Two months of blogging solidly, and what have we learned?
In short, nothing.
Actually, not quite true; I’ve probably generated 6 or 7 minutes of material from it, which I suppose isn’t terrible going. I also got a nerd riled up when I attacked GoBusters. There’s clearly some small benefit to regular blogging. But I think I’m going to take a rest from the daily stuff for a little bit. If anything interesting happens in my life, I’ll let you know.
You could be waiting a while…
I went to bed a King (Well, joint third in line), and awoke a struggling TV listings writer. I’m not sure that’s how the fairy tale is supposed to run…
It’s the downside to a great gig that doesn’t get talked about very often; you somehow manage to wow a couple of hundred people with your dazzling wit and tremendous stage presence, and you feel like you can’t be toppled. People come up to you after the gig, tell you they loved your stuff, they tell you that you were their personal favourite of the evening. The resulting ego boost is enough to carry you through a typically grim tube ride home; you put on some triumphant pieces of music on your iPod, ride it out and collapse into bed, the conquering hero (Probably doing a blog about it first).
Then you wake up the next morning, and you’re not special anymore. Maybe five minutes after waking you have a brief moment where you remember what happened the night before, and you smile. But then you have to have a wash, get dressed and drag yourself onto the bus to work. And you get in, and everything’s quiet and normal; and however much you do or don’t enjoy your day job, you’re not the centre of attention anymore, you’re not making people laugh – you’re just doing your job again. It’s a hell of a comedown.
Damn you, real world…
In October 2010, I achieved something rather special. Having been going for only five months as a stand-up, I took on London’s infamous King Gong show at the Comedy Store, and beat the gong.
For those of you who don’t know, King Gong is a ruthless spectacle in which newer comedians get up in front of a baying audience of about 3-400 people and try as hard as they can to get five minutes of jokes out without said audience deciding they’ve had enough and booing you off stage.
It was exhilarating to beat the gong back then, even if I didn’t win in the final laugh-off. I saw it as a sort of validation that I hadn’t been completely wasting my time in those back rooms of pubs in front of not many people. And it’s also a size of audience that you just never, ever get on the open mic circuit; to have them laughing at things I was saying was hugely satisfying.
The idea of returning to King Gong to try again has always been a daunting one for me; I did almost as well as it was possible to do first time round, with very little room for improvement, quantatively speaking. If I was playing a giant game of Play Your Cards Right, coming back to King Gong would be like receiving a Queen and then deciding to risk saying “Higher” rather than sticking where I was. As such, I didn’t go back.
Until tonight.
I spent most of the day in two minds about whether or not I was actually going to turn up and perform; not only am I monumentally lazy, but there was also the (irrational) fear that somehow not doing as well as I did last time would make me a worse comic than I was 17 months ago. Or worse, maybe I just got lucky last time, and the person holding the one red card that never went up was just a really big fan of Star Trek.
In the end, I bit the bullet. And beat the gong for a second time. It was a lot easier this time around, actually; I either had zero or one red card go up (I genuinely wasn’t sure), as opposed to two within the first 60 seconds last time round. By the time I was about halfway through, I had a pretty good idea that actually I’d got them well and truly on-side and would really have to deviate from the path to muff this one up. I did not deviate, and no muffing was done. The Hallelujah chorus played to indicate a successful run, and I couldn’t have been happier.
I didn’t win the evening overall, but the winner was a great comic called Nico Noche, and I was in joint third place with Jack Samuel Warner and Christian Elderfield, both of whom I like and respect enormously. It was esteemed company, and I was just proud to be up there in the final. Two guys came up to me afterwards and told me I’d been their personal favourite and I’d been robbed – I was rather suspicious at this point, as I didn’t even do my phone theft material tonight…
Will I go back for my third King Gong? It’s hard to say. Probably not for a little while. One of the reasons I booked myself in for this one is that, although I would still mention my 2010 achievement when shilling for gigs from promoters I’ve not met before, it was beginning to feel a lot like I was trading on past glories. It’s nice to be able to say that not only did I beat it twice, but I also beat it recently.
Even if the fact that I did as well tonight as I did in 2010 means that I’ve essentially wasted the last 17 months by not getting any better at it 
For the last year, I’ve been boring anyone who will listen (ie. nobody) with tales of Gokaiger, the Japanese space pirate Power Rangers who have the power to have all of the powers. Last week that came to an end, and this week the 36th Super Sentai, Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters, began airing in the timeslot. What a difference a week makes…
The motif of this year’s show is spies, and so everything’s super serious, with the three team members not cracking a smile until the end credits. Actually, they show no personality traits at all throughout the episode. At one point we are explicitly informed that Red (They don’t have names I can be bothered to learn) has a tendency to be too direct with people, but they don’t bother to show us this. There’s also some ridiculous stuff where he sees a picture of a chicken and physically freezes up. Because..? Nope, I’ve got nothing. Each character also has a ridiculous robot partner, who I don’t need to be able to understand to know that they’re going to get real annoying, real quick…
Yeah, the one on the right is a rabbit. I would make some comment about the girl GoBuster not being allowed a good animal, but I think all three of them got screwed over here.
The action was pretty well done. Go-Busters seems to be doing away with needless stock transformation sequences by having it done real-time, mid-fight, and some of the mecha footage was genuinely cool, of a calibre that I’d have liked to see in the Transformers films. But, as with the Transformers films, if there’s not the writing and likeable characters to back it up, it doesn’t mean a thing. Hard as it may be to believe, I haven’t been watching Super Sentai this past year for the fights; they’re the bit I zone out of a bit. I’ve been watching it for the characters and the plots. And so far… I’m not optimistic. There’s a very real chance I won’t be watching this time next month. Blog fans, rejoice.
Of course, what irks me more than anything about G0-Busters is that, after years of insisting that Super Sentai is NOT POWER RANGERS… They’ve gone and incorporated this little catchphrase from that show’s early years:
Thanks a lot, Go-Busters. Now I look ridiculous.
When I was younger, I would always look at the people sitting in Games Workshop, shake my head and move along. This was partly because I’ve never been particularly good with arty stuff like painting little metal men, partly because I think little metal men are a bit silly, and partly because I’m geeky enough already; by not getting involved in Warhammer and the like, I at least had something about which I could say “Well at least I don’t do that…”
I’ve always viewed cosplay in much the same way. I’ve never really understood the appeal of it, and felt like maybe it’d be a step too far. But last year I went to the MCM Expo down in the Docklands, and there were a lot of very happy cosplayers there, and it felt like a proper accepting, happy community of people. That and the recent end of Gokaiger prompted me to give it a try at today’s Hyper Japan event.
Hyper Japan is an event designed to celebrate Japanese culture, if by Japanese culture you mean “Anime and refreshments”. I’ve never had much of an opinion on anime; some of it I like, but I rarely go out of my way to watch it. So I was lost during quite a bit of today’s proceedings. HJ was a lot smaller an event than I’d expected it to be; having been to the Expo, and to the Comic-Con at Earl’s Court before that, this was tiny by comparison. Conveniently, this meant I didn’t have to stick around until 4pm to watch the cosplay parade, as I’d already seen all of the costumes wandering around just by staying in one place for 15 minutes.
The anime focus meant that my Gokaiger costume went largely unrecognised (I thought one guy who saw me said “Gokaiger” to his friend, but it could just as easily have been “Fat bastard”). I put this entirely down to the ignorance of the crowd, because I looked EXACTLY LIKE the character I went as:
We could be brothers!
With regards to the cosplay… I still don’t get it. At best I just felt a bit self-conscious, walking around like a big Boris Johnson lookalike. I certainly didn’t feel anything positive as a result of it. But then, this was a far less cosplay-focused event than the MCM Expo is; whereas about half of the crowd at MCM were cosplayers, it was maybe a quarter here. I suppose the fun is in being someone else for the day, and maybe I was never able to detach myself from me for long enough for that to work, but it does just seem to be walking around feeling slightly less comfortable than normal (in both senses – that wig really started to itch as the day went on).
I left at 1pm as the thing was starting to get popular (read: crowded), so I can’t make a full report, but I’ll leave you with my highlight of the day. There was a live performance from a singer who has apparently done a bunch of anime theme songs, and… Well, let’s just say there was at least one person who really enjoyed it. Watch the guy at the front…
Ever get that feeling that you’re the only one dancing..?
Brian Michael Bendis is taking over as writer of all the X-Men books following the end of Avengers vs X-Men, according to a report over at Bleeding Cool.
This is really disappointing news. When Bendis took over the Avengers titles in 2004, he was a breath of fresh air. He proved to be a master of dialogue, writing snappy conversations which made the book feel like something worth reading.
Eight years later, he hasn’t stopped with the snappy conversations. In fact, that’s pretty much all the Avengers books consist of nowadays; 7 or 8 characters all talking with the voice of Brian Michael Bendis for pages at a time, and very little actual plot.
The X-books, on the other hand, have been going from strength to strength of late. Wolverine and the X-Men, in particular, is a powerhouse book, which not only has snappy dialogue, but also strong characterisation and fast-moving plots. Jason Aaron has done a sterling job on making the post-Schism X-Men universe a success, and it depresses me that he’s about to be forced out of the post because Bendis wanted a new sandpit (Having soiled his own).
This may seem like a big old nerdy overreaction, and that’s because it definitely is, but this is not the greatest of news. Poor show, Marvel. Poor show.
I think, and I know this is going to startle some of you, that the brief period between waking up and leaving the house on a weekday is probably the most important time of the day. They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but I’ve never subscribed to that; the most important meal of the day is clearly the 4pm chocolate bar. It’s perfectly placed between lunchtime and the end of the working day, and gives you the extra boost of energy needed to plough through the final 90 minutes of sitting at your computer typing words into a database.
Because of this, I try wherever possible to have mood-enhancing things happening of a morning. Now that I have my new phone, for instance, I’ve changed my alarm tone to this:
If that doesn’t get me ready for adventure in the morning, I don’t know what will.
Often I’ll watch an episode of a sitcom (or two, if I have time) to get me in a lighter mood for the day ahead (I don’t wake up naturally this chirpy, you know). It’s a minefield, though; Scrubs, for instance, is best avoided as a mood-setter. Sure, it was one of the better sitcoms of the 2000s (Although that isn’t saying much), but Scrubs before work is basically a game of Russian Roulette. Sure, you might get one of the happy ones where Turk and JD kiss at the end, but you might equally get one of the sad ones where a patient dies or JD ends up wanking in a broom cupboard again.
I once tried watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, a show which I’d never watched a full episode of before that point. How that day did not end with me on proper suicide watch, I do not know.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, so instead I’m going to show you something that really did put me in a good mood for a bit today… Comedian and very talented man Jay Cowle provided – entirely out of the blue – this wonderful piece of “fan art” for the Dork Avengers Podcast, which we have very quickly adopted as our new logo:
Now all we need is for someone to write us a theme song… Make it happen, people.
I went to a game-themed pub quiz tonight, courtesy of IGN, and against all the odds (We were a team of non-gamers and Dunk in a room full of industry professionals) we came 2nd. And yet we didn’t get any prizes! Now, I know what you’re thinking; ‘Surely the satisfaction of coming second is enough?’ Well no, actually, it isn’t, so leave your stupid comments in your pocket.
Have you ever been to a pub quiz where the team who came second haven’t been honoured in any way, shape or form? Neither have I. Unfortunately for me, I’ve very rarely been on the team that came second to experience the bounty first-hand. If they’d only bought a couple of prizes and given them to the winners, that would have been short-sighted of them, but fair enough. But no! The winners had prizes literally coming out of their ears. The guy in charge took one box of stuff over to their table, and then one of the other staff members shouted to him “We’ve still got a few bits and pieces here…” Did he say “Oh, give it to the second place team”? Did he bollocks. “That’s all for the winners as well!” he beamed, presumably thinking he had done a good thing.
If I seem ungracious, that’s because I probably am a bit. But, I mean, come on. IGN, I know it’s unlikely that most of your readers will ever be granted the chance to achieve orgasm in the presence of another human being, but just in case they do, you need to teach them the lesson that actually it’s okay to come second.
Yeah, it was basically all leading up to that pun. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, send money.
Donald Trump… He’s no Alan Sugar, is he? The best thing you can say for Trump is that his surname is Trump, and that sounds a bit naughty, doesn’t it? Like a fart I mean. Alan Sugar’s surname is just Sugar, and there’s nothing rude about sugar.
I stand corrected.
I watched the first episode of the new run of Celebrity Apprentice USA this morning, mainly because it’s got Mr Sulu, The Incredible Hulk, the Real Winston Zeddemore and Penn Jillette who was on Babylon 5 and Sabrina the Teenage Witch those times. Zombie Nightmare’s Tia Carrere and Mega Shark’s Debbie Gibson are on the girls’ team, but that’s not quite enough to make me care. They should’ve put Beverley Crusher in there or something.
Anyway, to say that Trump (haha) goes lightly on his candidates is an understatement. The “celebrities” are playing to raise money for charity, but rather than just stating that at the beginning, he teases out each candidate’s sob story, hearing why they have such a personal connection to their charity… Yawn. SirAlan wouldn’t put up with any of this bullshit.
Nor would SirAlan treat whoever’s in the firing line like he wanted to be friends with them afterwards. Sure, in the final stages of each series of the UK Apprentice he’ll acknowledge people’s achievements, and in Young Apprentice he’ll go a little bit easier on them, but when an adult is the first one to fall for having stood around doing sod all throughout the task, SirAlan is unlikely to send them off with the words:
“You’re an amazing success story, you’re an amazing woman, but for the purposes of what we have to do here, you’re fired.”
STOP RUINING THE APPRENTICE, TRUMP.
Ha, I said Trump again.
And yes, I know it was Trump’s show before it was SirAlan’s, but he’s fast becoming the George Lucas of the franchise…