Amazon only lists four Troma movies on DVD, but one of them is Toxic Avenger, probably their best known. Personally, I’ve only ever seen one of the companies movies- Basket Case, I think- though I’d like to see more. The Guardian profiles Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman and his Cannes antics today.
Every so often I find Dark Basic on Amazon and think I should buy it and have a go at building a game. This article in today’s Guardian has got me thinking it again.
Just for silliness, and inspired by yesterday’s TMBG episodes, I’m declaring this a song titles and lyrics in post headers weekend (all the way through to Monday). Lyrics will be acknowledged and, where possible, a link to a relevant amazon page provided.
This one Abba
Previous post (after editing) Carter USM
This was originally a Heavensent post, but I like the subject so much I’ve copied it over here as well-
Carlton Hibbert has a link over to Dusso, a matte painter who has worked on Lord of the Rings and other big movies. He has also made Hangar 7, a short propeller-punk film set on Peenemunde with lots of Luft 46 style aircraft. Sadly, the QuickTime movie has been heavily compressed and is quite pixellated, but take a look at the production images for a clue of the quality of work this guy does for fun.
(And one other thing. It seems the Nazis drove Austin 1300s/ Maxis. In the whole of LA they couldn’t find one Beetle?)
sheer madness. I despise blogger and still have no clue how to design the site. So in the meantime, the site will act as a testing bed for my asp .net adventures. The demo pages for the new site will be linked from the main www.johnnytheo.com, allowing everyone to see how it all works.
I’ve been modifying my linakge to Amazon. Check out the new buttons in the side bar. At the very bottom of the sidebar are the bestselling graphic novels.
Post & Publish, when I get back to it, is a tale of the life, friends and (mostly failed) loves of a thirtysomething blogger. As it’s so obviously biographical, I have to be very aware of the dangers of fictionalising real people.
I’m already working under an unspoken (mostly, at least one person has it in writing) promise of discretion in blogging about the affairs of friends and family. But fiction is different. I build my characters bit by bit, each new detail being like those little revelations you get in any relationship. Which should be fine and create unique individuals, except that the details are almost all based upon observations. One gay character in Another Education was, in all other respects and completely unconciously, a fair representation of a good friend.
Thankfully he didn’t seem to mind. But he did keep calling me Darling for a few months afterward.
This is note the blogger I used to. Something must be wrong….
Bits of the new blogger interface are screwed up. I just lost a long post about my journey in (major accident on the M56 = gridlock in South Manchester and an extra hour on my journey) and work (I still don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, but I’m certain it’s not meant to be button monkey on the photocopier like I was yesterday).
Bugger.
After trying to lumber us all with ridiculous, robber baron-ish Terms of Service a couple of weeks ago the good people at Cafe Press must have haemorrhaged store owners, because they’ve re-written the ToS to take out the contentious clauses.
I haven’t read the full document yet, because it was playing silly buggers, but it’s here.
Maybe I’ll re-open my store with them.
Maybe.
I suspect that Spinneyhead is currently set to the wrong time zone as it’s currently 12:01 whilst I’m typing this. I guess it got messed up when we migrated to the new Blogger interface. Unfortunately only our evil web master can change the settings.
Toto (you don’t remember them? Here are a few of their albums on Amazon) have had to post a rebuttal of a statement on their website which said that one of their members wouldn’t be on the summer tour because he was having a sex change. It seems the music press has a hard time recognising a joke, even a blatantly obvious one. (Insert “Which would explain [band of choice].” here)
via Left & Right
The Spinneyhead store may be dead but now you can buy Blogger t-shirts. There’s a few other Blogger wearables at the Google store.
I’m updating my Amazon wishlist. If you’re feeling generous, please send me one of the items listed. If you’re not that rich, then how about dropping a few pennies in the tip jar. I’d like Spinneyhead to pay for itself, covering hosting fees and subscriptions to Blogger Pro etc., and maybe one day take the whole photos section completely digital (thanks to Damian for giving me his old digital camera. I’m going to take a few test photos with it later today.)
Whilst I’m at Amazon, I would like to recommend Interface by ‘Stephen Bury’ (actually Neal Stephenson and Frederick George working together), which the system recommended to me, but I’ve already got. It’s a neat story about political manipulation and the power of the focus group taken too far as a medical chip in a Presidentail candidate’s brain- put there to help him recover from a stroke- is used to manipulate his actions on the election trail. It’s a prescient satire on Wubble U (except that the candidate being manipulated is a decent and intelligent man who is appalled when he discovers what’s going on.) I’ve stolen the chip- in- the- head idea for my Union Jack proposal, to be used in a slightly different way.
Well, the Spinneyhead shop at Cafe Press has closed, as I’m certain that I’d end up paying the monthly fee because of low sales. Shame. Now I will have to go ahead and sell merchandise straight from the site, I guess. As I commented in a reply earlier-
As it was- when I started it- free to maintain, I set [the Cafe Press shop] up with an eye to the future. It was another way to draw attention to Spinneyhead and ensure there’d be a ready pool of merchandise when we hit critical mass and people wanted tchotchkes.
I guess Cafe Press have discovered they’ve got so many low volume shops being created that their server and traffic costs have rocketed and this is their way of trimming or fleecing what they consider to be dead wood.
Yeep! The Monitor Duty guys’ reading of the new Cafe Press terms of service is very worrying. It seems they want to fine underperforming stores and make a copyright grab on all the stuff that’s been uploaded to their servers. I’m going to go through the ToS later and see if I read it that way as well. Then maybe I’ll go looking for alternatives.
(BTW the spinneyhead store at Cafe Press is here. I might as well plug it whilst it’s still in operation.)
I’ve had a lot of hits in the last two days from searches for Pykrete. Someone must have a class project going on. So another quick recap on this wierd stuff is due.
Pykrete is made by mixing water and sawdust or wood pulp and then freezing it. A rather eccentric British inventor called Geoffrey Pyke dreamt it up as a material to build super huge ships from, based upon an idea of Churchill’s to create floating airbases. A 60 foot long test model was created in a Canadian lake, but the project never went any further than this, except in fiction.
The number of Pykrete resources on the web have increased since my first posts about the stuff in relation to Heavensent. Cabinet magazine fills out some biographical details of Pyke in their overview of the project, the story has been adapted for kids’ science TV, there’s been a radio play about it (I haven’t read the full text yet) and the Guardian has the obituary of Max Perutz, who also worked on the project.
I’ve probably mentioned this site before, but it’s a cool ‘what if?’ trip, and one of the inspirations for the tech level of Heavensent. It’s also back up and working again after a period of broken links and dropped images. Today’s visit unearthed details of two dirt cheap pulse jet powered fighters, the Junkers Ju EF126 “Elli” and Blohm & Voss BV P.213. They have such an air of desperation and resourcefulness about them that I have to incorporate them into the story at some point. In fact, I think the air corps of the Hidden Army (see chapter 6) should have some.
I’m collecting Luft ’46 style planes and equipment for a large diorama. Anyone who wants to contribute to the collection can find all sorts of cool kits at Hannants. I should start a Wants List.
Penny arrived at the barbecue on Saturday and demanded a copy of Another Education because she’d been printing it out and ran out of ink with only 20 pages to go. This is the sort of thing my ego needs. Demands that I publish the follow up, and a little bit of persuasion finally drove me to produce the Acrobat version of Ten Years Asleep- downloadable here. The online version has been updated to match it, and is available here.
A little note, which I’ll be incorporating into the download page and adding as an authors comment on the online version just as soon as I expand it some more-
Every few years, I sit down and write a State of the Ian story. In 1992 it was Ruby Red, two people picking up the pieces after traumas and fallout from previous relationships- with a little lesbianism thrown in because I became attached to a supporting character and wanted to make her happy. 1996 was politics in Another Education, with the compromises and bad decisions forced upon students by the increasing concentration on the bottom line in higher education.
Out Of Fashion And A Trifle Uncool was written in 1998 and was about a bunch of guys in their late twenties casting about for some direction in their lives, with varying success. It forms the major part of Ten Years Asleep. The original TYA was an attempt in 2001 to consolidate Education and Fashion and add some more stories spread over the decade to trace all the characters interactions over the period. Some of the chapters for this project have been included in the story put up today. Some others- notably a silly contemporary tale of Susan and Gareth unwittingly foiling industrial espionage- have been excised.
Looking back over the stories it’s possible to see themes- the female lead who has overcome some past problems and is now determined to leave them far behind, who falls for the clever but slightly flakey male lead; indie music; the Lakes; eccentric cars; beer. People who know me have spotted other things I missed, such as the feminine side I didn’t know I had. But the most obvious aspect of all the stories is my continued and ever optimistic romanticism. Like Gareth, I continue to believe that one day, through the simple method of just being myself, I am going to meet Miss Right. Based upon my body of work I’d hazard a guess that she’ll be a short redhead or brunette (but she could be blonde, black, asian or oriental. She doesn’t have to be short either- I won’t know until I know.)
I’m off into town to look Darcy-esque and see if I can bump into Miss Right. Enjoy the book.
I am now under orders to put Out Of Fashion And A Trifle Uncool/ Ten Years Asleep into pdf format and post it to the site and start work on my vaguely biographical ‘This is what I blogged and this is what really happened’ novel Post & Publish, which I’ve been thinking about for a while now.
The idea is to have the narrator blogging his life away in the countdown to a significant date (say, for example, his third of a century party) commenting on his life and the things going on around him. Obviously, what he says in the posts won’t have the full texture of the reality, and there are going to be some bits that he leaves out, so the self censorship and editing, as well as the narrative, give an insight into his character. Politics and silly links will be left out, of course, unless they relate directly to the tale.
Gotta go now, must start writing.