Alasdair Watson

We were just chatting about children’s fiction in the office, particularly the difference between older fiction, of the era of something like the nonpareil Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and modern stuff like Potter. Part of the conclusion we came to is that the strength of something like Milne’s work is in it’s pure charm, while with something like Rowling, you’ve got a more constructed product, with influences and elements visible from all sorts of childrens fiction and fantasy. One of the names that came up was Thomas Huges “Tom Brown’s school days”, that bastion of English boarding-school fiction.

Which, of course, lead to the thought of Flashman. And thus to images of Draco Malfoy as a bully and coward in the Victorian era, shagging hundreds of women and inadvertantly becoming a massively decorated hero of the British empire.

Just thought I’d share.

Andrew’s been away and Marysia’s been t00bing, but what have I been doing?

Well, yesterday I wore a suit all day, which was unsettling, but well worth it. It was my little brother’s graduation (hence the formalwear) – he got an upper second in Bsc Multimedia from Brunel. Our whole family is hugely proud of him.

Prior to that, at the weekend, I took deliver of a new PC. It’s the first time I’ve built my own, and more importantly, it’s the first time I’ve owned a desktop PC with a seriously high-end spec – the onther desktops I’ve had have been budget models that were good enough for what I wanted at the time, but little to no futureproofing. This thing, on the other hand, goes like a bastard. There are a few wiring problems with the top panel on the case that I need to smooth out when I have the time, but I can safely say I’m delighted with this, not least because it gives me that dual monitor set-up I’ve always wanted. :)

I also fear that I may be about to lose a large chunk of my time to Neverwinter Nights – it never quite ran properly on my old machine, so I’ve hardly done more than give it a quick once over, but it goes like shit off a shovel on the new one, and looks ace, so if you don’t see much of me for a while, that’s why.

I signed up to emusic.com in the end, and am hoovering down MP3s at speed with a clear

conscience. Got the new Dropkick Murphys album on the way, for example, and a small shitload of Thelonious Monk.

Oh, and somehow I have to come up with a script for a three panel strip (that format, at any rate) that’ll work as a trailer for “Take a Walk” – specifically for “Camden”. Since Camden is, in large part, an introductory piece, a trailer for a larger concept, this is going to be an interesting exercise.

In other news: Starbucks are less evil than I thought. The corp-culture stuff is a little scary, but interesting rationalised, but it’s the bit about how people from Oxfam say that the third world would be better off if more coffee buyers were like Starbucks that’s interesting (link lifted from Dan).

A friend of mine just pointed me at emusic.com, a subscription-based MP3 download service. The cost to me would be about 7 quid a month. I had a look through their artist listing. It’s fucking huge, and while the don’t have complete back catalouges for all of their artists, they’re pretty fucking good. (Tom Waits, for instance, only has his three most recent albums on the service, while they appear to have the complete back catalogue of The Fall, including live albums.) Just about every artist I like has something on there, and there’s scads more that I’ve been meaning to check out.

So, essentially, I’m being offered the opportunity to download an unlimited number of songs, legally and legitimately, without ripping off the artists, for less than the price of a CD a month. Can someone please tell me what the catch is? Is there anyone reading who knows more about the service who can tell me if there’s anything dodgy going on?

And getting what I deserve. I’ve just been re-reading the opening act of RUST, all that ever made it on-line. Half of it makes me cringe beyond belief, although there are still bits I like, even though it’s 4 years since I started it – I still don’t think anyone else has tried much of the storytelling techniques we took a crack at in that, and a few of them really do still work, even if my browser resolution is now too high to actually make the general layout behave quite like it was supposed to – the big reveal is blown, for example, although the splash page works much better now, especially with the improved load times that broadband provides (and the “Cult Of The Burning Clinton” sight gag still makes me smile), over that ones that were such a fucker when you were trying to do anything image heavy back in 99, and couldn’t even afford to assume 56.6 as the slowest speed to cater for.

I’ve had this weird itch to go back to webcomics for the last few months. My own purists “text and images only” thing, nothing with flash, or anything like that. But y’know, to tie them up with databases and PHP as well as javascript and CSS…

But y’know, the thing that still fucking haunts me about RUST is that tagline, that opening image. An angel, with wings of chrome, bleeding out, surrounded by decaying machinery – great corroded cogs, dead junction boxes and the last breath of digital angel.

Angels Rust.

I’ve still got to do something with it.

Half of the first of the “Take a Walk” shorts I’m doing with Sean Azzopardi is now online. “Take a Walk”, which I think I’ve mentioned here before is my loveletter to London. Each installment is going to be twelve pages – two six page monologues, the first of which is a conventional comic set in the present, a high speed runthrough of the area’s mental topography delivered by a nameless narrator.

The second of them, though, is where Sean gets to go to town. A short monologue delivered by somone out the past, a short fiction. A ten-second summary of a London life. I write the words, and Sean sets them to whatever illustrations seem apt, and he came out of the gate with all guns blazing in Camden.

Started a new workout programme last night. I’ve signed back on with my old gym with it’s better facilities, rather than using the one near work, so I took advantage of the induction package they offer and had a new programme worked out for me. The new one is rather more intensive than my old one, but I’ve got up today remarkably free of aching. But then, I went to the gym late last night, and I know it’s taken up to 24 hours in the past for the worst of the aches to set in. So I’m sitting here, feeling the odd minor twinge, and wondering if everything is about to seize up on me…

I note that the New Zealand film commission have paid for the first draft development of a screenplay based on the novel The Vintner’s Luck, which my friend Andrea lent to me last year, and which I thoroughly enjoyed – it’s a story spanning a century, about a French Vintner and his family, and his affair with a fallen angel. I look forward to seeing it if it makes it to the big screen.

CIA veteran on Bush and Iraq.

Via J H-R, I find The Group Is It’s Own Worst Enemy, a switched-on essay about social software and group dynamics.

Arthur, the magazine that the Alan Moore article came from. If you read the commentary, please go visit.