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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Loz's LiveJournal:
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| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | | 6:50 am |
Kieron Gillen on Longbox , some new comics-on-computers delivery system. In the middle he casually drops this little nugget: We have a few problems. Firstly, we make no money. Secondly, our comics aren’t available in enough places. Thirdly, we make no money. I say that one twice, because it’s the biggie...
The money problem’s the bigger issue. As we’ve talked about before, the single sales of the Singles Club were lower than we’d hoped for. They’re level with series 1, but due to the addition of colour, any profits evaporate. We make no money on the singles. We probably make a loss...
At the moment, with our current methods, a third series of Phonogram is entirely impossible. Frankly, Jamie is too old and too talented to starve for half a year again. Even if he was willing, I wouldn’t want to ask him. If we’re going to do a third series, we’re going to have to work out a new methodology for it. We’re chewing over the options, and have a variety of purely hypothetical plans, but…Folks, please start wanking for Gillen and McKelvie. If it worked for Morrison then it could work for them. Bash the bishop that Longbox is the online comics delivery system that works because that'll probably be the only way we get a third Phonogram series. | | Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | | 6:23 am |
For ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) friend_of_tofu I think it was... A chain of gyms has been investigated by advertising watchdogs after it promoted classes in how to beat up "chavs". Gymbox, which runs three fitness centres in London, offers courses called "Chav Fighting" to train men and women how to defend themselves from street attacks. The firm advertised the sessions through a leaflet bearing the heading: "Martial arts with Burberry belts and a fist full of sovereign rings. CHAV FIGHTING One of 100 different classes every week." ...Complainants also claimed that the leaflet encouraged attacks on women by plugging another class called "Bitch Boxing". In response, Gymbox said it had named the class "Chav Fighting" to draw attention to the courses in "witty manner". | | Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | | 7:50 pm |
Synecdoche New York Review, But No Real Spoilers.
I promised a review of Synecdoche, New York last week and spent several hours writing a long and detailed dissection that I didn't quite finish on Friday before heading down to spend the weekend at my sisters. Looking back at what I wrote I realised that there were a number of inaccuracies to the piece and some connections that I didn't see at the time and I don't have either the time or the patience to go back over it and correct it, so here is my much, much, shorter feeling about the film. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend anyone see this film. It is true that while most films fail to reach the lowest of expectations (I mean, I finally saw the first Transformers movie last week too. How exactly can you fuck up a film about transforming robots that badly? And don't get me started on the dank tuft of rectal hair that is Shia La Bouef) Synecdoche is an exception in having the highest possible aims. It fails to reach those and we instead have a cluttered mess of a film, it's a pudding colossally over-egged, it's a garden in which there are many, many roses, but unfortunately too much bind-weed. Charlie Kaufman has so many ideas he wants to cram in the film but they all wither on the vine, denied space to thrive. I'll admit my own personal neuroses probably had some part in me not liking this movie, the destructive relationship that the main character has with his wife and, especially, his daughter, is probably supposed to be really darkly humorous, it goes beyond my tolerances if that is the case and just seems needlessly cruel. The bizarre non-naturalistic flourishes in the film seem like genuine non-sense because they are squeezed in. I came out of the film feeling, to quote a DJ Shadow sample, as though 'my whole soul was undermined'. It is also treading ground which, to be honest, Kaufman covered better with Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. So yes, it should be supported because heroic failures are always better than small failures, but shouldn't we only support films that actually succeed? | | Monday, June 15th, 2009 | | 8:19 pm |
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| | Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | | 10:12 am |
I'm looking forward to the new run of Detective Comics, in which Batwoman takes over while Batman deals with a case of being dead (this being comics he'll get better in a few months time). I plan to actually buy the comics, as opposed to downloading them as I do with most of what else I read (although with Jeph Loeb, which I read just for his Ed Wood quality, I still feel that I should receive an apology afterwards for wasting my time, if not my cash). I'm a little concerned with this article, in which writer Greg Rucka claims that when the character was announced several years ago then pretty much didn't show up in comics that was all because of naughty newspapers misinterpreting press releases, leaving DC high and dry (not mentioning the cancelled Devin Grayson series). Not so much for that but for a couple of quotes that caught my eye. Batwoman is the highest profile queer character in mainstream, genre fiction ever. As a lesbian, she’s possibly an easier sell to the still mainly straight, white, male comic readers. "If I have to PT Barnum you a bit to get you into the tent then it might be worth it. But then the flip side is if somebody is going to open up these pages hoping for some hot girl-on-girl action then they will be sorely disappointed."which seems mostly positive, and "Batman is a demon, he’s a gargoyle. And I wanted Kate to be more seductive and consequently I would think more likely to take people by surprise... Their reaction to Kate is, yes, surprise and alarm, fear. But the way I see it is she’s more like a succubus when she wants information. She will coax it out of you, tease it out of you...."which seems less so. Those ole' feminine wiles again. I guess the proof will be in the pudding. | | Thursday, June 4th, 2009 | | 1:54 pm |
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| | Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | | 10:02 pm |
Wow, 2009 is Really a Shit Year for Finales That Make Sense Isn't It?
I've just watched the finale of the first season of Dollhouse. It's amazing, this series jumped the shark about ten minutes into the first episode, grew a beard mid-season, then jumped the shark again at it's end. If halfway through the episode Fran Kranz has just dropped his trousers and masturbated in front of the camera then not only would that have made me happy in my secret place but it would have been a better episode than what we got. I may return to this subject later. The appalling last episode, not Fran Kranz's love juices. There's probably Victor/Topher slash out there if you want to concentrate on that you perverts. | | Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | | 9:22 am |
| | Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | | 8:56 pm |
If you'd asked me before today I'd have said that it was impossible to feel sorry for Hazel Blears... and if you'd asked me today I'd have said the same! Bwahahahahaha! | | 3:00 pm |
A transsexual from Nottinghamshire has warned she will end her life if she is refused hormone treatment on the NHS. Debbie Davies, from Rainworth, is seven days into a hunger strike, and said she cannot afford to fund her treatment. Ms Davies, who was born as Richard in 1966, has been living as a woman for the past 18 months. Nottinghamshire County PCT has urged Debbie to stop the hunger strike and is currently reviewing its policy for patients who want to change gender. Does anyone know what Nottinghamshire is like at the moment? It was Oxfordshire that had the most draconian rules wasn't it? Oh, and BBC? You're missing a word from that first sentence. | | Monday, May 11th, 2009 | | 6:53 am |
Just Close Your Eyes and Count to Three
Well, thank goodness I didn't watch 300 until after I'd seen Watchmen or I would have gone in assuming it was being made by someone who couldn't direct his way out of a small plastic bag full of massive holes. I've not seen a film so turned on by pain since The Passion of the Christ. Naked sweaty men stabbing one another for several hours doesn't do much for me, the fact that the key pieces in this whole thing were '300' the comic book and '300' the computer game so that '300' the movie was just an advert for the latter (they might as well have got Stan Lee or Dan Didio to voice over saying "level up!" after each successive wave of enemies was killed) was unavoidable. And as for the tacked-on story from back home with the Queen trying to get the senate to send more troops, surely there is no-one in the audience that is not insulted by evil Senator McNulty carrying around the money he's been paid by the Gou'ald Xerxes to stop the Spartans from fighting on his person? All right, so he's not expecting to be attacked in any way, but what does he need to carry it on him for? And someone give Faramir a strepsil, the poor love's voice gets croakier as the film progresses. As ever with anything Frank Miller has produced in about the last twenty years I have to ask, is this his concept of masculinism or his parody of the concept? Or is it like Stephen Colbert, it is a parody, but other people's reality tunnels make them unable to see it as anything but the truth? | | Thursday, April 30th, 2009 | | 8:54 am |
When he was 16, Stephen Fry wrote a letter to his future self. Now, 35 years later, he replies. It's a beautiful piece of text. I don't think I ever actually wrote to or addressed my future self but, during my first year or two at university and, therefore, when I started a diary that I'm still keeping almost fourteen years later, I do remember there was at least some point when I assumed that, within a decade, I would be 'old' and that that, therefore, would somehow mean I'd have betrayed all the principles I stood for, despite the fact that I didn't rate my youth that highly at the time and didn't really have much by way of principles. I wonder how I would get on with my younger self. He'd be dismayed by how tubby I am, I'd be embarrassed by that hair. But it was at eighteen when I was finally born so I think I would be able to talk to him more easily than the grammar school boy of a few years previous to him. I have no wisdom that I'd like to pass on, but I would want him to tell his twenty-one and twenty-two year self, during the dark days, that it will get better, that their lives then are difficult but that after that it's rarely so bad again. Did you write a letter to the future? What did it say? How accurately have things turned out? What would you write back? | | Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 | | 8:40 am |
| | Thursday, April 9th, 2009 | | 6:49 am |
Christina Patterson, presumably desperate to fill out her column for a week, launches a vile and unprovoked attack on NHS nurses for their all being huge overweight trolls in the Indy. I'm sitting reading a book when a gargantuan creature comes lumbering over, and marches me to what might or might not be a scaffold. After a few adjustments... the creature nods.
The creature is, of course, a nurse and yes, my BMI is OK. Hers, however, is not. But we are not here to measure her BMI...
Other normal-sized friends have been told by giant doctors that they are fat... Because it is surreal, I'm afraid, to be lectured on your weight by someone whose mass of accumulated adipose tissue is considerably greater than yours.
No one expects nurses to look like supermodels, or lap dancers, or air hostesses, or even like anything that might ever have inspired an erotic fantasy... but you don't expect them all to look like Hattie Jacques either. And at least Hattie Jacques knew how to smile. You might, however, reasonably expect the custodians of the nation's health not to look as though they were about to consume the GDP of Iceland in medication for diabetes, and you might expect the custodians of the nation's health to at least have glanced at some of the leaflets on obesity they so lugubriously hand out.Between this, their hysterical about-face on the legalisation of Cannabis and their continued employment of Deborah 'immigrant homosexuals follow me around to have gay sex in front of my children' Orr it does seem this once great paper is now slowly trying to position itself as the broadsheet Daily Mail. Current Mood:  angryCurrent Music: Orbital- Crash and Carry | | Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | | 6:12 am |
| | Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 | | 10:34 pm |
New People Scare Me.
Was in the same room as Cleve Jones. last night. I didn't go and talk to him of course, that's what sensible people do. Instead I just drank the wine and nibbled the canapes. Current Mood:  embarrassed | | Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 | | 9:48 pm |
So has anyone seen any more of series 2 of Phonogram? I haven't been to the comic shop in a few weeks. |
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