Hitting the Heights

It seems odd to me that AD&D’s Ravenloft setting never included a version of Wuthering Heights.

Think about it. You’ve got the perfect Dark Lord in the form of Heathcliff, torturing his household and tormented by his memories of Catherine. Catherine would actually be a ghost, tapping on the windows at night and increasing Heathcliff’s torment. The Domain would consist of the bleak, high moors, with a few scattered houses and a single village, and the borders would be sealed when necessary by raging sleet and hail storms.

It’s such a natural fit that its lack boggles the mind. Were there no English Majors at TSR?

While on the subject of Wuthering Heights, I don’t believe that it’s possible for any human being to sing as high as Kate Bush does in the first few bars of her song based on the book. Her pitch is either a post-recording effect, or she is some kind of alien masquerading as a human being.

(I know where I’m putting my money… :D)

Oh, can I also mention Kate Beaton’s brilliant take on the book?

Wuthering Heights: Part 1
Wuthering Heights: Part 2
Wuthering Heights: Part 3

Nextwave

Finally got around to reading Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. over the weekend. My opinion? One of the funniest things I’ve read in ages.

For those unfamiliar, Nextwave is Warren Ellis’s deconstruction of modern super hero comics. He describes it himself thusly…

“It’s an absolute distillation of the superhero genre. No plot lines, characters, emotions, nothing whatsoever. It’s people posing in the street for no good reason. It is people getting kicked, and then exploding. It is a pure comic book, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. And afterwards, they will explode.”

He forgets to add that it’s freaking hilarious.

Having read something freaking hilarious it’s very tempting to expound on the bits that were particularly freaking hilarious.  I’m not going to do that, since not encountering them in context would spoil the jokes. But I will mention the following things…

Purple underpants
Rocket Submarines
The French
Tabby’s Mindlessness
Letters that don’t stand for things
The big bad’s intestinal problems
The entire existence of the Captain

Track it down and read it people. You won’t be disappointed.

PS: The book managed to inflict a bit of a crush on Tabby on me. There’s something about an insanely stupid woman that makes me go all masculine and protective – which is ridiculous because I’d most likely want to throttle myself after spending ten minutes with one 🙂

Urban Folklore

Here be dragons

This comic from Subnormality pretty much says it all.

They say maybe these are just good stories, as opposed to good facts. Just versions of old themes. But maybe those themes are old for a reason. Maybe there’s always been a city, and it’s always been kind of a drag at times, mundane and predictable, and as your comically brief window of existence ebbs away maybe it’s always kind of helped to pretend. To think about good stories as reality lumbers past, its cards all showing, its hills all flagged before you were born, its every expanse and signed and bathed in ceaseless light, nothing undiscovered.

That’s how I feel a lot of the time. I want there to be mysterious places, unsolved mysteries and strange phenomenon hiding just out of sight in the everyday landscape. I want there to be dragons, serpents and secrets just round the corner. And if there aren’t any, I’ll damn well make some up.

This was the impetus behind a project I came up with many years ago called The Secret History of Perth. It was to be a book full of completely made up rumours tied into the history of the city. Roman coins found during the construction of St Mary’s cathedral, strange cyclopean tunnels that put paid to attempts to build an underground railway system in the 1920s, Phoenician carvings in Bedfordale, a Japanese Midget Submarine in Melville Water and – oddly enough given the first panel of the comic – an illegal nightclub operating in the city’s storm drains in the 1970s.

As with many of my projects it never came to fruition. But there are actually a quite a few mysteries and urban myths around Perth without me making any up…

Platypuses – Platypuses are of course not native to Western Australia, but every now and then someone will claim to have spotted one in the streams up in the hills. Conventional wisdom is that they’ve just seen a native water rat, but rumours have persisted for years that at some indeterminate point in the past some indeterminate person released an indeterminate number of platypuses up there for indeterminate purposes.

Funnily enough, a few years back someone actually did the research and discovered that a breeding pair of platypuses were released into the hills back in the (I think) 1930s as part of some kind of deranged ecological ‘improvement’ scheme. One of them turned up dead a week or so later however, so it’s unlikely that they produced any offspring. As a result, the rumours now focus on some mysterious earlier release (possibly in the Victorian era) or subsequent, undocumented releases in the same program.

Japanese Sea Planes – During World War II rumours were rife that Japanese sea planes were using the dams up in the hills to pick up and drop off spies. Mysterious planes buzzing the hills at night were the black helicopters of the day. It’s almost certainly untrue, but it’s not completely outside the realms of possibility.

Secret Tunnels – It’s claimed by some that there are underground tunnels linking the Supreme Court building in the city to the Old Perth Mint. As the buildings are almost a kilometre apart this seems unlikely, but the rumours persist. Slightly more likely are stories of tunnels linking to the old Treasury Building across the road from the Court. There may also be a 1920s style public toilet entombed under the intersection just outside the Court – an underground toilet certainly existed there once, the question is whether it was demolished or simply sealed up when the authorities decided to close it.

The Boya Quarry – The old Boya Quarry up in the hills was supposed to be the site of all kinds of satanic rituals. These days it’s a rock climbing centre, but when I first visited it back in the 1990s it was full of junk and heavily gratified with pentagrams and the number 666. How much of that was down to genuine cult activity and how much to people who’d heard the rumours is open to debate.

The QV1 Building – Perth claims to be the most isolated large city in the world (it really depends on how you define ‘large city’). We have a population of 1.6 million and the nearest population centre with even 500,000 is a good 1,300 miles away. In the 1990s the QV1 skyscraper was constructed in the central city as a hub for telecommunications and internet firms and – so the rumours say – every communication link to the outside world was routed through it. Result? Blow up or otherwise disable QV1 and Perth would be completely cut off from the rest of the planet.

There’s another rumour about QV1, which is that its architecture is a tribute to Marilyn Monroe. The main north and south entrances resemble the skirt scene from The 7 Year Itch, and the building’s footprint seen from above resembles a pair of pouting lips.

Trilobites – Back in the 80s it was claimed that living, giant trilobites had been discovered in the city’s storm drains. It turned out to be a weird combination of rumour, hoax, and very hot summer with no other real news to report. An old tyre cut up to look like a giant bug was alleged to be involved.

So there it is. Perth has it’s own dragons.

My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles

By which I actually mean my favourite blogs, webcomics, etcetera. It’s been a while so I thought an update might be in order…

Blogs
Boing Boing – The grandaddy of all ‘random cool stuff ‘ blogs. Be sure to check out the submitterator for upcoming random cool stuff (and – depending on how well the spam filter’s working – promotional articles about public injury lawyers in Toad Suck Oklahoma).
Warren Ellis – They call him “Internet Jesus”.
Hyperbole and a Half – Rarely updated recently for various reasons, but wonderful. The tale of moving the dogs cross-country made me laugh so hard I almost passed out (literally).
Strange Maps – Exactly what it says on the tin.
Building Blog – Urban speculation and wild flights of fancy
The Worst of Perth – Everything that’s wrong with our fair city.
Not Always Right – Insane customer service stories.
Lamebook – I don’t have a Facebook account. This is one of the reasons why.
Regretsy – Fat, jealous losers critique the astonishing garbage and mass produced  crap people attempt to sell through ‘crafting’ site Etsy.
Studies in Crap – The finest in forgotten and bewildering crap.

Comics
Bad Machinery – Continuing strange goings on in the Midlands town of Tackleford. The current plot involves selkies (one of my favourite types of mythical beasts…)
Gunnerkrigg Court – Continuing strange goings on in a very unusual school.
Dresden Codak – Transhumanism, cyborgs and amazing artwork. An Ayn Rand analogue has just shown up, which should be… interesting.
Romantically Apocalyptic – Post-nuclear madness and (more) amazing  artwork. You shall obey Zee Captain!
XKCD – Wonderful geekiness.
Girl Genius – Ongoing gaslight fantasy adventures (don’t call it steampunk! They don’t like it!)
Wondermark – Recycling Victoriana into surrealism. Tusky McMammoth is my favourite.
Subnormality – Observations on the human condition. And Sphinxes.
Scandinavia and the World – What if countries were people? Stupid people?

There you go. That should keep y’all occupied.

Disparate Notes

Well, back to work tomorrow. Two weeks earlier than planned. At least I’ll be able to check out the Burgermeister.

The weather has been abominable for the last few days. Forty plus for most of the week. Today is meant to be a lot cooler so I’m throwing open the doors and windows to try and flush out all the warm, stale air that’s been building up.

My posts about FADADES earlier in the week seem to have enraged the FADADES fan community. Or at least one guy, who may well be the entirety of the FADADES fan community. Or maybe FADADES himself. In any case he left a very angry comment asking what’s wrong with FADADES. Not that much really, apart from his music sounding like Gollum and Donald Duck having an angle grinder fight in a firing range, and the man himself looking like Worzel Gummidge had to take a job at an S&M club to support his crack habit.

I spent Australia Day at Justin’s place helping him put up shelves in his garage. Hopefully they haven’t fallen down yet.

Ah, the Triple J Hottest 100. Gotye and Kimbra took out the number one spot, which really was no surprise. Several of the songs I voted for got in, which was nice, but overall I wasn’t terribly impressed. I guess 2011 wasn’t a fantastic year for music – or at least music that I like. Just another sign that I’m getting old I guess.

Let’s see, what did I vote for…

* Lanu/Megan Washington – Beautiful Trash – I am frankly astonished that this didn’t get in. Maybe it was released too early in the year for people to remember it.

* Seeker Lover Keeper – Even Though I’m A Woman – Got in at number 17. Good stuff!

* Luke Million – Arnold – Number 71. About where it deserved.

* Noah and the Whale – Waiting for my chance to come – Didn’t get in, although L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N did.

* Florence & The Machine – Shake It Out – Number 13. I expected it to get into the top 10, but 13 isn’t bad.

* Illy – Cigarettes – Number 35. Excellent.

* Crystal Fighters – At Home – No sign of this sadly

* Yuksek – On A Train – No sign of this either

* The Vaccines – Norgaard – Or this.

* Architecture In Helsinki – Escapee – Number 55. Not bad.

And others that I liked…

* The Wombats – Techno Fan – Number 26. Excellent!

* CSS – Hits Me Like A Rock – No sign of this.

* Stanton Warriors – Get Up – Or this.

* Jay-Z & Kanye West – No Church In The Wild – I expected this to do really well, but it didn’t turn up. No accounting for taste I guess.

* Bluejuice – Act Yr Age – Number 20. Bluejuice always do well.

So yeah. That was that.

Finally, in my wanderings around the net over the last week I stumbled across Romantically Apocalyptic – a beautifully drawn (painted?) yet completely deranged post-apocalyptic webcomic. Insofar as it can be summed up it deals with the adventures of zee Captain and his three minions in the nuclear-winter ensnared ruins of a gigantic city. Zee Captain is completely insane but has almost supernatural levels of luck, ensuring his continued survival – and the continued suffering of his erstwhile companions. There’s also some rather strange videos…

In any case, it’s well worth checking out. Even if you can’t figure out what’s going on (even I have trouble with it sometimes) the art is astounding.

That’s all I’ve got to say…

You’re a Solarsaurus!

Who fries molasses?

Dagnabit! Why didn’t they have anything this cool when I was a kid?

Official B.P.R.D. Training Camp (AKA, Hellboy Camp)

On another subject, just for the hell of it, I decided to transcribe the “lyrics” of that French black metal monstrosity I posted yesterday. These of course are not the real lyrics, as FADADES is presumably screeching and gurgling in French, but I quite like my interpretation…

I’m sorry, stray asses!
Starla!
You sold us! Tell us!
Rastas!
You’re a solarsaurus!
You sold us! Sold us!
He lives… Stole us!
Aarrrrrgh!
Truth! Urrrgh!
Who? Who fries molasses?
Starla!
He stole us! Tell us!
This… You liars! With us!
Urgh!
To us! Trust!
You sell us! Urgh!
Stole us! Arrgh!
Starla!
Space…
You liars! With us!

Who fries molasses indeed FADADES? Who fries molasses indeed…

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