For the first time in almost eight years, you and I are on an equal footing.
I began writing Cylinder and Miserable way back on the 9th of June 2006, and about a year ago I finished writing Series 3 (as noted in this other post); since then I've been publishing steadily without writing any new material, and as of today I have released all extant episodes (2126 of them!), up to and including the end of Series 3 - which means you know everything I do. Well, you know everything apart from the [MASSIVE SPOILER] which I'm planning for the as-yet-unwritten Series 4... but that doesn't count, because it doesn't really exist until I get round to producing Episodes 2127 onwards.
The previous two times, there was a big lump of overlap: I started writing Series 2 before I'd finished publishing Series 1, and I started writing Series 3 before I'd finished publishing Series 2; not so this time. In a way, it's apt that there should be a bit more separation between Series 3 and 4, as I'm planning a few changes next time round. (You'll have to wait and see what those changes are, though.)
Thing is, though, it's not just Cylinder and Miserable. It's very nearly everything.
Grace and Caffeine wrapped up back in 2010 (noted in my third-ever post on this blog), and despite me having notes for dozens of potential new episodes, I've never got round to producing any of them. Knowing It's Called Aspergers seems to have reached its natural endpoint as of last summer. Alien President was only ever a limited-time deal, and is long since completed. Tim, meanwhile, has put Brothers in Shells on an indefinite hiatus, and long since finished his C&M spinoff Sidewards. The only other significant comic strip (or project in a similar format) either of us have been involved with is Fort Paradox.
If you've been reading Fort Paradox, you'll have noticed that we ran out of episodes at the beginning of last month. Again, completely ran out, with no overlap or buffer - Episode 180 was published, without Episode 181 having been written. We scripted the next thirteen strips a few days later, though, and earlier this week Tim illustrated Episodes 184 and 193, which is the only thing that stopped us reaching "Eventuality Zero": the point where every single one of our comic-strip projects has completely run out of finished-but-unpublished episodes.
I expect the new Fort Paradox strips will take a while to see the light of day, as it's unlikely that we're going to finish the next two chapters in any sort of hurry, and hopefully C&M Series 4 will be in production before FP runs out again, so Eventuality Zero should still be at least a year or two away. Beyond that... who knows?
In the meantime, though, I intend to enjoy being able to discuss C&M on an equal footing - at least with Tim and Sarah, even if nobody else is paying attention any more.
- The Colclough
Showing posts with label Fort Paradox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fort Paradox. Show all posts
Saturday, 26 April 2014
Friday, 19 August 2011
Signing off (for now)
So, the Twenty Questions challenge is over. Pretty much. It has resulted in my most bloggingest month ever (sorry, I couldn't be bothered to work out how to say that in real grammar) with 18 posts in August, and it's prompted me to think through some questions and come up with some answers which had never occurred to me before. I'd probably have gone my whole life without attempting a scientific comparison of the relative merits of sheep and cows, for example, if Hannah hadn't included that on her question list.
It's also made me pretty tired of staring at ye olde Blogger Create Post screen.
Anywho, I'm off to Root Hill tomorrow, so I'll be internetless for a week. No more Blogger Create Post screens. No wordsmithing races or challenges. No animation, probably (don't panic though, I'm working on an idea for Arbitrary Stopframe Episode 9 for when I get back). No webcomic updates (well, Tim's going to look after Fort Paradox as it's his turn this week anyway, and Cylinder and Miserable will get some bonus strips online tomorrow). Goodness knows what else will happen though! After all, it was thanks to meeting H and one or two other things that happened at Root Hill 2010 that I started this blog in the first place. Who knows what RH 2011 might precipitate?
But before I head off, I've got one little loose end to wrap up from Twenty Questions: Sam gave me 5 extra questions, and I only answered 3 of them so far. Here are the rest.
Sam's questions, #4: "Which do you prefer: Motorhead or Metallica?"
I really don't know. I've never really listened to either.
Sam's questions, #5: "Who is your favourite Stand Up Comedian?"
Another case of "I don't have a particular favourite". But if I had to choose one, then maybe Jeff Dunham. For Achmed.
For those of you who are going to Root Hill, I'll see you there. For the rest, see you afterwards.
- The Colclough
It's also made me pretty tired of staring at ye olde Blogger Create Post screen.
Anywho, I'm off to Root Hill tomorrow, so I'll be internetless for a week. No more Blogger Create Post screens. No wordsmithing races or challenges. No animation, probably (don't panic though, I'm working on an idea for Arbitrary Stopframe Episode 9 for when I get back). No webcomic updates (well, Tim's going to look after Fort Paradox as it's his turn this week anyway, and Cylinder and Miserable will get some bonus strips online tomorrow). Goodness knows what else will happen though! After all, it was thanks to meeting H and one or two other things that happened at Root Hill 2010 that I started this blog in the first place. Who knows what RH 2011 might precipitate?
But before I head off, I've got one little loose end to wrap up from Twenty Questions: Sam gave me 5 extra questions, and I only answered 3 of them so far. Here are the rest.
Sam's questions, #4: "Which do you prefer: Motorhead or Metallica?"
I really don't know. I've never really listened to either.
Sam's questions, #5: "Who is your favourite Stand Up Comedian?"
Another case of "I don't have a particular favourite". But if I had to choose one, then maybe Jeff Dunham. For Achmed.
For those of you who are going to Root Hill, I'll see you there. For the rest, see you afterwards.
- The Colclough
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
Mixed Stuff
Yay for anthology blogs! At least this time I've got a keyword that conveniently helps describe all of my points...
Mixed Reactions: Tim told me yesterday that he has written the last-ever episode of Sidewards - again. This time, I'm told, it really is the end, and there are only a few weeks left before the final instalment of the strange but hugely enjoyable sandwich-assassin-fuelled weirdness is published online. I'm really looking forward to finding out how the plot resolves, but there'll be a little sandwich-shaped hole in my internet life for months afterwards.
Mixed Media: speaking of webcomics, yesterday I finished illustrating Fort Paradox episodes 67 to 70, using a technically complex art style that gives a parchmenty look (appropriate, considering the subject matter - you'll see what I mean when I publish the strips in a few weeks' time), which involved hybridising pencil sketches, an ink drawing, a failed attempt to incorporate oil pastels, and quite a lot of digital manipulation and arty-farty typography.
As a random side note, the new episodes are the longest consecutive run of FP strips to use the Candara font - the previous record being three, for strips 26 to 28.
Mixed Shades of Green: remember that pencil-on-canvas sketch of a kingfisher in action, which I mentioned a couple of posts back? I said in my last post that I'd painted the sky in, and this morning I've done a second, rather more involved round of painting, this time focussing on the vegetation. It took five different tubes of paint (only one of which was green) and five different brushes to create what could be described, in a reductionist analysis, as a big blob of green. But I'm quite pleased with my big blob of green, so I've decided it's time to take another photo and show you my progress:
Mixed Quality: I saw the Doctor Who 'mid-series finale' A Good Man Goes to War the other day, and I feel compelled to comment on it. I'm amazed that a certain sheep-liking ginger person hasn't blogged on this topic yet, what with her well-documented obsession with all things Whovian, but that's beside the point.
The point is that for me, AGMGTW was a very mixed bag, brilliant and depressing in equal measure. It had some excellent lines (I found Rory's final remark before the title sequence particularly funny), and lots of lovely VFX stuff, and so on and so forth, and in several places it showcased the usual Steve Moffat cleverness. And that Sontaran was hilarious. But there were problems, on a scale I haven't seen before in a Moffat-scripted episode. Spoilers follow, so if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to skip the rest of this post - if you're going, then take a biscuit, and I'll see you next time. Otherwise, you're in for some ranting and railing.
Moffat, like Davies before him, seems to have something against the Church. Yes, I know, that's common enough, but it does get depressing when one's favourite science-fantasy telly show feels it has to join in the bashing. Granted, Moffat's bizarre depiction of the 51st-century 'Church', as a pseudo-faith-based interplanetary military organisation, seems to be stabbing mainly at Roman Catholicism (what with a reference to 'the Papal Mainframe') and high-church Anglicanism rather than the smaller, more down-to-earth Baptist congregations like the one I belong to, but it still irks a bit.
Some of the supporting characters were frankly unnecessary. Lorna came across (IMO, anyway) as an insipid example of the 'person who is in awe of the Doctor and desperate to meet him' archetype, and I really couldn't work out for the life of me why 'Thin One' and 'Fat One' had been included at all. I don't think they added anything interesting to the plot whatsoever, and they should have been cut from the script before the episode got anywhere near the filming stage. I've written some screenplays, and I know a thing or two about writing out unnecessary side characters, and I'm sure AGMGTW would have been better off without those two.
So, that's the thematic and narrative problems whinged about. And finally: anatomy. Yes, you read that right. The thing is, I'm a great stickler for basic anatomical plausibility in fictional creatures. I can accept the hypothetical existence of a faun, a unicorn (provided you assume the horn doesn't grow until after birth, so the baby doesn't rip the mother apart from the inside), a dragon, and many other things, but there are some fantasy critters out there whose anatomy just doesn't make any sense. As I explained in this post back here, I dislike centaurs on the grounds of their badly-thought-out physiology. You try to figure out the skeletal structure or the position of the major organs, and you'll quickly find out that they just don't fit! Which is where the Headless Monks go wrong as well. The phrase 'Headless Monks' does sound rather funky, but the literally-headless chaps in AGMGTW have a few fundamental anatomical glitches. You've got to wonder: how do they eat, drink, taste, breathe, smell, hear or see? Most known higher life-forms do all those things with their heads, and if the Monks don't have a head then they could face some serious difficulties. Well, not 'face' the difficulties as such, since the face is part of the head and they therefore don't have one, but you know what I meant. My suspension of disbelief can stretch to cover the Weeping Angels, the Vashta Nerada, the Star Whale, the Pandorica, Sardick's sky machine, the Silence, and many other things, but people who stay alive without heads? Sorry, Steve, you've lost me.
Here's hoping the monsters in the next few episodes make a bit more sense.
And, for those who are still reading: sorry about the whinyness.
Have a biscuit.
- The Colclough
Mixed Reactions: Tim told me yesterday that he has written the last-ever episode of Sidewards - again. This time, I'm told, it really is the end, and there are only a few weeks left before the final instalment of the strange but hugely enjoyable sandwich-assassin-fuelled weirdness is published online. I'm really looking forward to finding out how the plot resolves, but there'll be a little sandwich-shaped hole in my internet life for months afterwards.
Mixed Media: speaking of webcomics, yesterday I finished illustrating Fort Paradox episodes 67 to 70, using a technically complex art style that gives a parchmenty look (appropriate, considering the subject matter - you'll see what I mean when I publish the strips in a few weeks' time), which involved hybridising pencil sketches, an ink drawing, a failed attempt to incorporate oil pastels, and quite a lot of digital manipulation and arty-farty typography.
As a random side note, the new episodes are the longest consecutive run of FP strips to use the Candara font - the previous record being three, for strips 26 to 28.
Mixed Shades of Green: remember that pencil-on-canvas sketch of a kingfisher in action, which I mentioned a couple of posts back? I said in my last post that I'd painted the sky in, and this morning I've done a second, rather more involved round of painting, this time focussing on the vegetation. It took five different tubes of paint (only one of which was green) and five different brushes to create what could be described, in a reductionist analysis, as a big blob of green. But I'm quite pleased with my big blob of green, so I've decided it's time to take another photo and show you my progress:
Untitled Kingfisher Painting (still a work in progress... but this time with more progress!)
Mixed Quality: I saw the Doctor Who 'mid-series finale' A Good Man Goes to War the other day, and I feel compelled to comment on it. I'm amazed that a certain sheep-liking ginger person hasn't blogged on this topic yet, what with her well-documented obsession with all things Whovian, but that's beside the point.
The point is that for me, AGMGTW was a very mixed bag, brilliant and depressing in equal measure. It had some excellent lines (I found Rory's final remark before the title sequence particularly funny), and lots of lovely VFX stuff, and so on and so forth, and in several places it showcased the usual Steve Moffat cleverness. And that Sontaran was hilarious. But there were problems, on a scale I haven't seen before in a Moffat-scripted episode. Spoilers follow, so if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to skip the rest of this post - if you're going, then take a biscuit, and I'll see you next time. Otherwise, you're in for some ranting and railing.
Moffat, like Davies before him, seems to have something against the Church. Yes, I know, that's common enough, but it does get depressing when one's favourite science-fantasy telly show feels it has to join in the bashing. Granted, Moffat's bizarre depiction of the 51st-century 'Church', as a pseudo-faith-based interplanetary military organisation, seems to be stabbing mainly at Roman Catholicism (what with a reference to 'the Papal Mainframe') and high-church Anglicanism rather than the smaller, more down-to-earth Baptist congregations like the one I belong to, but it still irks a bit.
Some of the supporting characters were frankly unnecessary. Lorna came across (IMO, anyway) as an insipid example of the 'person who is in awe of the Doctor and desperate to meet him' archetype, and I really couldn't work out for the life of me why 'Thin One' and 'Fat One' had been included at all. I don't think they added anything interesting to the plot whatsoever, and they should have been cut from the script before the episode got anywhere near the filming stage. I've written some screenplays, and I know a thing or two about writing out unnecessary side characters, and I'm sure AGMGTW would have been better off without those two.
So, that's the thematic and narrative problems whinged about. And finally: anatomy. Yes, you read that right. The thing is, I'm a great stickler for basic anatomical plausibility in fictional creatures. I can accept the hypothetical existence of a faun, a unicorn (provided you assume the horn doesn't grow until after birth, so the baby doesn't rip the mother apart from the inside), a dragon, and many other things, but there are some fantasy critters out there whose anatomy just doesn't make any sense. As I explained in this post back here, I dislike centaurs on the grounds of their badly-thought-out physiology. You try to figure out the skeletal structure or the position of the major organs, and you'll quickly find out that they just don't fit! Which is where the Headless Monks go wrong as well. The phrase 'Headless Monks' does sound rather funky, but the literally-headless chaps in AGMGTW have a few fundamental anatomical glitches. You've got to wonder: how do they eat, drink, taste, breathe, smell, hear or see? Most known higher life-forms do all those things with their heads, and if the Monks don't have a head then they could face some serious difficulties. Well, not 'face' the difficulties as such, since the face is part of the head and they therefore don't have one, but you know what I meant. My suspension of disbelief can stretch to cover the Weeping Angels, the Vashta Nerada, the Star Whale, the Pandorica, Sardick's sky machine, the Silence, and many other things, but people who stay alive without heads? Sorry, Steve, you've lost me.
Here's hoping the monsters in the next few episodes make a bit more sense.
And, for those who are still reading: sorry about the whinyness.
Have a biscuit.
- The Colclough
Friday, 4 March 2011
Lenses, Coins, and Action
After a couple of weeks' delay, I've finally made Arbitrary Stopframe 4 - but it was an uphill battle to get it filmed.
The root of the problem was a small dark speck which has been appearing frequently at the same position on various photos taken on our Nikon D80. I decided to try and get rid of it before shooting AS4, so I took off the lens (the default zoom one that comes with the camera body), cleaned it as best I could, and then reattached it.
The camera and the lens then refused to talk to each other, making it impossible to control the aperture, and therefore impossible to set up properly for the stopmotion piece. I detached and reattached the lens a few times, but it didn't fix the issue.
So I decided to give up on the zoom lens altogether, and instead dug out one of our alternative lenses - a fixed-length, mid-angle model with an aperture control ring (which the zoom doesn't have). Attached this, took a test photo... and then discovered that that same darn speck showed up in exactly the same place - which meant it wasn't in the zoom lens at all, but on the image sensor.
I ummed and aahed, and then remembered that I've got a very soft paintbrush which I've never actually used for paint. So I set up the camera in full manual mode with a 30-second exposure time (thank goodness the D80 will still take photos with no lens on it), and while it thought it was taking an arty-farty time-lapse picture I flipped it over, stuck my paintbrush into its gubbins, and flicked away the offending bit of grot, which was fortunately visible to the naked eye so I could see what I was doing.
Reattach the alternative lens, take another test photo... and the speck was gone. That felt good.
All that remained then was to animate Doctor Murkum having a bad time with a £1 coin. Or rather, a few £1 coins. I've currently got thirty-something pound coins lurking around my room, but for the purposes of the animation I picked out the post-April-2008 Matthew Dent ones with the royal shield on them, because in my humble opinion they look better than the old ones. That's the one and only reason behind the particular number of coins that appear in the clip: that's just how many 2008-design £1s I've currently got.
I've noticed that the light flickers a bit in this episode. This is probably due the fluctuations in the natural light sneaking in through the window, as I forgot to fully close the curtains before I started animating. Note to self for next time...
Anywho, now that I've had my nice long rant about electronics and aesthetics, here's the clip from the centre of the furore:
...and now that I've got started again, I shall try and get back to doing these clips on a weekly basis. Watch this space!
- The Colclough
PS. unrelated: I reached a rather momentous landmark the day before yesterday: I drew my 2000th comic-strip episode! In case you want to know, it was Fort Paradox 56, and was executed with fibre-tip pens, with dialogue added in the computer using the dreaded font Comic Sans.
The root of the problem was a small dark speck which has been appearing frequently at the same position on various photos taken on our Nikon D80. I decided to try and get rid of it before shooting AS4, so I took off the lens (the default zoom one that comes with the camera body), cleaned it as best I could, and then reattached it.
The camera and the lens then refused to talk to each other, making it impossible to control the aperture, and therefore impossible to set up properly for the stopmotion piece. I detached and reattached the lens a few times, but it didn't fix the issue.
So I decided to give up on the zoom lens altogether, and instead dug out one of our alternative lenses - a fixed-length, mid-angle model with an aperture control ring (which the zoom doesn't have). Attached this, took a test photo... and then discovered that that same darn speck showed up in exactly the same place - which meant it wasn't in the zoom lens at all, but on the image sensor.
I ummed and aahed, and then remembered that I've got a very soft paintbrush which I've never actually used for paint. So I set up the camera in full manual mode with a 30-second exposure time (thank goodness the D80 will still take photos with no lens on it), and while it thought it was taking an arty-farty time-lapse picture I flipped it over, stuck my paintbrush into its gubbins, and flicked away the offending bit of grot, which was fortunately visible to the naked eye so I could see what I was doing.
Reattach the alternative lens, take another test photo... and the speck was gone. That felt good.
All that remained then was to animate Doctor Murkum having a bad time with a £1 coin. Or rather, a few £1 coins. I've currently got thirty-something pound coins lurking around my room, but for the purposes of the animation I picked out the post-April-2008 Matthew Dent ones with the royal shield on them, because in my humble opinion they look better than the old ones. That's the one and only reason behind the particular number of coins that appear in the clip: that's just how many 2008-design £1s I've currently got.
I've noticed that the light flickers a bit in this episode. This is probably due the fluctuations in the natural light sneaking in through the window, as I forgot to fully close the curtains before I started animating. Note to self for next time...
Anywho, now that I've had my nice long rant about electronics and aesthetics, here's the clip from the centre of the furore:
...and now that I've got started again, I shall try and get back to doing these clips on a weekly basis. Watch this space!
- The Colclough
PS. unrelated: I reached a rather momentous landmark the day before yesterday: I drew my 2000th comic-strip episode! In case you want to know, it was Fort Paradox 56, and was executed with fibre-tip pens, with dialogue added in the computer using the dreaded font Comic Sans.
Saturday, 26 February 2011
What's Possible
Possible Stuff:
As of Wednesday afternoon, I've actually got a paid commission - making a 90-second computer-graphics-based advert for Day One Publications. Still doesn't seem possible, but apparently it is. Crumbs.
Following on from that: it is possible to handle financial and legal matters without your brain turning to an off-green goo and exiting your skull via the earholes. Or so I'm told.
After seven months in the making, Fort Paradox gained its fiftieth episode last weekend. Half-way to a hundred. Wow. And as if that wasn't enough, the project has its first episode or two by a guest illustrator. I don't know about the rest of you, but from my POV that's all terribly exciting. And it does seem possible (like I said, it's been a while since we started), but again, I haven't quite got my head around it.
It is entirely possible (and I hope probable) that I'll get round to doing Arbitrary Stopframe 4 in the next few weeks. I've been a little distracted for the last fortnight by long-stay visitors, paid employment, and the fact that I'm running out of finished Alien President episodes, but I've got story plans for a couple more Arbitrary Stopframe clips. Watch this space.
It is possible, but difficult, to design a bathroom by committee. The way it's going in our family at the moment is that we came up with a perfectly serviceable plan several months ago (before discovering that Mum and Dad's bedroom was going mouldy around the corners, and deciding to de-fungus and decorate in there before doing the bathroom), and ever since then Mum's been revising the plan in every conceivable way, working out why the revisions won't work, and coming back to the original plan.
It is possible for the same composer to create some music that's crazy and thrilling, some that's beautiful and uplifting, and one little track that's deliberately, pervertedly, infuriatingly, brilliantly cringible, all on the same album. Case in point: Thomas Newman's soundtrack from WALL-E, which I've currently got on my hi-fi. Oddly enough, exactly the same guy pulled exactly the same stunt on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is also in my CD collection.
Speaking of music: it's probably possible to sit through the entire 2-disc Doctor Who Series 5 soundtrack by Murray Gold (had it as a birthday present), and not feel the slightest bit like you're having any fun for the whole two hours plus. But I suspect you might have to be a corpse in order to achieve this.
Impossible Stuff:
I'm sorry, but a dying man simply can't do what he did, with that implement, without missing at least a little bit. IMHO, that scene went beyond the bounds of Suspension of Disbelief and into the territory of Plain Impossible. If you've seen Tangled, you should know what I mean, although whether or not you agree is another matter. I've phrased it that way to try and avoid being spoiler-ish.
It is impossible to sit in the same room for too long without starting to feel like you're going to go bonkers. It's taken me a long time to realise this, but it's finally dawning on me.
And finally: IMPOSSIBLE GEOMETRY!!!
It was really tempting to paint a big letter 'S' inside the middle hexagon thing, but I resisted.
- The Colclough
As of Wednesday afternoon, I've actually got a paid commission - making a 90-second computer-graphics-based advert for Day One Publications. Still doesn't seem possible, but apparently it is. Crumbs.
Following on from that: it is possible to handle financial and legal matters without your brain turning to an off-green goo and exiting your skull via the earholes. Or so I'm told.
After seven months in the making, Fort Paradox gained its fiftieth episode last weekend. Half-way to a hundred. Wow. And as if that wasn't enough, the project has its first episode or two by a guest illustrator. I don't know about the rest of you, but from my POV that's all terribly exciting. And it does seem possible (like I said, it's been a while since we started), but again, I haven't quite got my head around it.
It is entirely possible (and I hope probable) that I'll get round to doing Arbitrary Stopframe 4 in the next few weeks. I've been a little distracted for the last fortnight by long-stay visitors, paid employment, and the fact that I'm running out of finished Alien President episodes, but I've got story plans for a couple more Arbitrary Stopframe clips. Watch this space.
It is possible, but difficult, to design a bathroom by committee. The way it's going in our family at the moment is that we came up with a perfectly serviceable plan several months ago (before discovering that Mum and Dad's bedroom was going mouldy around the corners, and deciding to de-fungus and decorate in there before doing the bathroom), and ever since then Mum's been revising the plan in every conceivable way, working out why the revisions won't work, and coming back to the original plan.
It is possible for the same composer to create some music that's crazy and thrilling, some that's beautiful and uplifting, and one little track that's deliberately, pervertedly, infuriatingly, brilliantly cringible, all on the same album. Case in point: Thomas Newman's soundtrack from WALL-E, which I've currently got on my hi-fi. Oddly enough, exactly the same guy pulled exactly the same stunt on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is also in my CD collection.
Speaking of music: it's probably possible to sit through the entire 2-disc Doctor Who Series 5 soundtrack by Murray Gold (had it as a birthday present), and not feel the slightest bit like you're having any fun for the whole two hours plus. But I suspect you might have to be a corpse in order to achieve this.
Impossible Stuff:
I'm sorry, but a dying man simply can't do what he did, with that implement, without missing at least a little bit. IMHO, that scene went beyond the bounds of Suspension of Disbelief and into the territory of Plain Impossible. If you've seen Tangled, you should know what I mean, although whether or not you agree is another matter. I've phrased it that way to try and avoid being spoiler-ish.
It is impossible to sit in the same room for too long without starting to feel like you're going to go bonkers. It's taken me a long time to realise this, but it's finally dawning on me.
And finally: IMPOSSIBLE GEOMETRY!!!
#007: Impossible Triangle
It was really tempting to paint a big letter 'S' inside the middle hexagon thing, but I resisted.
- The Colclough
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Building Worlds
I've just been re-reading some of the posts from my old Tailcast blog (no longer online; I've got them backed up in a Word document), in particular a three-part ramble about fictional worlds of my own making, which I posted in mid-2009.
The basic gist of the thing was about how I've moved, and am still moving, through a series of different fictional worlds, and generally heading along an upward spiral in terms of their self-integrity and publishability. There was commentary on some of my earliest and least coherent efforts, and on the relative merits of the Geometriverse, and it all wrapped up with some vague remarks about hopefully going on to build new and better worlds which might actually be fit for release on, say, TV.
It made quite interesting re-reading, and it's inspired me to have another ramble on the topic, covering the developments of the last year or two.
The Geometriverse, for starters, is still going strong. It's been half a year since I last wrote any Cylinder and Miserable strips, and it'll be a few months yet before I restart, but it's a deliberate and controlled hiatus, and I'm still hoping to start work on Series 3 sometime, maybe as early as this year. While the webcomic is mostly an exercise in arcane humour, the narrative glue holding the plot arcs together is getting stronger and stronger with each new series - my plans for Series 3 are already shaping up to be the project's most tightly-written run yet.
But that's an extension of a world which I already knew about when I penned my earlier treatise. What's more talkable-about is the fact that, as predicted back in mid-2009, I've got new fictions in development, and they look likely to become my best yet.
Megastropulodon, for example. The existing short film, conceived in the first months of 2010, is just a precursor to the bigger narrative, a tiny little sample of the monster-fuelled weirdness of my planned TV series. The basic plan is that the story in the 15-minute film will be stretched out to become the overall narrative framework for a 6 x 30 minute series, with numerous other subplots and side stories being built into it. I've recently gone back to work on writing the series scripts, and I've now finished the first drafts for Episodes 1, 5 and 6, so I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of getting the bones of the story out on paper for the first 'block' of episodes. Sure, there'll be a load of rewrites to do before the stories are ready for the cameras, but the important first step has been taken.
Now you might ask "Why have you written Episodes 1, 5 and 6 first? What happened to Episodes 2, 3 and 4?"
And that leads me on to what I think is one of the most interesting developments in my fictional-world-building of late: the strange and fascinating process of co-creation.
I've left the middle three episodes of Megastropulodon unwritten for now, for one thing because I've got a clearer idea of what should be happening in the three framing episodes (due in part to their re-use of scenes and plot threads from the short film), but also because I'd like to keep some room open for other writers. Yes, the show is my brainchild, but in the world of television there are relatively few series creators who then go on to write every single episode on their lonesome. Gerry & Sylvia Anderson wrote only the pilot episode of Thunderbirds, leaving others to scribe the next 31 instalments. Doctor Who has had seven different writers per season for the last few years (I counted, I'm a geek). Thus far, I've got someone pencilled in for Megastropulodon Episode 4, but the other two episodes are at a bit of a loose end - but it's early days, so I'm not too worried about the gap at the moment.
What it comes down to is that two heads are often better than one. I don't need to explain the principle, do I. Suffice to say that it holds true for TV writing, and sometimes for comic strips as well. They're probably right when they say that "too many cooks spoil the broth", but with TV writing you can assign each writer their own episode(s) to work on, and then each cook contributes their own semi-independant broth to a big, exciting multi-soup smorgasbord. I'm not sure if that mixing of metaphors (or mixing of broths) made any sense to you, but I think it more or less says what I wanted it to say.
Looking back over my previous fiction-making career, I seem to have come full circle, from worlds shared with Cat back in the long-gone days when we used to play with snail shells and cuddly toys, via a period of more solipsistic work (e.g. the aforementioned Geometriverse), and now back to co-developed universes, albeit in a slightly more sophisticated form e.g. Megastropulodon, and the oft-harped-on-about Fort Paradox.
Speaking, or harping, of which: sorry to have to mention my pet subject again, but it happens to be the prime example of what I'm on about here.
The project was my idea in the first place. As in, I was the one who first said to Tim and Sarah, "why don't we get a load of our characters together and write a big, confusing cross-continuity comic?", and I was the one who came up with the name. But I never wanted it to be a solo thing. Right from the outset, I wanted it to have not just a plurality of characters representing different species from unrelated universes, but also a plurality of writers and viewpoints, illustrators and art styles. And that's what we've got. There are some places where we can't even remember which bit was whose idea, because we've built so many layers on top of each other's initial concepts. Three brains have definitely made a better broth than one. And even now, it isn't intended as a closed-membership club. So far it's remained an exclusive circle in practice, but that's simply because nobody else has expressed any interest in joining in, not because we're intentionally keeping it that way. I intend to address the issue in a bit more detail on the Fort Paradox blog next week, next time it's my turn to post an episode and do the Weekly FAQ feature.
So... I think I've said my piece. I shall leave you to chew over its implications. Or to ignore it and get a cup of tea instead, if that's what takes your fancy.
- The Colclough
The basic gist of the thing was about how I've moved, and am still moving, through a series of different fictional worlds, and generally heading along an upward spiral in terms of their self-integrity and publishability. There was commentary on some of my earliest and least coherent efforts, and on the relative merits of the Geometriverse, and it all wrapped up with some vague remarks about hopefully going on to build new and better worlds which might actually be fit for release on, say, TV.
It made quite interesting re-reading, and it's inspired me to have another ramble on the topic, covering the developments of the last year or two.
The Geometriverse, for starters, is still going strong. It's been half a year since I last wrote any Cylinder and Miserable strips, and it'll be a few months yet before I restart, but it's a deliberate and controlled hiatus, and I'm still hoping to start work on Series 3 sometime, maybe as early as this year. While the webcomic is mostly an exercise in arcane humour, the narrative glue holding the plot arcs together is getting stronger and stronger with each new series - my plans for Series 3 are already shaping up to be the project's most tightly-written run yet.
But that's an extension of a world which I already knew about when I penned my earlier treatise. What's more talkable-about is the fact that, as predicted back in mid-2009, I've got new fictions in development, and they look likely to become my best yet.
Megastropulodon, for example. The existing short film, conceived in the first months of 2010, is just a precursor to the bigger narrative, a tiny little sample of the monster-fuelled weirdness of my planned TV series. The basic plan is that the story in the 15-minute film will be stretched out to become the overall narrative framework for a 6 x 30 minute series, with numerous other subplots and side stories being built into it. I've recently gone back to work on writing the series scripts, and I've now finished the first drafts for Episodes 1, 5 and 6, so I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of getting the bones of the story out on paper for the first 'block' of episodes. Sure, there'll be a load of rewrites to do before the stories are ready for the cameras, but the important first step has been taken.
Now you might ask "Why have you written Episodes 1, 5 and 6 first? What happened to Episodes 2, 3 and 4?"
And that leads me on to what I think is one of the most interesting developments in my fictional-world-building of late: the strange and fascinating process of co-creation.
I've left the middle three episodes of Megastropulodon unwritten for now, for one thing because I've got a clearer idea of what should be happening in the three framing episodes (due in part to their re-use of scenes and plot threads from the short film), but also because I'd like to keep some room open for other writers. Yes, the show is my brainchild, but in the world of television there are relatively few series creators who then go on to write every single episode on their lonesome. Gerry & Sylvia Anderson wrote only the pilot episode of Thunderbirds, leaving others to scribe the next 31 instalments. Doctor Who has had seven different writers per season for the last few years (I counted, I'm a geek). Thus far, I've got someone pencilled in for Megastropulodon Episode 4, but the other two episodes are at a bit of a loose end - but it's early days, so I'm not too worried about the gap at the moment.
What it comes down to is that two heads are often better than one. I don't need to explain the principle, do I. Suffice to say that it holds true for TV writing, and sometimes for comic strips as well. They're probably right when they say that "too many cooks spoil the broth", but with TV writing you can assign each writer their own episode(s) to work on, and then each cook contributes their own semi-independant broth to a big, exciting multi-soup smorgasbord. I'm not sure if that mixing of metaphors (or mixing of broths) made any sense to you, but I think it more or less says what I wanted it to say.
Looking back over my previous fiction-making career, I seem to have come full circle, from worlds shared with Cat back in the long-gone days when we used to play with snail shells and cuddly toys, via a period of more solipsistic work (e.g. the aforementioned Geometriverse), and now back to co-developed universes, albeit in a slightly more sophisticated form e.g. Megastropulodon, and the oft-harped-on-about Fort Paradox.
Speaking, or harping, of which: sorry to have to mention my pet subject again, but it happens to be the prime example of what I'm on about here.
The project was my idea in the first place. As in, I was the one who first said to Tim and Sarah, "why don't we get a load of our characters together and write a big, confusing cross-continuity comic?", and I was the one who came up with the name. But I never wanted it to be a solo thing. Right from the outset, I wanted it to have not just a plurality of characters representing different species from unrelated universes, but also a plurality of writers and viewpoints, illustrators and art styles. And that's what we've got. There are some places where we can't even remember which bit was whose idea, because we've built so many layers on top of each other's initial concepts. Three brains have definitely made a better broth than one. And even now, it isn't intended as a closed-membership club. So far it's remained an exclusive circle in practice, but that's simply because nobody else has expressed any interest in joining in, not because we're intentionally keeping it that way. I intend to address the issue in a bit more detail on the Fort Paradox blog next week, next time it's my turn to post an episode and do the Weekly FAQ feature.
So... I think I've said my piece. I shall leave you to chew over its implications. Or to ignore it and get a cup of tea instead, if that's what takes your fancy.
- The Colclough
Saturday, 22 January 2011
Some You Win, Some You Lose
Okay, so I lost the "First 11 for '11" race. I was on 10, and then I ran out of things to write about, and left Hannah to steam ahead and win. I also got a bit sidetracked with the illustrations for Fort Paradox 33 to 38, which I was trying to get done as part of another geeky race against Tim. Which I'm pleased to be able to say I won. Still, 11 For 11 was pretty close at 11-10, so I'm not too distraught.
Now here's a little philosophical question that's just occurred to me: is it better to play a race or other game against an enemy and win, or to play it (presumably much more enjoyably) against a friend and lose? Not saying Tim's an enemy - far from it - it's a hypothetical question.
And that in turn leads on to the bigger philosophical question of what constitutes a friend and how one comes by them in the first place.
In case you hadn't noticed, this post seems to be drifting into deep and angsty territory. If this is worrying you, Tim, don't panic - I'll write something less depressing you-know-where afterwards B]
So, back to the subject: I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not the most gregarious type, I very quickly get lost in a crowd, and it usually takes me years to build up any sort of meaningful friendship with anyone - meaningful as in knowing someone better than just to say hi to. I know there was a time, pre-1998, when I didn't know Tim or Sarah Johnston existed, whereas now I know they exist and I'm absolutely convinced that they're awesome, but in all honesty I can't remember how I got from one point to the other. It was quite a long process, I think. Once in several blue moons I meet someone new and would consider them a friend almost straight away, but for me that event is nearly as rare as hen's teeth.
Must... not... get sidetracked... into a pointless discussion of chicken dentistry...
But then again, having said that, my circle of friends might be smallish but it contains some brilliant specimens. Okay, maybe 'specimens' isn't the right word to use, but you know what I meant. I hope. The point is, I like to think I have good taste in people. Too much normality gets boring, but there's not much chance of that happening in my vicinity, as I seem to be slowly accumulating a collection of rather wonderful eccentrics.
And I like it that way. I'd rather have a handful of fellow geeks around me than a huge contact list of 'normal' people any day.
To the few (you probably know who you are): thanks for being there. I'm really glad to know you, even if you do sometimes confuse me, or occasionally wipe the floor with me in some race that I challenged you to. I should learn my lesson and stop challenging people to races, maybe...
Ooh, look, I managed to end my deep and angsty ramble on a high note. Am pleased with that.
And on that bombshell, it's time to give you my latest bundle of stats (I wonder if I'll miss putting stats on the end of my posts?), and wrap up "First 11 for '11":
- The Colclough
Now here's a little philosophical question that's just occurred to me: is it better to play a race or other game against an enemy and win, or to play it (presumably much more enjoyably) against a friend and lose? Not saying Tim's an enemy - far from it - it's a hypothetical question.
And that in turn leads on to the bigger philosophical question of what constitutes a friend and how one comes by them in the first place.
In case you hadn't noticed, this post seems to be drifting into deep and angsty territory. If this is worrying you, Tim, don't panic - I'll write something less depressing you-know-where afterwards B]
So, back to the subject: I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not the most gregarious type, I very quickly get lost in a crowd, and it usually takes me years to build up any sort of meaningful friendship with anyone - meaningful as in knowing someone better than just to say hi to. I know there was a time, pre-1998, when I didn't know Tim or Sarah Johnston existed, whereas now I know they exist and I'm absolutely convinced that they're awesome, but in all honesty I can't remember how I got from one point to the other. It was quite a long process, I think. Once in several blue moons I meet someone new and would consider them a friend almost straight away, but for me that event is nearly as rare as hen's teeth.
Must... not... get sidetracked... into a pointless discussion of chicken dentistry...
But then again, having said that, my circle of friends might be smallish but it contains some brilliant specimens. Okay, maybe 'specimens' isn't the right word to use, but you know what I meant. I hope. The point is, I like to think I have good taste in people. Too much normality gets boring, but there's not much chance of that happening in my vicinity, as I seem to be slowly accumulating a collection of rather wonderful eccentrics.
And I like it that way. I'd rather have a handful of fellow geeks around me than a huge contact list of 'normal' people any day.
To the few (you probably know who you are): thanks for being there. I'm really glad to know you, even if you do sometimes confuse me, or occasionally wipe the floor with me in some race that I challenged you to. I should learn my lesson and stop challenging people to races, maybe...
Ooh, look, I managed to end my deep and angsty ramble on a high note. Am pleased with that.
And on that bombshell, it's time to give you my latest bundle of stats (I wonder if I'll miss putting stats on the end of my posts?), and wrap up "First 11 for '11":
- 11 For 11 status: 11 down, nil to go - race over
- Latest book read: The Dark Tower, and other unpublished fiction by C. S. Lewis
- Latest film/TV watched: deleted scenes from X-Men III: The Last Stand (dir. Brett Ratner, 2006)
- Latest music listened to: Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary by Karl Jenkins (1995) currently on speakers
- Latest food/sweets/whatever eaten: lunch = leek and potato soup with bacon and courgette muffins, followed by coffee
- Programs and web pages currently running: Outlook 2007, Word 2007, Windows Media Player, Skype, Firefox (tabs: Blogspot Create Post; A White Horizon, hannahlikessheepbaa.blogspot.com, MatNav)
- Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1135
- The Colclough
Monday, 17 January 2011
The Better Side
No, nothing to do with ITV1's current tagline. That's "The Brigher Side", anyway, not "Better". And I'm more of a BBC watcher.
More to do with the fact that Saturday had some really bad bits, and some really good bits. (Hannah's blog post in the small hours of the morning about good and bad experiences was rather timely, as it turns out.) I won't depress you with the bad bits of my weekend - I'd prefer to ramble about the good bits instead.
The big news: I've finished making those blasted DVDs at last! After waging an epic war against my DVD burning software, ranging across three different computers, I finally nailed it down on a little old laptop and compelled it to do my will. So now I've got a nice neat row of finished RH DVDs sitting in a cardboard box by my desk and waiting to be put in the post.
I also decided that I was finished with my latest painting. It involved six different layers of colour (each allowed to dry before the next was applied), and although I actually put the last one down on Friday, I thought at the time there would be more to do. But on Saturday morning, I went back and looked at it again, and I said to myself "nope, that's enough. I'm going to call it a day." And then, for lack of a better title, that's exactly what I did.
Yes, I do realise that I have committed a truly atrocious pun right there. My sincerest apologies to those of you with delicate linguistic sensibilities.
I also made more use of my new webcam. It's rapidly turning out to be better value for money than anything else I've ever bought (not difficult, considering how little I had to pay for it). Skype is much fun.
And I've done the illustrations for Fort Paradox Episodes 33 and 34, which feature a new experimental art style which I've never used for any other cartoon before. It involves biros, I'm quite pleased with how it's come out.
And now for something completely different (and altogether nerdier): on Saturday, I used Linux for the first time. My Grandad was asking if there was a free operating system he could use to recondition an ancient PC of his, so I made him a Ubuntu installer disc. But before handing it over, I thought I'd try it out myself in demo mode on our family laptop. It more or less worked, except that the laptop's optical disc drive is basically shot so it took ages to read the disc and load the software. It took me all of two minutes to find my way around the OS though, and I already like it almost as much as Windows, and much better than Mac OSX.
Since I've already got a perfectly good Windows installation on each of the machines I use regularly at the moment, I'll probably stick with dear old Microsoft for the time being. But I got a very good first impression of Ubuntu, so you never know - I might end up going the whole open-source hog someday!
My stats, for the next-to-last post of the 11 For 11 race...
- The Colclough
More to do with the fact that Saturday had some really bad bits, and some really good bits. (Hannah's blog post in the small hours of the morning about good and bad experiences was rather timely, as it turns out.) I won't depress you with the bad bits of my weekend - I'd prefer to ramble about the good bits instead.
The big news: I've finished making those blasted DVDs at last! After waging an epic war against my DVD burning software, ranging across three different computers, I finally nailed it down on a little old laptop and compelled it to do my will. So now I've got a nice neat row of finished RH DVDs sitting in a cardboard box by my desk and waiting to be put in the post.
I also decided that I was finished with my latest painting. It involved six different layers of colour (each allowed to dry before the next was applied), and although I actually put the last one down on Friday, I thought at the time there would be more to do. But on Saturday morning, I went back and looked at it again, and I said to myself "nope, that's enough. I'm going to call it a day." And then, for lack of a better title, that's exactly what I did.
#004: A Day
Yes, I do realise that I have committed a truly atrocious pun right there. My sincerest apologies to those of you with delicate linguistic sensibilities.
I also made more use of my new webcam. It's rapidly turning out to be better value for money than anything else I've ever bought (not difficult, considering how little I had to pay for it). Skype is much fun.
And I've done the illustrations for Fort Paradox Episodes 33 and 34, which feature a new experimental art style which I've never used for any other cartoon before. It involves biros, I'm quite pleased with how it's come out.
And now for something completely different (and altogether nerdier): on Saturday, I used Linux for the first time. My Grandad was asking if there was a free operating system he could use to recondition an ancient PC of his, so I made him a Ubuntu installer disc. But before handing it over, I thought I'd try it out myself in demo mode on our family laptop. It more or less worked, except that the laptop's optical disc drive is basically shot so it took ages to read the disc and load the software. It took me all of two minutes to find my way around the OS though, and I already like it almost as much as Windows, and much better than Mac OSX.
Since I've already got a perfectly good Windows installation on each of the machines I use regularly at the moment, I'll probably stick with dear old Microsoft for the time being. But I got a very good first impression of Ubuntu, so you never know - I might end up going the whole open-source hog someday!
My stats, for the next-to-last post of the 11 For 11 race...
- 11 For 11 status: 10 down, only 1 more to go... who will be the winner?
- Latest book read: *still* that commentary on Ephesians...
- Latest film/TV watched: haven't seen anything in a few days, and I've actually forgotten what the last one was...
- Latest music listened to: How to Train Your Dragon OST by John Powell (2010) currently on speakers
- Latest food/sweets/whatever eaten: crossaint and cowjuice for breakfast, unless you count the bit of jelly sweet I'm currently chewing on
- Programs and web pages currently running: Outlook 2007, Word 2007, Windows Explorer, Skype, Firefox (tabs: Blogspot Create Post; YouTube; Blogspot Dashboard)
- Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1130; Alien President #9
- The Colclough
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Free Sample Time!
You know those little nanoscopic jars or packets of food or cosmetic products you get handed gratis sometimes, in an effort by the manufacturers to get you hooked and make you spend loads of money buying their stuff?
This is a little bit like that, except that I don't have any financial incentive whatsoever, and this particular free sample might addle your brains a bit: I've decided to share with you the newly-penned 12th chapter of a rather odd short story which I've been writing on and off since mid-November (provisionally entitled A Salesman Beneath), just because I feel like it.
I have no idea how much sense this might make to you reading it in isolation, and I'm equally unsure how much sense it might make even in the context of the previous 11 chapters, but here goes anyway...
*****
A few minutes later, Pone found himself being handed one end of a long length of flexible piping, whose other end was attached to the top of the stove. Meebrick and Nodroz each had one too.
“What’s this for?” he asked.
“To breathe,” said Nodroz, sounding terribly matter-of-fact.
“What, the stove’s exhaust fumes? Aren’t they usually poisonous?”
“It’s a connective stove,” Nodroz said, with a withering stare as if it should have been plain and obvious.
“Oh, I see: so they’re connective exhaust fumes!” Pone drawled. “But of course. That makes me feel so much better about gassing myself to death, if I can do it connectively.”
“Was that sarcasm?” asked Meebrick.
“Take an educated guess,” snapped Pone.
Nodroz gave them both an even witheringer glare, and stuck the end of his own pipe in his mouth. There followed several minutes of pointedly heavy breathing, as the old man sucked the stove fumes deep inside his system, clearly eager to demonstrate that it would have no ill effects. After the first few breaths, Meebrick chowed down on his pipe, and started tentatively puffing. Neither of them shrivelled up or went purple or turned into a guinea pig, so eventually Pone decided to risk it.
The result was terribly disappointing: the fumes smelled and tasted of absolutely nothing whatsoever. In fact, the gases coming off the stove were cool and fresh and impossibly clear, like what you would expect to be breathing on the top of a huge mountain in the middle of a vast unspoilt wilderness. Pone gave himself another headache on top of the one he already had, trying to work out how it was possible for exhaust fumes to smell so un-exhaust-like. But it didn’t last long, due to the healthful influence of the fumes.
“Are you yet satisfied with your breathing?” asked Nodroz.
Pone nodded very reluctantly, and clung to the railing for dear life as his host turned back to face the wall of bold red jelly overlapping the prow of the boat.
“Come then,” Nodroz mumbled through a mouthful of breathing tube, “Let us go henceforth into the core of Wobble!” He raised his arms in a dramatic gesture, and as if in response the inert front-left engine glimmered back into life. Then he intoned a loud and forceful “HUMNNN!” and flung his arms forwards to signal the intended direction of movement – and the Contradictorium slowly but surely started to push its way deeper into the gelatinous micro-planet.
“By the way,” Pone queried, “why does this asteroid or planet or whatever it is have such a dumb-sounding name?”
“It’s made of jelly, and jelly wobbles,” remarked Nodroz with his usual, irksome serenity, “so they called it ‘Wobble’.”
Pone groaned inwardly beneath the burdensome weight of this new knowledge.
“Bish ishho exhitig!” Meebrick giggled through his breathing tube. And as if that wasn’t undignified enough, he clapped his hands like a little child.
A moment later, Pone found the jelly approaching just inches from his nose.
“What is it with me and jelly lately?” Pone wondered. His hair was still full of blobs of goo from his recent encounter with the invertebrate shoal. But the blobs were soon lost to sight as they amalgamated into the greater mass of the micro-planet Wobble.
The stuff was more yielding than he might have expected, and once it had got itself on the move the Contradictorium seemed to have little trouble forging a path through it. The jelly flowed back into place behind the boat, leaving only a negligible wake of tiny bubbles to show where they had been. Pone became profoundly grateful for the stove hose.
The journey into Wobble seemed to go on for quite a long time, and there weren’t any landmarks on the inside. Pone started to despair of ever escaping. He attempted to distract his suffering brain with thoughts of financial outlays, profit margins, sales commissions and tax bands, and when that failed he turned his thoughts to his paternal aunt and her frankly terrifying collection of tea-cosies. She had thousands upon thousands of them, and was always after more. The surest way of making her happy was to give her another one, and the next surest was to give her a teapot to put inside one so she could display it properly.
Many centuries passed, and what with the lack of landmarks and the impossibly clear air he was breathing, Pone started to feel that he was drifting outside of the space-time continuum altogether. He started to doubt the existence of the outside world, and to wonder if maybe this surreal jelly was all there was, and all there ever had been.
Those centuries were actually two and three-quarter hours.
And then he was rudely pulled back to reality by the sound of Meebrick squealing a few feet away, muffled a bit (but nowhere near enough, Pone thought) by the surrounding semi-solid dessert.
“What’s wrong with the blighter now?” Pone asked himself.
He turned to look, and saw that Meebrick was pointing and staring straight ahead.
Ahead of the ship, deep inside the jelly, he could faintly see the outlines of some sort of transparent structure. There were rooms, and doorways, and what looked like stairs – and he even thought he could glimpse a pot plant or two.
Minutes later, the boat glooped its way out of the wall of a large room inside the jelly, and drifted to a stop in the middle of the floor.
The space was filled with all sorts of scientific equipment – microscopes, telescopes, orreries, burners, test tubes and flasks, rulers and tape measures and callipers, vices and tweezers, and books upon books upon books. It was hard to tell whether everything in the room really was made of copper and bronze, or if it just looked that way because of the red jelly which comprised the walls, floor and ceiling surrounding them. And Pone had been right – in another room at the top of a short, broad staircase, he could see a real, live pot plant. He wondered (with good reason) whether it had a funny name and whether it was going to be rude to him.
And in the middle of it all, not looking remotely pleased about having visitors, stood a very small girl in a long pink dressing gown, with a glowing magenta ponytail and a ferocious scowl. And a monocle, which didn’t really go with the rest of her look.
Meebrick gave an enthusiastic greeting, but sadly forgot to remove the breathing pipe from his mouth first, so it didn’t come out very well. He was glared at like something the cat dragged in. But being Meebrick the misnomer, he wasn’t much bothered by this and just kept on grinning and waving.
“GRANDMOTHER!” bellowed the little girl.
“I am so sorry to intrude,” began Nodroz the Third, “but might I take this opportunity to introduce…”
“GRANDMOTHER! I need you in here RIGHT NOW!”
There was one of those difficult silences.
And then a couple of minutes later, a tiny, hunched old lady oozed out of the ceiling and dropped onto the gelatinous floor just in front of the Contradictorium.
“How many times must I tell you, Grandmother – USE THE STAIRS!” shrieked the little girl.
“Sorry, dearie,” croaked Grandmother. “I did remember, but I’d already sunk my legs into the floor and it was too late.” She looked around, and realised how close she had been to impaling herself on the prow of the visiting boat. “Ooh, my word!” she chirped. “We’ve got some company!”
Meebrick grinned and waved again, and Grandmother waved back.
“I’ll go and put the kettle on,” she said.
“Thank you, Grandmother,” said the little girl.
Grandmother recovered her cane from where it had stuck in the jelly floor next to her, and wobbled off towards the kitchen.
The little girl glared at the intruders again.
“So who are you, and what are you doing in my laboratory?”
“I am Nodroz the Third,” began Nodroz the Third. Pone rolled his eyes again – he was getting tired of hearing him introduce himself. Nodroz pointed to the plant pot up front, “this is my faithful vegetable companion Yaseez, this…” he pointed at Pone, but then Pone decided to interrupt.
“My name is Pone Crustley,” announced Pone Crustley, “and if anyone tells you I’m called Woshling…” he paused for a second to give Nodroz a warning with one eyebrow, “… they’re telling you lies.”
“You look more like a Woshling to me,” announced the little girl. Pone slumped back against the stove and lost interest in the conversation, while she pointed at Meebrick and demanded to know who he was, and got the usual “it’s a real delight to see you!” greeting (thank goodness he’d taken his breathing tube out now).
“We are seeking to decipher the secrets of Wobble,” intoned Nodroz. “Humnnn.”
“Don’t you swear at me!” snapped the little girl.
“Basically,” chirruped Meebrick, “we don’t have a clue what we’re looking for, if anything, and we’re going for a road trip inside this jelly asteroid thing just for the fun of it. And then we spotted your place – can I just say, I absolutely love what you’ve done with the decor – so we thought we’d drop in and say hi!”
“I see… very well, then. Fortunately you haven’t collided with any of my extremely important scientific equipment. I am Professor-Emeritus Poppy Darlingsby,” announced the small girl. She adjusted her monocle and squinted at Meebrick. He gave a good-natured squint back.
“Um… what are you researching?” Pone asked, as he felt her gaze move over to him.
“Never mind that yet,” said the Professor.
Another very long silence.
This time, it was broken by the sound of shuffling feet and clinking chinaware.
“Here’s the tea!” chimed Grandmother from somewhere nearby.
“Excellent,” said the Professor. She started heading for the short staircase. “If you would all please follow me to the living room?”
*****
I don't plan on posting the whole story on my blog, but if you want to read more then I'm sure I could arrange to send you the back issues and keep you up to date with new chapters as and when they get written =]
(Random aside: for those who read Fort Paradox, we're still waiting for some questions for the new Weekly FAQ feature! Come on, ask questions, darn it!)
- The Colclough
This is a little bit like that, except that I don't have any financial incentive whatsoever, and this particular free sample might addle your brains a bit: I've decided to share with you the newly-penned 12th chapter of a rather odd short story which I've been writing on and off since mid-November (provisionally entitled A Salesman Beneath), just because I feel like it.
I have no idea how much sense this might make to you reading it in isolation, and I'm equally unsure how much sense it might make even in the context of the previous 11 chapters, but here goes anyway...
*****
A few minutes later, Pone found himself being handed one end of a long length of flexible piping, whose other end was attached to the top of the stove. Meebrick and Nodroz each had one too.
“What’s this for?” he asked.
“To breathe,” said Nodroz, sounding terribly matter-of-fact.
“What, the stove’s exhaust fumes? Aren’t they usually poisonous?”
“It’s a connective stove,” Nodroz said, with a withering stare as if it should have been plain and obvious.
“Oh, I see: so they’re connective exhaust fumes!” Pone drawled. “But of course. That makes me feel so much better about gassing myself to death, if I can do it connectively.”
“Was that sarcasm?” asked Meebrick.
“Take an educated guess,” snapped Pone.
Nodroz gave them both an even witheringer glare, and stuck the end of his own pipe in his mouth. There followed several minutes of pointedly heavy breathing, as the old man sucked the stove fumes deep inside his system, clearly eager to demonstrate that it would have no ill effects. After the first few breaths, Meebrick chowed down on his pipe, and started tentatively puffing. Neither of them shrivelled up or went purple or turned into a guinea pig, so eventually Pone decided to risk it.
The result was terribly disappointing: the fumes smelled and tasted of absolutely nothing whatsoever. In fact, the gases coming off the stove were cool and fresh and impossibly clear, like what you would expect to be breathing on the top of a huge mountain in the middle of a vast unspoilt wilderness. Pone gave himself another headache on top of the one he already had, trying to work out how it was possible for exhaust fumes to smell so un-exhaust-like. But it didn’t last long, due to the healthful influence of the fumes.
“Are you yet satisfied with your breathing?” asked Nodroz.
Pone nodded very reluctantly, and clung to the railing for dear life as his host turned back to face the wall of bold red jelly overlapping the prow of the boat.
“Come then,” Nodroz mumbled through a mouthful of breathing tube, “Let us go henceforth into the core of Wobble!” He raised his arms in a dramatic gesture, and as if in response the inert front-left engine glimmered back into life. Then he intoned a loud and forceful “HUMNNN!” and flung his arms forwards to signal the intended direction of movement – and the Contradictorium slowly but surely started to push its way deeper into the gelatinous micro-planet.
“By the way,” Pone queried, “why does this asteroid or planet or whatever it is have such a dumb-sounding name?”
“It’s made of jelly, and jelly wobbles,” remarked Nodroz with his usual, irksome serenity, “so they called it ‘Wobble’.”
Pone groaned inwardly beneath the burdensome weight of this new knowledge.
“Bish ishho exhitig!” Meebrick giggled through his breathing tube. And as if that wasn’t undignified enough, he clapped his hands like a little child.
A moment later, Pone found the jelly approaching just inches from his nose.
“What is it with me and jelly lately?” Pone wondered. His hair was still full of blobs of goo from his recent encounter with the invertebrate shoal. But the blobs were soon lost to sight as they amalgamated into the greater mass of the micro-planet Wobble.
The stuff was more yielding than he might have expected, and once it had got itself on the move the Contradictorium seemed to have little trouble forging a path through it. The jelly flowed back into place behind the boat, leaving only a negligible wake of tiny bubbles to show where they had been. Pone became profoundly grateful for the stove hose.
The journey into Wobble seemed to go on for quite a long time, and there weren’t any landmarks on the inside. Pone started to despair of ever escaping. He attempted to distract his suffering brain with thoughts of financial outlays, profit margins, sales commissions and tax bands, and when that failed he turned his thoughts to his paternal aunt and her frankly terrifying collection of tea-cosies. She had thousands upon thousands of them, and was always after more. The surest way of making her happy was to give her another one, and the next surest was to give her a teapot to put inside one so she could display it properly.
Many centuries passed, and what with the lack of landmarks and the impossibly clear air he was breathing, Pone started to feel that he was drifting outside of the space-time continuum altogether. He started to doubt the existence of the outside world, and to wonder if maybe this surreal jelly was all there was, and all there ever had been.
Those centuries were actually two and three-quarter hours.
And then he was rudely pulled back to reality by the sound of Meebrick squealing a few feet away, muffled a bit (but nowhere near enough, Pone thought) by the surrounding semi-solid dessert.
“What’s wrong with the blighter now?” Pone asked himself.
He turned to look, and saw that Meebrick was pointing and staring straight ahead.
Ahead of the ship, deep inside the jelly, he could faintly see the outlines of some sort of transparent structure. There were rooms, and doorways, and what looked like stairs – and he even thought he could glimpse a pot plant or two.
Minutes later, the boat glooped its way out of the wall of a large room inside the jelly, and drifted to a stop in the middle of the floor.
The space was filled with all sorts of scientific equipment – microscopes, telescopes, orreries, burners, test tubes and flasks, rulers and tape measures and callipers, vices and tweezers, and books upon books upon books. It was hard to tell whether everything in the room really was made of copper and bronze, or if it just looked that way because of the red jelly which comprised the walls, floor and ceiling surrounding them. And Pone had been right – in another room at the top of a short, broad staircase, he could see a real, live pot plant. He wondered (with good reason) whether it had a funny name and whether it was going to be rude to him.
And in the middle of it all, not looking remotely pleased about having visitors, stood a very small girl in a long pink dressing gown, with a glowing magenta ponytail and a ferocious scowl. And a monocle, which didn’t really go with the rest of her look.
Meebrick gave an enthusiastic greeting, but sadly forgot to remove the breathing pipe from his mouth first, so it didn’t come out very well. He was glared at like something the cat dragged in. But being Meebrick the misnomer, he wasn’t much bothered by this and just kept on grinning and waving.
“GRANDMOTHER!” bellowed the little girl.
“I am so sorry to intrude,” began Nodroz the Third, “but might I take this opportunity to introduce…”
“GRANDMOTHER! I need you in here RIGHT NOW!”
There was one of those difficult silences.
And then a couple of minutes later, a tiny, hunched old lady oozed out of the ceiling and dropped onto the gelatinous floor just in front of the Contradictorium.
“How many times must I tell you, Grandmother – USE THE STAIRS!” shrieked the little girl.
“Sorry, dearie,” croaked Grandmother. “I did remember, but I’d already sunk my legs into the floor and it was too late.” She looked around, and realised how close she had been to impaling herself on the prow of the visiting boat. “Ooh, my word!” she chirped. “We’ve got some company!”
Meebrick grinned and waved again, and Grandmother waved back.
“I’ll go and put the kettle on,” she said.
“Thank you, Grandmother,” said the little girl.
Grandmother recovered her cane from where it had stuck in the jelly floor next to her, and wobbled off towards the kitchen.
The little girl glared at the intruders again.
“So who are you, and what are you doing in my laboratory?”
“I am Nodroz the Third,” began Nodroz the Third. Pone rolled his eyes again – he was getting tired of hearing him introduce himself. Nodroz pointed to the plant pot up front, “this is my faithful vegetable companion Yaseez, this…” he pointed at Pone, but then Pone decided to interrupt.
“My name is Pone Crustley,” announced Pone Crustley, “and if anyone tells you I’m called Woshling…” he paused for a second to give Nodroz a warning with one eyebrow, “… they’re telling you lies.”
“You look more like a Woshling to me,” announced the little girl. Pone slumped back against the stove and lost interest in the conversation, while she pointed at Meebrick and demanded to know who he was, and got the usual “it’s a real delight to see you!” greeting (thank goodness he’d taken his breathing tube out now).
“We are seeking to decipher the secrets of Wobble,” intoned Nodroz. “Humnnn.”
“Don’t you swear at me!” snapped the little girl.
“Basically,” chirruped Meebrick, “we don’t have a clue what we’re looking for, if anything, and we’re going for a road trip inside this jelly asteroid thing just for the fun of it. And then we spotted your place – can I just say, I absolutely love what you’ve done with the decor – so we thought we’d drop in and say hi!”
“I see… very well, then. Fortunately you haven’t collided with any of my extremely important scientific equipment. I am Professor-Emeritus Poppy Darlingsby,” announced the small girl. She adjusted her monocle and squinted at Meebrick. He gave a good-natured squint back.
“Um… what are you researching?” Pone asked, as he felt her gaze move over to him.
“Never mind that yet,” said the Professor.
Another very long silence.
This time, it was broken by the sound of shuffling feet and clinking chinaware.
“Here’s the tea!” chimed Grandmother from somewhere nearby.
“Excellent,” said the Professor. She started heading for the short staircase. “If you would all please follow me to the living room?”
*****
I don't plan on posting the whole story on my blog, but if you want to read more then I'm sure I could arrange to send you the back issues and keep you up to date with new chapters as and when they get written =]
(Random aside: for those who read Fort Paradox, we're still waiting for some questions for the new Weekly FAQ feature! Come on, ask questions, darn it!)
- 11 For 11 status: 9 down, 2 to go - I reclaim the lead in the race again! Won't be surprised if this is the last time I'm ahead...
- Latest book read: no change since the last post
- Latest film/TV watched: How Do They Do It?
- Latest music listened to: no change since the last post
- Latest food/sweets/whatever eaten: lunch = chicken sandwich, crisps and half an orange
- Programs and web pages currently running: Outlook 2007, Word 2007, Windows Explorer, Skype, Firefox (tabs: MatNav; Blogspot Create Post; Blogspot Dashboard; my last post)
- Webcomics posted today: no change since the last post
- The Colclough
Friday, 3 December 2010
The Answers!
Last week, I did a little research project in which I tried to work out what proportion of my creative output I've actually got round to sharing with people. The average answer, from four responses, was 51.25% - which has the interesting implication that I've only shared about half of the things I've ever created.
Anywho, for the benefit of anyone who found themself staring at that list and wondering what on earth I was yakking about, I shall now divulge The Answers, i.e. a new version of the list featuring the same 50 names, but now with added notes and things to explain who/what those 50 entities are.
The Primary Culprits
Before going onto the list itself, here's a brief(ish) overview of the major groups:
Universe XGT – a collective handle for a huge continuity co-created with my best friends Tim and Sarah. Some of the more important bits of it have emerged into the public view in the form of stopmotion short films, including Alpha One’s Megalomaniac Quadrilogy, X-Battles GT, and The Probe Has Succeeded, but there’s also a big sprawling mass of largely unpublished back-story, most of which would be bad for your head. Accounts for 10 of the 50 names on the list.
Cylinder and Miserable – my main webcomic; updated five or six times per week from late 2006. Features lots of random weirdness. Accounts for 7 of the 50 names on the list.
Grace and Caffeine – the weekly Christian comic strip which I produced for my church from late 2006 to summer 2010. The principal cast had all appeared in other places first, but Grace and Caffeine was their biggest starring role. Along with some smaller related projects, accounts for 5 of the 50 names on the list.
The Martian Ballet Trilogy – a series of computer-animated films, co-created with David Allwright, and revolving around the career misadventures of an inept Martian called Mike Half-Left. We planned to make a fourth film, but it all seems to have ground to a halt, so I’ve taken to referring to the existing films as a trilogy. Accounts for 4 of the 50 names on the list.
Megastropulodon – a short live-action film made for the final year of my BSc in Media Production, and a TV mini-series which I’m currently writing based on the same concept. The name is borrowed from the big ugly mutant creature at the centre of the story. Accounts for 3 of the 50 names on the list.
Intergalactic Hamsters - my BSc Media Production dissertation film. Well, technically, Intergalactic Hamsters is the film within the film, and my dissertation (full title The Making of "Intergalactic Hamsters") is a spoof behind-the-scenes documentary chronicling the collapse of the Intergalactic Hamsters project. Accounts for 2 of the 50 names on the list.
The List Explained
...and here are the notes!
So, there you have it. I hope you feel all enlightened and stuff. And for those who've got catch-up to do, happy reading!
=]
- The Colclough
Anywho, for the benefit of anyone who found themself staring at that list and wondering what on earth I was yakking about, I shall now divulge The Answers, i.e. a new version of the list featuring the same 50 names, but now with added notes and things to explain who/what those 50 entities are.
The Primary Culprits
Before going onto the list itself, here's a brief(ish) overview of the major groups:
Universe XGT – a collective handle for a huge continuity co-created with my best friends Tim and Sarah. Some of the more important bits of it have emerged into the public view in the form of stopmotion short films, including Alpha One’s Megalomaniac Quadrilogy, X-Battles GT, and The Probe Has Succeeded, but there’s also a big sprawling mass of largely unpublished back-story, most of which would be bad for your head. Accounts for 10 of the 50 names on the list.
- Alpha One's Laser Cafe (2008)
- Alpha One's Quantum Shampoo (2009)
- The Probe Has Succeeded (2009)
- X-Battles GT4 (2010)
Cylinder and Miserable – my main webcomic; updated five or six times per week from late 2006. Features lots of random weirdness. Accounts for 7 of the 50 names on the list.
- Cylinder and Miserable (2006 to date)
Grace and Caffeine – the weekly Christian comic strip which I produced for my church from late 2006 to summer 2010. The principal cast had all appeared in other places first, but Grace and Caffeine was their biggest starring role. Along with some smaller related projects, accounts for 5 of the 50 names on the list.
- Grace and Caffeine (2006 to 2010)
The Martian Ballet Trilogy – a series of computer-animated films, co-created with David Allwright, and revolving around the career misadventures of an inept Martian called Mike Half-Left. We planned to make a fourth film, but it all seems to have ground to a halt, so I’ve taken to referring to the existing films as a trilogy. Accounts for 4 of the 50 names on the list.
- Martian Ballet: Fifth Anniversary Special Edition (2003, 2004, 2008)
- Martian Olympics (2006)
- Martian Medicine (2008) is not currently available for online viewing, due to music copyright issues. A HD remastered version with a new score is pending. (Edit, 20th of May 2011: just rediscovered this post and decided to update it with a link to the film, which is now back online as promised)
Megastropulodon – a short live-action film made for the final year of my BSc in Media Production, and a TV mini-series which I’m currently writing based on the same concept. The name is borrowed from the big ugly mutant creature at the centre of the story. Accounts for 3 of the 50 names on the list.
- Megastropulodon Attacks! (2010)
Intergalactic Hamsters - my BSc Media Production dissertation film. Well, technically, Intergalactic Hamsters is the film within the film, and my dissertation (full title The Making of "Intergalactic Hamsters") is a spoof behind-the-scenes documentary chronicling the collapse of the Intergalactic Hamsters project. Accounts for 2 of the 50 names on the list.
The List Explained
...and here are the notes!
- Acid Gulps: a dodgy but popular soft drink from the Martian Ballet Trilogy (first appears in Martian Olympics, 2006).
- Albert S. Broccoli: an artificially-sentient broccoli from Cylinder and Miserable (first appears in Series 2, 2008), who acts as manager/butler/chauffeur/whatever to Cylinder the Cylinder.
- Alex Lanning: a biologist from Intergalactic Hamsters (2010); in the original story plan, Alex was supposed to be brilliant, but lacking in dress sense and other social graces, although this didn’t come out very much in the finished film.
- Arthur the Pensioner: a nice little old man, whose only appearance to date was in Arthur & the Punk (2006).
- The Blue Danube, with Walnuts: a random video I made back in 2007, which features me smashing up a tableful of small semi-edible walnuts with a claw hammer, in time to the closing couple of minutes of Strauss’ The Blue Danube waltz. It wasn’t as wasteful as it might seem – we salvaged and ate most of the walnuts afterwards.
- The Binary Triumvirate: an alternative/experimental electronic music trio from Cylinder and Miserable Series 2 (2009).
- Black Antarctic Cryogenics: a huge cryogenics plant located underground in the middle of a desert, from Cylinder and Miserable (first appears at the end of Series 1, 2007).
- Bradley Stanton Park: a blindly patriotic American mountaineer, from a little animation project called Frozen Bones that’s been languishing in ‘development hell’ for quite a while.
- Cylinder the Cylinder: the ‘alpha protagonist’ of Cylinder and Miserable (first appearance 2006); also stars in Fort Paradox (2010 onwards).
- Distant Prayer – Fragment III: one of my very few musical compositions (circa 2005 ish).
- Deep Glass: sculptural work, made from stoneware clay with a hotter-than-usual biscuit firing, and the crushed remains of a Shloer bottle (circa 2006).
- Doctor Murkum: cyborg, drug-addled, hopelessly incompetent wannabe antagonist from Universe XGT, easily identified by his grey environment suit and its bulky helmet and breathing apparatus (first appearance circa 1998).
- Dyngaria: the name of two almost-but-not-quite unrelated stories that I’ve started writing. The first incarnation was years and years ago, and unspeakably bad. The new one is still in its infancy, but much more promising. 'Dyngaria' is also the name of one of the main settings of the newer book.
- Edwin (full name Edwin Leonard Hall): the thin, grumpy old chap with the white hair and the gardening skills, from Grace and Caffeine (2006, first appearance in other stories 2003); also stars in Fort Paradox (2010 onwards).
- The Essence of Fandom: a mixed-media drawing/painting thing I did a couple of years back.
- Emily Arkley: the purple one with the Vespa, from Day-Glo! (2007).
- Empire Theatre, Mars City: the theatre where Mike Half-Left’s troubles began, in the Martian Ballet Trilogy (first appears in the original version of Martian Ballet, 2003).
- Establisher II: the unmanned titular space probe from The Probe Has Succeeded (2009).
- The Fifty-Seven Meme: myself and certain friends of mine have noticed that the number 57 appears more often than most others, sometimes in the most unexpected places, leading to the theory that it is in fact woven into the very fabric of the spacetime continuum, and/or is deliberately stalking us around the universe. I’ve made several intentional ‘57’ references in various media, in a tacit acknowledgement of its presumed metaphysical importance.
- First Dabox: the homeworld of the pragmatically-minded Grud race, in Universe XGT. The orange chap with the five eyes in The Probe Has Succeeded (2009) is a Grud.
- Forkley: a fork-lift-truck type individual, from the ‘Ganaraner’ race of sentient machines in Universe XGT (first appearance circa 1998); also appears in Fort Paradox (2010 onwards).
- Fort Paradox: the name of both a recently-started cross-continuity webcomic, and its principal location. I won’t tell you what the Fort actually is, as that would spoil the surprise for when we reveal it in the comic strip B]
- Gastropo Thrush: a molluscoid athlete from the Martian Ballet Trilogy (first appears in Martian Olympics, 2006).
- Gavin the Head: you don’t want to know. Suffice to say it’s from Universe XGT, and if you’re going to try and comprehend Universe XGT, Gavin the Head is a very bad place to start!
- Greenchester: a little game I wrote in Visual Basic 6 in 2008. Windows only.
- Harry Dixon: sort of cheating, this one: Harry was the main character from the short student film One in a Million, which I directed, from a script by course mate Stephen Boulter (2009).
- Hooper (full name James Richard Boris Montgomery Hooper): long-suffering assistant to the failed megalomaniac villain Alpha One, from Universe XGT. Unlike most of UXGT, Hooper and Alpha’s misadventures have been published: in the stopmotion films Alpha One’s Laser Cafe (2008) and Alpha One’s Quantum Shampoo (2009). A threequel is in production.
- The iKon Cinema: many years ago, back in the days when I used to make towns out of Lego and cereal packets, I decided I wanted to build a cinema. It worked too, sort of, thanks to a system of paper strips with different scenes on them, which could be fed through a little ‘gate’ setup to emulate a screen. The films were a bit rubbish, but it was an achievement at the time. I could show you a picture of the remains, but they're really dilapidated, so it'd be a bit embarrassing.
- I See the Light at the End: my last and greatest sculptural work (to date, anyway… never say never): a 5 x 7 foot mosaic (btw, there’s that number 57 again, see?), built from over 400 custom-designed and hand-made tiles, at Farnborough Sixth Form College (2007).
- Jason Meddings: the reluctant ‘Chosen One’ from Megastropulodon Attacks! (2010).
- Lost in Minehead 2006: the official video from one of our church youth holidays. I didn’t do the camerawork, but the project was turned over to me for post-production.
- Mark Coleridge: student filmmaker protagonist of The Making of “Intergalactic Hamsters” (2010).
- Matilda Ferguson: from a not-yet-published storyline in Cylinder and Miserable (due to appear online in 2011).
- Metaphysical Violation Drive: a type of airship propulsion technology from Cylinder and Miserable (first appears in Series 2, 2008, as part of Cylinder the Cylinder’s new vessel the Excylindrical).
- Mike Half-Left: ill-fated protagonist of the Martian Ballet Trilogy. The serial job-failer first appears in the original version of Martian Ballet, 2003).
- Pascal Davis: a computer-nerd character who first appeared in his own strip, Pascal Davis and the Machines (2005), and then made a few guest appearances in Grace and Caffeine (2007 – 2010).
- The Prayers of Thousands: sculptural work, featuring plaster casts of people’s hands (2005).
- Quantum Shampoo: the titular substance from Alpha One’s Quantum Shampoo (2009) – I won’t tell you what it is here. You should go and watch the movie!
- Redwood 257: one of the locations from a fragmentary script which I’ve been picking at on and off for four-and-a-half years.
- Rhugestian Swamp Dog: an omnivorous egg-laying mammalian creature, the size of a large dog or a small pig, with a long prehensile nose. Those who recognise the species will probably know them as the green thing from The Probe Has Succeeded (2009), but in the wider context of Universe XGT, they are said to hail from the planet Rhugestis, not from Harcom-1, the setting of the stopmotion short.
- Ron Haggard: the self-proclaimed ‘Sidekick’ from Megastropulodon Attacks! (2010).
- The Square: a new-but-unwanted cargo ship surreptitiously rescued from the scrapyard and transformed into a notorious guerrilla warship, in Universe XGT.
- The Suitcase: the favourite biological weapon of the so-called ‘Evil Terrorists of Doom’, from Cylinder and Miserable (first appears in Series 1, 2007).
- Tarberford: setting of the very short-lived comic where most of the main cast of Grace and Caffeine began their existences.
- Tasmin (full name Anna-Beth Tasmin Linden): a new character who I’ve added to the in-development TV-series version of Megastropulodon.
- Tharryk: a massive and impenetrable prison galaxy in Universe XGT.
- Tom (full name Tom Thomason): the nice chap with the hooked nose, the bald scalp, and the liking for tea, often found behind the pulpit of Volesford Free Church in Grace and Caffeine (2006, first appearance in other stories 2003). Also stars in the animated short film Goin’ Teapotty (2009).
- Turbo Gran: aged but invincible protagonist of the interactive short film of the same name (2008).
- TW-A42: a subcategory of the Doorwarden-series robots. The A42 itself hasn’t yet made any public appearance, but it will soon enough, and one of its successors, the TW-C75, appeared in Vs. Doorwarden (2003) and its sequel (2005).
- West Spottlington: a largeish fictional town fifteen miles from Volesford, which is mentioned a few times in Grace and Caffeine (2008-ish onwards), and is also the setting of Megastropulodon Attacks! (2010) – although I couldn’t really say whether or not these two stories both take place in the same version of the town, or if they just happen to share the same name. It’s never been stated in any published film or comic strip, but I've also decided that West Spottlington is the home of Pascal Davis.
So, there you have it. I hope you feel all enlightened and stuff. And for those who've got catch-up to do, happy reading!
=]
- The Colclough
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
Saturday and Stuff
Spent Saturday in London with friends from Root Hill. Despite having been to RH itself 5 times, this was the first time I'd been to any reunion thing. Partly because I'm not a great traveller, and because it's expensive (although, to be fair, Sam's train ticket was a lot pricier than mine), and because I'm not always in the loop with these things, and so on and so forth. But it was a good day. It was good just being around other people instead of staying in the same house all the time. Not sure how good my presence was for the other people, mind you, but it was good from my POV.
Started the day with a scenic tour of some of London's train stations while we waited for people to turn up, and as soon as we'd got the group together we went to Leicester Square and split up again for lunch - I say 'split up', although most of us ended up at the same table in KFC. KFC was, as usual, KFC, so the food wasn't anything out of the ordinary. (Random aside: my first introduction to KFC was in Hong Kong, where there was at outlet in the shopping centre that we lived on top of. We spent a lot more time at the McDonalds though.)
Then came Harrods.
I don't like Harrods.
I think I went once before, years and years ago, but I didn't really remember much. But it only took me about two minutes after walking in the door this time around before I decided that the shop really wasn't my scene. The whole building seems to be a labyrinth of small spaces, filled with far too much stuff and far too many people, with nothing to indicate where the exits are. We got split up and a bit lost somewhere around the second room, and out of the original fifteen/twenty-ish-strong crowd, I ended up touring the building with a splinter group of just 3 or 4 other people. I think I kept mumbling something about the exit most of the way around the building.
There were two bits that sort of appealed: the Lego area within the toy department (whatever some people might say, you're never really too old for Lego), and the audio-visual department. The AV area was showing a looped clip of Avatar on most of the screens, but I think they'd set up the TVs' colour balance wrong - yes, it's a very colourful film, but I'm sure the blues and greens weren't that overblown in the cinema.
The photo frame upstairs was unforgivable. They had this 5 x 7 inch photo frame (not a digital one, just a bog-standard photo frame) made of metal settings and crystals, that looked just like some average piece of aluminium and cheap-coloured-glass tat from a downmarket gift shop, but apparently this one was made of rare and expensive metals and gemstones instead… so they had the nerve to ask £35,000 for it! I kid you not. A photo frame with an asking price of thirty-five grand. I just stood there and stared in shock, and mumbled things about broadcast-quality 1080p HD cameras, very nice cars, and employing a full-time servant for a year, any of which would cost about the same amount of money.
Enough about that.
We relocated to the science museum for the rest of the afternoon, which was much better. Last time we were there, I didn't get to see the 'Birth of Hi-Tech Britain' gallery, and had a nagging sense of 'should have done that' at the back of my mind ever since, so I took the opportunity to make up for the omission.
Dinner happened in the basement of a Pizza Hut in Piccadilly. A lot of the pre-dinner conversation involved talking to Hannah about Doctor Who and the relative merits of Steven Moffat - it's nice to be able to talk to someone about DW without having to stop every two minutes to straighten out the chronology or explain what an Ood is. My younger brother and sister have some sort of working knowledge of the show, but they can't always remember what happened in what order, and they'd probably draw a complete blank if I mentioned 'Hartnell' or 'Pertwee' or something like that.
The pizza, surprisingly, turned out to be an avocado-scented sock instead... uh... no, actually, it was pizza, just like it said on the tin. I won't bore you with a long description of the pizza. You already know how it goes - dough, sauce, cheese, etc etc. (Speaking of avocado though, are you reading Fort Paradox, and if so how is your brain coping?)
So now it's over, and I'm back to the usual set of other stuff. I'm nearly finished editing the Root Hill video (just 2 or 3 months in the cutting room this time, instead of 5 ish!), and I'm starting to think it would be a good time to cut together the aforementioned trailer. Watch this space.
And finally: I'd like to say thank you to everyone who responded to my 'How much have I told you?' research exercise last week. I'll post the 'answers' - i.e. a list of who/what all those things are, and where they come from - later this week, so you can find out what those names are all about. 8]
- The Colclough
Started the day with a scenic tour of some of London's train stations while we waited for people to turn up, and as soon as we'd got the group together we went to Leicester Square and split up again for lunch - I say 'split up', although most of us ended up at the same table in KFC. KFC was, as usual, KFC, so the food wasn't anything out of the ordinary. (Random aside: my first introduction to KFC was in Hong Kong, where there was at outlet in the shopping centre that we lived on top of. We spent a lot more time at the McDonalds though.)
Then came Harrods.
I don't like Harrods.
I think I went once before, years and years ago, but I didn't really remember much. But it only took me about two minutes after walking in the door this time around before I decided that the shop really wasn't my scene. The whole building seems to be a labyrinth of small spaces, filled with far too much stuff and far too many people, with nothing to indicate where the exits are. We got split up and a bit lost somewhere around the second room, and out of the original fifteen/twenty-ish-strong crowd, I ended up touring the building with a splinter group of just 3 or 4 other people. I think I kept mumbling something about the exit most of the way around the building.
There were two bits that sort of appealed: the Lego area within the toy department (whatever some people might say, you're never really too old for Lego), and the audio-visual department. The AV area was showing a looped clip of Avatar on most of the screens, but I think they'd set up the TVs' colour balance wrong - yes, it's a very colourful film, but I'm sure the blues and greens weren't that overblown in the cinema.
The photo frame upstairs was unforgivable. They had this 5 x 7 inch photo frame (not a digital one, just a bog-standard photo frame) made of metal settings and crystals, that looked just like some average piece of aluminium and cheap-coloured-glass tat from a downmarket gift shop, but apparently this one was made of rare and expensive metals and gemstones instead… so they had the nerve to ask £35,000 for it! I kid you not. A photo frame with an asking price of thirty-five grand. I just stood there and stared in shock, and mumbled things about broadcast-quality 1080p HD cameras, very nice cars, and employing a full-time servant for a year, any of which would cost about the same amount of money.
Enough about that.
We relocated to the science museum for the rest of the afternoon, which was much better. Last time we were there, I didn't get to see the 'Birth of Hi-Tech Britain' gallery, and had a nagging sense of 'should have done that' at the back of my mind ever since, so I took the opportunity to make up for the omission.
Dinner happened in the basement of a Pizza Hut in Piccadilly. A lot of the pre-dinner conversation involved talking to Hannah about Doctor Who and the relative merits of Steven Moffat - it's nice to be able to talk to someone about DW without having to stop every two minutes to straighten out the chronology or explain what an Ood is. My younger brother and sister have some sort of working knowledge of the show, but they can't always remember what happened in what order, and they'd probably draw a complete blank if I mentioned 'Hartnell' or 'Pertwee' or something like that.
The pizza, surprisingly, turned out to be an avocado-scented sock instead... uh... no, actually, it was pizza, just like it said on the tin. I won't bore you with a long description of the pizza. You already know how it goes - dough, sauce, cheese, etc etc. (Speaking of avocado though, are you reading Fort Paradox, and if so how is your brain coping?)
So now it's over, and I'm back to the usual set of other stuff. I'm nearly finished editing the Root Hill video (just 2 or 3 months in the cutting room this time, instead of 5 ish!), and I'm starting to think it would be a good time to cut together the aforementioned trailer. Watch this space.
And finally: I'd like to say thank you to everyone who responded to my 'How much have I told you?' research exercise last week. I'll post the 'answers' - i.e. a list of who/what all those things are, and where they come from - later this week, so you can find out what those names are all about. 8]
- The Colclough
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
Prepare to be Addled...
I'd like, if I may, to introduce you to my latest bizarre and impractical invention.
It's a webcomic.
Depending how much of my previous output you've read, you might not think 'another comic strip' sounds like that big a deal - what with me having already written Grace and Caffeine, Cylinder and Miserable, and others.
Well... my friend Tim also writes webcomics, primarily Brothers in Shells, which is getting close to its first anniversary. And besides all the cartoons, we and Tim's sister Sarah have also made various short films, and have another private fictional universe called Universe XGT, the contents of which are almost entirely unpublished. So the three of us decided over the summer to start a new cross-continuity webcomic, in which we would throw together various characters from our different fictions in a shiny new environment, and see what happens. We've written 25 strips so far, and we've already used representative characters from six completely unrelated narratives, with more probably joining soon.
We named it Fort Paradox, for reasons which will hopefully become clear as the story goes along.
I should warn you up front: the sanity levels are dangerously low sometimes, and if you venture into the Fort, you may well find your grey matter getting a bit overworked. But in return, readers who persevere shall be rewarded with ninja snails and avocado-flavoured catastrophes, among other things.
- The Colclough
It's a webcomic.
Depending how much of my previous output you've read, you might not think 'another comic strip' sounds like that big a deal - what with me having already written Grace and Caffeine, Cylinder and Miserable, and others.
Well... my friend Tim also writes webcomics, primarily Brothers in Shells, which is getting close to its first anniversary. And besides all the cartoons, we and Tim's sister Sarah have also made various short films, and have another private fictional universe called Universe XGT, the contents of which are almost entirely unpublished. So the three of us decided over the summer to start a new cross-continuity webcomic, in which we would throw together various characters from our different fictions in a shiny new environment, and see what happens. We've written 25 strips so far, and we've already used representative characters from six completely unrelated narratives, with more probably joining soon.
We named it Fort Paradox, for reasons which will hopefully become clear as the story goes along.
I should warn you up front: the sanity levels are dangerously low sometimes, and if you venture into the Fort, you may well find your grey matter getting a bit overworked. But in return, readers who persevere shall be rewarded with ninja snails and avocado-flavoured catastrophes, among other things.
- The Colclough
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