My english is declining at very much rate of rapid

I've written enough this month already, so I'll say this with an image:

In other news, Carnival issue #1 is nearing completion. I have eight out of eight pages, and am waiting only on a cover and a website. Watch this space.

Luke, I am your… wait, what?

I won’t go into details about how I found this out, but apparently the word ‘Vader’ comes from the Dutch word for ‘father’.

George Lucas has been telling us for years that he had all six films in mind when he was making the original Star Wars, but there are two further repercussions of such a fact:

1) Emperor Palpatine names Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith. What were the other options? “I name you… Darth Third-Cousin. No, wait, Sister. Mother. Brother. God damn it, Daddy-O.”

2) Dutch viewers knew the big twist in Empire Strikes Back all along. And they said nothing. The grand reveal must have been a huge let-down for them.

Also, ‘Darth’ probably means ‘dark’.

Falling far from the tree: the story of a switcher

I dislike Apple. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I hated Apple – ‘hate’ is a very strong word – but as a company they have always struck me as arrogant and anthropomorphically stuck up their own collective arse. A bit like the Guardian newspaper, with the downside that Apple products cost more and the upside that Polly Toynbee doesn’t come free with every purchase.

That said, they do make fine laptops.

Judging by the lingo used on Mac forums, I am a ‘switcher’: a convert from the perceived evil of Microsoft Windows to the greater good of OS X. There is a traditional route that ‘switchers’ take, which largely involves trying to make their Mac work like a PC, and then realising how wrong they were and letting the Leopard do its own thing. In fact, what I think happens is that ‘switchers’ just give up trying to get OS X to work like Windows.

Part 1: I own a Mac

Specifically, I was given an Apple MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of internal RAM, a 15-inch screen and OS X Tiger. For the non-geeks out there, this is the laptop equivalent of an African famine victim being given a locked box full of doughnuts: it’s fucking awesome, as long as they can figure out how to get inside.

I decided to do some background reading. Turns out that, as far as MacBooks go, mine is pretty good. I wanted to see what it could do.

Part 2: Apple lies – Macs are not for pleasure

Tommy Tallerico, at the recent Video Games Live concert in London, got the crowd to hold up mobile phones, PSPs and DSs instead of lighters. One person held up a laptop, and Tommy asked what type of laptop it was.

“It’s a Mac,” came the reply.

“Good choice,” Tommy yelled back, “You ain’t playing any games on that.”

For a product that markets itself on being able to do cool things like make pictures and music and whatnot, Macs are curiously game-less. Sure, games exist, but they’re not exactly in abundance. For £40, you can buy a port of Civilization IV – an excellent game, but you can buy it on PC for £10 with both expansion packs.

Spore, my most recent purchase for my old laptop, plays on both a Mac and PC. However, it won’t work on OS X Tiger. It wants Leopard, the relatively new operating system.

So I visited the Apple store.

Part 3: The plastic population

The Apple store on Regent Street, London, is huge. Spread over two floors, it sells basically everything Apple makes, plus everything – pretty much – that’ll run on a Mac. Despite this, the average Game store, which you could fit into the lecture stand at the back, probably holds more stock.

No one looks happy in an Apple store. They stare at the merchandise like mechanised zombies while orange T-shirted youths with less hair than the average leukaemia ward slouch about looking superior. These are the people that are so eco-friendly that when they lose a family member they phone the council to have the corpse recycled.

On the plus side, a copy of OS X costs £85: less than a legal home edition of Windows XP. Not that anyone has ever actually bought a copy of XP. Ever.

Part 4: Fuck me, did that actually work?

I don’t remember installing Leopard. I don’t remember installing much on the Mac. I’m not telling you this to get out of explaining the process. I’m telling you this because there is no process. Generally, you click an icon, then drag it to the appropriate Applications folder. Sometimes it’ll ask you a few questions. In the case of Leopard, I think it took 30 minutes and then restarted the Mac.

By way of contrast, the average PC program – games in particular – require you to submit to a Mensa-worthy intelligence test, figuring out drivers and graphics or sound options and whatnot. They try to install themselves into obscure places on your hard disk. Frequently, they don’t work until the second install.

So the first time I installed something on the Mac, it was so fast that I thought it hadn’t worked. It took me half an hour to realise that my program – ironically, Microsoft Word for Mac – worked just dandy.

Spore worked once Leopard was installed. For some reason, I still had to meddle with the graphics settings. It was the first – and so far only – Mac program that didn’t everything automatically.

Part 5: Big cats

Leopard is a neat piece of work. For a start, the default background is a space scene. I liked it so much that I nearly kept it on my desktop. In the end, via a brief stint with the eye of HAL 9000, I settled on a view of the Earth from space. Basically, Leopard’s first impression was a good one.

Two things in particular impress me about OS X. One: the search function – called Spotlight – is incredible. No one uses the search functionality of Windows, because it invariably takes ages and finds nothing. Spotlight goes through every hard disk plugged into the laptop – reads every document, the works – and gives you every result in less than five seconds.

Two: the back up system in Leopard, called Time Machine, is beautiful. It’s functional too, in that it backs up your hard disk every hour and doesn’t require you to stop working at the same time, but it just looks gorgeous. It swoops onto your desktop like a pterodactyl catching a fish. Honestly, it’s more fun than some games I’ve played.

Part 6: Back through the looking glass

Leopard was wonderful for many reasons, but it lacks a certain level of functionality that I absolutely need from a computer. Firstly, the games – as I’ve already said – are rare at best. Secondly, Creative – the company who built my MP3 player – are so shit-scared of competing with iPods that they won’t release any software to make their products work on a Mac.

I needed Windows. Thankfully, Leopard comes with a program called Bootcamp, which divides your hard disk in two and lets you install Windows on one half. This process is more difficult than it sounds. Bootcamp is easy enough – just make sure that you read the instructions and don’t have any programs open when you run it – but try and find a copy of Windows XP (a program no longer supported by Microsoft) for less than £100. Even an only-technically-legal OEM copy costs £40 on eBay.

Thankfully, my dad is anally-retentive enough to keep every CD that comes his way, and had no less than three copies of XP. One of them worked fine, and the Leopard CD is smart enough to install all of the relevant drivers to the Mac. So I installed the Creative software and Dawn of War and…

Part 7: I made a PC out of an Apple MacBook Pro

…wait. I got a Mac and installed Windows? Yeah, but you have to if you ever want to play more than a handful of games. It’s sad, because the Mac is a good-looking, well-built machine with more horsepower than it knows what to do with. Spore proves that it will run games, and run them well. But no one seems to want to play them enough for the games developers to take any notice.

Part of this, I suspect, is the price of the average Mac. My MacBook Pro, when new, was worth in the region of £1,300. I would never have been able to buy one on my own; hell, you could buy four games-worthy PC laptops for that money. I would guess most people who can afford this exorbitant price either don’t have the time for games or don’t want to turn their purchase into a games machine, which is a pity because you can have a games machine that does practical things as well. The irony is, of course, that entertainment devices such as the iPod (and its DRM-happy backend, iTunes) have done more to sell Macs than any Mac-specific tools.

That said, I like the Mac. It’s quick, and its reluctance to let me play around at the back end of some of the more technical jobs is made up by the fact everything tends to work first time. I may still hate the company Jobs built, but I will confess that I like the things they make.

The human potential for laughing inappropriately at exactly the right moment

After the earthquakes a few months ago in Chengdu, a group of Russians were working with local Chinese emergency services as volunteers to dig for survivors. One survivor, when he was found, saw the green eyes of his rescuer and reportedly said:

"Ta ma de, zhe dizhen zhen xiong, ba wo zhen dao wai guo lai le!"

Apropos of very little, but it made me smile. Thanks to Yu for the story. 

Breaking the faces of friends

I am a Tekken god. 

Seriously, challenge me. I dare you. I would put money on most people not being able to beat me at the game. Give me Devil Jin, Lee or Baek, and you're only laying a single punch on me before I floor you. Let me choose Xiaoyu, and you won't even get that punch. 

Tekken is a visceral game. It's so violent that it's poetic in form; a brutal and elegant shit-storm of a fighter that – to me – faceplants its competition into the mud and then puts in a final boot. I hate the choppiness of Street Fighter 2; it's easier to learn an actual martial art than play Virtua Fighter; Soul Caliber is just too serious about itself; Dead Or Alive and Mortal Kombat are frankly jokes. 

I first played Tekken during its second incarnation, back in 1998 – ten years ago. It was on a flatmate's PlayStation, and I was awful. I only played a couple of games, and then went back to Zelda on the N64. The following year, however, I started hanging out with a guy called Chris.

Chris was good at Tekken 3. Unlike me, he owned a PlayStation and had been playing the game since number two, and knew what the buttons did. Being a bit of a gamer, and having an aptitude for fighters, he had become something of an expert, and pummelled me into the distance. Which, with the infinitely big stages of Tekken 3, was a long, long way away. 

Ordinarily, that would have been it. Normally, I get bored with things I'm obviously bad at very quickly, which just makes it all the more surprising that I've stuck with my current job. However, with Chris, I had a conundrum. I was spending a lot of time at his flat, and we were both video game fans, and we needed a game to play together. 

After watching him play Final Fantasy VIII, action was needed. I went and bought a PlayStation of my own, and – unbeknownst to Chris – picked up a copy of Tekken 3. Then, after a few late nights learning a quick, tricksy little Chinese fighter called Xiaoyu, I went and whomped him. 

Whomped him. 

I remember Chris being speechless. Never in the ten years that I've known him have I seen him so incapable of uttering a single word. We fought a number of times that day, and he barely laid a finger on me. I was on fire. 

Not literally, obviously.

Of course, the next time we met, the battlefield had been levelled. He picked his own character to play with: Lei, a Jackie Chan-a-like. We both knew how to play the other characters, but we always came back to Xiaoyu versus Lei. Eventually, we had to turn off the game timer, as rounds could go on for four or five minutes at a time. 'Epic' wasn't the word. Half the time, neither of us would even try to hit the other for the first minute. We knew each other so well, we could actually predict each other's opening gambits. When we finally figured out reversals, we could win a fight without throwing a single punch. 

These days, we don't play Tekken very often. Sometimes, one of us will be in a room with other friends, and sometimes we'll play Tekken against them. We play and talk, only one eye on the TV. We'll usually win, but there's something missing against other people. 

Yet, every so often, when the moon is right and the mermaids are swimming, we'll break out the latest version of the game. At those times, nothing can tear our eyes off the telly. At those moments, Tekken is more than a game, it's a conversation carrying more information than mere words. It's a bond between two friends who – through the game – know each others' mood and state of mind. People watching us have accused us of taking the game too seriously, but we have to be, because the moment we let our guards down the other will break through and win. 

Chris and I have often joked that we're friends only because we've got so much blackmail material on each other that we could never be enemies. We've known each other for ten years this month, and for nine of those years we've had Tekken to translate our Big Conversations into a secret language. Happy anniversary to us. 

Postscript: Chris and I played Tekken 5 tonight, which was the impetus for this article. I beat him 8-6, but it was a close call. Even without any practice, we fucking rule. 

Question answered: why I like superheroes

I took Yu to see Iron Man tonight, which marks the third time I have been to see the film at the cinema. The BFI are running a superhero season, which is a brilliant idea. I’ve never been to the BFI at Southbank before, although I have been to the IMAX down the road (I saw 300 there – never was a film more suited to an IMAX screen).

When I first revealed to Yu my liking of superheroes, she asked me to write down my reasons. She wanted to know why a twenty-eight-year-old man of reasonable education would enjoy what boils down to little more than men in tights hitting each other with magic powers. It’s a fair question, and one that isn’t entirely easy to answer.

The obvious response is that superheroes represent escapism. However, that’s not a good enough answer. In fact, in this world of a thousand fictions, it’s a bit of a copout. There are literally hundreds of alternative genres to escape into. I have no particular desire to have superpowers; like most guys I have pondered which superpower I would prefer, but that doesn’t mean I dream of having one. *

Any film you watch, any book you read, any game you play, represents escapism to some degree or other. Escapism, in short, doesn’t cover why I prefer superhero fiction to, say, romance novels or crime stories.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is to do with my love of graphic novels and comics. When I was a child, my parents took out subscriptions to Transformers (the UK comic, as opposed to the at-the-time substandard US version) and the Real Ghostbusters. Not strictly superhero comics, they were a marked difference to comics such as the Beano, which in the UK was pretty much the only alternative to a boy too young to really understand 2000AD.

I stopped reading comics when I went to boarding school, and only picked them up again when I was bored while studying for my Masters Degree. I’d recently been to see the first Spider-Man film at the cinema, and wanted to read the origin story in comic form. Completely by accident, I missed the original version and picked up the trade paperback of Ultimate Spider-Man.

Now there was an eye-opener.

If you’ve never read it, Ultimate Spider-Man is a reimagining of the character, set in more modern times. It was – and still is – written by Brian Michael Bendis, and represents every reason I love superheroes. I still have it on subscription.

Bendis’ Peter Parker walks and talks like a real teenager. He has problems like I had at school. He has a girlfriend, with all the highs and lows that brings. He argues with his aunt and uncle. He is irrational, occasionally stupid, and frequently bullied. The only difference between him and any other teenager is the fact he has superpowers and a secret identity.

Bendis isn’t writing a superhero story, though. Primarily, he’s writing a soap opera. Every character, no matter how minor, is fully developed and beautifully written. Seriously, I studied novels during my degree with worse characterisation. So, as an introduction to comics, Ultimate Spider-Man was a good’un.

I’ve read a lot of comics now. Most of them were superhero comics. The thing that people tend to get confused with, however, is the fact that ‘comic’ is not a genre: it’s a medium. Comics can be any genre. I’ve read some wonderful Westerns (Loveless, for example), good crime stories (Criminal), some seriously top-notch fantasies (Sandman being top of a very long list) and more comedies than you can shake a stick at (Invincible, The Boys, or – for lack of any better genre to put it in – Girls). On top of that, titles such as Maus, Local, DMZ and Glamorpuss demonstrate the sheer breath of comic genres. Pick any one of those four titles: they are decidedly not for kids.

But I still keep coming back to superheroes. Why? Well, they’ve been around a while. Some of them – not all, but some – have been around long enough to mature into really good stories. Want proof? Read Ultimate Spider-Man, The Ultimates, Invincible, Watchmen, certain Batman comics, or Mark Miller’s new Kick-Ass series. They may all wear tights, but not at the expense of good stories or dialogue.

I mentioned again in my last post my current writing project. To give a few more details away… It’s a comic, being drawn by Chris Ralls. It’s about a man called Carnival. He’s not a superhero, but he’s not a normal man either. The comic – hopefully – will straddle the fantasy and detective genres. And writing a good comic script, in all seriousness, is the hardest style of writing I have ever engaged in.

I’m writing this with a glass of Southern Comfort (I know, I know) next to me, and I am fully aware that I’ve avoided the original question. The answer, I guess, is that I don’t intrinsically like superhero fiction any more than other genres. Instead, I’ve been lucky enough to find some fantastic comic stories – some of which are, by chance, about superheroes.


* For the record – and discounting the rather cheap and easy “I’d be Superman” answer – I’ve have either the powers of the Hulk or Captain America. Even better, though, would be to forego superpowers entirely and be able to fly the Iron Man suit around.

Carnival

There will be another blog post up soon - got a hankering to write about my trip to Berlin, from which I have just returned.

First up, though, I want to put up a quick update to this post. Not only is there finally and definitely An Artist Attached To This Project in the rather rugged and handsome form of Chris Ralls, but I've got the first five pages sitting on my hard drive.

And they are fucking awesome.

More soon. I may even put in some details next time.