Playing with new materials. A pentel GFKP brush pen, and Manga Studio EX.
Starting running. I’ve been trying to get on a bit more of a health kick lately. Needs doing. Trying out a neat little app called Get Running, it seems pretty good. I guess I’ll know how good in a couple of weeks.
What I’ve been reading
The Action Philosophers trade. It’s been out for a while but I’ve always meant to pick it up and it doesn’t disappoint. A fantastic way to learn about the history of western (and some eastern) thinking. It’s funny without undermining its subject, and has a tonne of interesting little details about the lives of philosophers as well as their ideas.
The New ‘Hark, A Vagrant’ Trade. Sure I’ve read most of it online but it’s smart, it’s funny, and Ms Beaton deserves our money.
One Piece. Yes, I know, but I only started reading it when I moved back to Manchester and was pleasantly surprised by how wonderful the characters are, and how bouncy, clean and energetic the art is. I was so ready to brush it off as yet another epic shonen saga for me to have no interest in reading but to my horror it turns out it’s actually fantastic. I’m not sure I want to watch the show, but the comics are great.
Wonderwoman and Justice League Dark. Already spoken a bit about Wonderwoman (see: ‘Yay!’ and ‘SHE HEADBUTTS A CENTAUR’ etc), and JLD is interesting but so strongly entrenched in set-up land I can’t say much about it until it gets going.
Next up is going to be REAMDE, because there has not been enough Neal Stephenson in my life. (Can there be enough Neal Stephenson in your life?)
What I’ve been watching
Spinning Penguin Drum. Strangeness from the director of Utena. Deep strangeness. And penguins. And trains. And references to national disasters and hypothetical libraries. And more symbolism than you can shake a stick at. I’ll post about this one in more detail when it’s finished I think.
Fate/Zero. Oh man. Fate/Zero. TypeMoon stuff has always been a guilty pleasure of mine and this is TypeMoon plus Urobuchi (writer of Saya no Uta and Puella Magi Madoka) plus UFOtable and Kalafina (Studio and Musicgroup that did Kara no Kyoukai) . If you don’t know the Fate universe, the set up is effectively a battle royale between a bunch of mages (who generally keep all magic a secret from the public) who each summon a legendary hero to fight for them in a battle for the ‘holy grail’. It’s a prequel to ‘Fate/Stay Night’, but where that was a grail war fought by effectively flailing newbies getting it wrong, this one appears to be run by cheating assholes and it’s brilliant. The result takes a few episodes to get going but once it does, it’s gotten better every episode. Occasionally the budget shows (it’s TV anime after all) but it’s incredibly pretty, and the story and characters keep getting better. Streaming in a load of languages on NicoNico for 7 days after broadcast, then it’s over to CrunchyRoll. Where you can have it in the delicious high-res it deserves. (If you do plan on watching it and want some F/SN first… do yourself a favour and skip the anime. Find the game or a play through and read that instead, as the show is both the weakest route of the story, and makes the lead character terrible).
“What are memories? Souls? Spirits? This is a world where memories can be turned into data and stored. Even if the body dies, its memories live on, and can be transferred to another body. Bad memories can be erased, and good ones downloaded. However, this is something only the privileged can do. In a world like this, our protagonist, Kaiba, is travelling in another body with no memories of his own.”
Kaiba is a 12 episode series that came out in Japan spring last year, from Masaaki Yuasa (MindGame, Cat Soup) and Madhouse, which won the Excellence Prize for animation 2008. After the first 3 episodes, I can see why. Continue Reading
As people who talk to me a lot probably already know, I’m a bit of a fan of Pixel’s excellent freeware platformer, Cave Story (aka Doukutsu Monogatari). So when I heard that it was being ported to WiiWare by Nicalis, I was pretty excited even though I’m kinda still lacking in a Wii right now.
And got even MORE excited when this week, Nicalis contacted me asking to use some of my fanart for promotional work!
So, here it is on the Wii page of IGN, as a preview to the new gameplay videos. (Full size version of image here)
It’s great to see Pixel getting some money for his creation, and the guys at Nicalis seem to really love the game and are giving it the care and attention it deserves—I especially love that rather than using an interpolation algorithm to up the resolution, the sprites have been tweaked pixel by pixel, most of them by, uh, Pixel. And they’re looking fantastic, especially the hero. I can’t wait to see Curly Brace!
(And I was given the revelation that the hero’s scarf is actually green rather than the red 90% of fanart of him makes it. How about that.)
So, I’m up in Glasgow for a couple of days, to see some gigs at Celtic Connections, what is possibly the biggest celebration of traditional music still going in the UK. It’s around 3 weeks long with hundreds of acts all over the city. Sadly, due to workload and things like inconveniently having to graduate, I’m going to miss seeing my favourite acts playing here (Shooglenifty, Peatbog Faeries, Colin McIntire (or Mull Historical Society to you) and the secret GOD of Scottish song writing Michael Mara) but next year I intend to remedy this. OH do I intend to remedy this.
Anyway, enough about me, back to what I was watching last night. Keeping with the sense of humour all the best trad musicians have about the scene, as an antidote to Sunday’s ‘Harp Heaven’, last night there was a show called ‘Accordion Hell’, celebrating… well, the infamous accordion. The musicians were full into the theme and were all bedecked with little devil horns and plenty of damnation jokes. We were treated to 8 mind-blowingly talented accordion players, accompanied by a rather good drummer and an excellent guitarist (who also was an honorary accordion demon for one tune that he had written.) The range of tunes spanned from the bright and high-energy to the beautiful, delicate and moody, to the downright funky. All of it played with style, humour and skill. I think one reason most people hate the instrument is they’ve never heard it in the hands of someone who really knows how to work it, and haven’t seen what an amazing, rich sound one person with a squeezebox can make happen. When the cords and complex melodies get layered up it’s hard to accept it’s just one instrument doing it, and some of the intricate and blisteringly fast finger work that was going on in the concert was just staggering. (Though that’s something else people who have never much been in the folk scene get to see. Sure, some of it can be lacklustre, but we’ve also got some of the most technically brilliant musicians playing in this scene and the level of skill it takes to pull off some of the things they can do is hugely under-estimated.)
So yes, Accordion Hell was fantastic and renewed my appreciation for those can take an instrument used for so much evil and mediocrity and use it for the forces and good and awesome. Brilliant.
