Now, if you know me, you know I like music videos, possibly too much. I watch them all the time, and get really aggressively pretentious about them. If that kind of thing annoys you, you should definitely stop reading this entry.

Currently making the rounds (apparently via Waxy originally) is Pour some sugar on me, by boyband Townsend covering Def Leppard. At first glance, it appears merely an awful video for an awful song: it parodies hair bands, but at the same time firmly including every single boyband video cliché in the book: the matching outfits, the all-white room, the really really bad choreography.

But looking closer, I can't help but think maybe the director was having a laugh at their expense. The video is a nested set of parodies: a parody of hairbands inside a parody of boybands, nested inside a television set being watched by other people at home: if not to drive home the point that it's nested, what's the point of the sequence being set inside a television? Likewise, the Beatles costumes don't make any sense (it's a Deff Leppard song!) unless you're trying to emphasize how much of an obvious boyband they are by throwing in the original boyband. And taking it even further, to drive home the point about it being a video cliche, we throw in a reference to the original video -- Hey Mickey -- with a bevy of cheerleaders dancing in a white room.

It's either really dumb, or extremely clever. I'm still not sure which. But I've watched it 3 times now trying to decide, and now so will you. So either way, it was certainly an effective video.

Summary: good popcorn movie. Go in with low expectations, and you won't be disappointed.

The effects are excellent, and that's really what Hellboy is all about: big, gothic eye-candy. If a many-tentacled monster is not your idea of a good antagonist, avoid this movie. The fairly predictable plot is lacking somewhat in a climax: it attempts to have about five, but instead of leading you from wonder to wonder they all lead you waiting for the even bigger climax around the corner, which never arrives.

The acting is surprisingly good for an action movie, and the dialogue manages to avoid any of the cringeworthy cheesiness of Van Helsing, for example. The action was giggle-worthy in a few places, and I like silly movies that make me giggle.

The mythology and the unabashedly dark nature of Hellboy himself are nicely fleshed out, as well as his strange adult/child persona, alternately a cigar-chombing, beer-guzzling lout and a timid child, writing unsent love notes and eating milk and cookies. Much is left unexplored and unexplained, which as the Matrix movies proved is probably a good thing, since explaining stuff fully tends to ruin the mystique.

Is it wrong that I noticed the fish-boy has surprisingly good muscle definition, and was blue? I think it's wrong. As far as eye-candy goes Hellboy himself isn't going to turn any heads unless they're really into muscles, but FBI agent boy is adequately cute in a pure-as-driven-snow way.

It's that day again.

Well, there's been a big gap in my blogging, mainly because life's been too busy in the real world to find time to write about it. This was a good weekend though; Popstarz was fun with a big group of ex-Warwick peeps plus London peeps. My night bus took a million years to get back however (mainly thanks to a numbnut without a ticket who decided if he just stood there being an asshole long enough the driver would get tired and drive on. 20 minutes later he was disappointed.)

Despite not having had much sleep as a result of the night bus, Saturday was fun. A picnic in green park, followed by coffee, followed by movies (The Bourne Supremacy, which I thought wasn't bad, just dull), followed by drinks, all in the excellent company of Thom, Ian and Tarrant, although they really need to get out of the habit of referring to friends by their ID on OUT.

Oh, and the site now has a music log on the bottom-left. Now you can know exactly what shit I listen to!

Update: The Bourne Supremacy was so dull, I got the name wrong. Fixed.

At my funeral, I hope it will be said that twice as many people turned up as expected. I hope people will wear bright colours and remember to laugh. I hope there will be a sing-along. I hope people will tell dirty jokes at my wake, and that it brings together people who should see each other more often. I hope people will hug more than cry.

Then I will have achieved something with my life.

Phew! It's finished. Nearly 13,000 overly pretentious words for your consumption. This is what has been eating up all my blogging time recently, so I hope you consider it worth it. Yours in a choice of formats:

• The original text file
• As PDF, including a preface and explantory text (recommended version)
• As a Word document, for those with Adobe-phobia. Should work in OpenOffice.Org et al.
• As quick-and-dirty HTML exported from word, for those who can't ever be arsed to leave their browser.

Please let me know what you think, by e-mail or in comments :-)

Update: accurate criticisms received so far:

• Arthur C. Clarke does, indeed, want his book back. But all creativity is synthesis of absorbed information into new forms, so if you were totally unable to discern my influences I'd be surprised and probably disappointed. But I believe it's sufficiently original to stand on its own.
• The beginning is dull, because it's so obviously just there to set up the scene, which is contrived. But there's a joke about it being silly and contrived, so that's okay.
• It's not really got a plot. It's just an argument. Nothing happens.
• The characters aren't developed or explored. Sorry if that bothers you, but really they're just vehicles for the words.
• There is no climax. A criticism that currently applies to my life as well, but I'm enjoying it anyway.
• It's not very accessible. Yeah, a play that expects you to have already read The Selfish Gene is probably going to alienate a few people. Sorry about that again.

Woo! Another fabulous birthday weekend achieved, despite a near-total lack of pre-planning on the part of Mr. Abson and myself.

In brief: Friday night clubbing at (inevitably) Popstarz was followed Saturday by a brief shopping excursion (love my new coat) followed by sitting on Clapham Common in the rain, followed by a great deal of fortuitous meeting up in tube stations, followed by extended picnic shopping at Sainsbury's followed by a picnic on the porch in the drizzle at my house, followed by drunken conversation/tickle-fights/music-snobbery indoors for more than 7 hours, followed by clubbing at Ghetto (G: you still have my top!), followed the next day by much sleep, then a wonderful coffee bar in Notting Hill with a charming Argentinian waitress, then upstairs for a ridiculous meal consisting mainly of cocktails, coffee and chips, then a pub.

In other words: I've had a busy weekend.

Many thanks to the hard-core who came, and stayed, and stayed, and stayed. As more and more people come to London these parties will doubtless increase in size :-)

This weekend was, surprisingly, just what I needed. I've been complaining to anyone who will listen about having been feeling unsettled and confused. This weekend has done a lot to ground me, and while it has not removed the main source of my unsettled confusion it has at least crystallised it into a solid issue I can focus on and deal with, though I've yet to figure out how to resolve it, and I suspect the answer may be "with quite a lot of effort".

Ah well. My 24th year (*gasp*, I'm so old!) is already promising to be as eventful as my now-completed 23rd.

The Seldo.Com family of websites was unavailable for 24 hours yesterday, because of an underground fire in Baltimore, apparently. Isn't the global Internet a wonderful thing?

Normal service is now restored; no data was lost in the process.

Update: Oh, the permalinks on my RSS feed were wrong for some reason. They've been fixed now. Sorry about that.

The air is crisp, the nights are dim but not dark, the parks are cool and breezy. Squirrels play on the grass like they were trained to frolic picturesquely. The coffee warms you nicely but you don't break a sweat, and you can bundle down into your coat, but it's still warm enough to hold hands. Streetlights glint off polished cobbles in a way that would make a movie lighting technician ache with longing while a warm voice sings a song by the Beatles and strums a guitar. The moonlight mixes with the reflection of the London eye in the Thames and in the middle of Embankment Bridge the traffic noise dies away and is replaced by the steady sound of rushing water sloshing around the base of the pillars until a saxophonist starts busking mellow jazz.

Paris may get all the publicity, but don't forget: London can be romantic.

In continuing evidence that the US administration is in fact run by completely fucking crazy psychos, on September 10th Donald Rumsfeld audibly equated Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, twice in the same 20 minute period:

"The leader of the opposition Northern Alliance, Masood, lay dead, his murder ordered by Saddam Hussein, by Osama bin Laden, Taliban's co-conspirator..."

"Saddam Hussein, if he's alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught. And we've not seen him on a video since 2001..."

Forget the oil conspiracy, forget the Iranian spy who fed us fake evidence, forget the Bush family's urge to finish what they started in the Gulf War. The reason we went after Saddam instead of Osama may in reality be that these idiots can't tell the difference between the two.

"Oh, that's Afghanistan? So what have we been invading? Oh, damn."

At least the conspiracy theories made sense...

In an e-mail conversation yesterday:

it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Pulling out would probably cause melt down in the region, but it may well be heading that way anyway. I think they should stay, having started off on this ill-concieved adventure they should at least try to rectify the situation - but I don't know how and apparently neither do they and in the mean time many, many more people are dying and the situation certainly isn't getting any better... but to pull out now would be devastating to all concerned.

See, this is a problem we've discussed before: what do the insurgents want? Polls have shown that the majority of Iraqis welcomed the invasion and even think things are better now than they were before. The insurgents, damaging as they are, are a minority, and they're not even a coherent minority:

1. Some of them, such as the dude who holed up in that siege in the shrine, are transparently just making a power-grab in the upcoming social order.
2. He's a world apart from the Iranian-funded trouble-makers who are attempting to destabilize the regime to provide Iran with a way of grabbing territory and bringing Shias into the fold.
3. And then there's a (possibly non-existent) faction of 'foreign fighters' allegedly tied to al-Qaeda who are destabilizing the regime explicitly for the purposes of forcing the Americans to withdraw

Group A are relatively benign, and they are probably the majority: they have an interest in enlarging the pie. If the Americans leave there's a chance they could devolve into civil war, but given the way the clerics seemed to be able to shut him down just by saying "stop fighting, dammit" I think that's unlikely. These guys' power rests on religious fervour, and the fairly level-headed clerics have more sway over their followers than they do.

Group C, I believe, are largely a creation of American propaganda. It's useful to say that al-Qaeda militants are behind the insurgency for political reasons, but al-Qaeda was pretty effectively stomped after 9/11; even if there are people in Iraq who claim to be members of al-Qaeda, where are these people getting all their money and firepower? Even if they exist, they're small scale. The Americans are billing these guys as the problem, but I don't buy that.

Group B is where the trouble lies. I'm betting most of the action -- blowing up police stations, sabotaging oil lines, all the really expensive and deadly stuff -- is coming from Iran, not al-Qaeda. These attacks lack the flair for the dramatic and the obvious symbolism that a-Q seem to go for; these attacks are a lot more like guerilla warfare and yet the Iraqis themselves say they don't want anything other than peace. Who's doing all this wanton, deadly damage? In whose interest is it? Well, al-Qaeda of course, but I've explained why I don't think it's them. Iran is the other candidate, and there's been a lot more evidence floating pointing to Iran than a-Q (our good friend Chalabi, the Iranian spy being a HUGE tip-off).

But it seems to be politically impossible to point the finger at Iran for some reason that I'd like explained to me.

So group A are expecting the Americans to leave but are actually just playing the game for their own power while they're around; but I believe they'd rather grab power in a relatively ordered American-controlled framework than have to work much harder for it in a free-for-all following a sudden American withdrawl.

Group C do not exist in sufficient numbers to really care about, but getting the Americans to leave is what they want: the faster the Americans get out of the Middle East the better, as far as these guys are concerned.

Group B are the danger. They want the Americans to leave because then they'll really cause trouble. Civil war is not the danger in Iraq; the danger is that a weakened Iraq will get invaded by an Iran using the instability there as an excuse to go in. And while having an enlargened and emboldened Iran doesn't sound like an especially good idea on the political front given their nuclear ambitions and general hostility towards the Great Satan, the real reason the Americans are never going to back out now is because it would put more than half of the world's oil reserves under direct control of two openly hostile but at least passably legitimate governments (S.A. being the other) with no pretext for another invasion, the result of which would be rocketing oil prices and economic disaster for the West, in particular the USA. If this was a war for oil then it has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

So basically backing out would lead to stability but would seriously weaken the West, and staying in will lead to ever-increasing instability. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, but note that it's us who are damned if we leave, and them who are damned if we stay*. And it's clear who we value more.

Update: Some B/C confusion fixed.

(well, apart from all the dead soldiers, but if we cared about troop losses so much why did we invade a country that wasn't attacking us in the first place?)

The first episode of the new season has arrived! Oh frabjous day! There's loads of spoilers after this point so if you're planning to see it STOP READING NOW. This review style is shamelessly stolen from Television Without Pity, including calling Jonathan Kent "Bo" and giving it a grade at the end. This is too much fun not to do.

• This episode is all about the Naked Clark.
• This is by no means a bad thing
• Nice reference to Lois' previous chain-smoking 1980s persona. I'm liking Lois so far: she's pushy and annoying, the way a Lois should be
• What is Lex doing in Egypt? Shades of comic-book inconsistency
• Loving the red blanket. Good idea.
• Totally loving the butt-shot of Clark. And so is the Chinese grandmother. This show is ALL ABOUT HIS ASS
• It's amazing how Paris looks a lot like Chicago with bad props
• New love interest is pretty damn cute. But there's way too much plot exposition in this conversation.
• What is Martha reading? Oh, Huck Finn. Good "come back to haunt us" reference.
• Chloe is dead. This is a very silly plot twist that I hope goes away. Although it does explain why Chloe doesn't come from the comic-book canon; they always planned to kill her
• The nicorette product-placement is pointless
• As the final revenge for all those amnesiac ex bad-guys he left littered around the landscape, now Clark has amnesia. Oh, sweet irony!
• Back to Egypt, which looks a lot like Arizona with bad props
• "Footprints in the sand" is current running contender for cheesiest line of the show
• How did they park a jet on a cliff? How is it managing to take off from a cliff?
• Oh, Lex is now a chemical-dependent monster now. VERY comic-book twist. The amount of ridiculous shit they've had to pump into this episode to close the plot holes in last year's season closer is ridiculous.
• Clark hates Bo! Oh, you broke your picture.
• And now you broke your statue! Luckily, there's an incredibly annoying buzzy crystal inside! It's like the free prize in cereal boxes.
• Oh, angry driven Kal-El is soooooo much sexier than confused Kal-El
• THE FLYING EFFECTS ARE AWESOME is this going to happen every time he takes off?
• "I thought brass-rubbing was code for something else" is new cheesiest line, but I'm liking new Sassy Lana.
• The only person who has the same personality as last season so far is Martha, and her personality (wimpy crying victim) is the most annoying one, dammit!
• Why does Lana look like a 16th-century brass rubbing? Why is a 16th-century brass-rubbing attacking her? I have so many questions.
• Back to wimpy Martha. Lois shouldn't wear red. Good boobs though. (Did I mention I'm bisexual these days? I am. Moving on.)
• HAHAHAHA. I love Lois' reaction to Martha's condolence.
• "Nerd with glasses"! Okay, I've changed my mind, this episode is all about the screamingly obvious foreshadowing.
• Lois can't emote or wear red. Bad combo in an actress.
• "Bird? Plane?" is our new joint winner for cheesiness and foreshadowing. Also, since when do birds turn up on radar?
• Brid-gette Swans-by has an incredibly slow southern accent. Also, she's the old Lois, she looks just like the new Lois! Is anyone else going to point this out?
• She's in love with Dr. Swan "in a different lifetime", i.e. the superman movies! God this foreshadowing is a blunt instrument.
• Oh no, "a mothers' love" takes the prize in a strong field for cheesiest line ever! This gets better and better. Or worse and worse, depending on your point of view.
• Black kryptonite is totally going to send the fan-boys scurrying for their back-issues
• Ooh, daddy-Lex has a whole new look, carcinogenic prison inmate! He looks the most like an evil super-villain he ever has
• Three crystals? Jesus, even more comic-bookery
• Oh, are they still talking? I totally tuned out of all that plot. Back to new, thinner, sexier Kal-El! Seriously, has he lost weight?
• He's got a totally new attitude to walking into bright lights these days
• Lana's looking simultaneously awful and hot at the same time. Boyfriend just looks hot.
• So black kryptonite has the effect of... of... causing a really obvious metaphor for a moral dilemma and two naked Clarks?
• Bo wakes up! Celebrations all around then.
• Hang on, 10 minutes of episodes left and we're already back into everything-is-the-same-as-last-season mode? Oh, fuck that's disappointing.
• Oh, all this emotional talking is really sickening.
• So, the insurance is still maxed out. Shouldn't you guys be getting back to the farm? In fact, considering all the major medical incidents the Kents have had in three seasons, their premiums are probably absolutely shocking
• Totally gratuitous naked Lana footage will last for the next 60 seconds. Hey Lana, cool new tat! Looks like you're a harbinger of doom.
• Incidentally, isn't Lana a student in Paris, and a penniless orphan one relying on a scholarship for funding? How come she has her own elegantly-appointed studio flat with lots of natural light and big windows?
• Ah, so that's the next 6 minutes: Lois Lane vs. Daddy-Lex.
• Where do I know this Lois chick from before? She sounds like that girl from Showgirls. And her hair is the same colour as that girl's now, too. Wasn't she a brunette when this show started? I guess they did need a way to make her look different from old-Lois/Brig-ette.
• Why is she hitting on Papa Lex? This is very creepy, and she's not acting at all like a reporter. I'm not liking this chick.
• Talking to gravestones? Way to steal Lana's tactic, Lois
• 1987? Chloe was born in 1987? God DAMN I feel old. Also, there's no way she was 17, she looked 25.
• He's wearing red and blue again! And he remembers being naked in front of her? Nice start to this relationship.
• Her hair is totally the wrong colour for a Lois
• They hate each other! Yay, I like her again.
• She's living with him? Okay, that's more than a start. The countdown clock to Clark's first bang has started.
• Chloe's still alive! I knew that wouldn't last long. I mean, she's still on the website and everything (Pete is waaaay out of the picture)

Hmmm, overall a B+, mainly for the flying. Long-term opinion of Lois still to be determined, I guess they're still playing with the character. Yay for Chloe not actually being dead, but annoying that everything got Back To Series Normal so damn quickly, they could at least have stretched it to a two-parter.

Gosh, that was long. Am I going to do this every episode? It's very fun. I'm going to rewatch the flying sequence a few times now. Also the various naked sequences. In fact, the whole episode minus all the glancing at my screen to type. Having just read the television without pity mini-cap, it seems they agree with my rating. Nice.

Spoilers start right now. Stop reading if you haven't seen it. You have been warned.

So, undeniably, that was a really pretty movie. The use of colour is gorgeous, the costumes and landscapes excellent, the special effects -- with the notable exception of the hordes of very obviously animated arrows -- extremely well done. The alternate stories worked well. This was not a bad movie, in fact it was a good movie. It was just a difficult movie to take seriously, unless you have a very deep understanding of, and have bought completely into, the Chinese cultural mindset that gave birth to the film.

Here's why I couldn't take this movie seriously:

• Emperor: I have worked out that you are going to kill me, but I am so full of fucking honour that I'm not going to call the guards because your story has moved me so much.
• Jet Li: And I am so full of honour that instead of laying waste to all your guards, like I've been doing all the way through the movie so far, I'm going to sit here and get shot by thousands of arrows, leaving a cartoon-style arrow-shadow on the wall.
• Broken Sword: And I am so full of honour that I am going to let you stab me to prove I was right that assassinating the emperor was a bad idea
• Flying Snow: And I am so full of honour that to prove I agree with you, I am also going to stab myself.
• All: Oh, we are so full of honour. Incidentally, we've done a scene in every colour except purple. Can we do a scene in purple yet?

Get ready to turn and face the strange, people. I'm switching web hosts to site5, so expect some turmoil and a few hours of downtime, probably this weekend, when I finally get around to migrating all of your sites over. You won't lose any data, and hopefully all your usernames and passwords will remain the same. The new host has five times the store space and ten times the monthly traffic, you can all upload pictures willy-nilly once again!