Eff Why Aye

Just a brief note to say that good old NickMB.co.uk is now functional once more, so in the name of good old simplicity, my blogging has returned to its motherland. Future entries will appear there, and all entries from this outhouse have been copied over.

So, I’ll see you there. Or back here if we break that site again. Oh, and read Behatted!

TV Eggs

Hello.

So, Good Friday is here, I had the day off work, and I have been… working. On Behatted, obviously. So far today, two strips have been completed. (Well, the second one is nearly complete. I’m taking a break.) I still need to finalise the three strips for next week, then I might do another one if I feel up to it, although it involves some heavy graphics work.

It’s hard work having a webcomic, I’m not sure anyone told me how much work it would be. Little wonder I’m tired and irritable all the time really. Since I seem to be constantly working even when not at work. Honestly, you should see the state of my DVD backlog, it’s tragic.

But, I will be doing some great TV watching this Easter weekend, because this Easter is a great time for the nerdier members of the human community. Firstly, the first new Red Dwarf in a decade airs tonight on channel Dave. I’m not sure what my expectations are, but just seeing the guys on screen again is oddly exciting to me.

Having said all that, I shouldn’t get over-excited, since I won’t be seeing the new ones until Monday as I don’t have a TV. Lame. However, I am watching them all in a row at someone else’s place with some beer and curry, which I think is very much in the spirit.

And tomorrow, too, is a new Doctor Who special, to mark off another of the few remaining episodes before David Tennant dies. The general word seems to be that this will be a fairly cheery, bubbly adventure, one of the last for Tennant, before we get close to his departure and everything gets very dark and serious. (Just in time for Christmas, then. How festive.)

So I’m pleased. I’ll probably blog about at least one of those once I’ve seen them. Now, back to finalising this Behatted script so I can allow myself dinner. Oh, if you’re a big completist of my bloggings, there was a musing on the Behatted blog posted yesterday, featuring a new comic by me, with art by an actual artist! (Not about hats.)

Analytics – reproduced

I’d written at least a good chunk of a blog post about the dark underside of my current Google Analytics obsession, when suddenly Internet Explorer died. And I remembered, once again, that actually typing blog entries in the stupid boxes provided by blog software is a really stupid idea, leading only to misery and heartbreak. Much better to type them in Notepad and then paste them in, much like I’m doing now.

Now, it just remains for me to decide whether to try and reproduce my deceased entry or go off on a whole new tangent…

Well, I’ve only had one hit on my webcomic, Behatted, today, which is… something I shouldn’t really care about, especially as it is the weekend, not often a busy time for the internet. And also as I’ve done very very little advertising, outside of my own Facebook and Twitter accounts.

To be honest, I think I need to try and take the weekends off from panicking about this kind of thing. I’m feeling stretched thin enough with the pressure to work all day at my office, then come home and mastermind global hat-domination. If I spend all weekend hyper-ventilating about web statistics, I will be unlikely to even stay ahead of my hat comic backlog needs.

Plus, lest we forget, I was meant to be editing one of my novels, a mission that has been a little neglected in the last couple of weeks in my bid to get Behated up and running. So, in the name of simple basic sanity, I think I’ll give the panicking a rest for a bit and try to have a nice quiet weekend of typing and wandering.

I’ll be honest, I’ll probably still check the analytics every so often, which may make the last bit pretty redundant, but it’s worth a shot.

And that’s at least a small blog entry worth of typing. I’ll try and do one about something else at some stage this weekend, lest people think I do nothing except obsess about hats nowadays.

Talking about the internet

No sooner did I go to the trouble of setting up an Outhouse (and having it pointed out that I may as well have used my already-existing Posterous page), we appear to be taking steps to bring the big daddy site back from the dead. NickMB.co.uk may return soon, hopefully prettier than ever before. Certainly, it will be powered by WordPress, as I grew a little bored of the B2 Evolution blog engine. (Even if it was a nice talking point to be using a package that no-one had heard of.)

Anyway, that is not my biggest internet news. I have begun my webcomic, Behatted, a story of small hats, adventure and… yet more small hats. It’s somewhat amateurishly drawn (that’s putting it mildly), but I’m very proud of it; I think I’ve hit upon something good. The first episode went up this morning, and it will continue to appear even Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

So, yeah. Tell all your friends, recommend it on your favourite strange social bookmarking site, etcetera etcetera.

To try and get people to actually look at my hard work, I’ve been delving into the odd world of Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. It’s an odd service, much-abused by people like me who desperately want to promote themselves, but maybe they don’t care, as people abusing them keeps their hit counts going up.

What bemuses me, actually, is that I always hear people talking about using these sites to promote their own work, but I hear very little about anyone actually going onto them to find things to look at. Where do the people who look at my site come from?

(Having said that, I had a very gratifying moment today when someone I know went on a “Stumble” and actually “Stumbled Upon” the Behatted site. That was very cool.)

Enough for now. But yes, I am now doing webcomics and internet promotion, and it is strange. I think that was my point.

TV Viewings

At home. Not been here for a while, and it’s always nice to be back. They have iPlayer on the television, you know, I don’t think I can ever mention that enough. So now, seamlessly, I’m going to blog about some interesting television programmes.

• Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe started on my birthday, joyously, and features the man himself still perched on his sofa, venting at his television. However, unlike the parent show, Screenwipe, he’s staying focused on the news for an entire series this time. There was actually a news-only episode of Screenwipe a few years back, and it was one of the better ones of the whole run, providing a good place for Brooker to pair off his two strengths: Comical OTT hatred and righteous indignation. So I’m quite thrilled that it’s back for a whole run. The tone is perhaps a little more depressing than Screenwipe was, but I guess that’s the result of going from covering X-Factor to covering the news. First episode available on iPlayer until next Wednesday if you want it.
• Not actually a programme I’ve seen, now, but one that I am being prevented from seeing, namely good old Doctor House. Channel Five have decided to stall the new season until “summer, maybe autumn” so they can show an exciting new slice of US drama, The Mentalist. I haven’t seen that, it could be excellent, but I was of the impression that House is one of the more popular shows on that channel? They’ve just announced that they are having serious problems as an organisation, and I can’t help but feel that if they just showed the new series of House, things would get a little better.
• I watched Genius on iPlayer the other day, and am in two minds about it. Some of the banter is very funny, the prop re-enactments of the ridiculous inventions are great (especially the 100m high running shoes), but the treatment of the guests rankled with me a little. I haven’t listened to the original radio show, so this could well be part of its normal style, but the back-and-forth between guests and hosts seemed to tip from light ribbing into outright mocking rather a lot. Certainly, even if I had a suitable idea, it’d be a cold day in hell before I go on Genius with it.
• The new “Volume Four” of Heroes, which is actually the second half of season three (why?), has started on BBC2 and I’m surprised by how much I’m enjoying it. I found Volume Three largely incoherent, but I’m glad I gave this new one a chance, as they’ve made a real effort to get more to a straight-forward action plot with some humanity behind it, rather than a bizarre combination of over-egged scifi and soap operatic plot twists. Even the plight of the Petrelli brothers, who were really annoying me before, has somehow become interesting again. I’m not ready to use phrases like “a blistering return to form” yet, but this is a fun little series again and I can afford it 40 minutes a week.
• Finally, I’ve been slowly picking my way through the first series of E4’s Skins on the unexpectedly excellent 4OD service. I’ve actually still got one episode to go, but this seemed a decent place to write about it. Basically, I was expecting trash, and it’s… not. Swings dangerously close sometimes, but that’s almost part of its trick. It has the characters act like hedonistic arseholes, we let it slide because we think we’re watching a show which wants us to think being young and on drugs is way cool, and then a few episodes later their actions actually do have consequences. It helps that the young actors involved range from good to great for the most part, with no weak links. I look forward to picking through the next couple of series, also available for free.

Wow, I watch a lot of television.

Watch This

Yeah, I took the rest of my birthday off, it seemed silly to spend it typing a review of a movie even I’m not that curious to hear my thoughts on. To be honest, my cultural intake (books, comics, TV, even the occasional film) is rather high right now, I suspect I’m just going to have to accept that some of it will escape unreviewed.

However, since I bothered to do a pre-show blog about Watchmen (I would give you a link, but it’s on the broken site), I kinda feel I’d be letting myself down if I don’t at least throw out a quick paragraph about the actual movie.

So, yeah, it’s pretty long.

The Watchmen movie as a whole has been met with a combination of apathy and outright hostility for the most part, with even the postive reviews having to include a lengthy “but…” segment, and I’m unlikely to challenge that trend. There are some bits that are flat-out excellent, but others which are just flat.

To be honest, a lot of it suffers from the same syndrome I moaned about when I reviewed the early Harry Potter films: The main appeal seems to be the chance to see a beloved story enacted on screen with super-cool special effects. It doesn’t seem to even try and rise to the challenge of providing a new intepretation of the story, it just takes the source material and plonks it up there.

It’s sad, because when it does its own thing, it sometimes works. The opening credits, which aren’t a direct rip from the book, are an excellent way of immersing the viewer in this universe. Admittedly, there’s a bizarre alteration to the ending, which I’m not sure works quite as well. I can see why the original climax would have been tricky, but I’m not sure they’ve thought the new one through.

Also, it has this… austere air to it, this strange conviction that “YOU ARE VIEWING A MASTERPIECE”, I guess because the source material is generally accepted as a masterpiece. Unfortunately, the film clearly isn’t one, so it just seems pretentious.

But despite falling short of masterpiece status, I don’t think it’s bad, or that it deserves the level of outright bile it has generating in some quarters. It’s not as good as the book, but few things are. I don’t think it’s worthless, or even especially bad, I certainly don’t agree with the claims that the story is incomprehensible if you haven’t read the comic. Yes, it requires some concentration, and maybe people aren’t used to that in superhero films, but all the necessary material is there. Some of the performances are excellent, others less so, and yes, the large blue penis is hard to ignore.

In short, it’s an interesting experiment, which hasn’t entirely succeeded. These, of course, are the things which view the most column inches on the internet. See, here I started off intending to produce a relatively concise couple of paragraphs and have ended up rattling off around 500 words. Dammit. Never mind.

The Birthday Message

As it appears the spell of downtime on nickmb.co.uk is dragging on a bit, I have created this temporary site to blog in the interim, should the mood strikes me. I’ve been meaning to do this for a few days, but I finally pulled my socks up today, as it is my 25th birthday, and I’ll be damned if I let it pass without some form of blogging.

I’d love to say I’d had a major midlife crisis as I turn 25, but to be honest, I feel oddly calm about it. When I turn 30, though, that will be a shitstorm. Tune in 2014 (by which time, my website will hopefully be back up) for some proprer hardcore man-whining. For now, though, yeah, I can’t say I’ve failed to meet any of the targets I feel I should have for myself at this stage in my life, so to hell with that. Let’s just be happy.

However, inspiring though the last paragraph was, it doesn’t leave me with anywhere to go for a few more. After all, if one decides consciously not to bitch in a blog post, what can one do? Knit? Crochet? Sew? Doesn’t sound like rivetting prose, does it?

I could always talk about comics or something, maybe?

(I know what you’re thinking… “Wow, he set up a whole new blog… for this?” Isn’t it great? I missed typing this stuff more than I realised.)

Actually, no, let’s break for now. I have a birthday shower to have, then I gotta somehow magic some breakfast out of quite literally nothing whatsoever. I’ll return at some stage in the next few days, to bring you my brief thoughts on the Watchmen movie, literally weeks after the rest of the internet stopped caring.

Ta-ta.