You gotta keep the devil way down in the hole...

So on the advice of pretty much everyone on the Internet I went ahead and started watching The Wire. I gotta say, it's not bad. I'm still reserving judgment on whether it's the best show on television though. I will concede that for people with an irrational fear of sci-fi or fantasy it could very well be.For me though, the likes of Buffy, or more recently Lost and Battlestar Galactica trump The Wire in several ways.

What The Wire brings to the table is some great characters, and a massive overarching story that encompasses each seasons arcs and continuously builds on them. The characters themselves fill out more and fan out relationships until the whole thing becomes this great epic story of warring families and terrible betrayal. Actually, now that I think about it, betrayal seems to be a key theme everyone's always going behind each others backs in this show. It didn't really strike me while watching, but looking back the good guys and bad guys alike constantly screw each other. Not that there is clear cut good and bad. Sure, everyone sticks to their designated lawful/unlawful side of the fence, but all the main characters are definitely shades of gray rather than tones of black and white.

It' not all great though, while the characters and overall story are pretty great, the writing gets a little clumsy sometimes. Kima was a great character in the first season, but they had to telegraphed the crap out of everything that was going to happen to her, and then hammered the rest of her important traits every chance possible. Then they nerfed her character via storyline the rest of the show from season 2 onwards.

Furthermore, I never understood why Stringer Bell was the 2IC to Avon until much later on. In the first two seasons he's king bad-ass while Avon does very little of anything. Sure, they hint that maybe it's a Barksdale family history thing, but it's not something that gets explained until season 3.

I'm willing to forgive though. I mean, if I had to justify all the goofy stuff that happens between the good stuff in Lost, I'd need a week of essay posts. Besides, every thing in season 1 was worth it for the McQueen-being-sent-to-the-cooler style shot of McNulty on the boat at the very end. McNulty's such a wag.

More than meets the eye.

I have a shaming admission to make: I now know more about trains than I cared to believe existed in the first place. I guess it all comes with the job, but its still embarrasing when I see a train and know what it is. And accidentally shout out its name like it's some kind of train bingo. And am naked in public except for a strategically placed train timetable.

Luckily, that doesn't happen too often, but I've often thought : What if I was in creative charge of Trainz?

Naturally I'd be merging it up with some other franchise and definitely that franchise would be Transformers (or Street Fighter, as mentioned previously). In honour of that, allow me to present what would be our main character: Turnout.

Turnout would be a noble Autobot, and while being a fine soldier, his key role would be support. Since his vehicle mode would be a SD40 Diesel engine (the current unofficial mascot engine of Trainz), he would be most useful moving shipments of supplies to the front lines and taking wounded teammates back to base.

Maybe he could be in a group, maybe The Freighterbots, that contain other kind of freight vehicles like a semi truck, and a cargo plane. Maybe they could merge into a bigger robot. Maybe that robot could be called Transportotron. Maybe.

As a special bonus What-if-Wednesday: What if Turnout was a Bayformer?

This hastily sketched mess should answer that question. Would he be the same as his original self? Hell no! No time for character development, we've got 40 minutes of military footage to fit in! And some gay dogs! Better give him a racist stereotype like the rest of the minor characters... Lets go with Mexican. So now he's always napping, carries around a giant robot sized bottle of tequila around with him for no explicable reason, and when he transforms into a train he shouts "ARRIBA ARRIBA UNDERLAY!". And probably at one point he can wear a roof like a sombrero or something.

Oh and lets give him rollerskates or something, because that's almost like being a train.

Fuck you Michael Bay.

The new kid in town...

This luckless bastard is Johnny "Lovebaby" D'Agostino, main character of the short comic "Johnny Lovebaby buys the farm".

Johnny's got himself in some trouble with the wrong people and now he's stuck in a four way game of Russian Roulette. The only way out is down the barrel of a gun. Hilarity ensues.

Johnny's personality is somewhat based on a guy I know, just who will forever remain a mystery. Lookwise he's not based on anyone in particular. He's a womanising lovable idiot who's always been on the edge of the underworld but never dabbled into it. He's pretty clueless and totally unlucky, but he does have an innate but underdeveloped understanding of numbers and probability. Kind of imagine Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting if he hadn't met Robin Williams and just used Minnie Driver for sex.

"Johnny Lovebaby buys the farm" is another comic I have mostly written but really need to get around to drawing up one of these days...

Actually... September is the most STOMPY of all the months.

Hastily drawn thing - GO!

In my defense, I have been doing some stuff with the blog, trying to make it more in line with the website. Hopefully you've noticed. Particularly with the header image remixed from the website.

Unfortunately, this is going to require me learning more about templates for blogger, so expect a couple more little changes as this week goes on and I have more of an idea of what I'm doing.

At some point I'm going to have to get around to updating the website a little too :S.

Also, I'm getting a little bored with this "picture to the left" business, so I'm switching it up for no good reason until I feel otherwise.

What else is new? Nothing.

...And I want my scalps.

More Inglourious Basterds. Just coz it was so good. Nothing interesting to say today I'm afraid.

And I would've gotten away with it, if not for those meddling kids...

Often as I'm walking down the street I'm approached by complete strangers who ask me completely out of nowhere: "Hey Gareth, what if you and your housemates were some kind of Hanna Barbera cartoon?"

Naturally my first response is of confusion. "Who are you?" and "How do you know my name?" are common replies. As are "Stop following me" and "Do you wanna come back to my place, since you seem to know where it is anyway?".

So, what if indeed?

Well I know if we were we'd lie somewhere on the less abstract side of the official "Hanna Barbera Line of cartoon detail". I may be a raging misogynist, but I'm no Fred Flintstone. My guess is we'd be more like Mystery Inc. from Scooby Doo. Sure, we don't have an animal sidekick, but we do solve mysteries on a weekly basis. Mysteries like "Who's turn is it to clean the bathroom?" and "Who left all the lights on and the backdoor open after leaving the house?". You know, the mysteries that matter.

I don't think we fall into the archetypes set by the original group. Sure, I'm sometimes mistaken for a stoner AND I used to have chin hair but I DON'T drive a van, for example. And none of us are swingers like Fred and Daphne,at least as far as I'm aware. What I do think I can do is round out what skills we all bring to the group:

Caitlin - Infiltration/Undercover work.
Sarah - Critical and logical thinking? Heh... Probably interrogation.
James - Legal reasoning and YELLING.
Gareth - General indifference. And Internet detectivery.

Anyway, this picture took SOOOOOO much longer than I was expecting. Even now I still wish I'd managed to do a good background. But really, it was getting so late and it's What If Wednesdays, not What If Thursdays. I may add in the background and some text and quietly slip it in later.

Speaking of quietly slipping it in later: I remember ages ago someone explained to me why Fred and Daphne were swingers (I think it was something to do with the neck scarves? Apparently back in the day that was swinger code for "Come get it, boys!") and also why Shaggy and Velma were habitual druggos (kinda obvious there). But what I didn't realise is how Daphne's always striking these Bettie Page style cheesecake poses all the time in promo pics. All suggestive hips and come hither eyes. No wonder we're a generation of deviants. Coincidentally, don't do a Google image search for Daphne Blake.

You could've been number one.

One day I've really gotta get around to finishing Starlight. Pretty much all the coding is done, I just need to get around to doing all the art and placing all the levels.

The main character is this guy, Mr. I'm-totally-spacing-on-his-name. I'm pretty sure it was some Muse reference though, just like everything else in this game. For instance, he's part of the military order of the Knights of Cydonia. He pilots a ship that has the universes only U.N.O. gun. There are also Super Massive Blackholes. Also revelations.

In other related news, my old sketching pen finally ran out of ink so I've been forced to move on to another one. It's a different brand and not as good in my humble opinion. I should've bought up big with the other pen, but I guess that's something to remember for the future. Furthermore last night I was well and truly wrecked so I rushed the colouring somewhat. Story over.