A Believer: Part 2

I have watched more ‘Gravitation’! Four more episodes, to be precise. In my review of the first four parts, I said it was a 16-part series. Wrong, me! It is 12.

This is good, as it means each episode is PACKED WITH DRAMA. It pure rips along at a braw pace. What sort of shite happens in parts 5-8, though? And what did I think of it all?

Read on to find out, if you can be arsed!

Comic Book Book

Hello! Or, as Kryptonians would say, “hrosh :bem”!

B…but how can I speak Kryptonian? Am I one of the many, many survivors of Superman’s deid planet? Am…am I Nicolas Cage?

No, I just did an internet search, and came across this website. It made me feel a bit ill, probably because my human brain can’t comprehend the fact that a whole planet had only one language. But that’s Krypton for you – banal, sterile, cold.

Unlike this book I saw ages ago in a local charity shop, and finally purchased, then read!

Adventures In Nothing

OR: THE FURTHER EXPLOITS OF A HOOP-JUMPING YES-MAN

Hello, Jobseekers! I’ve finally been shunted onto one of those awful ‘Pauline from League of Gentlemen’ forced-labour job course thingies. You know, the Jobcentre gets you off their books (and unemployment statistics?), and gives you over to a private company, who humiliate and patronise you for a while, before making you work near-full-time in some menial job that teaches you nothing (and pays you nothing more than your dole), with very little chance of an actual job at the end.

I’m a bit of an old hand at this, as no-one will give me a job (a glib account of complicated circumstances), and I wrote some stuff about it before, here.

I had my first meeting at A4E last friday. I’m not sure what ‘A4E’ means, but I’m sure I could look it up? Angst 4 Everyone? Angry 4 Ever?Affluence 4 Effluence?

(It means ‘Action For Employment’, apparently)

Get ready for a rambling account of a day that may as well not have happened (and I wish hadn’t)!

A Believer

I’ve had my eye on ‘Gravitation’ for a while. It’s a Yaoi animé, I knew that much, and I’d seen some of those awful Youtube things of it, y’know? The things where people badly edit scenes together from an animé, and put Linkin Park over the top? AMVs, I think they’re called?

Why I’m being a dick about them, I’m not sure? I was young once, I probably would have done something like that, had I had rudimentary editing software and immediate access to cool shit (not Linkin Park, though. No good songs, them). I vaguely remember writing some sort of King of Fighters fanfic as an early-teen, a page for each team, describing the events leading up to the fighting tournament. I know what it is like to like things! To have the hunger, the aching need to express love for and identification with cultural product!

(All of the previous shite I have just typed is relevant to Gravitation. Even the stuff about Linkin Park)

Violence Wars XVI

Aye, I’ve done my fair share of complaining about 2D fighting game, The King of Fighters XIII, and with good reason. Bizarrely, this has even led to being accused of trying to ‘boycott’ the game, which is rather odd given that I point out I’m probably going to buy it in the articles. And buy it, I did! B-b-but what’s my opinion of it, this game I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about?

Slowest Bullet, Part 2: Positive

Well, I’m sitting in with the heating on, I’ve got crumpets in the toaster, and I’ve just had a really nice pint of scrumpy. It’s the perfect time to write the follow-up to the last miserable post I wrote, this time trying to focus on stuff that I actually like! I’m pretty sure there’ll still be some complaining, though. It is the lifeblood of blogging, and make no mistake, now that I’ve had people also complaining about me on some messageboard, I AM a blogger, for real.

GREAT.

Anyway, as everyone knows, modern computer games are dreary and dark, and feature hypermasculine  ‘space marines’ (as an old Warhammer 40K player, it took me until the post-Halo glut of games featuring this sort of thing to realise just how banal a term ‘space marine’ is), and objectified ladies who pose and strut (I wonder what are more backwards, mainstream computer games, or mainstream comics?). I mean, obviously not all games are like that, but a huge amount are. This is why my gaming habits tend to focus on 2D fighting games, and JRPGs. I am a textbook SNES guy, basically.

Bright colours and a practically-dressed woman in an action pose. Fucking hell!

Slowest Bullet, Part One: Negative

Since I got trapped on an alternate Earth where the internet didn’t exist, and people had to find their own solutions to tough bits in computer games, I have experienced a lot of pop culture.

I’m back on this ‘real’ Earth now, so I may as well write a wee bit about some of the games I’ve played/films I’ve seen/comics I’ve read in the last few months, and my unhelpfully-negative opinions of them.

Oddly enough, even though the internet didn’t exist on that parallel earth, everything else was exactly the same, meaning my opinions on the stuff there are just as relevant to this earth as that one.

Don’t think on that too long, though, as it won’t make any sense.

And it’s all a lie (OR IS IT?)

(yes).

New Bleach Characters (because it didn't have too many already)

A new ‘season’ (series) of Bleach started about a month ago, and it’s ‘proper’ manga-derived stuff, as opposed to the months of filler which I have studiously ignored due to it’s non-canonicity (REAL WORD). There’s no doubt a conversation to be had about the relevance of canon, but in the case of Bleach, what I do know is that it has a track record of ‘canon = thrilling adventure; non-canon = placeholding pish’.

I typed ‘canon’ a lot.