Thursday 14 November 2019

Vile by Keith Crawford actually is a really violent Frozen

Vile by Keith Crawford actually IS like a really violent Frozen and I can prove it with five minutes and an etch-a-sketch!
But if you don't have 5 minutes here's TEN things they both have:

1) Strong lead characters whose names begin El...
2) Snow, lots of snow
3) Family power plays
4) Ice, it's cold up north you know
5) Awesome Castles
6) Single word titles, which let's be frank is just plain cool.
7) Magic and mystical creatures
8) Big explosions!
9) Nuanced characters with ambiguous motivations that drive a compelling plot as they strive to do the right thing as they perceive it or at very least the right thing for them
10) A talking snowman.

Ok, so Vile doesn't have a talking snowman but it is really violent and very very good. It also doesn't have songs that are going to get stuck in your head what with being a book an' all!

Don't believe me? Get involved with the kickstarter, help it get published and then you can find out for yourself: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vile/vile

Whilst you wait for your copy of the book to arrive I suggest you listen to the author being very silly (trust me he writes better than he sings): https://twitter.com/keithcrawford77/status/1194885225597349888?s=20


I hope Disney don't read Vile (or this) because I hear they're crazy litigious.

Sunday 14 May 2017

Radio Charades

My blog writing has suffered of late. I've got excuses, of course I have. If you wish I was still churning out words and opinions on the things I like most in life then the news is good - I've gone audio!

I have been working on a podcast called Radio Charades, a name which I hope conveys how much use I expect it to be!

Radio Charades is probably best describe as geeky light entertainment and is the continuation of a conversation that's been going for about 25 years with my friend Toby. There's news (of sorts) and discussions ranging from almost serious to entirely ludicrous.

We're now up to 20 episodes and you can find them all on iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, and Wordpress. Go to one or all of those places and like and subscribe and tell your friends (unless you hate it in which case feel free to keep your opinions to yourself). You can also email us at radiocharades@gmail.com

A selection of some of our episodes:

Episode 1: The Gritty Reboot - we discuss reboots, sequels and remakes.
Episode 6: Giraffatitan! - getting old and why it's good.
Episode 8: A Surfeit of Muppets - we considering which fantasy worlds we might like to live in
Episode 11: 15 Amazing Ways to Store Yarn! Number 12 will Blow your Mind!
Episode 14: Roborumble! - a tournament to discover the finest robot every built

I'm not really sure what the purpose is or who it's for but I'm proud of having done it and it looks set to continue. Who ever you are I hope you enjoy it!

 Radio Charades Logo

Tuesday 18 August 2015

A boy and his tiger

There is a a big (metaphorical) clock ticking down in the Sunburnt Tiger household currently - in September we are expecting our first child! It's a magical mix of excitement and panic that's a bit hard to believe or really comprehend. So whilst my wife is doing the most important and creative job I can imagine it's hard not to feel a little left out of the process. If you'll indulge an analogue I'm like the second wheel on the unicycle of gestation - hopefully I make the whole thing a little easier but am not actually required.
When we first started talking about having a family I thought that I'd really like to paint a mural for the nursery. I've always liked painting and writing on walls, I'm not really sure why! I had seen this kids bedroom and the idea was firmly planted - Calvin and Hobbes. I love Calvin and Hobbes. So here then are a few pictures, I hope you like them.

The room was pretty pink and pretty disgusting, full of holes and grime.

Decorating done I scaled up Bill Watterson's painting. Pencil first... then colour...
 

...then black. Hobbes was finished first... followed by Calvin and the tree.

The finished thing looks like this, the baby's crib will go in that corner so most of the tree trunk and grass will be unseen.
  

If you want to see more pictures or larger ones you can see them on my Flickr page.

All that remains is for me to put up some curtains and build some more furniture and then I'm about as ready as I can be for my little Sunburnt Tiger Cub!

Thursday 28 May 2015

It's never just painting a room...

I own a house, this is a good thing. The people who owned it before me treated it badly, this is a bad thing.
The décor stands as a good illustration of how two wrongs don't make a right - they had bad taste and were bad at decorating, the results were bad, violently bad. This is a double-edge sword for me - anything I do to the house will be an improvement however seeing the slapdash nature of what they did I see the need/benefit of doing things properly.

I keep making the mistake of thinking I need to paint a room, whilst not technically wrong it obfuscates the bigger picture. Painting a room in fact requires repairing, filling, sanding and cleaning, oh and I suppose painting too. 

A few weeks ago now I started work on our spare room, again it needed lots more than just painting. Extensive preparation has been completed to undo the damage done by the previous "decorators" and I was braced to spend my evenings for the next week painting, my body however had other plans and told me quite simply to stop. I have a problematic spine, 99% of the time it does me proud supporting my over sized noggin and allowing me to do amazing things like walk around. 1% of the time it does pain and suffering. This is never what you'd call good but I have managed to get something positive out of it, so what's been good about a having bad back?

  1. It wasn't as bad as it has been, I've been able to move a bit and sit up and the need to not do anything only lasted from Monday evening till Wednesday afternoon. 
  2. I couldn't do any decorating and felt no guilt.
  3. I spent a day dosed up on painkillers reading comics.
  4. I read the first three chapters of a new book by Toby Frost (and saw him to give him my thoughts) 
  5. As my strength has returned I've tidied and sorted some stuff that was getting overlooked.
  6. I've had some time to reflect on the work I've done on the house so far.
So here's a few pictures of the decorated bits of the house (apologies for the poor photos they weren't taken in sensible lighting - believe it or not the walls are not all just white)

The Master Bedroom with Walk-in Wardrobe (previously an en suite)



The Study/Geekotorium



The Lounge 




Wednesday 20 May 2015

Tonight I'll be burning my guzzolene soaked bra!

I'm going to jump on this suped-up smoking bandwagon and play my flame throwing guitar and talk about Mad Max and, yes, feminism. For what it's worth I've avoided reading anyone else's opinion so far, I wanted (as mush as possible) for these to be my thoughts. I should say that I am a man this probably needs saying to give context to my opinions, and please note that they are just that, my opinions, and I welcome any intelligent debate on them.

Feminism has become a dirty word mostly because it's poorly understood. In very simple terms feminism is just the belief that women and men should be equal in everything, something that most reasonable people are (or should be) behind. Sadly we are still along way from achieving this and perhaps as a man in the developed West it's not that easy to spot the imbalance, or worse perhaps its easy to ignore. The bigger problem for the feminist agenda is phrases like "the feminist agenda", they just sound scary and are misunderstood by many (not just men) as meaning "we want to put women to the top and men to the bottom", when all it really means is "we want it to be ok for a woman to be at the top if she's better than her male counterpart and wants to be at the top".

Equality might be a better word than feminism because, for mankind, it's manifestly frightening to have to manage when you feel manipulated by so many maniacal mandates, manuscripts and manifestos that manoeuvre under a mantle manufactured to start with something that seems to exclude your gender in favour of the other! Manatees mango manganese, but that's a different story.

So why is Mad Max at the forefront of feminism right now? For 2 reasons an obvious one (which probably isn't really feminist at all and will feed the misconceptions) and a subtler and considerably more awesome one.

I will be avoiding proper spoilers but if you're concerned then this is the point to stop reading, I doubt I'll give anything away that the trailer didn't

Reason 1 (The Rubbish Reason)

The main villainous warlord has a harem of ladies that he is using firstly to give him children and then later to be milked like cattle. Now I'm going to go out on a terrible limb here and say he's not that bad a villain - sure those things he's doing are truly horrible and should not be allowed but in the context of the world of the film he is actually doing quite well for his people - they have a water source, they grow crops, and they have safety in a world which offers none, the harem in fact lives like princesses or as close as this horrible future allows. Amusingly one of the princesses (for want of a different word) is said to have all her own teeth at one point - a fact that points to a good life considering most people are wandering round with titanic boils and cists all over them. It's mediaeval and barbaric but when the world and it's population have been nearly annihilated then perhaps mediaeval and barbaric is the best you can do. So naturally the plot revolves around freeing this harem of mothers to be and getting them to safety - they are metaphorically and very literally the mother to our future in the story. And if this is feminism then yawn, seen it all before. Anyone who tells you that the plot if feminist is probably an idiot - the plot is an excuse for a prolonged and extremely awesome car chase and little more.

Yes, because of the plot there are some damsel in distress types, maidens who need rescuing and they have various levels of patheticness and practicalness but this is more about their sheltered protected lives than anything else. Yes all the villains are men. Yes women are portrayed as the seed bearers - in one case literally as one woman actually carries a bag of seeds, the metaphor is pretty thin here. So at surface level it's swings and roundabouts for feminism and ultimately is probably just a film with all the tropes we've come to know and suffer. But there's more here if you want it...

Reason 2 (The Real Reason)

Mad Max is a film where people drive vehicles, crash vehicles, kill, maim, injure, punch, spit, curse, try to survive and maybe look for redemption or a better life. People. Not men, people. That includes women. Gender does not get in the way of anything. Women are allowed to kill and be kill as though they were just as mortal and evil as men. This is a grim world and grim things happen without respect or concern for your gender - it's brutal and uncaring and has a pure equality to it that says "you are in may way and I will run you over".

One of my favourite scenes is the first meeting between our two lead protagonists - Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa and Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky. The driving force for both characters is survival, Furiosa has also charged herself with keeping the princesses alive too. Neither is inclined to explaining themselves to the other, nor should they (this is a film thing rather than a feminist thing). A number of things happen with little or no allowance given just because some of the people there are women.

Max doesn't give a fuck, Max's character motivation is stronger than any concern of gender (or even other people at all) so it just feels right that he is prepare to hold a gun to the back of someone's head, it also feels right that he has assessed the situation and has spotted that the others value the heavily pregnant women most and so it's her he chooses as his hostage. It feels right that he is prepared to drive off and leave them all for dead, he just doesn't care he's not a hero, he's just a double hard bastard with a talent for survival. 

Max is not the hero. Furiosa is the hero. Both clearly have troubled pasts, which we don't need to know about and thankfully don't get told about, and both are pushed to do good things by their pasts. Furiosa is hoping for some kind of redemption and Max is driven by ghosts of his past failures. Of the two Furiosa seems to be the one to have taken a moral choice where as Max is an unwilling hostage of his madness, doing the right thing against his instinct to run.

Max and Furiosa fight, they properly fight, like two people fighting for their lives, no apology is made for this. He hits her and he certainly doesn't pull his punches and she beats him to the ground with one hand tied behind her back (sorta). The only reason they don't kill each other is due to external factors and other people joining. Even pregnant women are shown to be violent in the fight for survival, throwing punches and shooting guns - as they should be, surely nothing fights more fiercely in nature than a mother protecting her young? And Furiosa has the upper hand at points (pun intended) she's not better than Max but she's definitely his equal. She's a better shot, he's smarter, she's more sane, he's better in a fist fight, who's a better driver is open to debate but that honour probably goes to Nux (Nicholas Hoult has come a long way from About a Boy)

Another arguable point is that she is the better character (ignoring previous films now). Max is very hard to empathise with and as a character boils down to two things which he details neatly for us at the beginning "My name is Max. My world is reduced to a single instinct: Survive. As the world fell it was hard to know who was more crazy. Me... Or everyone else.". Good well, rounded, detailed female characters are in short supply - we could probably list them, sad to say to often female characters are lightweight, flimsy and two dimensional relying on stereotypes and resulting in forgettable roles. This is particularly true of action films as a genre and on the rare occasions where a woman rises above "love interest" it often feels very deliberate and forced

Max, Fury Road, Charlize Theron and George Miller don't seem to care that Furiosa is a woman, it's irrelevant to the story and the character could easily have been portrayed by a man. It seems to me that not caring is important. Women and man are different but most of the time in the modern world those differences are irrelevant and should be ignored. We shouldn't care and that should be really easy, so easy that even a man could do it!

Sunday 17 May 2015

I've been busy, see?


I have things queued up that I want to write about but I feel they deserve time, care and attention. 3 things I'm short of these days. This has meant I have put off all other posts and writing, some what illogical perhaps, but I am so that's ok.

Most notable things I've not and am not writing about but plan to when I find the time and correct state of mind are: getting married, moving home, and most recently finding out that I'm going to be a father. It's been an eventful year to say the least - ticking off a big three. My wedding was amazing and probably deserves about 7 blog posts so is somewhat intimidating as a topic to do justice to. Likewise the news that I'm going to have a child is rather monumental and as such difficult to get my head around let alone write my thoughts down.

Thanks to the timing of the pregnancy my wife was too unwell/tired to help with the house move very much, and has had to bow out of the redecorating due to trying to avoid paint fumes during pregnancy (much as Gemma has wanted to help). Unfortunately the house was in a much worse state that we had anticipated having been ruined by the previous owners and left in a poor state, it's hard to believe it's only 8 years old. So there's been  lot of work to do and it's all been me which has been a bit hard, working during the day and painting and such like during the evenings. On the plus side that means that I get to feel pretty proud of what I've achieved, currently however that has manifested in just feeling rubbish about the state of the rest of the house. (My negativity and general state of mind is another blog that needs some thought).

At this point I have painted 3.5 rooms (0.5 for the inside of a walk in wardrobe) and have 2 rooms to go (ignoring the things we're putting off for a bit). It doesn't sound a lot but each room has needed completely emptying, before the removal of mirrors/screws/nails/wallpaper/general dirt and grim, polyfilla-ing, sanding, painting of skirting, masking, painting of ceiling, masking, and several coats of paint on the walls, before finally recarpeting and getting/building new furniture and moving things back in. It has been expensive in terms of time and money, we're still in boxes some of which I've moved dozens of times. But the rooms I've done look good and I feel I'm building a home.

So at the moment I'm tired, I'm doing enough to be tired, I'm doing enough to be sleeping well, I'm not though.  

I don't know why I'm not sleeping well, it also means I'm not being awake well. I'm sure I'm in line for a series of "It'll only get worse once the baby arrives!" but at least then I'd feel like I had a reason. I suppose it could related to my current inability to breathe properly, thank you sinuses/allergies/hayfever or whatever! Being tired I'm eating poorly or at least eating a lot - so all the hard work I put in for the wedding has been totally undone, so I'm overweight again which doesn't help me feel good about things. Decorating the room I've just started seems like quite a drag right now.

However at the same time as all of that we are think of names for the baby which is thoroughly awesome, so it's swings and roundabouts, and definitely on the up-swing!

Tuesday 6 January 2015

2014: A Year in Review

I've not got any resolutions for the New Year, not because I'm not resolved to do anything but more because I'm already in the middle of doing the things I've previously resolved to do. Most notably, perhaps, is buying (and then moving into) a new house - the chaos of which means the typical resolutions towards healthier life style are just a bit trickier and are being filed under "things to do after we move". Also on that list is a whole truck load of domestic things - it may surprise you to know that "paint new house" requires me to be in the new house before it can be undertaken.

I've been toying with the idea of not drinking, but I don't think I would say I'm resolved to it. Certainly the genealogical leanings play on my mind from time to time and in 2014 I think I thought "I'm getting too old for this shit" too many times. I haven't quite worked out if I've quit and if so for how long or if I'm just going to work out a more age appropriate way to enjoy alcohol. 

At the start of 2014 I decided to record one thing everyday that was good. It would be like a micro-diary or calendar, I did it for a number of reasons:
  1. I like keeping records of stuff. I keep a journal of films I've seen, my photo everyday for a year is something I'm immensely proud of, and of course I record losses and victories of board games I've played.
  2. I knew 2014 was going to be a big year for me (what with getting married and all) and I liked the thought of having a log of it all. I suppose point 2 might be the same as point 1.
  3. Regardless of how much I like my job (which of course varies wildly from day to day) I wanted to remind myself that I was capable of being more than just a teacher and regardless of how busy or tired I was I could, and should, always make a little time to do something I enjoy. A bit of a work to live move rather than live to work. It didn't have to be monumental, watching a TV show for half an hour or reading a comic.
  4. I'm prone to negativity. Sorry. I thought that taking a moment each day to reflect on something positive, and moreover to ensure I did something deliberate that I'd enjoy, would be a good thing. A little something to show I was in control.
And it was good. I can now tell you one enjoyable/awesome/fun/nice/good thing for everyday of 2014 and that feels good. The variation of "things" is like a microcosm of life in that they range from the mundane to monument. The box I had to write in was about 4cm long so comments were fairly limited here are a few highlights (with added explanation)

May 29th: End of Empires
Toby Frost still asks me to "proof" his books, I'm not convinced he needs or wants me too but it means I get to read it before it hits the shelves! I did the majority of End of Empires whilst overlooking the Bay of Naples, which was nice.

July 7th: Black Science
Comic book discovery of the year, Black Science is reminiscent of the 1950's TV series of Forbidden Planet ...on acid. It's a wonderful celebration of everything Science Fiction can be - truly free and more than a little unhinged.

July 13th: Tringe
Full day of stand up comedy including Marcel Lucont, Rob Deering, and Tony Law

July 19th: I am Batman
Outstanding stag do in North Wales, some kinda blog entry for this is overdue/necessary.

July 31st: Ginstitute

August 9th: Wedding!
That's right, got married! Likewise blog overdue.

August 20th: Helicopter and August 26th: Sharks!
Not a reference to 1966 Batman but 2 highlights of my honeymoon!

September 6th: Vinyl
Bought myself some record to play on this

September 18th: First viewings + valuation
Got the ball rolling on moving house!

December 22nd: Lip Sync Battle
Inspired by Jimmy Fallen, we had a lip sync battle, it was awesome.

Not surprisingly the build up to and the day of the wedding. Regular appearances came in from seeing people, food, drink, and playing games - these four best combined in named events: Brofest, Geekend, and The 4 Boardmen of the Apocalypse. Also top scores for making things, comics and oddly sorting and tidying.

I have played a lot of games this year (see reason 1), 258 to be exact, of which I've won 133. Pretty good really. I also know how many games you played here and how many you won, of course you may not care for stats the way I do.

So let's go 2015, what you got?