Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
Blood for Book God! Skulls for the Abnett Throne!
My copy of Blood Pact arrived. Hooray! I’m about halfway through and was seriously concerned for a bit there that Abnett was going to kill Tona Criid. He hasn’t – yet – so I’m happy. For now.
It’s occurred to me while reading that if Daniel Craig isn’t available to play Gaunt in my theoretical TV/Movie adaption, Anthony Stewart Head could also do a very good job. And would probably be a bit cheaper 🙂
Captain Fishface agrees!
We went to Tattooine by mistake!
This is sheer brilliance…
Not safe for work, obviously 🙂
Yes, it’s one of those “who would play so-and-so” entries…
Woke up this morning intending to have a shower, shave, put a load of washing on and get into some much needed cleaning of the apartment. All of these aims have been frustrated by the revelation that I have no water.
There’s a lot of banging coming from the apartment next door, so I suspect they’re doing bathroom renovations and have managed to switch off my water along with their own. I’m tempted to head out to the… what do you call the place where all the pipes and taps are? A tap cupboard? That’ll have to do. I’m tempted to head out to the tap cupboard and start messing around in the hopes of restoring my water while leaving theirs off, but I’d probably screw up and spray scalding steam all over the renovators – not that that’s a completely unappealing idea in my current waterless mood.
Anyway, of late I’ve been indulging in my Imperial Guard fetish (oh man, that doesn’t sound good does it :)) by reading my way through Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series. They’re bloody good reads (often summarised as Sharpe in space) and I’ve caught up all the way to Blood Pact, which I will commence upon as soon as Amazon gets its act together and actually delivers it.
When reading a sprawling novel series with a cast of dozens I generally find it useful to consider who I’d cast if I had an unlimited budget to produce a movie or TV series of it. This helps me keep everyone straight in my head. I’ve done this with some of the Ghosts, and – since this is my blog, I can do what I like with it and I’ve got nothing better to do while waiting for the water to be reconnected – I thought I’d list them here.
(I should note that this list is rather strongly influenced by one that I stumbled across online, lest anyone accuse me of casting decision plagiarism. I’d link to it if I could find it again)
Colonel-Commisar Ibram Gaunt: Daniel Craig. As far as I’m concerned Daniel Craig is Gaunt, which makes the current crop of James Bond films rather odd viewing 🙂
Major Elim Rawne: Eric Bana. I think he could easily pull off the combination of charisma and menace required for Rawne.
Master Sniper Hlaine ‘Mad’ Larkin: Hugh Laurie. Not an obvious choice but I reckon Laurie would make a really impressive Larkin. Everyone thinks of him as House of course, and as far as personality goes you couldn’t get much further apart than the domineering doctor and the mentally vulnerable sniper, but Laurie is such a gifted actor that I think he could do it, and do it well. You’d just need to give him a different accent (which you’d be doing anyway) and haircut so everyone doesn’t think “House!” any time he appears on screen.
Sergeant Agun Soric: Bob Hoskins. Another casting choice that just seems to work for me. Hoskins is Soric.
Chief Scout Sergeant Oan Mkoll: Robert Carlyle. Another from the casting list that I stumbled over. At first I thought it was a ridiculous idea, as Carlyle looks nothing like the Mkoll in my head, but after watching his performance in this week’s episode of Stargate Universe I’ve reversed my opinion. He’d make a great Mkoll.
Eszrah ap Niht: Jason Momoa. Momoa seems to be the go-to-guy for big menacing dudes in sci-fi/fantasy at the moment. I can’t recall if Eszrah is meant to be particularly big, but he’s certainly menacing, which makes him seem big 🙂
Major Gol Kolea: Tahmoh Penikett. He’s probably a bit young to really be (former) family man Gol Kolea, but I reckon he’d do the job.
Ayatani Zweil: John Hurt. If he wasn’t willing to commit to an ongoing role, Hurt would also make a great Lord Militant General Noches Sturm.
Trooper Brinn Milo: Colin Morgan. Get rid of that ridiculous haircut and he’d make a great Milo.
Sanian/Saint Sabbat: Ellen Page. Now that’s a casting completely out of left field I know, but I suspect that if she could handle the role, she’d be fantastic in it. Put her on the audition list and see how she goes.
So that’s where my casting list stands at the moment. Yes, it leaves out a bunch of important characters, but I simply haven’t decided who should play them yet. I know I did have a great idea for Varl, but can’t remember who it was. So, roll on the pilot episode people! Let’s get this underway! ;D
They has one
After watching the Battlestar Galactica finale a few years back I actually tried to create this chart, but gave up after the sheer volume of information overwhelmed my fairly feeble infographic mojo. But it matters not because Billy Ray Stephens Jr. has done it for me!
Is that awesome or what?
(Well, apart from the various typos :))
I can’t take credit for this, sadly
The Fable of the Ships
(After 8 rounds of translation)
A newly wed Bride went to visit a Wizard.
“Why do we call down the stars upon our ships?” she asked
“We put the stars on our great sails as lanterns to guide our ships to safe harbour” he answered.
“What about those that sink?” she asked
“When an evil sorceror climbs to a high point to cast a spell, he throws a burning brand into the sea” explained the wizard
“Can this magic only be done at night?” asked the Bride
“If I had only a little more knowledge I would turn you into a frog!” answered the Wizard
“That would be good” said the Bride
The Great Fleet
(Original Text)
A young girl was speaking with her Great-Father.
“Why do we call the stars the Great Fleet?”
“The stars are the mast-lanterns of the Great-Parents. They shine in the night to guide our spirits home.”
“And what of falling stars?”
“Sometimes when one of the Great-Parents climbs the mast to light the lantern they drop their taper and it falls into the ocean.”
“Then why don’t falling stars appear only at dusk?”
“Don’t be too clever little one, or the Great-Parents will turn you into a seal-pup!”
“I’ll be good!”
In the grim darkness of the future there are only wiki edits
TV Tropes, was there ever a a better website for losing yourself in? You start at 9:00 in the morning reading up about your favourite movie and the next time you glance at the clock it’s 11:00 at night and you realise you’ve been absent mindedly been chewing on your own arm for sustenance while reading about Brian Blessed.
(Sorry. BRIAN BLESSED!!)
For quite some time one of my (and my friends’) favourite TV Tropes pages has been the one about Warhammer 40k, which does a fantastic job of explaining exactly what the setting is all about, all the time being side-achingly hilarious. So I went to check up on it the other day…
What was so great about the old page was that it was hilarious, accurate and subtle. A number of ridiculously insane things were discussed in an even, meaured, calm tone, sort of like Stephen Fry lecturing you on the complete works of Stan Deyo. Now it’s like a raving lunatic (or for that matter Stan Deyo) running up and screaming in your face about the complete works of Stan Deyo. It’s informative, sure, but nowhere near as enjoyable.
Or maybe it’s like the difference between a glass of well aged scotch by the fireplace in a well stocked library versus a vodka UDL by the toilets in a high octane nightclub.
Now I tried accessing the history of the page to try and recover my preferred version of the text, but the wiki software used by TV Tropes is strange and confusing to me. So rather than engage in further faffing about I decided to use my extraordinarily powerful memory to try and reconstruct it. So, here it goes, the classic version of TV Tropes’ Warhammer 40k page…
(Well, the important bit anyway)
Thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the mighty Imperium of Man has expanded across the galaxy… to discover that the galaxy is a Hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch crap himself in terror, and it has a Hell. From without, the Imperium is besieged by innumerable hordes of alien monsters from the farthest abysses of space, soulless death-machines and nightmare daemons (as well as nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons, and the occasional nightmare daemon in a soulless death machine); from within, treachery, heresy, plain ignorance and the festering infectious taint that is Chaos threaten to rip it into uncountable pieces.
Warhammer 40,000 is not a happy place. Rather than just being Darker and Edgier, it soaks itself in light-absorbing paint, straps on a jetpack and hurls itself over the edge, screaming IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF FAR FUTURE THERE IS ONLY WARRRRRRGH! The Imperium of Man is a totalitarian, oppressive, stark, and downright sucky place to live where, for far too many people, living isn’t something to do till you die, but something to suffer through till something comes around and kills you in an unbelievably horrible way, while torturing your soul and melting down your body for biomass – and it’s quite probably something on your own side. The Messiah has been locked up on life support for the past ten millennia, laid low by his most beloved son, and an incomprehensibly vast Church Militant commits hourly atrocities in his name.
The problem is, as bad as the Imperium is, they’re not quite as bad as many of the other factions. Death is about the best you can hope for against the vast majority of the other major players in the battlefields of the 41st Millennium. The basic premise of 40k, insofar as it can be summed up, is that of an eternal, impossibly vast conflict between a number of absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal, and (in one case) omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology and creative piece of nastiness imaginable turned up to eleven. The 40k universe is a spectacularly brutal playground of tropes and horrible things taken to their absolute extreme, and in some cases, beyond. Entire planets with populations of billions are lost due to rounding errors in tax returns. Orders a million strong of capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Super Soldier Knights Templar serve as the Imperium’s special forces, while the trillions of soldiers in its regular armies take disregard for human life to new and interesting extremes. A futuristic space Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even a hint of the taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, and is backed up by legions of psychic daemonhunting elite super-soldiers and fanatical pyromaniac power-armoured battle nuns. The standard-issue sidearm of a Space Marine is a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Astronomican, a navigation aid has the souls of thousands of psychic humans sacrificed to it every day, dying to feed the machine. The faster than light travel used by most factions carries with it a good chance of being eaten by daemons. The ancient and mysterious manipulator-race contrive wars that see billions dead so that small handfuls of their own may survive, while their depraved cousins literally cannot endure the agony of a life not spent torturing numberless innocents to death in ingeniously horrific ways. There are several vast Bug Swarms trying to eat every organic thing in the galaxy, light-years-wide holes in reality through which countless daemons and corrupted daemon-powered super-soldiers periodically attempt to destroy the universe, and an entire civilization of undying omnicidal maniacs serving their star-god masters’ desire to exterminate all living creatures, down to the last bacterium. There’s a genetically-engineered survivor warrior species infesting every corner of the galaxy and cheerfully trying to kill everything (including each other if nothing better presents itself) because it’s literally hard-wired into their genetic code to do so and because it’s fun. The closest thing to the “good guys” you can find in this setting is a tiny alien empire sandwiched between all the other factions – and they may or may not have a thing for forcing new subjects into their empire through orbital bombardment and concentration camps, but at least they’ll offer you admittance into their club. Everywhere there are chainsaw swords, BFG’s, armored gloves that crush tanks, mountain-sized daemonic walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of city blocks and warships that level continents, if not simply obliterating all life on an entire planet just to be sure. And sometimes even that doesn’t work. There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness; there is only war.
There. that’s much better!
(The version of the Warhammer 40,000 text above is of course licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. In other words it came from TV Tropes and you can do what you like with it as long as you let everyone else do the same.)
Nyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyannyan
Nyan Cat + Slipknot = Win!
I heard that was you…
Saw two movies yesterday. Well, one and maybe a third of another.
After about a month’s break due to Fabes’s commitments regarding the Dockers and his son we got back to work on the infamous 40k boards again. They are now all sealed, and one has had the magnets installed (they’re actually looking really good now). As is usually the case whenever we get together to work on a project however we realised halfway through that we’d shot ourselves in the feet – installing the magnets on the boards has to be done sequentially and it takes about 24 hours for the araldite we’re using to fix them to cure. Result – an entire afternoon with nothing to do but watch glue dry.
So we put on the TV instead and mercilessly mocked whatever we came across as we channel surfed. We eventually stumbled onto 1972’s What’s Up Doc? and ended up seeing some quite large chunks of it.
The bits we saw weren’t bad. I mean, they weren’t fantastically amusing, but they were OK for a slow Saturday afternoon. And it’s downright startling to realise that back in the day Barbara Streisand was pretty damn cute.
Anyway, eventually I got home, watched the new episode of Dr Who (my opinion on it is in a holding pattern until part two airs next week), then settled down to watch Juno – a film that I thought I’d like back when it came out, but never got around to seeing.
As it turns out I was right, it was a lot of fun (for some reason Ellen Page pretending to be a Kraken is one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen). And it didn’t feel at all preachy – any movie about teen pregnancy runs the risk of turning into some kind of after school special but to me Juno managed just to be a bunch of stuff that happens without any kind of big moral or message. Good, fun, quirky entertainment with characters that you can care about. And krakens.
In my own life my kitchen is now startlingly clean and organised. This is good because I’ve been fighting a bit of a war with cockroaches for a while and it looks like I’ve broken the back of their offensive. Either that or the roach bombs I’ve put up on the window-sill in preparation for fumigating the entire apartment have scared them off. Today I’m starting on the bathroom, which will be a whole world of fun, but at least won’t take as long as the kitchen did.
(Note to cold climate dwelling foreigners who may be reeling in disgust at my arthropod related revelations. In a sub-tropical climate cockroaches are always present. In cold and temperate zones having roaches may be a sign of complete hygienic depravity, but in these warmer parts of the world it’s not a matter of having no cockroaches, it’s a matter of knowing they’re around but keeping numbers down so you only see them when the weather goes all pre-Cambrian and they think they’re running the planet again and can go roaming with impunity. So having a roach problem doesn’t mean I’ve turned into a ragged-haired, garbage-hoarding, slum dweller, it just means I haven’t done the washing up as often as I should :))
Well, back to it.
For Tanith! For Verghast! For cold and flu relief!
In the next Gaunt’s Ghosts novel Dan Abnett should have the Ghosts face a Chaos cult called the Histi.
That way they could fight them with anti-Histi-mines!
(Yes, yes, I’ll go drive over my head with a chimera now…)
