Darick Robertson Draws Star Wars

As a chaser of abject awesomeness, check out this drawing by on Darick Robertson posted to the Growing Up Star Wars Flickr pool.


For those not in the know Darick is the artist behind Transmetropolitan, the other miscreant responsible is the perennial language abuser Warren Ellis. He also happens o be one of my favourite comic book artists evar.
Thanks to a Mr. Wil Wheaton for this internet treasure, whoever he is.

Tags: art, comics, george lucas kills my youth, star wars, superfan

5 Films You (Maybe) Didn’t Know Were Based on Graphic Novels

Hollywood seems to have picked up a new habit; that of adapting comic books into films. There’s Batman, Iron Man, Spiderman, Superman, the X-Men… OK, so I jest about the unfortunate name legacy left to some of these franchises, but a lot of them have translated successfully into high grossing films.

Now you may be seeing a trend in these movies, there’s a large showing for Marvel and DC’s finest, but there’s still a lot of love out there for the more obscure, more adult comics. I’ve already mentioned the WE3 movie on these digital pages and works like From Hell, Sin City, V for Vendetta and 30 Days of Night have shown that the graphic novel format can translate just as well.

I have to admit I’m not a fan of superheroes in comic books, the trappings of the underwear pervert have formed a gestalt of ideas it seems hard to break out of (with the exception of Animal Man.) Don’t get me wrong, I like the films that have grown from these established characters, but I’m more of a Transmetropolitan kind of guy. With this in mind I went to see The Spirit last week and was thoroughly disappointed; with Frank Miller, a man with an amazing eye for using shadow contrasts, and the source material from Will Eisner, the father of comics I expected a triumph, instead I left the theatre bored and bemused.

To this end I’ve decided to list, for your delectation, 5 movies that you may not know were based on comic books…

A History of Violence

Based on the graphic novel of the same name, A History of Violence tells the story of a cafe owner trying to escape the repercussions of a horrendous crime he committed as a youth. The comic was written by John Wagner, one of the creators of British comics icon Judge Dredd (which also became a film, but a truly abysmal one) and drawn by Vince Locke, famous for his work on the Brief Lives run of Sandman. the film holds an 87% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for two Oscars, one of them for Josh Olsen’s adaptation of the original comic’s script. The film differs quite a lot from the graphic novel, but the central themes and tone are retained effectively.

Road to Perdition

The original Road to Perdition was written by Max Allan Collins, an insanely talented writer of novels and script, as well as directing and writing for a band. The bast. The art for the books was drawn by Richard Piers Rayner, an old DC/Marvel hand and now Middlesborough FC’s resident artist. The books themselves tell the story of a disgraced mafia enforcer trying to raise his son in a world of violence, a theme which is retained in the film version. Sadly David Self‘s treatment of the adaptation was tinkered about with by a rotating group of writers at the behest of Spielberg and resulted in the dilution of the film’s message.

The Crow

Perennial goth posterboy Eric started life as the main character of J. O’Barr‘s The Crow. As the writer and artist James created The Crow as a way of dealing with the death of his fiancée at the hands of a drunk driver, a fact mirrored in the fiction as Eric’s fiancée is killed in the book. In this case I feel the film outshines the comic. O’Barr’s personal misery is evident in the book, but comes across as a little too goth for my tastes. The film was directed by Alex Proyas, director of the fantastic Dark City, and the production of the film famously led to the death of it’s star Brandon Lee.

American Splendor

Yeah, if you’ve seen this then you know it’s a biopic of autobiographic comic creator Harvey Pekar. the film takes aspects of Pekar’s life and mixes them with the elements of his American Splendor series to tell the story of Pekar’s life and the creation of the series he’s famous for. Drawn by different artists, including legendary underground comics genius R. Crumb the comic series is to my mind one of the best examples of exactly what can be done with the graphic novel medium. The film currently enjoys a 94% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. See it, its bloody good.

Ghost World

Not strictly its own comic book, Ghost World was a story arc from creator Daniel Clowes‘ alt comic Eightball. It tells the tale of two 90′s high school graduates and the decline of their friendship as they transition into adulthood. Directed by Terry Zwigoff the man responsible for Crumb, a documentary about the life of R. Crumb (which I’ve not managed to see yet) the movie garnered Clowes an Oscar nomination for his treatment of his own work.

Tags: comics, films, geeks, graphic novels, lists, movies

Gone to pot?

A report by a group of leading academics will controversially push for changes in cannabis laws, allowing the state to prepare and distribute marijuana for recreational use. Amanda Fielding, the founder of the Beckley Foundation,  “a charitable trust set up to promote the investigation of consciousness
and its modulation, and the science of drug use, from a
multidisciplinary perspective” will present the findings of their report to the UN Commision on Narcotic Drugs, who will in turn report to the UN general assembly at a meeting that will decide the international drug control policies for the next decade.

The findings of the Beckley report show that cannabis damages the health of heavy users as is to be expected, including increased risk of psychosis, lung and heart problems. Around 40% of Americans admit to having tried the drug and 3.9% of teenagers worldwide use marijuana regularly, compared with just a single per cent of the world population that uses other illegal drugs. Teenagers have an increased likelihood of dropping out of school early, and being in traffic accidents.

The potency of cannabis is also getting higher (pun definitely intended :p) as levels of THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol), the chemical that gives the user a high, are treble the levels that were present 10 years ago. Similarly the levels of cannabidiol, believed to help prevent psychosis, are falling, and are absent in certain strains.

Comparison of the dangers of different drugs - Hennigfield & Benowitz

There are obviously dangers associated with the drug, however the Beckley commision concludes that “the damage done by prohibition is worse than from the substance itself.” The drug is thougt to be less harmful to users and society than other illicit drugs, and far less damaging than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. Each year 2.5 million deaths are attributed to alcohol and 5 million to smoking. To date there have been just two documented deaths from marijuana overdoses.

Many of the harmful consequences stem from the fact that cannabis is illegal, the Beckley commision claims. University of Maryland Criminologist Peter Reuter, a co-author of the report said “If you don’t think being arrested is a harm, you’re unpersuadable, in the US, 750,000 people were arrested in 2006, and I think that’s a substantial harm.”

A study by the National Drug Research Institute in Perth, Western Australia, in 2000, came to the same conclusion. Cannabis possession here attracts a criminal conviction, although in South Australia this is not the case. It was found that 32% of those ‘criminalised’ had severe employment consequences, compared with just 2% of those ‘infringments’ in Southern Australia.

The Beckley report is recommending that cannabis should be subject to strict standars to ensure that it is not strong enough to cause psychological problems and sold through government outlets. This will ensure that children are unable to buy the drug and that the criminal element that currently profit from drugs are slowly pushed out.

Fielding accepts that it is a controversial proposal, but I for one think it seems well thought out and potentially beneficial. The key seems to be moderation, for me, as with all things in life. People will always take drugs, if we can help make this safer for the user then, that can only be a good thing. It would obviously need to be proven that the weaker strains discussed are genuinely safer, and a large-scale information campaign would be required, but it has to be better than the alternative.

Tags: beckley, cannabis, controversy, danger, legalisation, science

The Darkest Of Liquids

Blackwater… Now anyone who’s heard of this company before has probably backed off a couple of feet from their screen already. They’re the kind of people that, once encountered, you remember with some trepidation. They’re what the US Government refers to as a “contractor”, but are basically guns for hire, and have no small amount of controversy attached to them.

Artists Impression

I myself had heard of these guys a while back. As I read much in the way of geopolitical news, there was this little spat going on in Mesopotamia a few years ago and Blackwater took on several contracts in the wake of said conflict. The reason they were brought to my attention again was that, usually some might say, a group of their more enthusiastic workers are being brought to book for going above and beyond their customers expectations when dealing with a crowd of people who happened to be in a square they were going through.

After reading the news article I realised I had the interwebs close at hand and, therefore, looking at their company website might prove interesting, informative or even reassuring… perhaps they aren’t as dark as the liquid they’re currently employed to protect… sorry, I mean as evil as the previous regime of the country who’s rebirth into freedom and liberty they are currently being employed to support…

Ok, so the vague mandate these types of contractors seem to operate under makes me feel quite uneasy and the things they do with the power they have does nothing to dissuade me from this opinion. So please understand me rightly when I say this was nothing compared to how overwhelmingly disturbed I found myself after reading through their website.

After reading the first page I began to wonder if I had the correct website at all, the description of what they do and how they do it could adorn the title page of any service industry website I care to mention. As I progressed deeper into the bowels of their web presence I became more scared of the complete ambiguity that pervades the text than anything actually stated. It feels a bit like seeing something menacing in the darkness, then shining your touch there and it’s gone… You know you saw something but where’s it gone now??

Personal lowlights for me were all from the Pro Shop area:

• The inspirational posters (“Blackwater Determination” being illustrated with an oil rig, wonder what they’re getting at there, and “EOE Baghdad 911” with what looks like their equivalent of the Bat-call spotlight).
• An instructional DVD called “Basic Pistol Training” (can’t help thinking that, if it had Arabic writing on, it would surely get you arrested and imprisoned without charge).
• The very worst must be in the Clearance section, where you can buy Blackwater branded “Christmas Onesies” for your baby (age ranges from 3 to 24 months).

As there are far too many “highlights” for me to comfortably cover in this post, I invite you to visit their site and sample this rather unsettling experience for yourselves…

Tags: blackwater, disturbing, government, guns, internet, onesie, police, pollitics, rant

She bangs the DRM

He milks the pun

Apple made what is supposedly their last appearance at the annual Macworld conference in San Francisco yesterday.  In the final day’s Key note speach Apple’s senior vice president of world-wide product marketing Phil Schiller (how does he fit that title on his office door?) announced that apple would be removing digital rights management from all music sold on itunes.  The move sees 8 million songs DRM free with immediate effect, with the final two million to be DRM free by the end of March.

The decision to remove DRM from itunes has long been on the mind of Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, who was sadly unable to deliver his usual keynote speech due to serious illness.  In 2007 Jobs published an open letter, ‘Thoughts on music’ in which he called for major record labels to drop DRM.  It’s taken time but Jobs has achieved his aim with Sony BMG, Universal and Warner finally reaching an agreement.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are in layman’s terms a means of controlling the usage of digital media by preventing access, copying or conversion to other formats by the end user, meaning that though a buyer has paid for  a product, they are not free to use that product in any way they wish.  With regard to itunes the music files are encrypted preventing play on any product other than itunes or the ipod.  Files can also be played on only five different PC systems which must be authorised by the account holder from which the music was purchased.

With the dropping of DRM Schiller also announced that the current price policy of one price for all would also be changing, introducing a two-tier pricing system with DRM free itunes tracks costing an additional 30 cents, it is so far unclear if an increase in price will also be seen in the UK where currently plus tracks cost the same 79p as older tracks.  Mark Mulligan, a director with market analysts Jupiter Research, reacted to this by saying the end of DRM in its current form was inevitable,  “Ultimately, what we’re going to end up with is a new form of DRM. The more you pay, the less DRM you get bolted onto your music. Premium music will be DRM free, the cheaper it gets, the more shackles are attached,”

Following the successful launch of Amazon’s DRM free download service it seemed inevitable that apple would be forced to react or lose market share, however I’m a little concerned that they seem to deam it necessary to charge extra for this service, while the new style tracks are a higher quality, the difference is only really audible on high end equipment, so therefore a moot point  with the average itunes user.  While no increase in price has been announced in the UK the charge to upgrade previously purchased tracks to the new format is twenty pence I can’t help but wonder if a 99 pence price point is being considered in the future, 30 pence higher than many tracks offered by Amazon (starting at 59 pence, with most priced at 69p).

While DRM may not be an issue to the average itunes user, that doesn’t mean that they will be unaffected by the issue, while it currently looks like the major record labels are through itunes taking a step in the right direction apple will have to take care not to price themselves out of a market which in 2009 as the high street suffers is only going to get larger and more competitive as consumers seek new music at lower prices.

Tags: computers, DRM, music

Machine Intelligence

Most folks laugh at this phrase, everybody has had fun with their backwards printer and rebellious cellphone. Working daily with the facepalm worthy exploits of folks I’ve come to laugh at the notion of human intelligence as well, but that’s another story.

Even now work is going on to create synthetic brains, devising simple heuristic rules which can guide the creation of artificial neural networks. New hardware and software is being created right now to facilitate the growth of true intelligence from a machine, and that makes me excited.

It’s worth noting the differences here between artificial intelligence and machine intelligence, there’s a big gap. Artificial intelligence can only respond to stimuli that it has specificially been created to work with, an example is bots in videogames. A bot can act like a player, and even though you can tell them apart from humans they still react in what would be considered a lifelike way within the simulated situation in which they exist, but without special markers built into those game worlds the bots cease functioning correctly and begin to act erratically. Machine intelligence works by creating models from available data and building scenarios within it’s neural network, allowing it to come to decisions that the original designers of it’s heuristic software may not have anticipated; taking my example above, the intelligence would learn the rules of the game through observation not through intentional prompts. There are different methods to achieve this but their goal is the same, to create a thinking model.

Isaac Asimov famously wrote about devices built with such an intelligence in I, Robot (and later Cory Doctorow took his ideas and ran with them in his I, Robot and more playful I, Row Boat) defining three rules which should govern the behaviour of a machine intelligence. The question is though, should we artificially restrain what thoughts a synthetic mind can entertain? Does the simple act of rationalising and coming to decisions based on available input constitute sentience?

It’s more a question for the philosophy students out there, me; I’m looking forward to the Turing Test being beaten and robot equality movements. It’s all a long way off, but we’re a clever bunch, eh? In the mean time watch this video and be enlightened:

Thanks to Andrew C. Hoyer for the aweome photo and having the ‘nads to Creative Commons licence it!

Tags: computers, futurism, geek, robots, video

Needless Bureaucracy FTL (of live music)

Save our live music

Ordinarily I don’t concern myself with the goings on in London, there’s a mutual understanding there; they have no idea who I am, and I think they’re all insufferable gobshites. However, occasionally things start in London and go on to affect other places, which is why we need to nip this one in the bud.

I’m referring to form 696, or as I like to call it, the harbinger of death to live music.
Form 696 already applies in 21 London boroughs, and requires licencees to submit 8 pages of information on live music performers, including names, addresses, phone numbers and the ethnicity of it’s potential audience. Failure to comply will result in a fine and possible loss of licence.

The metropolitan police have stated that this is in response to incidents involving guns in 2006 and is designed to provide safety at the venues and pinpoint troublemakers, but almost instantly makes open mic nights impossible, and creates serious problems for small venues. I’m not a musician, but I would question why my privacy was at risk for performing live music, and a detterent such as this hardly encourages our musicians, which are sadly one of our few remaining exports.

Feargal Sharkey, of The Undertones fame is campaigning, as the head of UK Music, against form 696 and a petition has been started that I urge you all to sign. Furthermore there are fears this information allows the police to focus on music enjoyed by black and asian young people since the type of music and the likely audience needs to be disclosed. Mr Sharkey had this to say:

“In explicitly singling out performances and musical styles favoured by the black community we believe the use of Risk Assessment Form 696 is disproportionate, unacceptable and damaging to live music.”

Tags: gigs, music, needless bureaucracy, petition, rant, rights

More of 2008 in list-form.

One of us had to, and I thought I’d jump on the end of the year bandwagon.

2008 will for me be known as the year I stopped reading, apart from my usual cover to cover of The Hogfather in the run up to Xmas I can’t think of another new (or new to me) novel I read in 2008, there must have been one, but seriously I can’t think which.

2008 was also the year I re-discovered Heavy Metal, both the film and the genre.  In the first instance all thanks to a recent episode of South Park, and the latter just because every album I’ve heard this year has been pretty damned Awesome, also the fact that 2008 was another year without a new Green Day album (Unless you count Stop, Drop and Roll by the Foxboro Hot Tubs, which I don’t) led me down a darker more head-bangery route.

In Movies 2008 showed us all that Pan’s Labyrinth Wasn’t a fluke and when it comes to horror movies Spain is really where it’s at at the moment Rec and The Orphanage really push home everything that’s wrong with Hollywood horror movies and the current trend for SFX in creating what is essentially (Daily Mail Moment Warning) torture porn.  (Ban this sick filth.)

Gigs in 2008 were fewer and further between than I’d would’ve liked, but what are you gonna do?  This year was dominated by the fact that I finally went to see Bon Jovi (no, I’m not being ironic).  Bon Jovi was like a gateway to harder rock’s, the first hit my mum approves of but the rest is gonna cost me, sort of thing.  To finally see them live was akin to being ten years old again only with access to a hell of a lot of beer.  On that note my hero of the year award goes to Twickenham, the home of British Rugby, a fine venue for a gig, and sponsored by Greene King so therefore having the best gig beer tents ever.

Gaming in 2008 saw me first abandon my Xbox 360 in favor of PC gaming, then abandon my PC in favor of the Wii and DS, then abandon Nintendo and buy another 360 (the circle is now complete).  On all formats however RPG’s held sway.

Right.  Enough pre-amble, list time.

Movies.

• Wall e (A Stanton)
• The Orphanage (Technically 2007, but not released in the UK ’till 2008) (J A Bayona)
• The Mist (F Darabont)

Games.

• Guitar Hero World Tour (Activision)
• Fable II (Lionhead)
• The World Ends With You (Square Enix)

Albums.

• Death Magnetic (Metallica)
• Black Ice (AC/DC)
• Along Came a Spider (Alice Cooper)

Disappointments.

• The Kaiser Chiefs (Turns out they’re not all that great)
• Living in a hotel (gets real old real fast)
• Green Day (It’s been four years now FFS!)

Going Forward…

• New Green Day album in 2009.
• Blogging more, sorry Ralph-fans.
• Fighting my crippling WOW addiction (just 20 more levels man.)

All the best for 2009 y’s all.

Tags: games, list, movies, music, new year