ozoneocean wrote:
fuck everything. I tripped on the stairs in my back garden, fell down and smashed my phone screen.
fuck fuch fuckkityy fuckfuck. -_-

Have to ring for repair quotes tmorrow.My savings at the moment are sinking dowwwwwwwwwnnnnnn………

I would like to do the comic play page, but I am not in the mindspace for it right at them moment, I will try and come at the intomorrow or the next day.

Ow… I hope you didn't sustain any bad injuries. I've fallen down stairs before. Definitely not pleasant.

The worst injury will be my wallet.
I fell up the stairs. They're rough limestone blocks. I landed on the stupid hand that was holding the phone. Most of the force was taken by the heel of my palm, only part was taken by the phone. I still feel some of the shock in my wrist…
SO basically the phone and that hand saved me from having my teeth smashed, because my face was next to go down after the hand…

STill friken bad.

ozoneocean wrote:
The worst injury will be my wallet.
I fell up the stairs. They're rough limestone blocks. I landed on the stupid hand that was holding the phone. Most of the force was taken by the heel of my palm, only part was taken by the phone. I still feel some of the shock in my wrist…
SO basically the phone and that hand saved me from having my teeth smashed, because my face was next to go down after the hand…

STill friken bad.

The exact same thing happened to me at a party a few months back. Ive been walking around with the broken phone, which apart from a few cracks still works perfectly, all that time and I still havent gotten enough money together to fix it. It might even be cheaper to buy myself a new phone…

- - -

I've been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett's discworld novels lately and decided that a comic book about it would be awesome, a television series would be even more awesome… For those who dont know the discworld novels:

The Discworld is a flat, round world, carried by four turtles on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. The world exists only because every probability graph needs to have a littlest number. It is awesome. People should read it.

If one would read the stage directions of the play the characters are roughly described. It helps to have a nodding acquiantance with the plot conventions of detective fiction and especially 1940's noir movies as possibly parodied by Warner Brothers Looney Tunes? the characters are all the usual archetypes. Watch the movie the Third Man and imagine Bob Hope in the leading role, guest-starring Abbot and Costello. Clara would be Dottie Lamour and the other gal Veronica (Swan) Lake with Bill Duck played by Alan Ladd on his soapbox to look taller.

Expand your cultural vocabulary back a few decades to movies that aren't in color with cartoons that are (with a serial and a double feature) on a Saturday morning matinee before TV destroyed the world's imagination. All standard types from a film noire as seen through the prism of Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Looney Tunes et al.

Maybe one has to have parents who grew up with this stuff as opposed to ones who grew up on Scooby Doo?

What Bravo said.

I'm not sure if that was meant to be a dig at what you assume to be my lack of cultural knowledge or something, Bravo?

In any case, I can certainly guess as to how some of the characters are meant to look, but I think it makes a heck of a lot more sense to have a brief visual description of them than for me to go and watch a bunch of films so I can do one comic page. Ain't nobody got time for that!

Kroatz wrote:

The exact same thing happened to me at a party a few months back. Ive been walking around with the broken phone, which apart from a few cracks still works perfectly, all that time and I still havent gotten enough money together to fix it. It might even be cheaper to buy myself a new phone…

- - -

I've been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett's discworld novels lately and decided that a comic book about it would be awesome, a television series would be even more awesome… For those who dont know the discworld novels:

The Discworld is a flat, round world, carried by four turtles on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. The world exists only because every probability graph needs to have a littlest number. It is awesome. People should read it.

I did some Quote shopping and I got a price of $169 at a place that's not too hard to get to, so I may have it fixed this afternoon.
The first place I rang quoted me $379… At that stage I was really thinking a new phone would be better. $169 is easier to cope with.
I don't want to leave it broken because some small spinlters have already come off… so it's a potential danger to me and probably to the LCD undrneath- If that gets damaged it'll cost much more to fix.

————-

There are some animations of some of the discworld books already… Soul Music is one. Maybe Mort too? I can't remember. I don't really like the style they used.
There are 3 movies, made for TV but done pretty well- The Colour of Magic/The light Fantastic, The Hogfarther, and Postal.
Of all of them I thought Postal was the best. It was funny, very well done, with a good view of the normal magic/scientific daily workings of the Discworld.
The Colour of magic was pretty cheap looking (to me) and a terrible book to do a movie off because it's an early, weird version of the Discworld when it was still just a parody of mainstream fantasy and not it's own place- there was obvious Robert E Howard, Fritz Lieber, Anne MacCaffery and other stuff there that theye didn't bother to put in the film properly because the parody reference thing doesn't fit with the modern series anymore.

The Hogfather just went on and on… I found it booring. But the actor that played Taetime was pretty good in that he looked exactly like James Cagney and spoke like him too, which was deliberate and fantastic because he was playing a psychopath.

ozoneocean wrote:

————-

There are some animations of some of the discworld books already… Soul Music is one. Maybe Mort too? I can't remember. I don't really like the style they used.
There are 3 movies, made for TV but done pretty well- The Colour of Magic/The light Fantastic, The Hogfarther, and Postal.
Of all of them I thought Postal was the best. It was funny, very well done, with a good view of the normal magic/scientific daily workings of the Discworld.
The Colour of magic was pretty cheap looking (to me) and a terrible book to do a movie off because it's an early, weird version of the Discworld when it was still just a parody of mainstream fantasy and not it's own place- there was obvious Robert E Howard, Fritz Lieber, Anne MacCaffery and other stuff there that theye didn't bother to put in the film properly because the parody reference thing doesn't fit with the modern series anymore.

The Hogfather just went on and on… I found it booring. But the actor that played Taetime was pretty good in that he looked exactly like James Cagney and spoke like him too, which was deliberate and fantastic because he was playing a psychopath.

Ive watched both The Colour of Magic, which I found to be quite fun, and the Hogfather, which is a tradition of mine to watch every christmas for the past three years or so. Going Postal is a movie I'm not ging to watch until I've reached that part if the series. Since I've only read up to “Lords and Ladies” and I don't really have enough money to keep buying a new book whenever I've finished the last one, it might take a while before I watch it.

What I would really like to see in a television series is a sort of mash up of all the books, sort of placing most of the seperate stories at the same time. The clearing of Ank Morpork in “The light fantastic” would work really well with the early parts of “Moving Pictures”. The role of Granny Weatherwax in “Equal Rites” would become so much funnier if all the events of “Sourcery” happened at the same time. Granny Weatherwax walking through wizards fighting each other, totally ignoring them because that's what she does, would be the best television in years.

I don't know if you (Oz) have read all of the books but there isn't a single one I've read so far that I didn't love. (with the possible exception of “Eric” which didn't really compare to the source material…)

I started to lose interest with the later books when characters started to become ciphers for Pratchett's cultural and political perspective, especially someone like Sam Vimes who seems to be Pratchett's proxy.
The thing is that it's a perspective that I agree with, I just don't like it being preached to me.

Anyway, they are great books. I see what you mean by a mashup idea… I think it'd be better if Pratchett just wrote a series though maybe?
The Going Postal movie is pretty close to that idea, because unlike the other two movoes you have a good look at the normal working everyday Ahnk Morpork, with all its usual character types.

Stylisticly it's interesting to see the period they've settled on for the look of things, and that fits with how the series has changed too. In the early days Pratchett went for a traditional sword and sorcery setting, the low fantasy style of Fritz Lieber was pretty obvious and Ank Morpork was clearly a close parody of Lieber's famous Lanhkmar.
But as Pratchett moved more to social commentary and started incorporating technology he moved to an obvious Dickensian 19th century London setting, and Going Postal shows that mix pretty clearly.

Hippie Van wrote:
In any case, I can certainly guess as to how some of the characters are meant to look, but I think it makes a heck of a lot more sense to have a brief visual description of them than for me to go and watch a bunch of films so I can do one comic page. Ain't nobody got time for that!

If nobody wants to help out with that, maybe we could just change the look of the characters from panel to panel, thus keeping the continuity nightmare theme?

I based my Max McDuff on 1950s Frank Sinatra, but made him smile a lot less, and gave him beady little eyes … does that help? Although my drawing skills are such that he does change appearance every frame, as suggested above :-) I shall now claim this was on purpose.

Gunwallace wrote:
. . . he does change appearance every frame, as suggested above :-) I shall now claim this was on purpose

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJXU7EVXs2A

words I live by …

My McDuff. I think its based on a nightmare I once had for a few months.

That same guy used to visit me in the dead of night when I was a kid - but his eyes were red.

This is all immensely helpful: I love your Frank depiction too Gunwallace.

You're artists, ude your imagination. :)
I might draw all the characters as trannies ^_^

The newest Transformers Prime episode just gave me nightmares. How? They introduced a new kind of Terrorcon… basically undead Cybertronians. Usually they're the equivalent of Zombies. However, thanks to an experiment on a dead transformer containing a human grafted into it a new Terrorcon is born. They didn't give it a name, but I call it a Vampiricon because they're now the Cybertronian equivalent of Vampires. They suck Energon out of living Cybertronians and transform them into Vampiricons in the process. One of the principal characters escaped being fully transformed (she wasn't killed), but she can now suck energon out as well via a proboscis that shows up where their mouth usually is. Too bad the human grafted Transformer died (he pretty much deserved it anyway).
Now I gotta figure out how to take care of a large feral tomcat that showed up in my work area. He's harassing/hurting the cats belonging to the tentants. He's already killed one kitten and he's even tried to challenge me (my Maglight flashlight beam does wonders for driving him away though).

I'm sure there are a few of us DDers staying in England… or something like that. I'm also pretty sure your hotels don't have rooms as bad as this…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i13X-gCv8lY
I only saw rooms as bad as this at a motel or two that I stayed in during my time in the U.S. (Texas)…

My parents stayed in worse places than that in Britian.
During their first trip there they were even evacuated by the anti-terrorist squad!
That was in 2000, back when the only terrorists in the UK were IRA… people have forgotten about the IRA, Muslims are what make them pee their pants in fright now…

OMG, a statistically infinitesimal number of people who happen to also be Muslim did some horrible things, that must mean the billions of other Muslim people around the rest of the planet must also be evil and out to get me! That makes 100% logical sense in my childlike halfbrain.

I've been listening to a lot of the podcasts by Brian Dunning on Skeptoid.com. I highly recommend it! There's a lot to be said for logical reviews of factual information and sceptical thinking. It's damn entertaining too because he tackles all sorts of mysteries and urban myths from a realistic perspective, instead of the silly theatrical magical UFO based shit you usually get.

This is not so. I am completely surrounded by muslims and yet my pants are dry - we are a very moderate bunch here you know!

Hahaha!

Well mostly I mean people around the world, not just the UK. It just gets so irritating to me when people hold entire ethnic groups or religions responible for the actions of crazed individuals.
Two ex-pat British co-workers were having a chat after that knife attack in the UK, angrily saying that Muslim authorities should come forth and explain, and the Muslim community should be held accountable…
They don't hear themselves… change that to “the black community should explain” “Asian community” or something like that and see how stupid and inappropriate it is.

I didn't have a go at them though because they were emotional after the event and I'm not that big of a dick… but I came close.

Ok, enough ranting, I'm going to do my radio play page and watch The Phantom.

Hahaha!

Well mostly I mean people around the world, not just the UK. It just gets so irritating to me when people hold entire ethnic groups or religions responible for the actions of crazed individuals.
Two ex-pat British co-workers were having a chat after that knife attack in the UK, angrily saying that Muslim authorities should come forth and explain, and the Muslim community should be held accountable…
They don't hear themselves… change that to “the black community should explain” “Asian community” or something like that and see how stupid and inappropriate it is.

I didn't have a go at them though because they were emotional after the event and I'm not that big of a dick… but I came close.

Ok, enough ranting, I'm going to do my radio play page and watch The Phantom.

The Phantom? Is that the “Ghost who Walks” guy who can leave an impression of his ring on your face when he punches you? I'm pretty sure it's got magical properties… the Mythbusters proved that punching a person with a ring like that (even with superhuman strength) won't leave any sort of impression on the criminals face, but would more likely result in a huge skull fracture…

Bottomless Waitress has updated.
http://www.drunkduck.com/Bottomless_Waitress/5434770/
Most of that was done on my Galaxy Note tablet.

Well, the mafia game is done. That was the shortest one ever, but fun nonetheless. (Mostly because I ended up on the winning side.)

ahem, mytake on Mcduff

Some of my favorite time wasters are among the comments on amazon. I thought I'd found most everything ridiculous on the site, but then I came across this one.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005MR3IVO/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_dpd_oKmVrb157K13K

I need a lube barrel, for… reasons.

Saw Real Steel. It would have been an ok film, apart from Jackman's bad US accent and the stomach churning performance by the child. He was terrible. The boy killed the film.
Really wasn't his fault though, I don't think it's ever the actor's fault unless it's someone like Tom Cruise who has the power to put themselves in that position. It was the writers who included that horrible character, the casting people who chose that child actor, etc. It could have been a cool film, but they neutered it: because of that character the story couldn't go where the setup and the situation suggested it should. Every time it was getting cool, it got yanked back down by that horribly cutesy boy.
Seriously, even the kid in that bad Star Wars film fit far better.

I haven't seen it, but it sounds like a rip-off of the Twiligjt Zone episode “Steel.”

But to be fair, a lot of movies are TZ rip-offs.

Bingo!
Looked that up and that IS where the plot comes from, but probably much better if it doesn't also include a cutesy child.

Nope, no kids in the original…just two downtrodden men.
That's a strange choice to add a child to a storyline where it's not necessary. Bringing in child actors is always a gamble, I imagine.