Monday Movie: Angel-A

André (Jamel Debbouze, probably best known as the young greengrocer from Amelie) has hit rock bottom. Heavily in debt and down on his luck, he can't even get arrested. Can't even kill himself without having to rescue a similarly-inclined woman, "Angela", who appears out of nowhere and then attaches herself to him, taking a mysterious interest in his emotional and moral well-being. Wait, could she be-? No, of course not.

After a prolonged period without helming any films, Luc Besson returned to write and direct Angel-A, a small, low-key film that nevertheless allows Besson to show off his unparalleled flare for visual style, arresting premise and memorable characters. Of course, he has something of a more fluid relationship with plot and character development, both of which are rather weak here. But Angel-A, for all that it lacks, still manages to be both charming and eye-catching throughout.

Friday Classic TV Blogging

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Thursday Book

The Great Silence - Juliet Nicholson

This history of Britain from 11th November 1918 to 11th November 1920 provides a very readable account of the nation's slow recovery from the Great War - charting the path from stoic weariness, through a gradual acknowledgement of the need to grieve, and finally the desire for some much needed peace and recreation at the dawn of the twenties.

Nicholson's focus is largely biased towards the higher classes, and the focus on London is so deeply ingrained that in certain places the fact that the text is about the capital is only mentioned incidentally. There's also a stronger interest in the prosaic and everyday than the impersonal or theoretical. Which, actually, is entirely suited to my purposes - namely: trying to get a feel on a personal scale for the cultural forces that would shape 1920s England.

Your Guide to US Political Concepts

President A detains people without due process and readily admits torturing them. He also implements social policies that place the vulnerable and marginalised at risk of increased hardships and mortality.

This president is a GOOD, CHRISTIAN MAN.

President B attempts to expand healthcare to reach more vulnerable and marginalised people. At every turn he is sure to defer to those who are vociferously opposed to his plans, scaling them back.

This president is a FASCIST.

Monday Movie: Lebanon

It's 1982, and four twenty-year-old men are shut up in a tank, rolling into Lebanon with a platoon of soldiers. Young, inexperienced, watching proceedings through their periscopes and heading into the aftermath of an air-strike, they're expected to shell first, ask questions later. When they don't, the more vulnerable infantrymen get killed. When they do, they contribute to the indiscriminate bombardment of a largely civilian area.

And then, as the platoon's only vehicle, they're also used as storage for a corpse, a Syrian prisoner, and the Phalangist soldier who wants to "interrogate" him. And this is all before their hard-edged commanding officer (who drops in on them from above like a visitor from another world) realises that they've blundered into very dangerous territory indeed.

Samuel Maoz's claustrophobic and autobiographical Lebanon, filmed - but for two static shots - entirely inside a tank, is a grimy, unflinching psychological drama, which I wouldn't call political so much as simply honest.

Friday Julia Blogging

This random prettiness from the 1920s represents Gentle Julia, apparently.

Just After Thursday Book

Zima Blue - Alastair Reynolds

I've written previously that I think Alistair Reynolds is currently doing his best work outside of the Revelation Space continuity that made his name. This book is a collection of just such stories, spanning throughout his career. As such it's probably a bit of a mixed bag, but it also supports my assertion, in that it contains several stories that I found substantially more powerful than anything in the opposing collection, Galactic North.

Chief among them are Enola, a simply beautiful story about an intelligent weapon of mass destruction - that can't be discussed without spoiling its surprising intensity; and Beyond the Aquila Rift, a typically Reynoldsian story of astronauts blasted into baffling depths of space and time. Spirey and the Queen lays out a deliciously dark and gritty civilisation that nevertheless brims with winning personality (even if it become less punchy as it goes on). And a trio of stories about a man fleeing genocide across the Galaxy manages to put a new spin on themes you might have thought Reynolds had done to death elsewhere (unfortunately these stories were written out of chronological order, and I felt the climax turned out a lot weaker than the build-up).

Then there's a couple of stories revolving around an interplanetary reporter which are fine enough, but not quite my thing. The rest of the stories are set much closer to home - 'near future' stories of a type not usually associated with this author (although he writes that he wishes he could shake this assumption). These stories did win me over eventually, but I honestly think Reynolds is simply better at fantastic world-building than he is at producing an interesting twist on our own present day society.

Still, mixed bag or not, this is an essential buy for any Reynolds fan.

Verily Procreational

Insert obligatory mention of how great it is that short-form cinema is being made more accessible by the Internet. Follow with superlative-laden raving about the following content being right up my alley:

View on ExposureRoom

View on ExposureRoom

Hat tip: Twitch, of course.

Friday Death Scene Blogging

Eh, whaddya gonna do?

Human civilisation has reached its peak.

Fire the nuclear missiles now. There's no way we can top this.

Official site (Japanese).

Friday Goose Blogging

Today I met someone who was a goose.

Monday Movie: Millennium Actress

Somehow, small-time documentary-maker Genya Tachibana has managed to arrange an interview with his idol, the legendary - now reclusive - actress Chiyoko Fujiwara. As Chiyoko tells the story of how she fell in love with a dissident artist and first became involved in film, Tachibana and his reluctant cameraman are drawn literally into her story - past and present, real events and acting roles, all merging seamlessly.

Millennium Actress could probably have been a live action film, but hand-drawn animation allows writer/director Satoshi Kon to blend disparate scenes into one another with ease, to portray images that are perfect and impossible, and yet exude deep emotional veracity. This is a film that tells a story on a personal scale while allowing incredible flights of fancy, that's moving and profound without ever losing its sense of humour and fun, that toys expertly with pacing and viewer expectations.

I always struggle to decide which of Satoshi Kon's films is my favourite, but in the way it weaves an unexpectedly subtle story into an imaginative and vibrant animation, I'd say this is the one to demonstrate his true potential as a filmmaker. A potential which is now, of course, sadly and abruptly fulfilled.

I Saw a Thing

Presumably it's been there since February.

She Stole My Heart(s)

Hey, give those back!

Monday Movie: Mesrine Parts 1 & 2

Jacques Mesrine returns from the violence of the Algerian war to a life of burglary. Finding his way from there into organised crime, he eventually becomes a transatlantic icon, after a spree of armed robberies with his then girlfriend across France and Quebec. When he's finally incarcerated and tortured in a notorious Canadian prison - and resolves to both break out and come back and break out the other prisoners, something tells you he's not going to be proven wrong - even if the latter exercise merely results in a lot of people getting shot. And, of course, it's all based on a true story.

Mesrine Part 1: Killer Instinct, climaxes with Jacques, if not fulfilling his word to bust open a prison, at least committing enough audacious crimes (for example, robbing two banks on opposite sides of the same street one after the other) to have become something of a legend. Mesrine Part 2: Public Enemy Number 1 picks up the story with our anti-hero going from strength to criminal strength - escaping from a courtroom with the judge at gunpoint, robbing banks and casinos, escaping prison yet again, abducting a millionaire and rowing leisurely away from a huge police and military search party.

Where things get really interesting is how Mesrine becomes obsessed with his public perception, to the extent that when one journalist publicly attacks his self-proclaimed Robin Hood status, Mesrine lures him to a fake interview and then tortures and attempts to murder him. The sense of the criminal as a member of wider society - in particular of the famous criminal and their relation to the media - is palpable. But where director Jean-François Richet really succeeds is in depicting both Mesrine's crimes and his charm with unflinching honesty. We're left with no doubt that this is a man who did terrible things, but we also all too readily understand the allure that made him such an infamous figure.

And, finally, you can't discuss the film without mentioning Vincent Cassel's incredible lead performance - a single role which has launched him from being best known as the guy who used to be friends with Mathieu Kassovitz, to a name being tentatively compared to Pacino and De Niro. Time will only tell whether this is his peak or his best opportunity, but I sincerely hope that he's now given more roles that will let him fulfil his potential.

It's not the end of the world.

But you can see it from here.

Friday Shepherd Blogging

Image source

The shepherds of Greater Kumania.

Friday Gimli Blogging

AND MY AXE.

Friday Public Safety Blogging

Don't be an amber gambler.

Who are the real vandals?

Via Wooster Collective

Monday Movies: Futurama's Fifth Season

The fifth season of Futurama was released as a series of direct-to-DVD features, which is good enough to qualify for a Monday Movie or four in my books. The first two movies - Bender's Big Score and The Beast with a Billion Backs form a consistent story arc in which amoral android Bender busts open the entire Universe and enables its invasion by an enormous tentacled monster. The third instalment, Bender's Game is billed as a straight-up parody of epic fantasy tropes, but actually does quite a bit more besides, and, finally, Into the Wild Green Yonder pits the regular cast of characters against one another in a bid to provide some emotional resolution for what was expected to be the series finale.

What's interesting about Futurama is that while many people might be inclined to call it a parody, I think it's actually one of the best examples of science fiction you'll find in movies and television. Okay, yeah, there's pretty much nothing they won't throw out the window for a cheap gag, but a cheap gag on Futurama goes a long way. In contrast to a certain other Matt Groening cartoon, perhaps the fact this one has forever been circling the bowl of cancellation has lead to a brutal comic efficiency. Also, perhaps completely the opposite from that other franchise, although the cast of Futurama may all seem like mere parodies and tropes, there's a real effort made to give them depth, likeability and some measure of development.

As is often the case with shows unfairly threatened with cancellation, the team are definitely pulling out all the stops for what they thought might be their last gasp. While that may leave me wondering what they'll do with the new season they got, there's no doubt that Into the Wild Green Yonder provides a satisfying (but far from final) conclusion, and the other three films demonstrate nerd comedy at its finest - epic and irreverent, but ultimately with a smidgen of heart.

Friday Lizard Blogging

Credit: L Church a.k.a. Clicksy
Some rights reserved

R.I.P. Satoshi Kon

Died yesterday at the age of 46. His body of work is as powerful a demonstration as you'll find of the capabilities of animation as a medium.

In celebrating the great films he made, it's difficult not to think of those we'll now never see.

Update: had to share this.

Monday Movie: Goemon

Goemon is a master thief who lives like a rock star and robs from the rich to give to the poor. But his carefree existence looks set to end when he steals something the powers that be cannot allow to escape - something that threatens to drag Goemon back into a life he thought he'd escaped, and tear apart the recently united Japan.

Director Kazuaki Kiriya's second feature is just as difficult to recommend as his first. Goemon could uncharitably be described as a self-important melodrama filmed in front of a green screen, prizing style over substance and occasionally jumping gear into impossible bouts of computer-generated violence. And, you know what, I don't dispute that at all.

But give those of us who love Kiriya our due. His visuals are bold, imaginative, and utterly unreal; the costumes and props were clearly conceived in terms of pure cool-factor rather than practicality or historical accuracy; and the profoundly earnest script, combined with those dreamlike visuals, can actually be very affecting if you only give in to its trashy charms. I, for one, hope that if Kiriya does ever manage to tame his excess, it's not at the expense of his knack for highly stylised, extravagantly chimerical worlds.

BLAAGH RAARR

see more Señor Gif

Laughed so hard at this I probably shouldn't admit it.

Friday Mash-Up Blogging

New Phone

Finally got off my arse and bought a cheap touch-screen phone.

Exploring Oblivion

So when I picked up Bioshock about a year ago, it was as part of a double pack with Oblivion - which I'd never heard of except in reference to Fallout 3, and which the packaging seemed to warn me off from playing on Vista. Of course, I actually got it running really easily, while Bioshock required all sorts of hoop-jumping, and ultimately crapped out completely on a later level (and when my video card is working fine with everything except Bioshock, I think I'll just leave it be, thanks). A year later, I'm still playing Oblivion every so often.

I guess "medievil Fallout 3" is an accurate description, although I enjoy it in a slightly different way. For a start, where I've also enjoyed Fallout 3 as an exercise in character creation and (slightly painful) NPC interaction, I'm playing Oblivion as pretty much a straight explore-em-up. My best discovery yet is that I can play as a mage who can constantly cast invisibility spells when that beauty spot I stumble upon happens to also be home to a minotaur. And that also opens up a lucrative market in robbing and murdering the braindead NPCs that infest the otherwise picturesque landscape.

In fact, playing a criminal seems to be the strongest way to play the game. Not only do I get intimately acquainted with otherwise minor characters as I rummage through their belongings, but I have an incentive to learn their daily schedules and avoid them as they go about spouting repetitive inanities. Still, I think the fact that Oblivion is trying to simulate a relatively stable world actually makes it a little more consistently believable than the much sparser but no less stable post-apocalyptia of Fallout 3. And, more than its better known successor, where I think Oblivion succeeds is in creating a world where, even if you find the more obvious forms of gameplay not to your liking, you can still make a compelling virtual living as an invisible burgling rambler.

Monday Movie: Micmacs

When Bazil catches a stray bullet to the head, it's the second arms-related tragedy in his life after his father was killed by a landmine. Now unemployed, homeless, and a little... peculiar, Bazil joins a small community of misfits who live in a scrapyard, and plots to destroy the two arms manufacturers responsible for his misfortunes.

Micmacs à Tire-Larigot was not a risky film for Jean-Pierre Jeunet to make, embodying all his characteristic touches: the warm colour palette, the slightly odd-looking actors, the well-meaning mischief. The plot is rather loose, and the characters are never well defined. But, in its own small way, this is a film with an endearingly quirky voice of its own.

It's perhaps Jeunet's most understated film, dispensing with the narrator of his previous two films, often letting scenes play out with little or no dialogue - helped in no small part by Dany Boon in the lead role. Boon's portrayal of a melancholy character in desperate poverty who nevertheless displays dynamic and comedic brilliance is more than a little Chaplin-esque, and the whole film displays a visual ingenuity more common to silent films and cartoons. It may lack the emotional power that Jeunet is capable of, but the worst you can say of Micmacs is that it is a nice film.

Friday Game Show Blogging

Shooting Stars, undeniably the best game show ever.

Monday Movie: Curse of the Golden Flower

In an opulent and multi-coloured Imperial Palace, the callous Emperor (Chow Yun Fat) is slowly poisoning the Empress (Gong Li) under the guise of medicating her. But the Empress suspects, and, when she's not indulging in her strange obsession with embroidering chrysanthemums, she tries to uncover the plot and convince the Emperor's sons to side with her against their father.

Zhang Yimou's extravagant epic of political intrigue and domestic abuse treads the fine line between bold storytelling and melodrama - visual feast and aesthetic indulgence. Certainly it can be enjoyed simply as a display of expensive real-world sets and incredible costumes - but it's also a stark portrait of struggle against implacable tyranny.

Friday Henry Blogging

Why, it's Henry VIII!

New Disc Rotator

Well, my poor old DVD player (seen above beneath a heap of Wii peripherals) has been with me for almost a decade now, and it's been getting increasingly sick. Today saw its retirement - replaced by a cheap new model from the same brand. No Blu-ray for me, no thanks.


I had help, of course.

Monday Movie: 13 (Tzameti)

While working on the roof of a morphine addict, Sébastien, a Georgian immigrant to France, overhears discussion of a shady job that the addict hopes will earn him a large amount of money. When his employer then dies of an overdose, leaving him out of pocket, Sébastien manages to obtain the secretive instructions for this mysterious job and follow them - with little idea just what he's getting into.

Director Géla Babluani says that 13 (Tzameti) was inspired by his own experiences emigrating from the violent and turbulent Georgia of the 1990s to peaceful and stable France. The result is a minimalist and noir-ish film that depicts a French underworld where the rich bet on the lives of the desperate. Tense and draining, there's a terrible veracity to the way Babluani imagines Western Europe as a place of obvious civility and hidden brutality.

Zzzzzap!!!

Credit: Bre Pettis
Some rights reserved

30 Ways to Die of Electrocution features scans from an old book about, well, electrocuting yourself in weird ways.

I'm not much of an electrical engineer, but apart from being really unlikely, a lot of these diagrams seem to show a questionable understanding of electrical current.

Spawn more overlords!

I know Starcraft is only getting a sequel because the game's multiplayer is now pretty much South Korea's official sport. And I know that Blizzard is in the grip of Activision's drive to turn video games into soulless, mass-produced consumer goods bereft of any kind of creativity.

But I really liked Starcraft's single player campaign (at least until Brood War, when the missions suddenly required actual strategy and I flailed like mad). I think it's a great example of a well integrated narrative, and nicely defines a universe that steals all the best bits of your favourite science fiction books and movies, and mixes them up into this glorious mash of trailer trash in space; biomechanical alien infestations; dying elder races; and allying, back-stabbing factions thereof. So... consider me hyped.

Not sure how I feel about Tricia Helfer as Kerrigan, though.

Million Kilometre Siblings

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image source with more information

This view provides a stark view of Mimas' Herschel crater. Dione, in the foreground, looks quite plain by comparison, its "wispy" terrain hidden from view.

Both moons were over a million kilometres from Cassini when this image was taken.

Friday Dordrecht Blogging

Image source

Dordrecht circa 1650, by Aelbert Cuyp.

Thursday Book

Winged Victory - V.M. Yeates

Tom Cundall is a pilot flying Sopwith Camel scout planes in France, 1918. The novel methods of aerial warfare have stabilised somewhat, and with four months experience, he's avoided becoming part of the terrifyingly large fraction of flyers who die during training or on their first few missions. It's not a pleasant lark, certainly, and Tom is no hero or 'jingo', but he's confident that he can see out a war that, after the entry of America, seems to be close to its finish.

Of course, with American troops pouring into Europe, Germany knows that it will have to move soon if it is to stand any chance of winning. When the inevitable offensive arrives, Camel squadrons are ordered to bomb and strafe the advancing troops. Suddenly, Tom's experience in the air counts for nothing, suvival becoming a matter of simply failing to occupy the same point in space and time as any of the thousands of machinegun bullets being fired from the ground. For one reason or another, it seems that Tom's last few months flying on the Front will be the ones to see him physically or psychologically undone.

Yeates wrote Winged Victory in 1933, hospitalised for the tuberculosis that would kill him a year later. The book was initially praised, and then forgotten; briefly revived by pilots during the Battle of Britain, who adored its uncompromising realism; and then out of print for the rest of the century. Only after seventy years of praise from historians citing it as an honest, realistic and almost autobiographical novel, did it finally seem to catch on, now readily available to anyone interested in the First Air War. For example: me.

And if that is your interest, this book will certainly see you well served, but it deserves to be far more widely read than that. Although the operational details of the Royal Flying Corps (and then, midway through the book, the Royal Air Force) are fascinating, they're merely the backdrop for a deeply human story that mixes satirical farce with the blackest of humour, and the most terrible tragedies with a spark of vicious wit. It's a platonic love story between three fast friends, whose brilliant and terrible philosophies and politics make up pages of inspired or ridiculous banter, and whose tragedies are heart-wrenching. It's a portrait of the toll of war on lives and minds. And its a historical indictment of the way that millions of men across Europe suddenly started killing one another, as efficiently as possible, for four long years.

Monday Movie: Apocalypse Now

Captain Willard lies in a drunken, post-traumatic stupor in his room in Saigon. He wants nothing more than another mission. And, for his sins, they give him one. Colonel Walter E. Kurtz has, the general says, gone rogue. He's operating out of Cambodia with an army of Montagnard natives who worship him like a god. Willard is to travel up the Nung River, infiltrate Kurtz's group, and terminate the Colonel “with extreme prejudice”. But as Willard travels through Vietnam, observing the absurdity and brutality of the American war, he begins to wonder just what his superiors can have against Kurtz.

A film that could only have been made in seventies Hollywood, Apocalypse Now sees all the excess and bravura of a multi-million dollar budget directed at a story that is, in literal terms, small and personal - even if thematically it aims to represent the Vietnam War in totality, and even to get to the root of war itself.

Although the shoot was a notorious nightmare that overran both its budget and its deadlines (and gave star Martin Sheen a heart attack), Francis Ford Coppola flexed his directorial muscles to choerograph epic scenes involving A-list actors, hundreds of extras, military hardware on loan from a real war, tonnes of pyrotechnics and huge sets. Even if modern CGI ever allows us to duplicate these spectacles, no-one will deserve as much credit for it.

And then, once again, there is the fact that all this light and sound was not intended to dazzle and hypnotise the audience, but supports a predominantly low-key film that emphasises atmosphere and character, and tackles human nature head on. The modern tendency to dress up war in comforting lies is a dangerous hypocrisy, Apocalypse Now argues, and our only hope to move past violent conflict is to truly grasp what it entails.

Right!

Small project initiated!

Deadline for first draft: one month.

The Sky, by Hand

UP THERE from Jon on Vimeo.

Hat tip: Wooster Collective.

"The other therapist didn't work out for you."

Konami's Silent Hill series is essentially the classier, spookier cousin to Capcom's Resident Evil franchise, but although you may have noticed I'm a big Resi fanboy, I've never really had a chance to play a Silent Hill game until now. And I have to say that the series has never seemed more tempting. As Resident Evil devolves into standard shoot-em-up territory, Konami, having attempted to do something similar with Silent Hill, then decided to pull an about-face, getting British independent games studio Climax to make a Silent Hill game in which the protagonist can barely fight back at all.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories begins with Harry Mason driving through the snowbound and deserted summer holiday resort of Silent Hill, with his daughter Cheryl. When he skids off the road and crashes the car, he comes round to find that Cheryl is nowhere to be seen. Harry wanders off into the town in search of her, but as he explores and meets the few people around, he's confronted by facts that seem at odds with his own memories, and even his current experiences are frequently contradicted at a later point by other characters. And then there's the little matter of how, every time he seems to be getting close to the truth, the world twists and freezes over - strange, skinless beings appearing to pursue Harry relentlessly.

These latter sequences are the game's weakest point. I certainly found them unnerving, but this very fact, combined with their frantic nature, simply made me solve them by running around in a blind panic. Initially I found these sequences extremely incongruous as well, but actually, as the game progressed I thought they acquired a better sense of purpose while becoming much better married to the other parts of the game - which in itself is a part of the wider progression of the story towards conveying exactly what is going on.

Still, the game's non-chase segments are more my preference, involving simply exploring the town of Silent Hill, interacting with characters and solving puzzles by manipulating objects semi-intuitively with the Wii remote. As much as the chase sequences gave me the heebie-jeebies, it was these more sedate and grounded scenes that I found by far more scary - from supernatural chills such as chasing a shadow Cheryl with your flashlight, to more mundane scares such as internal bleeding following a blow to the head (the latter being a part of a sequence that I found genuinely very upsetting).

The third set of scenes are where it gets really interesting: the game's framing narrative involves sitting on a psychiatrist's couch and answering his questions and tests. The rest of the game comprises the story that you are telling him. As the very first loading screen makes clear, these questions and tests are used to shape your experiences in the rest of the game (although your behaviour is also analysed elsewhere). For example, my Cybil was a homely police woman wearing a realistic cold-climate uniform. A player who showed more interest in getting sexual images out of the game would instead have found Cybil to be a blonde bombshell whose stripper-esque outfit can barely contain her cleavage.

This is really interesting to me as a development in interactive narrative. Although the events you experience can change, the story is generally linear. The interactive part of this story is rather in that it shapes itself to be the story that it thinks you should experience. Looking through the Silent Hill wiki, I'm surprised just how much the game got right for me - I definitely think I was much happier getting the events and characters that I got from the game compared to some of the others that it might have given me. Of the three different Dahlias, for example, I found the “punk” version I got to be much more my kind of gal than the “seductive” or “tomboy” versions.

And then there's the ending. Holy fucking shit. I don't know if any others saw this coming, but I found it to be the perfect culmination of misdirection and foreshadowing. It was so surprising and tragic, but hopeful (again, something that the game selected based on its psychological profiling of me), such a beautiful shock, that I actually started properly crying. Which is a first for me and a video game.

As someone with a penchant for interactive storytelling, I think Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is one of the most powerful and well devised examples of how to shape a story in tandem with your audience that I've yet encountered. Its chief flaw is that it perhaps tries a little too hard to be a video game. Although I enjoyed the puzzles, and the chase sequences did grow on me, ultimately they were never as powerful as the experience of exploring a convoluted and deeply psychological narrative. If you're interested in survival horror games, this may or may not be for you. But if you're interested in storytelling, then you owe it to yourself to check this out. You may not find the story as deeply moving as I did, but it will definitely teach you something about how it can be done.

Friday Houseboat Blogging

Image source (Credit: Rhaessner)
Some rights reserved

Also pictured: ducks.

So did anyone in England get work done this afternoon, or was it essentially an unofficial holiday?

Also, what are those two blokes doing at Wimbledon?

Space Rocks, Clouds

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Cassini captured this group photo of two of the Solar System's best looking moons, with the varied terrain of Dione standing out especially sharply against the thick clouds of Titan.

Time Tube

When the lifts at Notting Hill Gate tube station were replaced with escalators, the passageway leading to them was sealed off, along with the late-fifties advertisements plastered to its walls. This passageway has now been rediscovered, along with its remarkably well-preserved posters - images of which have been posted to a Flickr gallery.

(Saw this on London Tonight - not sure if the video's viewable outside the UK.)

What have I done?!

Adiós old NASA headers, hello brand new Blogger template. I probably wouldn't have gotten around to this if Google didn't seem to be on a quest to prettify everything up. These new templates are pretty cool, although a lot of the background images suffer from the same issues as the ones available for the Google homepage - they're gorgeous images by themselves, but they don't fit so nicely around the content.

Still, this image of Earth is rather nice, although if I can figure out how to upload my own background image I'll probably change it to something from Cassini...

Let me know if you have any issues with functionality/readability/accessibility etc.

Top 25 WW1 aces and their ages

Name	Age
1.Manfred von Richthofen	25 when killed
2.René Fonck	24 at end of war
3.Edward Mannock	30 when killed
4.Billy Bishop	24 at end of war
5.Ernst Udet	22 at end of war
6.Raymond Collishaw	24 at end of war
7.James McCudden	23 when killed
8.Andrew Beauchamp-Proctor	24 at end of war
9.Erich Loewenhardt	21 when killed
10.Donald MacLaren	25 at end of war
11.Georges Guynemer	22 when killed
12.William George Barker	24 at end of war
13.Josef Jacobs	24 at end of war
14.Werner Voss	20 when killed
15.Robert A. Little	23 when killed
16.George McElroy	25 when killed
17.Fritz Rumey	27 when killed
18.Albert Ball	20 when killed
19.Rudolph Berthold	27 at end of war
20.Bruno Loerzer	27 at end of war
21.Paul Bäumer	22 at end of war
22.Tom F. Hazell	26 at end of war
23.Charles Nungesser	26 at end of war
24.Georges Madon	26 at end of war
25.Oswald Boelcke	25 when killed

Order as per Wikipedia. It was going to be the top 20 until I noticed I could get Nungesser and Boelcke on there too.

Edward Mannock was the oldest of this group, at 30. He was an exceptional pilot in a lot of ways, not least with the amount of effort he devoted to ensuring that the younger pilots under his command (who knew him simply as "Mick") were properly schooled in how to survive. His devotion to his comrades manifested as an intense hatred of German pilots, and his actions and beliefs were a stark contrast to the perception of the First Air War as chivalrous.

Albert Ball and Werner Voss are the youngest listed, both aged 20 when they were killed.

Voss was a close friend and rival of Manfred von Richthofen. His final dogfight became legendary, as he single-handedly held off a squadron of planes led by James McCudden, before finally being shot down. "His flying was wonderful," McCudden said of Voss, "his courage magnificent and in my opinion he is the bravest German airman whom it has been my privilege to see fight."

Ball was a loner who was valued highly for his propaganda value. He spent his time on the ground gardening by himself, and the letters he wrote home showed a young man struggling with the repressive nature of his role, and his growing unhappiness at killing so many pilots. He crashed while pursuing the Red Baron's brother, Lothar von Richthofen, although it's unclear who (if anyone) shot him down.

Yes, Yes I Think So

Given my interest in interactive naratives and environments, you could be forgiven for thinking I might rate the original Deus Ex more highly than I do. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot I love about it, but there's also a lot I didn't think worked so well. Still, the basic concept of a globe-trotting cyberpunk game with an emphasis on letting you play the way you want to gets huge props from me for being a bold step in an ambitious direction.

There's no telling if Deus Ex: Human Revolution will be more my style than the original, but this trailer has me pretty juiced - neon cityscapes, cyborg modification, civil unrest... and driving music that lends it a Christopher Nolan-esque feel.

ESA Dazzles

Credit: ESA

Although I wish they were as open as NASA, I'm still glad that the European Space Agency exists and does good work. And every so often we members of the public do get a little reward - perhaps none greater than this beautiful video taken by Mars Express, showing an "astronaut's eye view" of an orbit around Mars.

Go watch it immediately.

Brontesaurus

Via (with transcript)

Friday Caterpillar Blogging

Image Credit: Lukjonis
Some rights reserved

Yes. Yes, please.

Between the Resident Evil and Ace Attorney series I probably owe my soul to Capcom by now. This new game from Ace Attorney creator Shu Takumi (who also directed Dino Crisis 2) looks like it might just clinch the deal...

Wschod, another short film online

It's always pained me that so many great films by interesting film makers disappear into the ether, just because they're not feature length. So this new trend of short films being posted on the Internet after they've done the festival circuit is pleasing me no end - especially when it allows us to see gems like Wschód (East), a low-key, post apocalyptic story filmed inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

This is exactly the kind of science fiction I love - the kind that has a vivid, evocative setting, but that doesn't make the setting the focus, instead telling the story of those who live there. This thing's got atmosphere you can cut with a knife - and the simple, implicit storytelling totally hooked me.

Hat tip Twitch, of course.

Post 1000

So this is my 1000th post at Space Cat Rocket Ship, the blog with the slightly erroneous four word title that no-one knows quite how to space out or hyphenate.

The popular portrayal of a blog (at least by the newspapers that have so much to fear from them) is of a soapbox from which to try and inflict your views on the world; a sea of monologues readily available to all, but completely drowning one another out. I'm sure there are some people who have important things to say in particular niches who succeed in using their blog in just that way. I'm sure many more try, wonder why no-one reads their posts, and then give up.

Because I don't see a blog as a monologue. Even the most authoritative and well known blogs are clearly dialogues - their authors, commenters and communities all blurring together.

Space Cat Rocket Ship has kind of barrelled through the intertubes like the aimless rocket referred to in the header above. I first started reading blogs when my friend Disillusioned Kid began one of his own, and I clicked a few of the links in his sidebar. When leaving comments, I decided I wanted to be able to provide a space which would act as a kind of dynamic profile page, letting people know what kind of a person was visiting. I guess that's still the ethos behind this blog even now, as most of my posts here are fuelled by the desire to share something I think is cool and articulate why, or to post something creative that I've worked on.

I know some of you are interested in generating traffic to and/or monetising your blogs, but I'm quite happy knowing that a visitor coming to this blog for any one thing is probably going to leave disappointed after a while. Because, like I said, I see this place as a two way dialogue, and I like the fact that I'm just as, if not more interested in what you guys have to say.

So thank you to all my regular and irregular commenters, whether I first saw you commenting on Pinko Feminist Hellcat, read your Sunday Scribblings, found you through Blogging Against Disablism Day, grabbed your interest with one of my little freeware games, or just happened to be the landing pad for a random link clicking. Let's have another reunion at post 2000...

Thursday Comic

20th Century Boys, vols 2-4 - Naoki Urasawa

When Kenji was a kid, this wasn't what he expected the future to be like - running his family store, now a part of a national chain, while raising the baby his sister was unable to care for herself. No, Kenji had imagined a future of laser guns and an evil conspiracy to destroy the world - a detailed and fantastic future-history that he wrote down in a "Book of Prophecy" along with the rest of his childhood gang. Only, certain events are starting to seem rather familiar, and he's sure he's seen the symbol of this new doomsday cult somewhere before. Could it be that a member of his old gang is now actually trying to enact Kenji's absurd plans of global destruction?

I started reading this series on the back of a number of mentions from people who praised it highly, but did little to explain just what was so great about it, and I now find myself in the same position. Mystery, comedy, family drama, horror, science fiction, crime, action, period drama, epic, personal, all this and more. But more importantly, well characterised, well observed, well written, carefully plotted, and always intriguing you with new mysteries, even as others are solved when they've run their course. It's difficult to know just who to recommend 20th Century Boys to, except to say that this is a work of some skill and artistry, and you should definitely find out if it's for you.