Chronic Lack of Perspective Within US Government Shocker!

US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, talking about the men they're charging over the September 11th attacks:

[There will be] full due-process and defence lawyers and all of the fundamental rights that would bring to justice those were responsible for one of the worst war-crimes in world history.

(emphasis mine)

Never mind that it's not a bloody war crime at all since no one was actually at war at the time, Hiroshima, Dresden, the Trail of Tears and the Holocaust all just pale in comparison, don't they?

Cretin.

By all means bring these men to justice, but try to do it through something other than sheer rampant idiocy.

Heavy Metal Thunder

A lot of my fondest video gaming memories involve not the games themselves, but their soundtracks. The Amiga in particular had some great music ; Chaos Engine and Stardust are classics, and I remember playing through Lemmings mainly for the tunes.

I never had a PC Engine, as they were about as abundant as unicorn tears in Britain; in fact I never even saw one until very recently when one turned up in the window of GameStation. So I missed out on a whole system's worth of games, which I'm slowly catching up with on the Wii's Virtual Console.

I just downloaded Lords of Thunder, which like many PCE titles, is a shoot 'em up. Not one of my favourite game genres, to be honest, as I lack the inhumanly quick reactions needed to be any good at them, but Lords of Thunder is still worth playing, if only because of the absurdly over the top power metal soundtrack. Really, I've heard nothing like it before; it's as if DragonForce have set up shop inside the Wii and are rocking out like the galaxy itself depends on it.

It's sheer silly big-haired guitar-wielding brilliance:



Genius. How the guys at ocremix haven't been all over this game yet, I don't know.

Says It All...

"Good luck staying awake!"

The BBC's Super Bowl presenter, within thirty seconds of the coverage beginning.

Heath Ledger

"[We] are devastated that he will no longer be on hand to divert us, surprise us, inspire us, cheer us."

Oh, now it's just getting silly.

The Rehabilitation of Henry J Pym

Right, so as part of the Silver Bullets transformation into Comics Bulletin, they've set aside Tuesdays exclusively for Marvel content. And they've asked me to do a regular column, in which I bitch and moan about a Marvel character, because bitching and moaning brings in the punters, apparently. The first one is up, and concerns one Hank Pym, better known as Ant-Man. Or Yellowjacket. Or Giant-Man. Or Goliath. Or Dr. Pym...

Anyway, it's here. And "Green Day" wasn't my idea.

Brand New Day

Two posts in two weeks. It's getting to be a habit.

Not much to report, actually, except that over at SBC, we've read the first chapter of "Brand New Day" and found it rather less than brand new. If you read Spider-Man comics at any point between, say, 1969 and 1985, you've seen all of this before. That's not to say that it's not any good, but... well, read the review.

Renegade Master

Again, it's been a while. Oops.

Things have been fairly eventful, which makes a change, as usually I struggle to find interesting things to talk about here. The biggest thing is that we've moved house. We were feeling a bit cramped in our flat, despite the sea view, and so we've been looking at moving up to a house; Meg had been searching for a while, and we didn't think we were going to even start the process of moving until the spring, but she chanced upon a small cottage a bit further out of town than where we were (no sea view). We went to see it, loved it, and decided to go for it. We had to take it pretty much then and there, so we moved in a rush about a week before Christmas. And because the flat was part-furnished, we didn't have any furniture.

And we still don't. Our sofa and bed aren't arriving until February, so we spent Chrimble sitting in fishing chairs and sleeping on inflatable mattresses. A full third of our presents seemed to be among the two million lost by a beleaguered Royal Mail, and Meg burnt or sliced most of her fingers preparing the Chrimble dinner. Still, even with all that, and the requisite Christmas Colds, we had a pretty good time of it in our new place. It will be nice when we have real furniture, although I secretly quite like these funky fishing chairs.

I should probably also mention that my story "More Than You Can Chew" was recently printed in the third issue of vaguely-horror-themed anthology comic Paragon. It's not my best work by any means, as it's more of an illustration of a concept than a real story, but nonetheless it's great to see it in print. The rest of the issue is a really good read, including a fun mystical superhero thingie called Battle Ganesh, which plays like a Hindu Dragon Ball Z, and should turn out to be the star strip of the comic, Paragon's version of Judge Dredd or Dan Dare. Should you want to pick up a copy, you can find ordering details on the ComicSpace page.

Alas, the funky comics project I was hoping to kick off, um, today isn't ready, and I'm still behind on a strip I'm drawing for a friend, so my New Year's resolutions are to get the latter done by the end of January, and to at least get started on the former by Easter.

Oh, and the Silver Bullet Comic Books Year In Review for 2007 is up. Go and see what I was grumpy about last year, and what my more level-headed colleagues actually liked. Also at SBC, a review of Amazing Spider-Man #545. I'd dropped ASM a while ago, on the grounds of it being rubbish, and I wish I'd stuck to my boycott.

It's back to work for me tomorrow. Given how I forget how to do everything after only a weekend, having almost two weeks off will completely throw me, most likely.

Moon On A Stick

I saw Richard Herring in the street today. He's quite tiny.

The King Is Dead?

I think Papa Lazarou may have been out-scaried by The Mighty Boosh's Cockney Eel Man.

I Did It Thirty-Five Minutes Ago

Apologies to Americans and Torrenters, but I'm watching Heroes on BBC Three, so I'm a bit behind you lot. So this is unlikely to be a ground-breaking bit of analysis to you, but I have to tell someone, as it meant nothing to Meg, as she's never read Watchmen.

But my word, the Heroes people have. We found out tonight that Linderman, the shadowy yet successful businessman, and former member of a previous generation's superhero group, wants to save the world by uniting it in a time of crisis, a crisis he's not planned exactly, but certainly knows about, a crisis that will kill half of New York City.

When the most powerful character so far turned out to be an obsessive son of a watchmaker, I thought "ooh, a nod to Watchmen" but this is full blown homage. The creator of the show says he doesn't know much about comics, and any similarities are just coincidence. I call shenanigans on that.