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.

Extra Holiday

Last night was pretty quiet. I lisened to the second part of The Honourable Schoolboy on CD, read and played Assassin's Creed II for an hour or so.

Today was another fairly dull day at work. In the afternoon we had to go up to a meeting that lasted for nearly an hour. The meeting itself was pretty much pointless. One good thing is that I have an extra day added to my holiday! Instead of having to be in work on the 30th and 31st December, I only have to be in on the 31st. It seems there was a mix up in the processing.

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.

Playing Video Games

Last night I was playing a bit of Red Dead Redemption which has so far been a really fun game. The way it's done it really looks like those old Clint Eastwood Western movies.

I was back at work today and it was pretty much another quiet and fairly dull day in the office.

At least it should be a short week this week.

Yes Man

Last night I was playing my new games, and they both look really good. Uncharted 2 is a kind of action-adventure game very similar to the Tomb Raider series which involves a lot of scaling up walls, fighting enemies and running and jumping over obstacles in the search for ancient treasure. Red Dead Redemption is a Western game, where you play a gunslinger trying to track down a violent gang. They both seem really fun and they both have really spectacular sound and graphics.

Today I went out to get my groceries for the week. When I got home I was watching the movie Yes Man, a 2008 film directed by Peyton Reed, about a withdrawn and depressed banker (played by Jim Carrey) who, after attending a self-help seminar, decides to commit himself to saying "yes" to any opportunity that presents itself, which results in various comic consequences. I quite liked the movie. I thought it was pretty funny.

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.

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.

Birthday and Christmas

It has been a really busy few days! On Wednesday the 23rd it was my 31st birthday and my Dad came around to take me to my parent's house. For my birthday presents I got the Blu-Ray DVD of True Blood season one, the DVD of Peep Show season six, the graphic novel of The Sandman Volume Ten: The Wake written by Neil Gaiman, a New England tee-shirt, a portable Trivial Pursuit pack with all the questions focussing on Entertainment (i.e. film, music, books and sport), a magnetic dart board and some gift vouchers. My brother and his girlfriend, Katherine, were due to come up the day before to spend Christmas at my parents but, due to the really bad weather, they weren't able to come up then, and they came on my brithday so instead of going to Hard Rock Cafe for lunch as we had planned, we decided to have a Chinese take-away meal instead.

On Christmas Eve I stayed in and watched Peep Show. In the afternoon I played a few games of darts and Trivial Pursuit with the family. In the evening I was watching a horror movie from 1974 on TV called Black Christmas, directed by Bob Clark, in which a mysterious killer stalks a group of college students who are staying in a sorority house over Christmas.

On Christmas Day itself We all opened up our presents together. I got a DVD of Doctor Who: The War Games, the graphic novel of The Sandman Volume Nine: The Kindly Ones written by Neil Gaiman, a video game called Bioshock for the PlayStation 3, a book called The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, a book called Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar, a 2010 diary, a Doctor Who calendar, and some chocolate. We had a great Christmas lunch with the usual turkey, miniature sausages, stuffing, rolls of bacon, roast potatoes, peas and gravy with crackers that all had musical instruments in them and basically one person acted as conducter and the rest of us had to try to play a tune with the instruments. In the evening I watched the Christmas special of Doctor Who, which was the first of a two part story which marks the final story that David Tennant plays the role of the Doctor.

Yesterday I went back home and watched the TV broadcast of Hamlet, which is probably the most famous of the plays by William Shakespeare. The story revolves around Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, who is extremely upset by his mother marrying his uncle, Claudius, less than two months after the mysterious death of his father. One night, Hamlet encounters the ghost of his father who informs Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius, and orders Hamlet to avenge his death. The TV broadcast was a version of the very highly acclaimed recent Royal Shakespeare Company production and starred David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius.

Today I stayed in and listened to a radio show called On the Outside it Looked like an Old-Fashioned Police Box, which was a documentary, hosted by Mark Gatiss, about the Target Books novelisations of Doctor Who stories which were very popular in the 1970s and 80s. I remember those books really well, because I read loads of them when I was a kid. They were really good and they were pretty much the first novels that I ever really read kind of on my own. In my High School they had a wide selection of them in the school library and they used to let us spend two lunchtimes a week in the library, if we wanted to, and every time I got the chance I used to go over there and read a Doctor Who book. Only the Doctor Who books for about five years. So even today if I watch an old episode of the show on DVD that I have never seen before I still have a weird sense of deja vu, and I remember it was because I read the novelisation of the show about twenty times when I was thirteen. Later on I watched a 1966 Doctor Who story on DVD called "The War Machines" in which a powerful new supercomputer has been installed in the then-newly constructed Post Office Tower in London. Of course the computer then decides to take over the world by brainwashing people to build robot "War Machines" (which kind of look like miniature tanks). It was pretty good.

It has been a really good few days.

Games

Last night I was watching an hour long documentary on BBC Four about how to solve cryptic crosswords. It just seemed like a really odd thing to make a documentary out of, although it was pretty fun.

It was followed by the first part of a three part documentary called Games Britannia which basically traces the history of games in Britain. Many of the games survive in at least some form even to this day. Then I was watching another episode of The Wire on DVD. I was watching the second episode of the second season, which was dealing with murder and corruption on the Baltimore docks.

Today was another quiet day at work. I'm taking a day off work tomorrow which should be fun.

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!

Grand Theft Cosmos

Although I missed the first quarter of an hour, due to the aggravating interruption from the gas and electricity guy, I did listen to most of a Doctor Who radio play called "Grand Theft Cosmos", in which The Doctor (played by Paul McGann) and Lucie (Sheridan Smith) arrive on 18th Century Earth, where they are trying to steal a strange and valuable jewel, which has a strange secret. I have been enjoying the radio series.

I actually remember, thinking back to old video games, I used to have a game for our old Amstrad 6128 computer called Roland in Time, which was basically like a computer game parody of Doctor Who, where you had to run around the screen finding crystals and avoiding monsters and traps. Some of the old games were really good. I also remember the old adventure games, in which the story was told entirely in text on the screen and you had to type in what you wanted your character to do and the story would unfold accordingly. They were good. I remember spending hours on a Lord of the Rings one.

I went along to work today and I walked there and back as well. I'm walking in order to lose some weight. I don't want to get to Canada looking like Alfred Hitchcock. However, due to the fact that I was up later than I had planned last night, I ended up sleeping in for an hour or so. As a result I had to miss out on my breakfast. It was another really quiet day at work, as usual. The thing is, much of the job is working with information from computer files now, so it is theoretically possible to spend the entire working day without once rising from the chair, which makes it kind of dull.

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.