New Year's Resolution: Blog More, because the world hangs on my every word.
It's been a busy old year what with one thing and another. Work is something of an uphill run except with navigation performed by a cross between a Rally Car navigator, a driving test instructor and Yoda (for the whole sitting on your shoulders whilst you run thing), so that your course isn't determined by practicalities such as terrain or final destination, but by someone yelling "Turn left! Turn right! Do a barrel roll!" in your ear every few seconds. Still, we've managed to get some interesting things done, though I have developed a powerful hatred for a certain mobile phone network.
My grandmother died. Same day as Steve Jobs, so once again I had to deal with the loss of a close relative at the same time all the press is eulogising someone I didn't particularly care for. Last time it was the death of my mother versus the death of Jade Goody. Jobs may have been something like a tremendous control freak with a knack for popularising things other manufacturers had been doing for ages, but at least he wasn't a horrible talentless racist idiot.
I get rather down at Christmas what with one thing and another. All commercial media (and the BBC for that matter) is dedicated to rubbing my face in what a tremendous amount of fun I should be having with my family, my friends and my TONNES OF PRESENTS. I don't even have tonnes of presents these days, although a certain person did her very best to swamp me in cool stuff including a pair of actually awesome socks. They're incredibly warm and snuggly and at last I understand why Fell Walkers walk the fells- To have an excuse to wear these socks. Sure they may wind up dying of hypothermia from the knees up, but it's a small price to pay.
So, what can we look forwards to in the new year? I reckon 2-1 odds on economic disaster and 5-1 odds on yet another war, with 10-1 odds on World War 3 in the Entangling Alliances whoops how did we get ourselves into this mess-style.
I told you Christmas made me happy.
Thursday 29 December 2011
Sunday 26 June 2011
Braincrashed
I have given myself a brain injury
I meant to, too.
This is going to take some explaining so bear with me as we go on a journey to a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...
Okay, really we're going nearly twenty years ago to an office five minute's walk from where I currently work. Way back then, I worked for the UK arm of MicroProse, doin' games and hittin' my co-workers upside the head with laser guns (actually true).
One of the more interesting characters in the office was an artist by the name of Mark Wilson, whose work you can see if you ever dig out the Atari STe version of Civilization, which you totally should because it's aces and much better than the Amiga version because there's not so much disk-swapping. He was quite a Sci-Fi fan, specifically of Dr Who and various extraordinarily bad films. When he'd been at University, he'd been involved in the cinema club and would run all-night showings of some truly magnificent movie catastrophes, and when he wasn't banging on about Dr Who or exactly why his friends had written a dedication to him in a Call of Cthulhu role-playing adventure (or why our head programmer was an evil troglodyte from Greek myth and how we should probably trap him in a giant wicker man and light him on fire, if only we could somehow get hold of all the wicker in the world), he would regale me with stories of the finest film in cinema history.
Starcrash.
No, wait- don't run off to Google it. You'll spoil the fun and the Wikipedia article, while accurate, is dull as hell and makes the film seem a lot more reasonable that the actual film itself. Sure you could Youtube it, but then you'd just be found face down in a coma with cerebro-spinal fluid leaking out your ears and nose from where your brain escaped.
Let's examine the cast. Two big names who aren't at all mismatched. Christopher Plummer and David Hasselhoff. Naturally, they play father and son. Space Emperor father and son, no less. Happily, the film was made in 1979 to cash in on Star Wars fever, so Hasselhoff has not yet transitioned to full-on 'Hoff and does not spoil the subtle balance of the film with his massive personality. Also, he wears a mask with laser eyes.
Next up is the heroine of our adventure, a lady by the name of Caroline Munro. Star of a number of Hammer horror films, including The Abominable Dr Phibes, she is best remembered for starring in an ad campaign for Lamb's Navy Rum and also for being the first woman to be killed by James Bond. Deliberately, anyway. Her main attributes are a willingness to star in a film where about half the time she is wearing a space bikini and fighting other equally scantily-clad women and an ability to be called by the name "Stella Star" without bursting out laughing, as I imagine that film stock was pretty damn expensive, it being a cheap Italian Star Wars knock-off with all the production values that implies, especially since they'd probably used up half their budget on Christopher Plummer- ten percent on his fee and the rest on the enormous amount of valium he seems to have consumed.
Our heroine's sidekick is interesting. All the way through, I was thinking "who is this incredibly curly-haired scary-eyed lunatic Space Jesus wannabe?" and "When is the woman with the second-highest billing in the movie going to show up? I bet she looks damn fine in a bikini". Well, it turns out that they were both one and the same person, by the name of Marjoe Gortner. This is remarkable on account of my "scary-eyed lunatic Space Jesus wannabe" comment, which I really did think at the time. Turns out Marjoe (portmanteau of "Mary" and "Joseph") was a revivalist preacher from the age of four, racking up a fortune of some three million dollars by the age of sixteen (a lot in 1960, fully half a Steve Austin). Space Jesus has powers. He brings Stella StaAHAHAHAr back from the dead with his magic gay disco microwave defrost powers and survives being hit with a stick by a bald-headed green man who was probably envious of his lovely locks.
He also has a lightsaber and uses it to beat troglodytes with. Our Space Jesus is an Angry (and crazy-eyed) Space Jesus!
The villain of the piece is Joe Spinell, AKA Lord Zarth Arn, who has built the most powerful weapon in the cosmos, so big it is built into a planet, that's how big it is! No poxy being mistaken for a small moon for this doomsday weapon, it's a whole planet that destroys people's minds by superimposing the red goop out of a lava lamp on them. Except for our heroes, as they "aren't like normal people". Actual Line.
Lord Zarth Arn (never, ever Lord Arn. Not even Arnie to his bessie mate Elric) has presumably built his terrible doomsday weapon (terrible in the sense that it is rubbish) on account of waking up one day to find out that a mad space-doctor has swapped his skin with that of Edward James Olmos. Also, despite being thin of face, he is surprisingly rotund of tum and should not wear so much skin-tight PVC.
There's a robot too. The fourth worst robot in history ever (the three even worse robots are in this film too thanks to the magic of Stop-Motion Animation!) , his creators couldn't be bothered wasting time giving him a good name, or even a two letter, two number registration like a certain other movie with somewhat better production values. This robot is called "L" or "Elle" and is identical to Elle McPherson is that he has legs and arms and a head. And the name. He is rubbish and his idea for avoiding hypothermia is to lie down in the snow and hold hands. Happily, cave-dwelling trolodytes smash him to bits with styrofoam bones, revealing his giblets to be made from an old, broken movie camera.
I don't want to spoil the plot too badly, partly because there isn't much of a plot to spoil, and partly because the Youtube video I'm going to link to later will do that for you. Instead here are a few highlights:
A giant stop-motion robot made of silver putty and bits of stuff left over from a meccano set. It has robot boobs and flashes red when shot in said boobs. Now I know why every videogame boss in every Japanese bullet-hell shooter flashes red when hit in the vulnerables. It is possibly the worst-animated thing in the history of history. Elbows do not bend that way!
Two smaller stop-motion robots based on the Ray Harryhausen skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts. Problem is, they didn't have Ray Harryhausen.
Music by five-time academy award winner John Barry who scored fourteen James Bond movies, including Goldfinger, for pity's sake! He did the theme music for the Persuaders! He was the first man to use a synthesizer in a film score!
Presumably his contribution to this film was made in the form of scrunched-up music scores covered in dog-ends, cigarette ash and banana peel, with "Crap! What was I thinking?" scribbled on them. I also presume that as a result of his work on Starcrash, he learned to shred stuff before chucking it in the bin.
Enemy spacecraft that fly in trains of five ships with less than half a ship-length between each other. They fly into combat this way too. Happily their ray-guns shoot every-which-way but straight ahead, so there's no danger involved. Also, brakes don't work in space, so no accidental five-spaceship pileups in the Haunted Stars here.
A bigger enemy spacecraft that is a giant hand made of tin cans and model kit sprues. The hand closes into a fist for battle. It has nice, big picture windows that turn out to be a slight tactical weak-point.
Imperial battleships that can stop the flow of time (for three minutes, which is interesting because how does time know the three minutes are up?) and whose primary combat strategy is "It's raining men" through the medium of golden torpedoes full of er- men. Happily, they were up against an enemy with big windows instead of a half-metre thick face-hardened steel hull, because face hardening does not mean "hardened with faces".
Did I mention the bikini chick-fights?
There is no punchline or moral to this blog post, save to say that even after twenty years of anticipation, I was not disappointed, this truly was one of the best worst films I've ever seen. Wherever you are, Mark, I salute you.
Click here, you know you want to.
I meant to, too.
This is going to take some explaining so bear with me as we go on a journey to a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...
Okay, really we're going nearly twenty years ago to an office five minute's walk from where I currently work. Way back then, I worked for the UK arm of MicroProse, doin' games and hittin' my co-workers upside the head with laser guns (actually true).
One of the more interesting characters in the office was an artist by the name of Mark Wilson, whose work you can see if you ever dig out the Atari STe version of Civilization, which you totally should because it's aces and much better than the Amiga version because there's not so much disk-swapping. He was quite a Sci-Fi fan, specifically of Dr Who and various extraordinarily bad films. When he'd been at University, he'd been involved in the cinema club and would run all-night showings of some truly magnificent movie catastrophes, and when he wasn't banging on about Dr Who or exactly why his friends had written a dedication to him in a Call of Cthulhu role-playing adventure (or why our head programmer was an evil troglodyte from Greek myth and how we should probably trap him in a giant wicker man and light him on fire, if only we could somehow get hold of all the wicker in the world), he would regale me with stories of the finest film in cinema history.
Starcrash.
No, wait- don't run off to Google it. You'll spoil the fun and the Wikipedia article, while accurate, is dull as hell and makes the film seem a lot more reasonable that the actual film itself. Sure you could Youtube it, but then you'd just be found face down in a coma with cerebro-spinal fluid leaking out your ears and nose from where your brain escaped.
Let's examine the cast. Two big names who aren't at all mismatched. Christopher Plummer and David Hasselhoff. Naturally, they play father and son. Space Emperor father and son, no less. Happily, the film was made in 1979 to cash in on Star Wars fever, so Hasselhoff has not yet transitioned to full-on 'Hoff and does not spoil the subtle balance of the film with his massive personality. Also, he wears a mask with laser eyes.
Next up is the heroine of our adventure, a lady by the name of Caroline Munro. Star of a number of Hammer horror films, including The Abominable Dr Phibes, she is best remembered for starring in an ad campaign for Lamb's Navy Rum and also for being the first woman to be killed by James Bond. Deliberately, anyway. Her main attributes are a willingness to star in a film where about half the time she is wearing a space bikini and fighting other equally scantily-clad women and an ability to be called by the name "Stella Star" without bursting out laughing, as I imagine that film stock was pretty damn expensive, it being a cheap Italian Star Wars knock-off with all the production values that implies, especially since they'd probably used up half their budget on Christopher Plummer- ten percent on his fee and the rest on the enormous amount of valium he seems to have consumed.
Our heroine's sidekick is interesting. All the way through, I was thinking "who is this incredibly curly-haired scary-eyed lunatic Space Jesus wannabe?" and "When is the woman with the second-highest billing in the movie going to show up? I bet she looks damn fine in a bikini". Well, it turns out that they were both one and the same person, by the name of Marjoe Gortner. This is remarkable on account of my "scary-eyed lunatic Space Jesus wannabe" comment, which I really did think at the time. Turns out Marjoe (portmanteau of "Mary" and "Joseph") was a revivalist preacher from the age of four, racking up a fortune of some three million dollars by the age of sixteen (a lot in 1960, fully half a Steve Austin). Space Jesus has powers. He brings Stella StaAHAHAHAr back from the dead with his magic gay disco microwave defrost powers and survives being hit with a stick by a bald-headed green man who was probably envious of his lovely locks.
He also has a lightsaber and uses it to beat troglodytes with. Our Space Jesus is an Angry (and crazy-eyed) Space Jesus!
The villain of the piece is Joe Spinell, AKA Lord Zarth Arn, who has built the most powerful weapon in the cosmos, so big it is built into a planet, that's how big it is! No poxy being mistaken for a small moon for this doomsday weapon, it's a whole planet that destroys people's minds by superimposing the red goop out of a lava lamp on them. Except for our heroes, as they "aren't like normal people". Actual Line.
Lord Zarth Arn (never, ever Lord Arn. Not even Arnie to his bessie mate Elric) has presumably built his terrible doomsday weapon (terrible in the sense that it is rubbish) on account of waking up one day to find out that a mad space-doctor has swapped his skin with that of Edward James Olmos. Also, despite being thin of face, he is surprisingly rotund of tum and should not wear so much skin-tight PVC.
There's a robot too. The fourth worst robot in history ever (the three even worse robots are in this film too thanks to the magic of Stop-Motion Animation!) , his creators couldn't be bothered wasting time giving him a good name, or even a two letter, two number registration like a certain other movie with somewhat better production values. This robot is called "L" or "Elle" and is identical to Elle McPherson is that he has legs and arms and a head. And the name. He is rubbish and his idea for avoiding hypothermia is to lie down in the snow and hold hands. Happily, cave-dwelling trolodytes smash him to bits with styrofoam bones, revealing his giblets to be made from an old, broken movie camera.
I don't want to spoil the plot too badly, partly because there isn't much of a plot to spoil, and partly because the Youtube video I'm going to link to later will do that for you. Instead here are a few highlights:
A giant stop-motion robot made of silver putty and bits of stuff left over from a meccano set. It has robot boobs and flashes red when shot in said boobs. Now I know why every videogame boss in every Japanese bullet-hell shooter flashes red when hit in the vulnerables. It is possibly the worst-animated thing in the history of history. Elbows do not bend that way!
Two smaller stop-motion robots based on the Ray Harryhausen skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts. Problem is, they didn't have Ray Harryhausen.
Music by five-time academy award winner John Barry who scored fourteen James Bond movies, including Goldfinger, for pity's sake! He did the theme music for the Persuaders! He was the first man to use a synthesizer in a film score!
Presumably his contribution to this film was made in the form of scrunched-up music scores covered in dog-ends, cigarette ash and banana peel, with "Crap! What was I thinking?" scribbled on them. I also presume that as a result of his work on Starcrash, he learned to shred stuff before chucking it in the bin.
Enemy spacecraft that fly in trains of five ships with less than half a ship-length between each other. They fly into combat this way too. Happily their ray-guns shoot every-which-way but straight ahead, so there's no danger involved. Also, brakes don't work in space, so no accidental five-spaceship pileups in the Haunted Stars here.
A bigger enemy spacecraft that is a giant hand made of tin cans and model kit sprues. The hand closes into a fist for battle. It has nice, big picture windows that turn out to be a slight tactical weak-point.
Imperial battleships that can stop the flow of time (for three minutes, which is interesting because how does time know the three minutes are up?) and whose primary combat strategy is "It's raining men" through the medium of golden torpedoes full of er- men. Happily, they were up against an enemy with big windows instead of a half-metre thick face-hardened steel hull, because face hardening does not mean "hardened with faces".
Did I mention the bikini chick-fights?
There is no punchline or moral to this blog post, save to say that even after twenty years of anticipation, I was not disappointed, this truly was one of the best worst films I've ever seen. Wherever you are, Mark, I salute you.
Click here, you know you want to.
Sunday 22 May 2011
Vidogame Noir in the End of Days.
So, this Friday I wandered round to Game and bought a Game. L.A. Noir. I didn't listen very closely to the sneak previews so I thought I was going to be a hard-boiled gumshoe who shoots people in the face. Well, I was wrong. I'm an annoying cop who shoots people in the face. The game is slightly weird- the big cases that I work usually result in suspects being taken alive and Due Process being served. However, as I drive from location to location, I pass random "street crimes" and almost without exception these result in hilarious bloodbaths whether I want them to or not. The Street Crimes don't mesh well with the main plot- In a main mission, I get commended for heroism for facing off against a couple of mooks with .38 pistols. In a street crime mission, I shoot up an entire gang of bank-robbers armed with semi-automatic rifles and tommy guns and no-one ever mentions it!
Speaking of things getting shot up, I'm glad I wear a hat in the game, because apparently it is magnetic and attracts bullets away from my face. Every time there's a gun-battle someone WILL shoot my hat off at least once. Yes, I can get my hat shot multiple times because like Indiana Jones, my character will risk life and limb in pursuit of sartorial elegance. Hat shot off? Well, let's stop shooting back at the three gangsters packing submachine guns and go hunting for my damn fedora, even if it means stepping out from cover and into the hot lead hailstorm. Who would do that? I wouldn't do it even in a videogame, but the game itself thinks I should, so I do so even though I'm hauling at the controller going "NOOO! DAMMIT! WHO WEARS HATS ANNNYYWAAAAAYYY???"
The developers have put a lot of effort into making the facial animation as lifelike as possible so that when I'm questioning people, I can pick up on facial cues to work out how much the lying bastard is lying to me. It works rather well for male characters, but for females, it has the side effect of making them all look like hideous wizened trolls, even when they're supposed to be fifteen years old or movie stars or something.
I could do without so much CSI:1946 poking around dead naked female murder victims who may or may not have been killed by the Black Dahlia killer, or by copycats thereof. It's creepy and will probably make the game the year's best seller in Japan.
When not mauling corpses, the clue-hunting sequences are interesting but have one minor problem- when you are near a clue, the jiggler thing in the controlller jiggles to let you know something interesting is nearby. This is fine except that the initial release of the PS3 (which I am playing the game on, not XBox360 for various reasons) came with controllers that don't have jiggly things in them. I got my PS3 on release and have been too skinflint to get the new jiggletrollers so hunting for clues is rather tricky. In the last case, I only found 11 out of 12 clues and got shouted at by the crazy Liam Neeson-a-like who runs Homicide and spouts pseudo-religious wrath-of-god nonsense in lieu of being an interesting, well-developed character.
Speaking of crazy pseudo-religious types, I note with some amusement but not much surprise that as far as I can tell, the May 21st Rapture did not occur and the world has not yet ended. Hardly surprising; ignoring the bit of the bibble that says something along the lines of none can know the hour of his coming because the lord cares not for your dental appointment, if I were an an omnipotent deity, I would have much more interesting things to do than choose 200,000 of the planet's most insufferable wossnames to come live with me at Chez God so they can all stand around being smug at the suffering of all the billions who didn't make the cut. Indeed, assuming that a God would want to choose 200,000 actually decent people, there's going to be a lot of empty heavenly housing-stock. A bit like post-crunch Ireland, but without so much of an impact on the Eurozone and the Queen hasn't made a visit. Yet.
Speaking of things getting shot up, I'm glad I wear a hat in the game, because apparently it is magnetic and attracts bullets away from my face. Every time there's a gun-battle someone WILL shoot my hat off at least once. Yes, I can get my hat shot multiple times because like Indiana Jones, my character will risk life and limb in pursuit of sartorial elegance. Hat shot off? Well, let's stop shooting back at the three gangsters packing submachine guns and go hunting for my damn fedora, even if it means stepping out from cover and into the hot lead hailstorm. Who would do that? I wouldn't do it even in a videogame, but the game itself thinks I should, so I do so even though I'm hauling at the controller going "NOOO! DAMMIT! WHO WEARS HATS ANNNYYWAAAAAYYY???"
The developers have put a lot of effort into making the facial animation as lifelike as possible so that when I'm questioning people, I can pick up on facial cues to work out how much the lying bastard is lying to me. It works rather well for male characters, but for females, it has the side effect of making them all look like hideous wizened trolls, even when they're supposed to be fifteen years old or movie stars or something.
I could do without so much CSI:1946 poking around dead naked female murder victims who may or may not have been killed by the Black Dahlia killer, or by copycats thereof. It's creepy and will probably make the game the year's best seller in Japan.
When not mauling corpses, the clue-hunting sequences are interesting but have one minor problem- when you are near a clue, the jiggler thing in the controlller jiggles to let you know something interesting is nearby. This is fine except that the initial release of the PS3 (which I am playing the game on, not XBox360 for various reasons) came with controllers that don't have jiggly things in them. I got my PS3 on release and have been too skinflint to get the new jiggletrollers so hunting for clues is rather tricky. In the last case, I only found 11 out of 12 clues and got shouted at by the crazy Liam Neeson-a-like who runs Homicide and spouts pseudo-religious wrath-of-god nonsense in lieu of being an interesting, well-developed character.
Speaking of crazy pseudo-religious types, I note with some amusement but not much surprise that as far as I can tell, the May 21st Rapture did not occur and the world has not yet ended. Hardly surprising; ignoring the bit of the bibble that says something along the lines of none can know the hour of his coming because the lord cares not for your dental appointment, if I were an an omnipotent deity, I would have much more interesting things to do than choose 200,000 of the planet's most insufferable wossnames to come live with me at Chez God so they can all stand around being smug at the suffering of all the billions who didn't make the cut. Indeed, assuming that a God would want to choose 200,000 actually decent people, there's going to be a lot of empty heavenly housing-stock. A bit like post-crunch Ireland, but without so much of an impact on the Eurozone and the Queen hasn't made a visit. Yet.
Monday 9 May 2011
Everything Tweets
Recently, I had to replace my vintage 2006-era iPod as the battery life was down to about three seconds. Someone who owned a soldering iron (like what I do) would probably have replaced the battery, but I used the excuse to move to a new iPod touch.
After buying a new shiny-shiny, what's the first thing you do? Well, the first thing you do is coat it in silicone rubber and add a screen protector that makes any improvements in display technologies a moot point because now there's a plastic film glued to your fancy retina display, but I digress.
Having bought the thing to play tunes, I find that it does rather more; such as let you tweet. For that matter, a Kindle will let you tweet too, as will an Xbox360 and many other random gadgets. Next up is underwear that will twitter to the world about what a horrible person you are if you try to wear them for longer than a day.
If anyone actually develops that as a thing, I will punch them. I'm all for improved personal hygiene (I work in a non-air-conditioned office with an average temperature of 26 degrees Celsius; this sort of thing matters!) but there is such a thing as too much information.
After buying a new shiny-shiny, what's the first thing you do? Well, the first thing you do is coat it in silicone rubber and add a screen protector that makes any improvements in display technologies a moot point because now there's a plastic film glued to your fancy retina display, but I digress.
Having bought the thing to play tunes, I find that it does rather more; such as let you tweet. For that matter, a Kindle will let you tweet too, as will an Xbox360 and many other random gadgets. Next up is underwear that will twitter to the world about what a horrible person you are if you try to wear them for longer than a day.
If anyone actually develops that as a thing, I will punch them. I'm all for improved personal hygiene (I work in a non-air-conditioned office with an average temperature of 26 degrees Celsius; this sort of thing matters!) but there is such a thing as too much information.
Thursday 10 March 2011
Everything's Vibrations!
I've been reading "classic science fiction" from the olden days when science fiction came in magazines named things like "BOGGLING STORIES!" or "TALES OF WONDERMENT".
Apparently, back in the 1930's any hack with a tripewriter could make a living churning out some right tosh, so long as there were enough thermionic valves, relays, rockets and incredibly dense young women in highly impractical space-suits.
Apparently-apparently, by the space-year 2147 the state-of-the-art in air travel will be giant aeroplanes that seat three thousand people, travel at over THREE HUNDRED miles every hour and use really really big propellers because apparently we will have forgotten about jets for some reason. Also, they will be used to transport large sums of cash (we must have forgotten about electronic funds transfers too), perhaps as much as half a million dollars at a time!
Sky Pirates will use maaagical knock-out gas that not only seeps through air-tight metal aeroplane hulls, but cures cancer as a side effect (no one finds this particularly impressive because they're idiots), then dock their maaagical invisible aeroplanes to the airliners (magnetically, of course, because magnets are magi-er, science!) and sneak aboard before nicking the cash and leaving stock certificates in the Sky Pirate corporation as payment because they're not thieves or anything.
The heroes who set off to defeat the sky pirate are sickeningly tall (the short one of the pair is "only a couple of inches over six feet tall"), sickeningly handsome, sickeningly wealthy, sickeningly clever and basically generally sickening.
They're so very clever that it takes them about an afternoon to invent a maaagical energy source that works off "the heat vibration of molecules" and a similar magical form of propulsion that also works off "directed molecular action".
They're so clever, they realise that the villain's invisibility screen is one of their own inventions that they had written up for "preposterous inventions quarterly" and had completely forgotten about until juuuuuust now, because heaven forbid that anyone else in the world ever invent anything ever!
Anyway, they defeat the villain and stop him curing random airline passenger's cancers. They send him to a loony bin because obviously he's an amazing genius just like them, only a kleptomaniac or something, and by the next story he's all sane and ready to help them fly to Venus in their molecular-action spaceship where they meet big-breasted blue women with extra thumbs and fight a mile-wide aeroplane powered by A HUNDRED PROPELLERS!!!
I can feel myself getting stupider reading these books. Any day now, I'll try to power my phone with atoms, or vibrate my molecules into invisibility or something.
Back then everything was explained by vibrations... Sorry, capital-v Vibrations! Anti-gravity machine? Etheric vibrations. Perpetual motion device? Molecular vibrations. Disintegration beam? More molecular vibrations, possibly transmitted by etheric vibrations. Spooks, spectres and poltergeists? Psychic Vibrations. Crazy television that lets you see things at a distance despite there not being a camera there? Etheric vibrations, part 2: electric boogaloo. Invisibility? Intangibility? Molecular vibrations *again*. Time travel? Vibrations in the FOURTH DIMENSION!!!
Nowadays, no-one really cares about vibrations as an explanation for stuff. The only things I can think of that still use it are Superstrings (all subatomic particles are different kinds of very small vibrating science-string, maybe), Crystal Healing (if they don't go the Chakra or It's-all-Quantum flim-flam routes), the Beach Boys and Ann Summers.
Apparently, back in the 1930's any hack with a tripewriter could make a living churning out some right tosh, so long as there were enough thermionic valves, relays, rockets and incredibly dense young women in highly impractical space-suits.
Apparently-apparently, by the space-year 2147 the state-of-the-art in air travel will be giant aeroplanes that seat three thousand people, travel at over THREE HUNDRED miles every hour and use really really big propellers because apparently we will have forgotten about jets for some reason. Also, they will be used to transport large sums of cash (we must have forgotten about electronic funds transfers too), perhaps as much as half a million dollars at a time!
Sky Pirates will use maaagical knock-out gas that not only seeps through air-tight metal aeroplane hulls, but cures cancer as a side effect (no one finds this particularly impressive because they're idiots), then dock their maaagical invisible aeroplanes to the airliners (magnetically, of course, because magnets are magi-er, science!) and sneak aboard before nicking the cash and leaving stock certificates in the Sky Pirate corporation as payment because they're not thieves or anything.
The heroes who set off to defeat the sky pirate are sickeningly tall (the short one of the pair is "only a couple of inches over six feet tall"), sickeningly handsome, sickeningly wealthy, sickeningly clever and basically generally sickening.
They're so very clever that it takes them about an afternoon to invent a maaagical energy source that works off "the heat vibration of molecules" and a similar magical form of propulsion that also works off "directed molecular action".
They're so clever, they realise that the villain's invisibility screen is one of their own inventions that they had written up for "preposterous inventions quarterly" and had completely forgotten about until juuuuuust now, because heaven forbid that anyone else in the world ever invent anything ever!
Anyway, they defeat the villain and stop him curing random airline passenger's cancers. They send him to a loony bin because obviously he's an amazing genius just like them, only a kleptomaniac or something, and by the next story he's all sane and ready to help them fly to Venus in their molecular-action spaceship where they meet big-breasted blue women with extra thumbs and fight a mile-wide aeroplane powered by A HUNDRED PROPELLERS!!!
I can feel myself getting stupider reading these books. Any day now, I'll try to power my phone with atoms, or vibrate my molecules into invisibility or something.
Back then everything was explained by vibrations... Sorry, capital-v Vibrations! Anti-gravity machine? Etheric vibrations. Perpetual motion device? Molecular vibrations. Disintegration beam? More molecular vibrations, possibly transmitted by etheric vibrations. Spooks, spectres and poltergeists? Psychic Vibrations. Crazy television that lets you see things at a distance despite there not being a camera there? Etheric vibrations, part 2: electric boogaloo. Invisibility? Intangibility? Molecular vibrations *again*. Time travel? Vibrations in the FOURTH DIMENSION!!!
Nowadays, no-one really cares about vibrations as an explanation for stuff. The only things I can think of that still use it are Superstrings (all subatomic particles are different kinds of very small vibrating science-string, maybe), Crystal Healing (if they don't go the Chakra or It's-all-Quantum flim-flam routes), the Beach Boys and Ann Summers.
Wednesday 2 February 2011
I'm ba-aaaack!
Hello again!
After a long absence, I've been reminded that I have a blog. In my defence, I've been very busy what with work and getting hit in the head and stuff. Also, my laptop was pinched (along with my XBox360, my phone and my dead mother's jewelery). I had the patio door open late one night to let the dogs out and two sods with a machete and a gun walked in, beat me up and took my stuff. Boo.
Here is a pic of me afterwards. Despite being taken on a cheapo netbook webcam (because someone had nicked my phone with a proper camera) and despite me being covered in dried blood, it is still the best recent picture I have of me. I don't photograph well (because I am ugly)
After a long absence, I've been reminded that I have a blog. In my defence, I've been very busy what with work and getting hit in the head and stuff. Also, my laptop was pinched (along with my XBox360, my phone and my dead mother's jewelery). I had the patio door open late one night to let the dogs out and two sods with a machete and a gun walked in, beat me up and took my stuff. Boo.
Here is a pic of me afterwards. Despite being taken on a cheapo netbook webcam (because someone had nicked my phone with a proper camera) and despite me being covered in dried blood, it is still the best recent picture I have of me. I don't photograph well (because I am ugly)
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