The Fractal Hall Journal

All I’m saying is that my primary feeling today isn’t so much one of hope, as of relief. And I don’t care what side of politics you come down on, the man on his way out was a fucking baboon.

More on this over at the Toybox.

On a similar note, via Aint It Cool (I know, I know), the CBC are planning a reality show where former Prime Ministers judge individuals on whether they’d make good PMs. While I was hoping to rib chum Plok about this, it turns out the Beeb has already bought the remake rights off of them. Oh dear. I am half hoping S4C will nick the idea for the Assembly, but we’re not that far away from Rhodri’s retirement; it’s quite possible someone will take this seriously and the next First Minister will get in on a phone vote.

I assume this is one of those let’s-get-The-Kids-into-politics things, ignoring the fact that The Kids are busy wearing hoodies and knifing grannies for their iPhones. Or something. I lose track.

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Anyone know what the word is for the analysis of character or story? Or myth, for that matter? Because I don’t. You know, what etymology is to words, or iconography is to, er, icons. But for fiction.

I’ve gone through a list of them. Aetiology kind of fits, but that’s more of a medical term. I thought about using iconopsy, but I don’t think I should be making new words up before I’m sure there isn’t already one in existence and besides, that would suggest a dissection, and I’m reminded of the famous EB White quote about humour and frog dissection (”…few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”) Same goes for “deconstruction”, or, Bendis forbid, “disassembly”. Because I’m not interested in destruction, even for the purposes of eventually rebuilding. I think you need to be Alan Moore, or Frank Miller when he’s not being shit, to pull that off.

So delineated will do, fitting in with the whole comic theme. The point of the exercise is to look at why a character works sometimes and not others, to take a look at the machinery in action. I’m not particularly interested in the psychology, here. That’s good fun on a pub conversation level, but I do think we can head into odd areas when we come out with sentences like “…but Hal would never do that!” And we’re all guilty of that, from time to time.

No, it’s the nuts and bolts I’m talking about here. Aesthetics and personal preference will creep in, of course; everything is subjective, as always. But I think it’s fun to take a closer look at the engineering.

There’s a lot of scope for this kind of thing with superhero comics, because the longest running ones have been running for such a long time. When you add in all those different interpretations (in particular for the big names), adaptations in other media, cartoons, lunchboxes, even Lego-based computer games, that’s a wide spread of data to look at, and plenty of conclusions to be made.

Brother Paul is indirectly responsible for this. We were talking the other day about the three-personality aspect of characters, and how it relates to Batman and Superman. He pointed out (and I think he’s right) that Superman actually has far more aspects than that, but instead of embracing what has become (by sheer accident of being consistantly in print for so long) a somewhat contradictory icon. Sometimes radical, sometimes conservative, sometimes alien, sometimes human, instead of using this, we instead criticise creators for not hewing more closely to our own views. We shouldn’t see it as a negative that the story has been contributed to by so many varied and different personalities over the years, is the point.

As part of this, I’m going to argue that, in story terms, superhero stories are ultimately interactions between heroes and their villains. Sure, there are plenty of good stories that don’t fit the pattern, but overall that’s the point of these tales. I think these take the form of two primary interactions: how the hero locates and places the villain into context and how the hero deals with the villains.

Finally, I also find it interesting that “comic books” are so often seen as a genre all on its own (cf. every cinema critic that’s ever referred to comic book plots or comic book characters). Usually, people who use the phrase as a genre discription mean “superheroes”. I think it can be subdivided further, into the sections you typically find in the Nerd Corner of your local bookshop: Crime, Fantasy, SF and Horror. Most superhero comics wander into all categories at one time or another, obviously, but I think there’s a core category that can be assigned to each that points to some interesting possibilities. I’m using bookshop categories as a shorthand because I think a discussion of what counts as SF rather than fantasy, while interesting, will cloud the issue here. I’m aware that, for all intents and purposes, Superman and Star Wars are heroic fantasies with barely a connection with anything recognisable as “science”, but, you know. Work with me here.

First up, tomorrow: the Caped Crusader.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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Well that was a close one, readers. Turns out I didn’t have Ebola Gulf-A after all, but whatever I did have has burned out my blogging mojo, because I’ve started writing this post four times now, and haven’t managed to get further than the first hundred words. Let’s see how I do this time.

I mean, it’s not like there’s a shortage of things to talk about. Like Russell T. Davies’ new book (well, collection of emails), “The Writer’s Tale”. I’ve read the first couple of chapters of this particularly heavy tome, and so far it’s been fascinating. As well as having some candid information about the nuts and bolts of getting Doctor Who made, because it’s made up of the typed back-and-forth between him and Benjamin Cook it’s almost like going through someone else’s inbox. It’s particularly interesting how similar his writing here is to his demeanour in television and print interviews. If nothing else, the man is exceptionally enthusiastic about damn near everything. If you’re a Whovian of any stripe, you really need to read this.

I was going to do a bit on violence in comics, and in popular culture generally, but to be honest people’s reactions to the subject (sometimes valid, sometimes not) have convinced me to shelve it until I can think a bit more clearly about it.

I will say this, though: the phrase “torture porn” has been thrown around a bit in recent years. In some ways, depending on what exactly we’re talking about, I think it’s a misnomer. I mean, I know I’ve used the phrase as a criticism in the past, and to be honest in retrospect I think I was wrong. What it comes down to is that the creators of either the Hostel films or the Saw series didn’t write them to get people off. They just didn’t. Yet that’s what the “porn” tag suggests.

Horror fiction has a very specific function. I am absolutely certain we get attracted to darker types of fiction, be it Silence of the Lambs, Dexter, or even Lovecraft, not because we want to actually eat human flesh/slice people up/summon slimy tentacled nethergods to consume our very Reality, but because it’s a relatively safe way of facing our worst fears, and our own inevitable death. It’s no different to the way comedy makes us face our own pomposity, absurdity or prejudice, and for that reason it doesn’t really surprise me that comedic films and shows get criticised almost as much as slasher flicks do.

Let me put it this way: the Saw franchise is hugely profitable. They are relatively consistant in quality (regardless of what initial value anyone may place on that quality, and besides, compare Saw IV to, say, Halloween IV, and tell me the series doesn’t buck the usual nosedive trend of endless horror sequels), cheap to make, and every film so far has made over $100 million dollars world wide. Leaving the DVD sales to the side for a moment, that means at least 10 million people on the planet have seen at least one of the films. Does anyone honestly want to tell me that these 10 million people wanted to see it because they get off on the violence? Of course not. They went because they wanted to be scared, and that isn’t the function of pornography.

When it comes down to it, people like to be scared. And that kind of catharsis isn’t necessarily damaging.

Wow, this week’s Google hits are going to be interesting.

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I’ve never been the biggest fan of Krypto the Superdog. Always seemed a bit of a stupid concept, even when I was little, with the thought balloons and the powers and everything. I quite liked Ace the Bat-Hound though, so it wasn’t just an anti-Silver Age story thing.

I wasn’t keen on Krypto’s modern-age return, even though I think Jeph Loeb’s take was interesting (namely, that a dog with Superman’s powers would be an absolute disaster), but that’s mostly to do with the really shitty Return To Krypton storyline that was running at the time. And then I read Morrison’s All-Star issue with Krypto in it, and finally understood the concept.

I get that a lot with Morrison. Sometimes it takes a writer like him to make sense of otherwise crappy ideas. I mean, as Superman stories go I’m far more of a Golden Age fan than of the chubby Silver Ager, and I usually loathe the shoe horning of Sixties goofiness into more recent runs (like Return To Krypton, in fact), but All-Star really did make something brilliant out of something a bit crap.

It doesn’t take much, I find, to have my opinion changed on something. Usually, all the bits are there, it just takes a single key to unlock everything. Maybe not a key, maybe a lockpick. You know, like in Elder Scrolls, or Splinter Cell, when you’re in that mini-game that stands in for picking a door lock, where you kind of jiggle the right-hand stick until the tumblers slot into place, and you get that satisfying click-thunk that opens the door. It’s like that, but in real life.

When it comes to Krypto, all I needed was to see a young Superman playing catch with his dog, but on the moon. Just a boy and his pet, but on a huge, epic, Superman-type scale. Click goes the tumblers, and suddenly I understand the point of Krypto. Also, this Krypto cover is awesome, and I want it as a poster really badly.

It’s not just comics this happens with. More than once, there are songs I hear that I don’t quite understand until the lock gets picked. Like “Feathers”, a Coheed and Cambria single from the last album. At first, it seemed just like an alright kind of record, and I didn’t get why they chose it for a single release. Then I heard it live, and it was awesome, and it’s really one of the best tracks on an excellent album. Or maybe I’m just easily influenced. Or fickle, perhaps.

I’m not sure how I feel about how English literature is taught in schools, and I tend to think that it just didn’t quite suit me. I know a lot of people who really appreciate the things they learned in their Lit classes, and the tools it gave them to understand what they read. A conversation I had with a friend a while ago still sticks with me, because my mate was so glad she did To Kill A Mockingbird at GCSE as she wouldn’t have appreciated it otherwise. See, I couldn’t disagree more. It’s one of my favourite books, and analysing it in school would have killed it for me. Shit, there were books I used to like that I hated once we were done with them in the classroom.

The problem comes down to keys, or rather how we find the keys. English Lit just works for some people, but it didn’t for me. Take Shakespeare; now, there’s one writer who just cannot be appreciated from being pulled apart and scrutinised by a classroom full of bored thirteen year olds. Up until recently, as in last year, I still had no appreciation whatsoever of his work. Then a couple of things made the tumblers rattle over.

First of al, I read about a Canadian comedy drama called Slings & Arrows over on Siskoid’s blog (think it may have been this bit) that sounded interesting, despite being about The Bard. And it’s really good. Really well written, very funny. But more importantly, the main character (played by Paul Gross, who was Fraser in Due South) speaks so well about Hamlet, that I actually started to understand where the heck the play was coming from.

As an aside, this is how the real information revolution will work. Not from big changes and social phenomena, global trends that make everyone love particular brands, although that’s always going to happen, but from more people being able to connect with smaller things they would never have found otherwise. A short run Canadian comedy from a few years ago? I never, ever would have found out about that in any other way than in the haphazard mode things are distributed over the internet.

About the same time, I went to see an open-air Everyman production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at St Fagans, the Welsh folk museum. And it was hilarious, seriously funny, and I realised that Shakespeare’s work is almost completely reliant on the delivery of the actors. Reading it just doesn’t have the same effect. These things together picked the lock, and I understood the man’s writing far better than I ever had before. I watched the Ian McKellan Macbeth from the 70s, and was completely engrossed, even though the exact same thing had bored me to tears at school.

All that said, I doubt anything will make me want to read about Streaky the Super-Cat.

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I brought Citizen Kane up yesterday as one of those films that you can’t quite believe didn’t get a best picture/director Oscar. It’s got a funny old reputation, that film, and it’s not helped by the constant “bestest film ever” title it’s given on endless lists and articles, not just in places like Empire magazine (where you expect that kind of thing) but in the general media. That’s not to say it isn’t one of the greatest films of all time, because it is. Much like music recording technology and pre-CGI special effects, Orson Welles and his crew had to put an incredible amount of skill and effort into crafting the techniques to create shots and set-ups we take for granted in movies these days because technological advancement has made it so much easier for us. The sheer craft of what the crew had to pull off is mind-blowing. They were using what was essentially state-of-the-art special effects just to frame shots correctly. And it’s not just the technical prowess, but also the script and the acting. There’s nothing about the film that isn’t engaging and exceptional.

Problem is, that kind of weight it carries around can be discouraging to someone coming to the film for the first time. There’s an expectation that if the film-student crowd like it then it must be unpleasantly challenging and hard to watch. God knows it made me reluctant to watch it, and if me and a buddy at University hadn’t happened to catch it one lazy Saturday afternoon, we probably wouldn’t ever have seen it. Much like Raging Bull, in fact; another film rated so enthusiastically by The Critics to be off-putting. And the thing about both of them is that I was completely blown away when I finally got round to watching them, not because of the dazzling artistry but because, first and foremost, they were both excellent stories, completely engaging and never boring.

Tangentially, the film-maker today who (in my subjective opinion, as always) is probably Welles’ spiritual heir? Peter Jackson. Seriously.

The thing about Welles isn’t just that he was a great writer and actor (because he was), but that he put so much skill and craft into the job of directing. It was all about prep and craft at a technical level. As far as I’ve observed, today’s art-housey films are very minimal, viewing the techniques of film-making as secondary, as a way of distancing themselves from the nuts-and-bolts side of things, technical achievement (and technical achievement alone, sometimes) being the defining characteristic of the Summer Blockbuster.

Regardless of what you may think of Lord of the Rings (book or script), the sheer amount of effort, care and design that went into Jackson’s trilogy was awe-inspiring, which by itself would have been a thing. What made it truly great was the addition of a fantastic cast to an excellent script. That’s Welles, and that’s Citizen Kane, through and through.

And another thing, you know who doesn’t help matters? The Things Used To Be Better brigade, who want us all to realise how far the Cinematic Arts have fallen. Horse-shit. If anything brought down the amazing cinema of the 70s, it was the creators themselves, devolving their own work into a self-indulgent mess. It’s no-one’s fault but Scorcese’s that he’s been crap since Goodfellas, and Jesus Christ is that an over-rated film. The fact is, Scorcese has never made anything as good as The Wire. Do I wish there were more grown-up films like Gone, Baby, Gone out there? Sure. But it’s not the end of the world, because I’m perfectly fine with the rise in quality of everything else we’ve had in recent years.

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1. Fractal Fact: The official elementary particle of the Journal is the gluon.

2. I’ve just heard an awesome bit on the Virgin Radio (soon to be known as Absolute Radio, as they constantly fucking remind us) morning show, where the DJ discusses whether or not the basement studio they’re broadcasting from is haunted. 1 Golden Square, where the station’s based, is allegedly built on a plague pit. Then again so is, you know, the rest of London.

3. In a list of films the world really doesn’t need, a new set of Terminator films written by the genius behind The Net and Terminator 3: Big Pile Of Wank, and directed by McG is perhaps at the very top. Christian Bale’s presence suggests it won’t quite be the dire, useless waste the AvP films are, but still. What’s the point?

The thing is, there are some things that work nicely in films as throwaway comments useful for world-building, but suddenly take on unwarranted weight in sequels or prequels. Like the “Clone-Wars”. One of these things is the mention of rubber-skinned T-600s in the original James Cameron film. Now McG wants them to be a major part of the new series, only eight-foot high with built-in gattling guns.

That is one of the most spectacular examples of missing the point I’ve ever seen. Bravo, Mr McG. Bravo.

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Ok, I mention Star Wars in passing, and the Hall’s viewing stats go through the roof. What the fudge is that all about? Maybe I shouldn’t have, you know, been slagging the series off. Oh well, unfortunately the X-Wing stuff really did stink.

Broadly related to this, I’m about halfway through Kevin J. Anderson’s Hidden Empire. Whatever criticism can be levelled at him, I find him a very easy writer to read. Some writers just seem to have a knack with prose that can be read through really quickly, I suppose. It’s engaging enough, although if it had turned into a bit of a slog then there’s nothing here that would have been so new or interesting that it kept me reading.

That’s a skill in itself, considering how many flaming characters are in this book. They’re all a bit cardboard, and the dialogue goes clunk-clunk a lot, and it’s all a bit lukewarm in the same way that Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is a bit lukewarm, and I think that’s the series that most resembles this one. There’s no subtlety at all, and I don’t know if that comes from having to wrangle such a huge cast and a lot of incident, or if Anderson just has a bit of a sledgehammer approach. A lot of stuff gets repeated, either because the author forgot he’d already mentioned something or he thought that his readers would have forgotten the detail in amongst everything else.

The biggest criticism is the so far uninspiring villains, who’s chosen Armada of Doom is made up of big spikey flying balls. I mean, what thought went into that? “Kev, are you sure you don’t want to come up with something more imaginative that big spikey flying ball spaceships?” “But, but, they’re really big spikey flying ball spaceships.” “Oh well, go on then. If they’re really big.”

He must be doing something right, though, because I’m still reading.

That really had nothing to do with Star Wars. Neither does the rest of this post.

Scott Kurtz’s PvP recently had a strip ruminating on what was the cooler Maneuver, the Adama or the Picard. For those of you unsure what this means, in short it means that the Fractal Hall Journal isn’t anywhere near its depth limit when it come to nerdy matters, though yesterday’s Linux post appeared to be rock bottom.

The answer’s easy, and Kurtz loads it anyway. A short warp-drive hop back and forth to make it look like one ship is two (more correctly the Barry Allen Maneuver, surely?), or using an FTL drive to jump into a planet’s atmosphere, drop all the smaller fighter craft as the mothership falls, then jump out before it crashes. Bad luck, Frenchie.

Ah, webcomics. First one I ever read was Get Your War On (big thanks to Chum Mike for that one). It was a bit of a revelation. Not least because sometime around ‘98 or ‘99 I had big plans to do something like that myself. It’s tied in with blogging too, because the first online journal thing I ever followed was Websnark, which (at the time) dealt mostly with webcomics. I read shed-loads of webcomics for about a year after the discovery, then whittled them down as the novelty wore off. Sixish months ago I stopped reading any except Penny Arcade. Burn-out, I guess. The other ones I picked up again and follow regularly are Shortpacked! and PvP. That’s three left standing out of dozens, and to be honest I never really liked PvP until the last year or so (just about the time everyone else thinks it went downhill, oddly). I still read Questionable Content occasionally, and while Starslip Crisis isn’t quite my cup of tea, I can appreciate how good it can be.

I think the PA’s Jerry Holkins is the best writer in the field, not just in the strip but also in his daily posts. The best artist (and second best writer, actually) is Scary Go Round’s John Allison, by a fair margin. In both disciplines, his style is so unique and interesting, his influences (Qunetin Blake, in particular) obvious but not overwhelming, incorporating what came before but creating something new. I’ve lost track of the strip a bit, but I think that’s more to do with wanting to save up a chunk of strips over time to read them all in one go. He’s maybe not quite as good at resolving stories as the rest of it, but the artwork is gorgeous.

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Secret Invasion: Fuck me, is it still going on? Haven’t they invaded by now? Isn’t this better characterised as Secret Occupation? Secret War Of Attrition?

Doctor Who at the Hugo Awards: Meant to write about this at the time, but forgot to, and now I can’t recall if I had anything interesting or longish to say about it, so I’ll keep it brief. Firstly, after watching all the Battlestar episodes to date, Moffat’s Who episodes beating Ron Moore’s show for three years running is a spectacular achievement, because Battlestar is some of the best television writing full stop, never mind in SF. The Pegasus episodes in particular, because that stuff is very, very good. And very, very harrowing. However, the Razor TV movie didn’t hold together quite as well as other episodes in Series 3 (regardless of apparent fan reaction to that series), so wasn’t that much of a challenge to Blink.

Secondly, the real challenge to Moffat’s episode was actually Paul Cornell’s Human Nature/Family Of Blood two-parter, and it really should’ve won. I mean, Blink was funny and brilliant, but Cornell’s just pips it, thanks in no small part to David Tennant and Jessica Hynes (Daisy in Spaced, of course), who were extraordinary.

And speaking of the Hugos, it must have been a poor year for film if Stardust was really the best long-form genre flick from ‘07. It was good, but Sunday afternoon family film good, not award-winning good. Other recent winners include Pan’s Labyrinth, Serenity and The Lord of the Rings (all of them), and it’s nowhere near as good as them. Hell, it isn’t even in the same league as recent nominees, like The Prestige and Spirited Away.

And to think Transformers wasn’t even nominated. Scandalous.

Knight Rider: And you can bet this show is never getting nominated either. I love that Mustang, but to be brutally honest the pilot was shit and the series looks worse. The thing is, this:

A big part of season one is going to be why Kitt is here with this group, why is he learning, and why is an artificial intelligence in this car. There is a bigger mythology to it and what I wanted to do was bring some from the original and update it. It’s been 25 years since Knight Industries was seen so what’s happened to them and where have they gone? [from an io9 spoiler post]

Sounds like a good idea in the right hands. But oh dear Lord are these hands the wrongest hands imaginable.

An observation of possible interest to the kind of nerd that even other nerds like to pick on: I’ve finally finished the big chunk of work I mentioned the other day, and it’s the first completed thing written entirely on my Linux-infused laptop.

Those who’ve been hanging round the Hall for a while may recall a few months ago I attempted to salvage my utterly out-of-date yet faithful and broadly functional old warhorse, a Thinkpad that got me through University. I didn’t really want to get rid of it and have to shovel out money for a new one, because it was only really going to be used as a word processor, and I wanted to see if Linux really was getting more user friendly.

The main problem with the plan was that the hardware’s a little too old to run Ubuntu, which I’ve been told is the dead simple Linux. Fluxbuntu and Xubuntu both ran on it, but the former wouldn’t recognise a USB memory stick and I didn’t really want to have to fudge around that much to get it working. Xubuntu ran really slowly at first, but I managed to set up some swap space on the hard disk that largely took care of the problem. It doesn’t really load any faster than XP did (old system, though, so not surprising) but it certainly hibernates and shuts down quickly, and there’s no sudden slow-downs or apparently random accessing of the hard drive, which is practically worth the bother on its own.

The USB stick works fine, which is the most important thing because printing duties will have to be done by transferring the files over to the Windows PC. I can’t be bothered faffing around with getting an internet or network connection on the laptop, and I think I’m better off without the distraction. Besides, I think the AbiWord writing package is just about all the creaky old system can handle.

To be honest, I wouldn’t call the Linux packages that will run on this relatively old system user friendly at all. I’ve just about got enough knowledge to do the minimum of what I need to do, but that’s it. Unless the more modern Linux packages are more user-friendly by a good distance (like, light-years distance) then I can’t see Linux ever being a realistic choice for most. But you never know, they might be.

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The new Batman film (again! I know!) had me thinking about whether I was old enough to see Batman Returns when it came out. I think it was a 12 rating, so I may have been a little younger than that, but not by much. The first 15 rated film I saw was Schindler’s List with Dad, and I was certainly younger than that. The first 15 I’d seen in the cinema, that is, not the first ever. I think that was Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and God bless VCRs, eh? The first 18 on tape was probably the era-defining artistic masterpiece Predator 2. Which really goes to show, if you ask me, how daft the British film rating system is.

Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein would have been the first 15 I saw unaccompanied by a grown up, with an old school friend, who I’m pretty sure was the same buddy I went to see Event Horizon with, years later. That was an 18, and I would probably have been 17 when it came out. I’m sure we had a conversation about how surprising it was that I hadn’t gone to seen any other 18 rating films earlier, but then again I don’t suppose there were many released at that rating ten years ago, much like now. Bad for business.

Actually, I really liked both those films, despite the poor reviews. I should try and catch them again sometime.

I’ve mentioned several times before how broken I think the BBFC’s classification system is, across the board, and how I roundly dissapprove (is that something you can do roundly? Not sure, but I’m doing it anyway) of ratings on children’s books. Amongst other things, I’m not keen at all of the way it makes people think they know what constitutes a certain rating, only to get angry down the line when it turns out the Board are letting damn near anything be a 12A, as long as there’s no mention of naughty, naughty drugs. So imagine my surprise at seeing various blogs and webcomics rating themselves PG-13, R or whatever, as if that’s a good way to encapsulate exactly what their readership should be, or expect.

Thing is, I’m not having a go, and I probably sound a bit more snarky than I want to be. It’s a good way to give people an idea of what they can expect, within the accepted meaning of those ratings. It just strikes me as suffocatingly restrictive. I mean, the whole point of internet anything is the freedom you don’t get anywhere else, even if this does lead to the somewhat variable quality you get with any kind of self-publishing. Blogs avoid the requirements of printed news outlets (because here I can say fuckalucka-shitball-tits whenever I like), Penny Arcade can get away with stuff that wouldn’t be allowed anywhere else. We’d all be poorer if we didn’t have the things we do thanks to this new media.

Should I have a content warning on the Journal? I wonder about that sometimes. I’m sympathetic to those who wouldn’t want their kids reading inappropriate stuff. Parenting, after all, is difficult, and can’t be a 24/7 behaviour monitoring thing. Shouldn’t be, in fact, unless you want to unleash some seriously damaged offspring into the world. But honestly, if your kid isn’t old enough to deal with rude words, I’m inclined to think they shouldn’t be online unsupervised. And I’m not really inclined to censor myself, however lightly. And as far as adults who don’t like swears go, well, your business is your business and you’re probably better off not reading this blog. Because I’m not likely to stop scrawling profanity over this site.

That said, I don’t suppose a little self-analysis would be out of the question. What is the point of turning the internet blue?

1. It is big, and it is funny. Ok, I’m being a bit facetious, but I’m serious about the latter half of that statement. Swearing is funny, and there’s nothing wrong with humour.

2. It promotes an informal atmosphere. Which seems a little counter-intuitive maybe. Plenty of people find profanity hostile. I hope I don’t employ that type, at least not much. This whole Journal project’s meant to be fun, and irreverance is part of that.

3. Finally, and most importantly, I suppose it’s also about making a point. Not a big thing, not a freedom of speech protest, not stamping my feet and getting all righteous. It’s more something I decided on when I first started writing here.

In earlier versions of the Journal, I wrote as “Hunter McEvoy”, the name taken from a comic strip character who would have been a kind of narrator for stories I wanted to do here. The previous plans got shelved, but I still used the pseudonym for a while, probably on a vague hunch that it’s best to keep anonymous online. I may not be wrong about that, and might live to regret switching over to my actual name. I hope not.

I opted to write as myself because there’s something to be said for owning your own words. If nothing else, it keeps me honest, and makes me think twice about getting too near the knuckle in some posts. Although it doesn’t stop me from waxing poetical about the new Transformers cartoon, and it really should. In the face of the hypothetical tactical Google from a prospective employer.

In all seriousness, it crossed my mind to censor myself. And I chose to dismiss that option. Because I am of the opinion that blasphemy and blue language, in and of themselves, are not bad things that should be suppressed. Sure, in context they can be harmful, even criminal, but that’s true of any words, profane or otherwise. So I write what I think, and post it with expletives included, because there’s nothing wrong with that. And to do otherwise would be dishonest, and I think that dishonesty in writing, even in fiction, even in deliberate lying, if you get my meaning, would be the worst outcome.

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What have we got for you good folks today?

• Started Warren Ellis’s Crooked Little Vein but gave up halfway through. I thought the first chapter was great (and I think it’s free online somewhere), but it went off the rails into pointlessness after that. And the main character ends up with a superhot Gothy sexpot sidekick who contributes only the discomforting sensation that Ellis was getting his rocks off while he was writing it. I don’t know, maybe I’m just not getting it. After all, there’s a similar old-man’s-fantasy sidekick in Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box, and I thought that book was brilliant. Then again, the main character’s a sleazy old rock star, so it does make sense in context. In Vein, the protagonist just kind of picks her up off the street.

• Mind you, Ellis is in good company because I didn’t manage to get more than twenty or so pages into Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island either. Which is odd, because the premise is intriguing (it’s the mid-fifties, and two US Marshalls have to locate a prisoner missing from an asylum on an island isolated by a huge storm, and the staff of the asylum are more than likely up to no good themselves) and I’ve read every other one of his books over the past couple of months and really enjoyed them. Maybe I’m just not in the right frame of mind at the moment, in that I’ve been making my way through Ian Rankin’s catalogue and I’ve probably attuned myself to a different style of crime writing for the time being. Then again, the introduction seems to be promising mind games played on the protagonists by a former-intelligence agent turned psychologist, and dear God there’s more than enough of that kind of thing in the genre already.

• Also, Leonardo DiCaprio will be starring in the upcoming Scorcese adaptation of the book, and his nauseating taint has unavoidably contaminated my enjoyment of the story. You know the taint I mean. The cheesy exudation of the terminally smug.

• I can wholly recommend the DVD Special Edition of A Fistful Of Dollars. While most commentary tracks are a bit shit, this one is provided by Sergio Leone biographer Christopher Frayling, and it’s fascinating. Incidentally, Frayling is also the chairman of the Arts Council England, and his appointment in 2004 was a little controversial because he’s, frankly, a pop culture junkie. How much of a junkie? Well, according to The Independent, when he was knighted in 2000 he took as his motto the Latin phrase “Perge, Scelus, Mihi Diem Perficias”, which translates as “Proceed, varlet, and let the day be rendered perfect for my benefit.” Or, to put another spin on it, “Go ahead, punk. Make my day.”

• More doom’n'gloom surrounding the Watchmen film. I was starting to feel a little optimistic about it after a chat with Brother Paul, who remains enthusiastic about the adaptation. Then I found out who was playing the second Silk Spectre. “Actress” Malin Akerman last appeared in otherwise-inoffensive chick flick 27 Dresses (and I bet you lot never thought that film would get a mention in the Journal), and she was absolutely fucking awful. Her skill was commesurate with a rotting, maggoty length of driftwood. Actually, that’s doing the hypothetical driftwood a disservice as the driftwood is showing signs of life. Because it’s riddled with parasitic fungus. I’ll concede that one bad performance doesn’t preclude a radical improvement, but we’re talking extremely fucking radical here; when a guitarist’s having trouble with barre chords- no, when a guitarists having trouble with open chords- actually, no, when a guitarist’s having trouble figuring out which way up the guitar goes, it’s unrealistic to expect her to be shreddin’ hot solos like Steve fucking Vai six months down the line.

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