read as a kid, and you'd a get a bit of story and then there's be a decision to make and it would be like "To turn left go to page 93. To turn right got to page 109" and whichever page you turned to there would be a different outcome. I also started reading a biography of The Beatles which so far is really interesting. I was never a really big fan of the Fab Four but I've always liked them. My Mum told me that when she was a teenager The Beatles were playing just a few streets away from her house and she desperately wanted to go, but she had exams the next day and my Gran made her stay in and do her revision. So Mum never got the chance to see The Beatles and run off with Paul McCartney, and I don't think she ever really let Gran forget it.

It was a really quiet day at work again and fairly uneventful. I've booked for Friday off and so I'll get a good long weekend, which I am looking forward to.

The Messengers

Last night I played for about an hour on Dante's Inferno, which is turning out to be a really good game. The graphics are really spectacular and pretty imaginative, and the gameplay is pretty involving.

Later on I was watching a movie from 2007 called The Messengers, directed by Danny Pang and Oxide Pang. The film tells the story of a young family who move from Chicago to a sunflower farm in rural North Dakota only to come under attack from demonic crows and ghostly figures who seem to target the family's troubled teenage daughter (played by Kristen Stewart) and their mute, psychic son. At times it kind of comes across as a weird hybrid of The Shining, The Birds and Children of the Corn. There are a few good moments in it but nothing really surprising.

I was on a half day today from work, so that was good, except that as I was heading back home and crossing the road a car ran a red light, almost hitting me. I managed to get out of the way in time, but still it was kind of a shock.

Dante's Inferno

Last night I was playing on my two new PlayStation 3 games which I got yesterday. Dante's Inferno was a kind of action horror game which was very, very loosely based on the first part of The Divine Comedy a poem by Dante Alighieri. In the poem, the poet Dante is taken on a tour through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven to find his beloved Beatrice. In the game, Beatrice is captured by infernal forces and Dante, now a Crusader, has to fight his way through Hell in order to rescue her, with the help of Death's magical scythe and various magical powers to fight his way through the nine circles of Hell, fighting monsters and jumping over pits and other traps. It is a really fun game, with some really spectacular graphics. It probably also enjoys the distinction of being one of the very few action video games to be based on 14th century Italian poetry.

The other game, Heavy Rain, was really different. It was really a role-playing mystery thriller, where you have to search a rain-soaked American city for a serial killer, "The Origami Killer", before he kills his latest victim. The game got a lot of attention for it's very innovative control system where you can interact with a lot of your environment, and also hear what your character is thinking at various points in the game. The decisions that you make in the course of the game can really affect the outcome, so it's one of those games that you can play a number of times and not play the same game twice. Again it is a really amazing looking game. Two very different games, but both really good in their own ways.

Today was the start of a new week at work, and once more it was very slow, with a lot of admittedly minor but very annoying irritations. I decided to take a half day on Tuesday and a day off on Wednesday, so that should be fun. There's no real reason for the time off, I just thought that it would be a nice change. The weather was really warm and sunny again today, and I hope that it continues like that for the rest of the week.

The Golden Army

Last night I watched the latest episode of Doctor Who on TV. It was a really good one this week and I think that the new Doctor and the new companion are both really starting to come into their own now.

Later on I watched a movie called Hellboy II: The Golden Army, directed by Guillermo Del Toro and based on a comic by Mike Mignola. The movie is basically about Hellboy (played by Ron Perlman) a large, cigar-chomping demon with a giant stone hand trying to defeat a rogue elf who wants to re-animate the robotic "Golden Army" and break an ancient truce between humans and supernatural creatures. I've not seen the first film but this one was a lot of fun, with plenty of action and humour and full of really impressive special effects.

I also watched a documentary called Not Quite Hollywood, which was about low-budget films in Australia, mostly sex comedies, horror films and action movies, which were dubbed "Ozploitation". A lot of them actually looked really good. The movie featured loads of clips from the films and interviews with the film-makers and actors, and also contributions from fans of the genre, such as an enthusiastic Quentin Tarantino.

Today I went along to my parent's house where the latest issue of Sight and Sound had arrived (this month it was featuring a special on Italian cinema) and also the game Dante's Inferno for the PlayStation 3 which I ordered on Monday. For lunch we had roast chicken, stuffing, peas, roast potatoes, chicken gravy and a can of beer. After lunch I had a walk with my Mum to a supermarket where I bought the game Heavy Rain for the PlayStation 3. When we got back it was actually nice enough to sit out in the garden for a change. It was really warm and sunny.

Shopping for Death

Last night I was playing Batman: Arkham Asylum on the PlayStation 3. Basically, the storyline of the game is that Batman is delivering the Joker to the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Gotham City. However when Batman delivers the Joker it turns out that it is a trap set by the Joker, as all the inmates are set free and take over the Asylum, taking guards and medical staff hostage, with the Joker as the self-appointed boss of the Asylum. Basically, you play Batman and you have to explore the Asylum, rescue hostages, fight the villains (including most of the familiar Batman adversaries), solve puzzles and eventually defeat the Joker. It's a really involving game and a lot of fun.

I also watched an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on DVD. It was a story called "Shopping for Death" written by Ray Bradbury and concerned two elderly insurance salesmen who are trying to save an extremely obnoxious woman before she annoys someone enough thet they kill her. It was one of the more unusual episodes.

It was another quiet day at work today. I managed to listen to all three hours of the radio adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold which I've got on my iPod. I do like it when it's really quiet and empty at work, because I'm perfectly happy just to sit and listen to my iPod and just get on with it, basically.

Six Hours

Last night was really pretty quiet. I watched an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents set in San Francisco in 1909 about a dowtrodden file clerk who shoots his boss when he gets sacked but is shocked a couple of days later when he is asked to return to the office as usual and his boss is apparently alive and well.

I was at work today and in the morning we had to go to a meeting about the new corporate plan. Due to the recent problems with the housing market the organisation have been losing a lot of money and they are expecting that to continue, and they are looking at ways to save money, although we were all assured that they were not planning any redundancies, basically they are letting it happen through natural wastage. Anyway, it's one of these regular panics that boil up every so often, but I am still definitely planning on the Canada move.

I left after six hours today and when I got home I decided to order the video game Dante's Inferno for the PlayStation 3, so that should be fun.

Bioshock

Last night I was playing some of Bioshock on the PlayStation 3. It is a pretty good game set in an underwater city called Rapture, where you play a character who has to go through the city in order to get to the surface, unfortunately most of the inhabitants of the city have been driven insane and violent by genetic engineering, and then there are these eerie little girls who are guarded by large powerful robots. However you can find weapons strewn around and also find money to buy various weapons and energy foods, along with various power-ups that give you special powers. You can also "hack" into vending machines so that you can get equipment and power-ups for free and also hack into security robots so that they attack enemies instead of you. It is a really fun game.

I also watched a Doctor Who story from 1969 called "The War Games". Basically The Doctor (who is played by Patrick Troughton) and his friends arrive in what they first believe to be the trenches of World War One, but soon discover that they are on an alien planet divided into various "Time Zones" each containing a historical war from Earth where brainwashed soldiers from Earth's past have been brought by aliens and forced to fight. It was pretty good.

Today I went out to the shops and bought a graphic novel called The Sandman: World's End written by Neil Gaiman, which means I have all ten volumes in the main Sandman saga now, and a book called The Diarists' Diary 2010. I also used one of my vouchers that I got for my brothday to get the CD soundtrack of the movie Magnolia and a DVD of Doctor Who: Image of the Fendahl.

I have to go to work tomorrow for one day. After that, I'll be finished with work until the new year. It feels really weird that it has now been a decade since all the fuss about the Millennium and the "Y2K Bug" and everything. It does not feel as long as that at all.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Last night I was playing some of Batman: Arkham Asylum on the PlayStation 3. It's a really fun game. The background is that Batman has captured The Joker and has brought him to Arkham Asylum, but it turns out that it's all a trap and that Arkham Asylum has been taken over by The Joker and his henchmen, and the staff, including Comissioner Gordon, have been taken hostage. Basically you play Batman and you have to explore the corridors of Arkham, fighting with The Joker's henchmen and all the other familiar Batman enemies, including The Riddler who has left a number of puzzles scattered around that you have to solve. It's a very involving game, and a lot of fun.

Later on I was watching the 1982 movie Halloween III: Season of the Witch, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace. It's a very unusual sequel because, unlike every other movie in the Halloween franchise, this one does not focus on the indestructible psychopath Michael Myers. Instead it concerns the insane owner of a toy company called Silver Shamrock, who maufactures a range of popular children's Halloween masks which are advertised endlessly with an irritating countdown jingle ("Three more days to Halloween... Halloween... Halloween... Three more days to Halloween... Silver Shamrock"). However, it turns out that the masks are lethal booby traps which are due to be activated by a special signal transmitted on Halloween night. Apparently, the producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill, wanted to turn the Halloween franchise into a kind of anthology film series with a new seperate horror film released every year focussing on a different aspect of the Halloween season. However the idea was abandoned due to the total commercial failure of this movie. The original script was written by acclaimed writer Nigel Kneale, who created the Quatermass TV series, but he had his name taken off the film when his script was changed in order to make it more gruesome and violent.

I started writing my NaNoWriMo story yesterday. I got 2,026 words done yesterday. The target is to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of November.

Today was yet another dull and quiet day in the office.

Dracula

Late last night I was watching the 1931 film of Dracula, directed by Tod Browning. In the movie, a young solicitor named Renfield (Dwight Frye) travels to the remote Castle Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, where the mysterious Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) is planning to move to England. The movie does not stick closely at all to the original Bram Stoker novel, and it hasn't aged very well by modern standards, but it is still a classic. Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi ended up forever typecast as Dracula and his performance has been imitated and parodied countless times since, but the perfrmance is still a really powerful one.

Today I went along and did some shopping. I got the film Choke, based on the Chuck Palahniuk book, on DVD, and a video game called Batman: Arkham Asylum for the PlayStation 3. I'm going to chill out and relax this evening until NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow.

Happy Halloween!

The Hurt Locker

Last night I was playing on my new video games. Mirror's Edge was set in a futuristic city where your character has to run around and find and deliver secret information. This is done mainly by running and jumping between rooftops, swinging over various obstacles, running along corridors and avoiding enemies (you get kind of extra points if you manage to get to the end of each level without killing anyone. Prince of Persia was set in a kind of fantasy landscape where you have to fight various strange creatures and use magical powers, as well as sword fighting, running along walls and the usual running and jumping. They both look really challenging but they were fun. I tend to get really quite involved when playing video games.

Later on I was watching a Doctor Who story from 1970 called "Spearhead from Space", in the story, the third Doctor (played by Jon Pertwee) finds himself stranded on present-day Earth at a time when a sinister plastics factory is being taken over by strange, plastic alien robots called Autons. It was the first story to feature Jon Pertwee as the Doctor and also the first Doctor Who story made in colour. The story features quite a well-known and genuinely eerie sequence where department store dummies and manniquins come to life and start attacking people.

It was a really beautiful warm, sunny day today. I went and got my groceries this morning, and for my lunch I bought a pack of gazpacho soup (which is kind of tomato soup with peppers which is traditionally served ice cold - and is very refreshing), a triple pack of bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches and some strawberry milk. After lunch I went up to the Cineworld cinema to meet up with Alan and see The Hurt Locker. The movie, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, told the story of an American military bomb disposal team in Iraq who suffer not only from the immense day-to-day stress of their job but also from tensions within the team. It was a pretty good movie and quite intense.

Games and Check-Up

Last night, of course, I was watching the feature-length final episode of The Wire. It felt a real shame to kind of say goodbye to the series because it was so good. I'll have to get the DVD sets sometime.

Work was very quiet, as it usually is on a Friday, when most people take the day off. I left pretty early, at around half past two and went to the shops. I bought a couple of second hand PlayStation 3 games, Mirror's Edge and Prince of Persia. On my way home I stopped off at the doctor's surgery and dropped off my completed registration form, and showed them my passport and TV license as proof of identification and address. They want me to go for a New Patient check up at some point. I should call up to book it on Tuesday, because it takes two working days to get the details on the system.

Columns

Last night was pretty quiet. I was playing some more games on the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection. I played a few games of Sonic the Hedgehog and a game called Columns, which was kind of similar to Tetris. Basically you have to match up various columns of coloured gems to make lines of three or more, which then disappear and you get points. The game is over when the gems reach the top of the screen. I really remember Tetris. I used to have it for the Gameboy. I can still remember the irritating music. Aside from that I was watching repepats of various comedy shows, such as The Big Bang Theory.

Today was a very quiet and very dull day at work, the people flying the hawk in the car park is still a big draw in the office. Also there were the usual amount of people who were doing nothing but moaning all day. Aside from that I was chatting with my friend Chris about Irvine Welsh novels, how to emigrate and trying to list all the movies Malcolm McDowell has made.

Hard Candy

Last night I was watching a 2006 movie called Hard Candy, directed by David Slade, about a photographer (played by Patrick Wilson) who has been flirting with a teenage girl (Ellen Page) on the internet. However when he meets her the roles of predator and prey are quickly reversed. It's a really disturbing and pretty intense film, taking place almost entirely in the photographer's large house. It is also very well-acted, with mostly only the two characters on-screen throughout the whole movie.

After the movie I was playing Sonic the Hedgehog (on the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection) before heading to bed. That is still a really good game even after nearly twenty years. The graphics are still good even today and most importantly the gameplay more than holds up. I remember the games we used to have for our old Amstrad computer. Some of them I still think would be great to play again. Then again like I was saying a few days ago, nostalgia can really play tricks on you. Like movies and TV shows which I thought were absolutely awesome when I was a younger but now just don't work at all for me.

It was another quiet day at work, at pretty dull. At around the middle of the morning there was a procession of taxi cabs passing the office all decorated with bright balloons and coloured paper and streamers and so forth, all honking their horns and playing music and stuff through loudspeakers. It's something that the taxi company does every year of taking disabled kids out for the day to the beach. It always attracts a lot of attention in the office where people are just always ready for any kind of distraction.

The Midwich Cuckoos

Last night I was listening to the first epsiode in a three part radio adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos, based on the novel by John Wyndham. The story revolves around the quiet English village of Midwich where, one afternoon, the inhabitants suddenly all fall unconcious at once, as does anyone who comes within a two mile radius of the village. After a couple of hours, everyone wakes up apparently unharmed. However, it turns out that every woman of child-bearing age is suddenly pregnant. The pregnancies are all surprisingly brief and when the children are born, they soon show signs of strange powers. It's quite a famous story that has been filmed a number of times before (as The Village of the Damned). It was a pretty enjoyable play.

Later on I was watching the final of The Apprentice, which was very entertaining. I think this season has probably been the best one of the show so far. It has been very funny. Then I was playing some games on the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection, some of them are obviously better than others, and a few of them have really not aged very well, but mostly it's a lot of fun, and the Sonic the Hedgehog games in particular are still great even after all this time.

Today of course was the start of another week at work and it was very slow and quiet and plagued by the usual endless computer problems. I got home at around quarter past five. I was having a look at some of my old diaries. I remember last year I had the idea of typing out all my old diaries and journals, but I kind of forgot about it and never really got done. My diaries are currently over thirty volumes. It's very interesting, particularly when I read about hings that were totally stressing me out years ago, for example eight years ago I was finishing university and I was convinced that I was never going to graduate. I was totally certain that I had completely failed, but in the end it turned out that I had passed. At the moment I have two main paper journals on the go. One is pretty much just about what I do every day and the other is more about my thoughts and feeling and opinions.

Old-Style Video Games

I watched an interesting documentary on TV last night called My Life in Verse, which featured comedian Robert Webb (one half of the Mitchell and Webb comedy duo and one of the stars of Peep Show) discussing the importance of poetry in his life, with particular emphasis on the work of TS Eliot. It was very interesting and surprisingly emotional at times. I also saw a really fun web movie called Fairy Tale Police which starred Rachael Leigh Cook as one of a pair of human cops ina kind of bizarre fairy-tale world. It was really quite funny and Rachael Leigh Cook is always worth watching.

Today I went out and bought a video game called Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection. It's a compilation of over forty games that were originally released for the Sega Mega Drive console (the Sega Genesis in the US) between about 1989 and 1995. The games are obviously very dated by now, but they're still fun and playable. I really remember when those consoles were out and there was a huge rivalry between Nintendo and Sega. It was actually quite a big thing at the time. I remember my brother, who had a Super Nintendo (we were a Nintendo family back then, we had the Super Nintendo and my brother and I each had a Gameboy console and we were into Super Mario and all that), once drawing a picture of Nintendo's mascot Mario barbecueing Sega's mascot Sonic the Hedgehog, which he would show to his friends who had Segas. Playing those kind of games again really brings me back to the early 1990s. It's really too easy to sentimentalise and get nostalgic for the past particularly because in hindsight you do tend to remember it as being a lot more fun than it actually was. I remember actually at work yesterday I was chatting with my friend Chris, who is a couple of years younger than me, about old games consoles and how they are different to those ones there today and I said "do you realise we are now on the wrong side of a generation gap?" and he was like, "oh, God, yeah we are."

I'm thirty years old now, and I always get depressed about my age. It's like I often think about dating, that if I did start doing it, it just wouldn't really be fun any more (mind you, none of my dating experiences so far could ever in any way be described as fun, more like total nightmares) because I'm probably too old to actually enjoy it. Also, there is so much other stuff that I want to do, like being successful and so on, and life is really short.