What I’ve been doing

• Working on an the cover to an EP, and a website for Kirsty Bromley. You’ll be able to buy the former from the latter soon.
• Working on a script for Crash Talyor.
• Doing flats and generally being the not-really-that-glamorous assistant for Mr Andrew Tunney. You’ll be able to see the results of that soon.
• 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).

LinkBloggy bit

• A Brief Rant on The Future of Interaction Design. What it says on the tin. An interesting look at how we interact with our technology.
• The excellent mr Sam Gwilym carries on thinking about that, and especially about styluses (styli?).
• Takeshi Miike and Phoenix Wright. YES.

“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. Aside from the fact it’s like someone mashed together 50′s Japanese animation, the Yellow Submarine film and Richard Morgan’s harsh, ubernoir cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon (and its sequels), it’s a unique and surreal show brimming with emotion as well as a surprising amount of intelligence. And can’t wait to see more.

Before I carry on, I should say: If you are into surreal psychological SF, or interesting retro animation styles, go and watch the first three episodes of this now. I’m going to be giving some spoilers in this review and I think this is one of those shows best watched without knowing too much. A word of warning though, Kaiba is not a children’s show, despite the cute and cartoony character designs.

After seeing how much acclaim Kaiba had been getting, I took a look at the opening episodes and was completely sold. The story drops us in the middle of a surreal, colourful dystopia, juxtaposing character designs that look half Osamu Tezuka, half extra-vintage kids cartoon with some really quite bleak and twisted writing. It works fantastically, the highly stylised art style letting the show do things that would be incredibly harsh if done realistically. People die brutally, characters have their minds torn apart, and there’s even been what could be classed as rape during the second episode. Despite that, it’s only when you stop to think about it what you’ve just seen that the horribleness of what has been happening really sinks in, letting it all pass by like some kind of dream or nightmare while you watch it. The mash of tones can be unsettling, but the lightness the animation style brings also helps break up the more serious, cerebral elements of the story while giving the added bonus of making the show completely stand out from everything else released in the last couple of years.

Our story opens as a young man wakes up with no name or memories, his only clues to his identity being an odd symbol on his stomach, a locket with the blurred photo of a girl inside, and a perfectly round hole in the middle of his chest. And things get stranger from there on out. Our hero, soon dubbed ‘Warp’, is thrown into a world where strange flying machines can suck out people’s minds on small cone shaped chips—reminiscent of Altered Carbon‘s ‘cortical stacks’—or steal their bodies to be used by the rich and privileged. With the help of some of the strange people he meets along the way, the protagonist stows away on a space ship and begins his journey through the stars to try and track down his identity. The world caught my imagination quickly, and in the three episodes I’ve seen the central idea of separating minds and bodies has been used fantastically. Warp has had 3 different bodies by the end of the third episode, one of which was a completely silent, toy hippo who’s form he had been put in so he could pretend to be luggage. Meanwhile, his benefactor had taken a shine to his first body, but realising she wouldn’t get anywhere with him, uploaded a copy of herself into it so she could have some ‘fun’. It does not end well. There’s some other very interesting ideas at play in it already, like what really counts as death if your mind and soul is always backed up, and what happens to people in a world where you can sell your own memories or body for money.

If this sounds like a lot of weird issues for a series to have raised so early on, that’s because it is… but it’s also a large part of why this show has made such a big impression on me. The art style is odd and taking a lot of getting used to, but it’s really growing on me, and works with the story far better than it looks like it should. To be honest, the sex scene in episode 2 really threw me and I almost stopped watching, as it cranked the weirdometer up a bit high even for me… but I’m very glad I continued watching. Episode 3 is a little more sane, but beautifully, brutally tragic and with a fantastic use of the soundtrack to boot. If these episodes are anything to go by, Kaiba is looking to be a really stand out show with some stunning ideas and fantastic visuals, on top of an emotional core that grabs you and doesn’t let go. The plot that is starting to develop is intriguing, but even the little stories of Warp’s travels have been more than interesting to keep me watching the rest of the series.

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.)

Come check it out!

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.

‘Hey Hey My My Yo Yo’ Junior Senior
Got on the recommendation of a friend and positive memories of that music video for Move Your Feet with all the pixel art. Anyway, the band is Danish the the album is full of pure hippyhoppy pop FLUFF that is far more infectious than it should be. Really, it’s silly and sugary and unashamedly cheesy and the result is a very fun record who’s opening track, ‘Hip Hop a Lula’ I can’t stop playing and I don’t know why. My version also came with the ep ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’ that is also pretty good with a standout opening tune. It’s all very happy and great stuff unless you want to take it too seriously.

‘In Rainbows’ Radiohead
At what should be at the other end of the spectrum, at bloody last the new Radiohead album is in the shops. Ignoring the very interesting hype from before with the pay-what-you-like download fun, I wanted a CD so I waited. Now, as one of those odd people who actually liked Kid A (but that’s because it was the last one I heard so I was ready for it) I don’t mind the weirder directions that Thom Yorke has been taking the band, but… I think In Rainbows has benefited hugely from Thom making his solo album before it. If Hail to the Theif was a little bit of a return to normal after the band had got Kid A/Amnesiac out of their system, In Rainbows is even more so. It’s a bit less tortured as well, but it’s not a complete step backwards either. The results of their experiments shine through all of it, but at the same time there are great tunes going on too. And guitars! Yay! Anyway, I like this one a lot, and absolutely adore the track ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place.’ Good stuff. Now hopefully they won’t make us wait like 3 years for the next one.

‘Hey Venus!’ Super Furry Animals
I could be lazy here and go ‘It’s SFA, of course it’s good’. Because it is. It’s a little more normal guitar pop than Lovekraft but it still has the usual quirks and charm you’d expect from them. (Especially shown in the opening tracks, the first of which is about itself being a Gateway Song to the rest of the album, and the second opening with the spoken lines ‘This song is based on a true story. Which would be fine, if it wasn’t autobiographical’). I do have to admit that none of the songs have yet beaten my fave SFA tracks from other albums, but they are growing on me and some of them are catchy as hell. It doesn’t really push the envolope or anything but it doesn’t need to because it’s still good and gives you pretty much what you want in a Super Furry Animals album. Which would be slightly odd but catchy songs mixing pop and rock sounds and great harmonies with fun synthy twiddles and interesting production. Lovely.

Anyone else been listening to anything interesting?