Video Game review - The Warriors - Xbox

I think my favourite video game this year is The Warriors on Xbox. Based on the 1979 movie this game was released in 2005 for the Playstation 2 and Xbox.

Its a running round hitting people game in the vein of Grand Theft Auto, for 1-2 player game where the first 13 chapters sets out the backstory, and the last 8 or so chapters follow the plot of the movie, a gang in late 1970's New York has to fight their way back to Coney Island for some script-related reason.

Back in the Glasgow, flatmate Alan had it for the PS2, we'd play it together, getting each other's back, looking out for each on the mean streets of some other time, playing by some other rules.

Anyhoo, I think I'd moved out of that flat before we'd got through the first ten levels, and ever since, I've been itching to play it again. Alas, the Xbox was discontinued, the Xbox 360 too expensive and no guarantee that it was backwards compatible with older games anyway. Just in case, I bought myself the game off of Amazon, but with no way to play it, just hoping that one day the Xbox 360 would be backwards compatible enough or some other system could do a decent job of emulating.

I was a fool.

About two weekends back, I wandered into Cash Converters and picked up a second hand Xbox for £10, and a controller for £2.50. And within moments I'd been transported, via Glasgow 2005-2007 to Coney Island, the dark hot summer nights of 1978. I was Cleon, Snow, Ajax and Cochaise. Robbing shops, mugging civilians, marching through other gangs turf. Sometimes I'd just smash up cars for the hell of it.

I felt young again, running with my gang, knowing they'd get my back.

Some would complain that its too violent, and brutal, and lack any kind of morals, but its just a game. Besides its not all about kicking the crap out of people, some levels involve laying down city-wide burners (graffiti) or friendly games of 'king of the castle' with neighbouring gangs.

Anyhoo, I am somewhat addicted to this game.

Aping Picasso on graph paper

So the other day I was pottering about the Pablo Picasso Museum in Malaga, with my sweetness and my notebook. Here are some sketched I made of his pieces.

This piece is titled 'mujer sentada' from 1906. Here I think we can see strong parallels between Picasso's work and that of another artist a century later.

This piece, a Minotaur from 1938, is reminiscent of Tim Curry's character in the 1985 Tom Cruise fantasy Legend.

This final sketch of Bater 1971, one of Picasso's last pieces, has crossed the line into indie homebrew comic land.

Living on the minimum wage

Following on from my earlier post where I mentioned how long I have to work in my minimum wage job each month, I thought I'd do a nice diagram rendering the same information.

This takes minimum wage to be £5.73, its gone up to £5.80 now. Also, the tax and NI that I pay seems to work out to be 15%, not sure why.

Again, I've run out of days to work by a large margin. Working more than a six day week is killing me.

So, what I need to do is somehow move somewhere where the rent is cheaper than where I am now, and also find somewhere to shift my debt to where the interest rate is a little more like the base rate.

Surely there ought to be huge competition between banks right now as to who can offer the lowest borrowing rates. There's this huge gap between the saver's rates and the borrower's rated as the banks recapitalise and maximise their profits, but someone could take a huge swath of the market by offering a rate just a little better than the rest.

Hmm, there probably are banks like that out there. I'd better look.

The other glaringly obvious thing is that I claim no benefits from the state. This would immensely ease my financial woes. The fact that I don't shows I'm either stupid, stubborn, or trying desperately to keep my integrity as a human being.

I like to think that the state takes money off me to defend the borders, maintain law and order, pick up the rubbish and fix the roads, that sort of thing, to beg them to return money to me is uncomely. Surely they should just be taking less of it from my earnings to begin with.

The Mastercard Brit Awards

Brits
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

Just watched the Brit Awards sponsored by Mastercard, and The Pet Shop Boys receiving the lifetime achievement award.

They don't make them like they used to.

This is a picture of Bill Drummond from the KLF and their 1992 Brit Awards appearance where he pulled out a machine gun and showered the assembled audience with blanks. You wouldn't get away with that these days.

Or would you?

Is it just that no one is audacious enough to try it?

Origami Flapping Bird - A step by step animated guide

Following on from yesterday's thrillingly instructive guide to folding an origami flapping bird, here it is again, but as an animation over on YouTube.

Only took a day and a half to draw and colour in. As usual, I used my Wacom tablet, Photoshop and Windows Movie Maker.

Working on animations

Today I am mostly working on drawing more animation frames. Its still incredibly slow going, just a second or two of video for every ten pictures, but its satisfying and passes the time.

Aref-Adib reckons that its a shame that all my animations only last between ten and thirty seconds and it ought to be a few minutes long to hold folk's attention. He's got a point, but after hours of labour I still feel the need to post the latest fruits on YouTube. If there's nothing to show for my labours, then its almost like I haven't done anything. Aye?

The videos from Window's Movie Maker are still really jerky, its a little annoying, but I want to avoid the hassle of setting the computer clock back to use an old version of Adobe Premier to do it until I'm got all three minutes worth. Are there any other free, easy to use and reliable bits of software that will string together still frames into a video clip?

New drawings

First new drawing up on Naked Chicks on Post-it Notes in about three months, Not Safe For Work aye here

The view from my desk

I sit with my Wacom tablet, scribbling what I can see around me, then string together an animation.

Once again, I feel kinship with the mighty Dilbert.

Zoids

Aw man, I found this cool site that got scans of every issue of the old Zoids comic from Marvel UK in the 80s. It used to be in the back few pages of Secret Wars and then Spiderman.

Back when I got into comics the first time round, we'd get Transformers, and then Secret Wars, Spiderman and Zoids and then GI Joe. A friend called Frog would bring round The Eagle every week too.

We sold most of them back in the 90s, some car boot sale when everyone was skint.

I think Zoids were my favourites, the most cultish and nichest of all of them cos it was just a UK think until the Japanese manga version came out. According to Wikipedia, Zoids was one of the first ventures of legendary comic writer Grant Morrison.

Check out the first story in this series here, talk about bleak.

ill theatre regulating

So I've got a wee bit ahead of myself on ill theatre drawings. Over on the site its up to this one featuring some wind / solar charger I saw on Treehugger, and over in real life and on flickr, I've drawn these two

and

which depict me demonstrating my old boy scouts strategy of being prepared and also building my own floating island out of rubbish and sellotape.

Now I reckon I could be all forward thinking, and post new pictures to the ill theatre site every weekday and have weekends off, and sustain it in definitely. and only those people fly enough to click through and regularly check my flickr will know what happens next.

Ballooning

I was going to head off to the Pocketbooks show over the road, but in a sudden moment of reparation I checked to see if there were actually any tickets. Well, I looked on Facebook and uncle Ian had left a message the other say saying there were a few tickets left and they were selling fast, so I kind of assumed it would be sold out and there'd be no way to pay on the door.

Instead, well, I used the ethernet cable from father dearest to hook up my old 2004 desktop computer to the internet so I could suddenly use all my peripherals like scanners and graphics tablets and big old monitor and stuff in Windows XP and I set to work drawing this idea of a story I had for ill theatre.

As you'll already know, ill theatre is this kind of webcomic, stream of consciousness personal blog what I started this time last year. The original idea was to used a limited pallet and colour cycle it a wee bit each day, adding an extra colour after each cycle. Got bored and gave up regular posts months ago.

Oh there were some neat storylines, mostly related to my quest to get back on the now defunct messageboard bowlie, sometimes involving time-travel and sometimes involving invading castle bowlie with an army of giant spiders, as suggested by uncle Tasty. And then once safely reinstalled in castle bowlie, which bore a bit of a resemblace to the Buffalo Bar, ill theatre covered my rather idiocycratic attempts at getting back in touch with girls what I used to know. And then finally the fall of bowlie in fiery flames with uncle King of Patrick patrolling the battlements with mighty broadsword whilst the kids escaped by whatever means was possible.

Anyhoo, whilst ensconsed in this illustrated internet world, there would always be a hotair balloon floating in the distance, this was supposed to represent the idlesphere. There was an aborted attempt to float up and have a looksee what was going on, but I kind of lost interest before I got round to it.

All that is pretty much ancient history now. Bowlie sank and whilst it lived on in the irc chatroom for many months, since I lost my irc-powers in early December, that was the final kind of nail, but my own blogodrome lives on and carries me to ever more exciting adventures.

This is me in my blog balloon watching the chatroom sink beneath the waves.

And here's my balloon floating over a maelstrom that may or may not be the North Pacific Gyre

This is my blog balloon getting dragged into what may or may not be the North Pacific Gyre, whilst in the distance North Harrow watches in silence.

Inspi

Incredibly frustrated by this netbook now, I thought that I could just install loads of neat and useful software to my Acer Aspire One wot I bought the other week as a replacement for my regular laptop when it died.

But alas, its not so simple.

I wanna do a really neat post-it note animation, I've been having 3D Monster Chase dreams it was this Doom-like game for the Amstrad CPC 464 twenty-five years ago, and my boredom tolerance has reached the point where I could draw the maze and animate running around it, but alas, my scanner doesnae work with this operating system, and besides I have no animation software or out that can stitch jpgs into mpgs.

I've got half a dozen songs in ma heid which I need to record and sling up, but there's no pre-loaded software to do it and I can't find owt that works with this variety of Linux. There's mic socket on the side, but thats no use, and the built in mic only seems to work for the webcam. Christ, it lets you record video from the webcam, but its impossible to do anything with the video.

I was talking to some musicy chap last night about the various music scenes and promoters around London, and after my mind boggled for a while I figured it would be neat to do some kind of hookup network diagram, linking bands to promoters, but its not to be with this OS.

Its been ages since I did any ill theatre drawings, my graphics tablet doesn't have drivers for this machine, and I can't just draw stuff on paper and scan it. I guess I could draw with biro, then take a photie then dick around with the gimp, but thats just too convoluted.

Playing MP3s is a bitch, the pre-loaded MP3 player is an ass, it takes forever to look at my removeable hard disc cos there's a few thousand more files than it can handle. I installed VLC which is some kind of free media player, but from the Acer website it appears to not have any codecs loaded, so its no good to anyone. What was the name of that open source media player, Songbird?

There's not IRC client easily available. I fear I may never enter the Bowlie chatroom again, my friends there long gone, lost into the ether. Truly this is the time Bowlie finally died.

Oh, and fucking hell, I have no CD burning facilities no more.

What happened? When did computers suddenly stop working? Its like we're back to 1993 technology where you never know if whatever you've bought, or downloaded is going to work, and you have to scrabble around for days trying to plug everything together and set ever thing up.

I have less than no money, can some PC company send me a computer that works, I promise I'll sing its praises from all of my websites and everything I can use it to create.

**UPDATE**
Oh and fucking hellski, I can't even watch The IT Crowd on Channel 4's catch up service cos it only supports Windows PCs. It's kind of like both of my legs and one of my arms have been tied behind my back and three of the fingers on my remaining hand are taped together, and my eyes, like I'm wearing some steampunk Cyberdog glasses with horns coming out.

ill theatre returns

theatre159
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

Have done a special trilogy of Ill Theatre drawings over on my personal blog as webcomic site. here here and here

Read through them all starting here

800

Over on the nuddy chicks site I've just posted my 800th drawing

http://nakedchicksonpostitnotes.blogspot.com/

Whilst I'm still not sure whether its something to be proud of, commenter Dan makes my heart swell.

Can I pretend to stop doing it when I reach 1,000 pictures?

Should I have a party or something, or just the usual packet of chocolate digestives and bottle of wine alone in my room?

Back to work ii

Have taken to soothing my singularity by prodding people at work with a stick, need to get out and go to lots of gigs and maybe have a small drink.

Things kind of falling apart, just like they used too, maybe more ill theatre drawings are needed.

Having bad bad thoughts about the Bill Drummond The17 book signing/talk/reading thing, should I invite along the girl I should have invited back in '95? Its crazy, but thats the way I roll.

If ever there's a time to get delerious and replay darks time in my head, its now. Will have to dig out the old books and diaries.

Speaking of which, in response to hearing that the notorious Bowlie spider-diagram doing the rounds is incorrect, ill-informed and not up to date, I sketched out on to the best of my knowledge.

And after slinging it online for a few hours, the little voice inside my head reminded me it was a bad idea. And whilst that voice is the voice of insanity that regularly costs me dear, it has made me the man I am today. Angry, frustrated and bitter.

Cheers for that.

Also diagrams didn't quite get the thousands of pageviews I was hoping for, barely broke double figures. You gotta ask yersel, "Is it worth it?"

This evening, do I just go straight to the gig that's probly sold out or do I try to run 10K again and get the old endorphins flowing?

Duty

Oh woe is me...

Its become my duty to write reviews of gigs, to go to these things and scribble or jab notes on my mobile phone, and punt it out onto the internet. Its not like anyone reads the damned things, just the bands themselves. My nuddy website, that gets thousands of hits a day as you might expect, but gig reviews, how many people? About twenty five hits a day.

Its almost completely hopeless.

I can't even stop doing it, I tried. I gave up months ago, it lasted about a week before I was back there, standing in the dark, glancing at 'the kids' (twenty-somethings) having fun, knives of jealous jagging from my eyes.

They stand with their friends and loved ones, chatting and laughing and thinking of the delights to come later that evening. But me, I scribble, cos if I don't, no one will.

I have become a quiet voice in a big empty room. "Readers, listen to this band, they are great", "This other band are crap", "This gig could be better if..."

I got home late last night, the train line from Highbury was closed for engineering work, I'd been to see Pocketbooks, The Zebras and Airport Girl at the Buffalo Bar, some Fortuna Pop pre-Indietracks show* . So it was late, I as tired, I wanted to get photies from the gig online, maybe stab out the review or just fuck it, not enough people read it to make it worth my time, or maybe they do, but I can't handle the ambiguity and the silence and the wait. Robbie pops up in messenger, he'd been out drinking with The Smittens, chatting to one of them who's heard of my gig reviews.

A slight fuzzy feeling spreads out in my tummy like the warmth of the first summer's day.

Then I think, oh, I've got to do this, haven't I. I don't get to lie down with my wife, or get a lift home with my friends. I just have to write the damned thing. All the time the shadow of Tasty looms over, sneering.

I don't even get to scrawl the vicious kick 'em in the balls and run away anger and frustration reviews of a year ago.

Erm.

Actually...

Its not true, I spent half of last nights gig chatting to MJ Hibbett and Camila from WeePop. It was nice.

Yesterday's favourite search to find this blog on google
'illandancient'

*see, technorati will find this post when you search for any of the band names now. I could even add links to every mention too, so google will wrap me in its warm embrace. But really, would it help me as a person? Would it help or hinder the bands? Doubtful all round.

Run

Never able to say no when asked, I appear to be going to a gig in Nottingham tonight. Sure the bands are fun, but that town has bad vibes for me.

So I was there by my computer, poised with razorblade in hand (metaphorically) when my flatmate's voice came blasting through "Chris, would you like to come jogging with me, Alec and Fiona?"

An hour and a half later I was stretching off round Regent's Park. The first bit of exercise I've done in about eighteen months, not including horizontal jogging. And you know, it wasn't bad. According to my flatmates, I'm just naturally fit. Personally I think its just that I don't complain about muscle pains and don't pay any attention to my phyiscal limits.

Its the advantage of not having noticiable changed in the last fifteen years.

This one dumb Easter weekend in the nineties, I tried walking the 55 mile boundary round Bolton in a day, made about 42 miles before nightfall. So when I got back to school and some teacher, possibly called Mr Frost was bragging about doing a ten day coast to coast walk, I pointed out I could probably do that in two days.

Zee, what happened, where are you now and can we go for a coffee and catch up?

Over on the nuddy chicks site, the poll about what to do when a girl says she'll let you know later in the week, the clear consensus is to jump out of a window, although it seems just waiting and taking the initiative and calling yersel are both valid options, that whilst not the most popular, would still be acceptable.

I gotta find a gig to go to tonight or some club full of people I'm no scared of. I think I have Saturday and Sunday night's tied up, slaughtering a few more French students, or going to Gresham Flyer gigs. But Friday night, party night, I need something.

Boing

I just got a video covered on BoingBoing. I'm pretty sure it won't last long, someone's going to realise where the 'thanks Chris' hyperlink leads and then it'll be dropped like a rock.

But right now, right now, I'm right there at the top of the 5th most popular blog on the internet. Me, using my own talents and abilities, and a faint wiff of integrity.

But I can feel it, the ground is starting to tremble, that crushing feeling of anti-climax, of failure, of defeat. Of reaching the top, but still not getting the girl.

Still wandering to HDIF on my own, sitting in a corner surrounded by friends, on my own, drinking until I can drink no more, being prodded out to the dancefloor, doing the same as I've done for the past fifteen years, and then staggering home on my own.

This is why I even bother.

Hunger

There is nothing in my tummy. I'm running out of money. My limitless talents are of no help. I wasalmost talked into lending a friend £500 that I don't have, because she was a girl in need and the closest thing I have to a buddy at the moment.

I got home yesterday to find a big old parcel, could it be the Bowlie Round 19 mixCD at long last?


No, it was even better


A friend from the internet's sexblogger community had sent me a load of goodies. Much skipping round the house and making 'eep'noises.

Managed to send off one Just Joans CD, at long last. Only another five to do, then the overwealming waves of guilt will begin to subside.

Ooh, memories of talking to people at a gig the other day. I could do with chatting to people I don't know more often than I do.

I've branched out, inspired by the parcel, I wrote a bit of erotic writing over on the nuddy site. Most of my traffic comes from non-English speaking countries so it could be a bit of a waste, but it was worth a try. Have a strange urge to exorcise daemons by writing more of that sort of thing, but again feel doubt that making up for a lack of social/sex life with fiction can only be wrong wrong wrong.