Category: Comics and Webcomics

Any Poor Souls…

Obsessed? Moi?

Any pour souls who trespass against us,
Whether they be beast or man,
Will suffer the bite or be stung dead on sight,
By those who inhabit this land,

For their’s is the power and this is their kingdom,
As sure as the sun does burn,
So enter this path, but heed these four words,
You shall never return…

(This has no relevance to anything whatsoever, but the song and the image are so inextricably linked in my head that I had to post it some time 🙂

Don’t Filter Me Bro!

Ah! Activist chicks!

OK, it’s again been a long time since an entry. I’ve been oscillating between not feeling like writing, or feeling like writing but being plain too tired to do so. End result? Decals for turning lego men into the Freakangels, and no blog entries.

But I’m pulling myself together today and actually getting some writing done (it’s 35 degrees outside, so it’s not like I’m doing anything apart from cowering under my air conditioner).

So anyway, yesterday there was a nationwide protest over the Government’s plans to force a mandatory net filter onto everyone. This is an absolutely terrible idea on any number of fronts both technical and social, so I figured I’d go along and make my voice heard. Ryan was also sufficiently motivated to go along, so we met up at Stirling Gardens for the rally at midday.

It wasn’t huge with about 300 protesters turning up, but that’s reasonably successful turnout for a city the size of (and apathetic as) Perth. There were a number of speakers, most of whom were pretty good once they abandoned the farcical PA system they’d bought along and switched to a megaphone (the one exception was a 911 conspiracy theorist who wouldn’t give his name and tried to tell us that the net filter is the work of the Bildenburg group, as are laws forcing children to wear bicycle helmets and restricting when you can water your lawn). I even got interviewed by a journalist and quoted in today’s paper, which is pretty gratifying on a personal level 🙂

(There were also a number of rather cute activist girls around the place, one of whom kept glancing at me. I’m not sure if she was glancing at me because I noticed her glancing at me once and kept glancing at her to see if she was glancing at me again which prompted her to keep glancing at me to see if I was glancing at her, or if she was actually glancing at me. She left before I had the chance to go over and say hi, which is convenient, as it meant I didn’t have to walk around cursing myself for being too timid to go over and say hi ;))

We also ran into Sam who I used to work with (actually I’m surprised there weren’t more people there I recognised). She and I had a quick chat while Ryan distracted one of the 911 Conspiracists who was trying to force pamphlets on us. Then we all cleared off before the riot cops arrived.

(That’s a joke by the way, we’re not quite a police state yet although this proposed filter is a good first step)

Apart from that I haven’t done much else lately. That should change as Christmas draws near, I’ve still got plenty of gift shopping to do at least. Watch this space for Astounding Tales of Holiday Commerce!

That’s about it for today. Expect more entries soon! (I know, I always say that… 🙂

Cartographic Madness

Hey, I’ve never claimed to be normal…

You know, as far back as I can remember, I’ve always loved maps. I don’t know exactly when or where my love affair with cartography began, but I rather suspect it had something to do with Arthur Ransome and his Swallows and Amazons books. Each one had a map right at the start, showing all the locations in the story. It’s been years since I read any of them, but I reckon I could still draw a pretty good map of the lake just from memory.

More than just loving maps, I’ve always loved making maps. Again I think Arthur Ransome is the culprit, Secret Water was all about map making (and mastadons, and eels, and almost drowning when the tide comes in). As a kid the walls of my room were plastered with hand drawn maps of locations from just about every book I read, and even now I’ll occasionally just grab a piece of paper and whip up a map of some kind, just for the heck of it.

All this may explain why I’ve spent a good four or five hours over the last few days doing my damn well best to figure out where Connor lives in Warren Ellis’s FreakAngels.

Careful examination of the scenes outside Connor’s place in episode two reveal a number of distinctive features…

  • It’s a narrow, two lane street
  • There’s a traffic light and a zebra crossing
  • There are tall, detached buildings on both sides
  • One building has two distinctive, urn-like details on top
  • Across the road from the urn building is one with a truncated mansard roof
  • There’s a t-junction close by (seen when KK lands her ‘bike’)

Now, all of this means nothing because surely it’s just a comic right? Well, possibly not. Paul Duffield has apparently made a few trips to Whitechapel to take reference images, and plenty of real places (the Ten Bells Pub, Christ Church, the Spitalfields Market) turn up. So there’s a reasonable chance that Connor’s street is a real one.

So, I’ve been driving myself to distraction examining Whitechapel street by street in Google Earth, and then looking at hundreds of images tagged ‘whitechapel’ on Flickr for clues.

No dice. I am rapidly reaching the conclusion that the scenes in episode 2 are at best heavily modified, and at worst a portmanteau of several different places (suggested perhaps by the fact that the torn, red awning switches building between frames, and the idea that a small, narrow street would have a zebra crossing ). So I guess I’ll just have to take a punt on where to put Connor’s place on the next version of the Google Earth file.

At least until someone makes a map of all the zebra crossings in Whitechapel 🙂

Kolfinnia Kokokoho?

Finland! Finland! On the Baltic Sea! Finland! Finland! Also known as Suomi!

Ah, busy week, busy week.

Not only have I been co-ordinating our efforts to go to the Supanova convention tomorrow (I have four tickets in my hot little hands right now which mean we’ll be able to go straight in rather than queuing) but we’ve got a new employee at work. His name is Lasse and there are a number of interesting things to note about him…

  • He’s from Finland
  • His birthday is February 29th, making him only 6 years old
  • Ummm…

Well he’s only been with us for a week so there are no doubt plenty of other interesting things that shall be revealed in time.

(Oh, and I know he’s not really 6 years old, but it’s such a common joke about people born on the 29th that it shouldn’t really require any explanation).

We asked him about the Estonian message from last week. It turns out that as similar as Estonian and Finnish may appear to us Indo-Europeans they’re actually mutually incomprehensible – although there are a few well known similarities such as the Estonian for “milk” meaning “sour milk” in Finnish, and the Estonian for “Wedding Day” meaning “Trouble Day”. This is no doubt a great source of amusement among Finns, probably of much the same calibre as the Australian/Kiwi “Fush and Chups” 🙂

I was tempted to ask him about the famous “Kokoo kokoon koko kokko” but figured it’s probably as annoying to Finns as “You chop a tree down then you chop it up!” is to English speakers, so I let it be.

I also caught up with Katie over dinner on Thursday night. We wandered around Subiaco looking for somewhere to eat, but everywhere was either stupidly expensive, closing or Indian (I have nothing against India, but I just can’t abide Indian food). We ended up at Cafe Ecco where we had a potato and rosemary pizza – which is a lot more delicious than it sounds. We then adjourned to Gelare for ice cream. A good night overall.

Today I headed over to the Galleria for groceries and a haircut. I figured I could do with a haircut before tomorrow as while the odds of Jewel Staite spotting me in the audience, falling madly in love with me and us living happily ever after in a flying castle are ’round about fifty billion to one, they’re bound to be slightly better (say forty billion nine hundred and ninety nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine to one) if I’ve got a decent haircut. Or at least any kind of haircut at all as opposed to the rather unorganised mess that was sitting on top of my head. So I got one. Any kind of haircut that is. I don’t know if it makes me look any less geeky, but at least it looks a bit neater.

Continuing with preparations for tomorrow I’ve spent the last hour or so fashioning a Pringles can into an insulated Red Bull can holder. You know, if I feel the need for a quick caffeine hit. The only problem (apart from my apartment now being littered with styrofoam scraps) is that it looks a bit like a pipe bomb, so I’ll need to be careful with it. Hope there won’t be any bag searches 🙂

Finally a FreakAngels Google Earth update. After the interlude last week the story is back in full swing, with Jack seemingly about to get into serious trouble. The GE file has been fully updated – including the exact location of “Camping Etc.”, which I managed to track down by dint of a lot of zooming around studying intersections (I could tell you where it is, but you’ll just have to download the file and see).

That’s it, early night before tomorrow’s festivities 🙂

Superfreaks

Being born psychic should really free me from having to get out of bed this early in the morning

Once again a big break between entires. I’ve been busy at work, and a lot of my writing mojo is going into another project, so I haven’t had much to left over for chronicling my oh so glamorous life. But I’ve decided to get off my backside and actually try to catch up a bit.

So, while my social life hasn’t really been more active than usual the extreme gap between entries has let things build up a bit. For instance, a few weeks back (Easter Sunday actually now I think of it) it was up to Fabian’s new place for a pseudo housewarming sort of thing. We (which is to say myself, Ryan, Matt, Juan and – naturally – Fabian) ate large quantities of food (all prepared by Fabes who will make someone a very good wife some day 😉 and watched Beowulf in the home theatre room, which was quite impressive. The room that is, the movie… not so much.

(They took a lot of liberties with the plot, which as a bit of an elitist classicist I took objection to. If I’d known Neil Gaiman was involved from the start – a fact I didn’t discover until the credits rolled – I wouldn’t have been quite as annoyed, because it was really a typical example of Gaimanian story remixing which I usually enjoy. But I didn’t know, and found the whole thing fairly irritating.

I guess I’m also slightly miffed by the fact that people all over the world are now going to think the oldest story in English literature is about a loudmouth jock who sleeps with a demon, cheats on his wife and cuts off his own arm to kill a dragon who just happens to be his own son. *sigh*)

After Beowulf we watched some of Revenge of the Sith, during which I amused myself by heckling Aniken and doing shadow puppets in front of the projector. Senator Palpatine may never recover from having his head crushed 🙂

The following week (which is to say last week) I went around to Rebecca and Dom’s for lunch, which was interesting because Rebecca had decided to do something with the dried barberries from the hamper I gave them for Christmas. Unfortunately the barberry rice that resulted wasn’t exactly a rousing success. But the conversation and company were (as usual) excellent, and a good time was had by all (or at least me).

(On the subject of Rebecca she’s managed to slip over in the kitchen and break her ankle in three places – they’re putting in screws and a plate tomorrow. Apparently she’ll be off her feet for several days, then on crutches for a few months. I’ve convinced her to see if she can get a cane instead so she can perfect her House impression. Get well soon girl!)

Hmmmm, what else? Oh yeah April Fools. I keep meaning to do something really creative with my site each year for April Fools, and always run out of time and end up redirecting it somewhere stupid instead. This year was no exception, and any visitors trying to reach Wyrmworld would have found themselves forwarded to the website of the Australian Liberal Party (I figure Brendan Nelson needs all the help he can get ;). I decided to leave the redirect up all day on the basis that the web is an international medium, and if I took it down at 12:00 Perth time then overseas folk wouldn’t be able to share in the confusion. I know at least one person *cough*Ryan*cough* got caught, so that makes it all worthwhile.

I’d better get to bed shortly (I foolishly stayed up until midnight last night watching season three of Battlestar Galactica which arrived earlier this week) but before I sign off I though I’d direct everyone to take a look at FreakAngels – a free weekly comic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield. Set in a partially flooded future London it’s about a gang of twelve young adults with freaky powers (and purple eyes, and names heavily featuring the phoneme /k/), who are somehow responsible for the apocalypse that pretty much destroyed the world six years beforehand. Six pages get released each Friday (which is to say Saturday here in Australia), and so far we’re up to episode eight.

Given that it’s post-apocalyptic, a bit steampunk and set in London I am naturally loving it. So much so that I spent an hour or so the other week throwing together a Google Earth file of all the identifiable locations featured. I may or may not maintain this as the series continues – I haven’t decided yet 🙂

Anyway, enjoy (keeping in mind that it’s “recommended for mature audiences” that is, and probably not exactly safe for work 🙂

Happy New FEAR

Work all year and what do you get, another year older and deeper in debt…

Two weeks into the new year and not an entry to be seen. Shocking I know. I’ve got an entry summing up the best music of the last year almost ready to go but it’s taking a long while to get finished and out the door. So I figured I’d better write something, lest everyone think I’ve died or something.

So yeah, it’s a brave new year. Yippee-kiy-o. I’m not that fussed to be honest. I’m kind of glad to see the back of 2007 – it wasn’t the most enjoyable year of my life – but I’m not terribly convinced that 2008 is going to be wildly better. Hmmm.

But at least I’ve been doing plenty of stuff. Yesterday I caught up with Rebecca, Dom and Jakob in Mount Lawley. On Thursday night I met up with Katie in Subiaco and we had dinner at Wagamama. We also almost got free tickets to the opening night of “Keating the Musical” – although I really wasn’t up to it and we had to turn them down. I’ve also caught up with Fabes and Ryan a bit – we’ve been working on a project that I can’t really say much about :). And of course I’ve been working on a few projects of my own…

I’m also back at work, which after two weeks of getting up at 9:00am is a bit of a blow.

Hmmm, that’ll do for now. I’m too tired to try and be interesting. But check out this rather amusing webcomic.

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