Keeps getting earlier

Hey guys, I know we’ve only just started November, and Christmas is still about a half a yonk away but it’s worth pointing out that as of yesterday the Child’s Play charity website has been updated and is now taking this year’s donations.

I’m not gonna preach to you guys I’m sure you’re all capable of deciding which charities are/aren’t deserving of your time or money, and hell sometimes charities are almost like a luxury we can’t afford no matter how much we want to.  Child’s Play’s just something that as a gamer I appreciate.  I’d like to think that I’ve gone someway to help a sick kid watch Wall-e and laugh like a berk despite his or her illness.

Tags: charity, games, geeks

Trailer Trash

Firstly, congratulations to Barack Obama, you carry not just the hopes of your own nation, but those of the entire free world.  Good luck sir.  Now, back to geekery.

I’ve long since learned to get over the fact that as a video-game fan Hollywood hates me and everything I hold in esteem.  If not then why would they continue to give Paul WS Anderson and Uwe Boll money?

Not only does the film industry apparently hate video games, turns out they’re also pretty antsey about anime as well.  After months of letting myself get over excited this weekend I finally saw the trailer for the Hollywood remake of Dragonball.

In case you’ve been living on Namek for the last twenty-five years or so Dragonball is a manga series written and drawn by living legend Akira Toriyama.  It followed the adventures of alien martial-artist Goku and his friends and was inspired in part by the Chinese folk tale Journey to the West.  The narrative covers a period of around thirty years, a total of 519 chapters over 42 volumes.  Toei animation translated Toriyama’s works into two successful anime series.  Dragonball and Dragonball Z originally broadcast on Fuji television from 1986 to 1996.  A third series Dragonball GT continued Goku’s adventures, but was not based on the original manga, and ran for only 64 episodes.

The Hollywood rework of Dragonball doesn’t seem all that bad on paper.  Kung-fu Hustle’s Stephen Chow is producing, director James Wong is best known for his work on the Final Destination movies, so a strange choice to direct what is essentially a children’s movie, but I am a fan of FD so I’m willing to give benefit of the doubt.  The cast includes one of my favourite TV actors James Marsters as the film’s antagonist Lord Piccolo, and Chow Yun Fat as Sensei Roshi.  The rest of the cast is less inspiring though with Justin Chatwin (Tom Cruise’s whiney runt son in Speilberg’s Car-crash remake of War of the Worlds) in the lead as Goku.

After watching the trailer, I’m starting to worry just a little that this isn’t going to be the movie that the franchise deserves, the trailer involves scenes set if not in, then at least outside an American high school, this seems a little out of sync with the world in which the series is based.  The trailer involves scenes featuring Piccolo in which I can’t help but notice that he isn’t green, despite claims that the character would look similar to how he appeared in the anime, in a similar pallette error Emmy Rossum’s portrayal of Bulma Briefs is sorely lacking the original’s blue hair.

Finally and this is where i earn the “Rant” tag, WHERE THE FUCK IS KRILLIN?  I read somewhere that some of the more cartoon-esque characters wouldn’t appear in the movie, that’s fine, I can understand why an anthropomorphic pig, or a talking cat might get the chop but Krillin is Goku’s best friend in both the manga and the Anime.  Former bandit-king Yamcha is the only one of the Z-fighters set to make an appearance in the movie.  The film adds further characters to Goku’s circle of friends which didn’t appear in the manga, and I find it hard to accept that one of these characters couldn’t be Krillin, this is a reimagining of Dragonball, so Krillin doesn’t have to be a short, bald, buddhist monk, but a character portraying several of Krillin’s character traits would have been a kindness to fans of the series.

Tags: anime, geeks, movies, rant

Stuporcollider meets JoCo and Paul & Storm

This Friday my compatriots and I shuffled down to Nottingham to visit Game City 3 for several varied yet interesting reasons.
Firstly I would like to announce that Ado and I are now official World Record holders! (Well, maybe not but we were part of the 1227 zombies in Nottingham city centre). Pictured are the zombies who were not constrained by crippling bouts of self awareness and actually got together to do the Thriller dance.

Later on, after receiving several strange looks from our fellow ale enthusiasts at The Olde Trip, still bedecked as the undead we marched on the Britannia Hotel, an Overlook-esq nightmare of seventies decor. Despite my well documented love of city center hoteliers we had the ulterior motive of attending Game City’s hallow’een party, featuring the wonderful Jonathan Coulton and the hilarious Paul & Storm.

Walking into the event, I was a little apprehensive. Tables and chairs do not normally a concert make. However after six or so pints of Caste Rock brewery’s guest ale, Fine Ale Fantasy, things began to seem much rosier. After meeting Mr. Coulton and Mr. Paul guiding their merch proles in the fine art of stealing all my money we sojourned to the main room to see the acts.

I don’t think I can impress upon you how truly fabulous I thought this gig was. Paul & Storm were fantastic, and we apparently dance like we’re at a Dropkick Murphy’s gig. Jonathan Coulton apparently was suffering from cold. I didn’t notice but I was down the best part of 10 pints by this point, and you’ll be pleased to know that your fearless editor Ado managed to hold up Mr. Storm from appearing in one of his songs by chatting US politics. I can only assume they were discussing Mrs. Palin’s lovely wardrobe (lie.)

Afterwards I managed to get to say hi to the artists, and I keep the British end up by being really quite drunk, huge, short haired, hoody wearing zombie lumbering around making comments that I just can’t remember. Ado has a picture of me actually touching Mr. Coulton and not slobbering like a fool but he is keeping it ransom until I can pay him the fee of 150 vintage 80′s metal tour t-shirts.

WIN!

Tags: beer, geeks, music, nerdgasm, superfan, world record, zombies

Hello Dolly…

As a TV addicted Geek, Joss Whedon is something of a hero to me (and by “hero” I mean, yes I would). This being the case, I was most excited to hear about his latest project and, in accordance with my apparent Mormanesque look, I thought I would relay the good news to you all…

Dollhouse is to feature Whedon veterans Eliza Dushku (oh my, she’s a feisty one) and Amy Acker (I think I’d cry afterwards). The basic premise of the show is that a company has a number of agents on it’s books who they hire out to perform any task the customer requires. These “Actives”, are mindless shell people who spend most of their time in a childlike state in the agency’s over sized dolls house. Before each mission they have personalities and skills implanted as required, once the mission is complete they return home to be blanked and put back into their gilded cage. Mission range from business to pleasure and anything in-between (I’m expecting assassination to high-class hooker patrol).

The hook is that one of the Actives (Echo, Eliza Dushku) starts to remember the time between missions. Thus she begins to workout what’s happening and, one assumes, the intrigue begins.

I heard about this project in early 2008 and have been picking up details ever since. What prompted me into this most evangelic of posts, however, was reading a report that production had been halted. I feared the worst, FOX cutting another promising Sci-Fi show off before it’s even got going would not exactly be a surprise. They’ve even done it to Whedon twice, with his best two shows to date Angel and Firefly, at which point he declared he would never work for FOX again… Obviously the “big truck of cash” came to town and changed all that, but I’ve learned to accept it’s influence in life…

Thankfully it turned out to be Mr Whedon himself delaying production, the reason he gave was that he didn’t feel that the scripts he’d left others to complete were of sufficient quality, so is running his eye over them and bring them up to par. I found this strangely reassuring, as you don’t usually hear improvement in quality as a reason for many things these days (least of all television production) and it has raised my hopes still further that a classic may be on the cards…

The obligatory wikipedia and IMDB pages, plus the TV.com page:

Wiki link; IMDB link; TV.com link

Until next week dear fellows and fellowesses…

Tags: big truck of cash, dollhouse, FOX, geeks, joss whedon, tv

The Internets has you, Neil

What do you write to introduce yourself to a new blog? It’s harder than it looks! glancing over my shoulder I’m tempted to rip off one of the starting posts of one of the great bloggers but noticed one thing; most of them don’t have one.

The most concise and awesome introduction I can find is that of Jason Kottke, posted way back in 1998 when Quake II still ruled the world. So read that post then come back here and you’ve got the best of both of the worlds of blogging, see?

I figure I should explain a little about this bloggery expedition. I’ve been reading blogs, sites and other repositories of random information for donkey’s years and I’ve even tried my hand at maintaining a blog or twelve, the most recent being the inevitably doomed A sine 9. My compatriots have all suffered similarly accursed wide reading habits and we feel we should subject allow you to share in our vast and pointless repository of knowledge. Here me and my fellow adventurers in Internet writing have tried to create a vault of stuff we find interesting as well as having space for the inevitable Angry Rant™, allowing us to keep a posting schedule where we don’t have to be brilliant and entertaining every day. Not that we aren’t. It’s just nice to have some breathing space, you understand.

Our goal here is to share what we enjoy with you, anonymous mass. You may think we’re writing drivel and choose never to visit again; well STFU you’re wrong and some kind of deviant who does unpleasant things to dromedaries. Some of you might stick around and see what we can squeeze forth from our herd-mind, which is dandy. Others may become hopelessly obsessed with our glorious prose and begin a campaign of stalking, which is kind of OK too if you’re Zoetica Ebb.

So subscribe to the feed, bookmark the site or forget you ever came to this forsaken manor and carry on with your ungulate entertainment. Meanwhile, the cat requires attention and he can shred a grown man’s lap in seconds.

Tags: blogging, geeks, optimist, rant

Hello World!

It seemed only apt to both the general theme and target audience of this, our newly founded Blogging locale, that we start with those words.

As all geeks (well those of the IT fraternity at least) will know, the first thing anyone should do in a new programming language is to make a script that displays these words, big and proud for all the world to see. So there they are… We are here… The Stupor has landed.

Thinking of an actual subject for a first post has been somewhat trickier than coming up with the title and introduction. Where to start?? My theories on time and space or the relativity there-of, politics from one side of the spectrum to the other, a review of an album or game recently purchased, a funny video or a photo of a cat that looks like Hitler… Where to begin??…

With all these things whirling around in my head just waiting to splurge forth. I think the trick to making this work will be like trying to harness the power of a nuclear reaction, without it exploding your face/ass/county off. An amount of discipline and control will be called for, but I’m confident that me and my fellow Stupefiers can direct our minds whilst also supplying many interesting insights and hilarious anecdotes along the way.

I assume that the only people reading this now (in the year of our Lord 2008) will be you three (Gazz, Neil and Ralph) and our collected family and friends. However, I predict great things here, so for all you completists that have skipped right back to catch the very first post those guys did before they moved to Hollywood and “sold out”… Hey future yous!!! How about that weather, pretty damn hot isn’t it? Remember that credit crunch thing? We never thought that would go on so long. What a shame about Obama, it was good while it lasted. Oh and good work on avoiding that flu pandemic too.

Ever the optimist,

Ado out….

Tags: blogging, credit crunch, flu pandemic, future, geeks, hello, Kitler, Obama, optimist