John Walker's Electronic House

As was passed around the internets yesterday, Bill Watterson has done a rare interview with Cleveland.com, of all places, to mark fifteen years since he stopped drawing Calvin & Hobbes.

Watterson’s an odd and excellent chap. Calvin & Hobbes was unquestionably the greatest daily strip cartoon in the last fifty years (I really cannot think of anything this could be challenged by), and made more excellent by his refusal to merchandise the strip. So thankfully we never saw Calvin grinning on birthday cards, nor, as Watterson once wrote, had the reality of Hobbes decided for us by a stuffed toy. Instead we of course had Calvin pissing on VW logos, and horrible knock-off t-shirts of, for some reason, Calvin pulling one particular face. But never anything official. C&H remained pure in its form, a comic strip printed in newspapers, then reprinted in books.

Watterson’s motivations for stopping the comic have changed over the last decade and a half. At the time he made it perfectly clear he was quitting because it was the only way to stop the syndicate from merchandising the strip. He called their bluff. Now he says he had said all there was to say, and it had been time to end before it became repetitive or disliked. Whichever is the case, while I would dearly love for there to be new strips to read, I think he’s right that it was best to end at its peak. The idea that Calvin & Hobbes might have gone on to become as tired and unlikeable as so many of the daily strips is too terrible to bear.

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I have a piece up on Eurogamer today looking back at the Nintendo DS. Three and a half years ago I wrote this ‘love letter’ to the DS, celebrating why it was such a strange and interesting platform for gaming, exploring the oddities it was producing, revelling in the glee this produced. Time has passed, things have changed.

So I’ve taken the ‘love letter’ idea more literally this time. It’s a mixture of difficult letter to the console, and article discussing the rise and decline of the games available. I’m pleased with how it’s worked out. It’s also appropriately odd. It begins:

“DS, we have to talk. I’m sorry that I’m doing this in a letter rather than face to face, but I need to express all my thoughts and feelings carefully. I need to make sure you understand. I need you to know that I still love you, I’ve always loved you, but something is wrong.

Remember that love letter I wrote you in 2006? We’d been together for a year and I’d never felt so happy. We were still getting to know one another even then, and you had that ability to constantly surprise me. Every time I thought I knew all about you, you’d pull out another twist, another wonderful talent. Of course we knew this wouldn’t last, but then, at that time, it felt like forever.

In August 2006 I wrote a piece of Eurogamer about my unbridled love for the DS. The console had been out for just over a year and what was happening was extraordinary. While the DS was of course home to streams of rubbish, it was also the place to go for your dose of strange. Many spectacularly odd games, ideas that seemed born of fever dreams and lunatics’ fantasies.

It was the memory one of these games this week that suddenly brought the reality of my relationship with the DS crashing down on me. I remembered Rub Rabbits.

Oh, remember that year. We were always hand in hand, laughing, playing. There was so much laughter. The games weren’t always brilliant, but it was about us, how we interacted, how we learned about each other. Those hours and hours chatting with Phoenix Wright. The strange adventures, exploring with Another Code. Painting together with Kirby: Canvas Curse. It was like nothing else. We were young, we had no responsibilities, people didn’t understand us. And we didn’t care.”

It continues here.

Persisting in this new weekly habit, Rum Doings Episode 14 certainly doesn’t discuss its chosen topic, What Should We Do About The Wheeliebin? It’s with troubling enthusiasm that we begin this latest episode, despite the blatant lack of rum in our hands. Your rules, we don’t play by them. This week our drink is, instead, honeybush tea.

Things we do talk about include the paradoxical anomaly that is BBC 1’s Outnumbered, why Russell Davies doesn’t deserve his “T”, the plot holes in Press Gang, obviousness in writing, and ask why can’t people enjoy their superpowers? There’s revelations of Michael Moore, and then of course the discussion we’ve all be expecting: who should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

Then, at long last, Nick’s brief lecture on Derrida. Which is genuinely our most requested topic.

We’d love it if you passed this link on, told friends, recommended us in forum threads, graffitied the URL on the sides of houses, and so on. (Don’t actually graffiti the sides of houses.) Also, if you would, write us a review on horrible, horrible iTunes. That would be splendid.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Because TV so strangely doesn’t understand our Earth years, the US lot beginning in September and ending in May, and the UK and AU lot starting and finishing whenever it feels like it, I couldn’t find a way to do a “Best of 2009” style thing for it. Because TV from this time last year feels like it’s from the most ancient of pasts. That’s – what – almost three seasons of Survivor ago! Imagine it. So here’s what TV is up to. Alphabetically. Oh good grief, I only got to E. So no, I don’t watch all these shows every day. Lots of them finished their runs already. I watch two or three programmes a day (which I’d say would be about average), banking up lots of shows for a day off maybe, or a way to fill a long train journey. It’s okay. It’s not as weird as it looks. The weird part is how I’ve spent so long writing about them.

Archer – FX

After an enormous post-pilot hiatus, Archer finally starts its series proper. It’s the latest from Adam Reed (Sealab 2021, Space Ghost Coast To Coast), and follows the formula: fast-paced adult cartoon with little interest in coherence or human decency. On FX rather than Cartoon Network, it frees things up to be a little ruder, swearier, and more callous. And it works well. The brilliantly droll Jon Benjamin (Dr. Katz’s Ben) plays Archer, a secret agent of sorts, who isn’t quite incompetent but more simply hateful. His mother is voiced by Jessica Walter (Arrested Development’s Lucille), along with Aisha Tyler (CSI, I guess), the compellingly lovely Judy Greer (I loved her in the very short-lived Miss Guided), and SNL’s Chris Parnell. Two episodes in it’s unsurprisingly great, as you’d expect from Reed, and really quite fantastically wrong too.

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Sorry to sneak up on you, but look, it’s episode 13. We’re going weekly for, well, maybe a week. We’ll see how it works out. Please let us know in the comments below, or to podcast@rumdoings.com, whether you would prefer weekly episodes, or the former fortnightly.

Distracted by a new rum, we take a long time to get around to introducing the topic we’re not discussing: Whatever happened to sitting down for dinner as a whole family?

Instead we find ourselves discussing Scientology, random word snap, and then dive head-first into a chasm of self-indulgence, and discuss the Rum Doings origin story. How John and Nick met, the creation of (the now deceased) Glebe’s Thrift Funnel, and then our dalliance with the stars. As regular listeners will remember, Nick and John have a “no false modesty” rule, and included in this is what so many call “name-dropping”, but we call “talking about people we met.” We relate the stories of our adventures in the nineties in which we met many of our heroes.

Apologies for the slightly annoying hollow mic noise that appears occasionally. You’ll forgive us. Let us know what you enjoyed or didn’t enjoy, either via email or comment below. Or leave a review on iTunes. And please, as ever, retweet and plug this link, help us get heard. We want to be heard by the w-hole wide world.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

The first series of Being Human (BBC 3) made the same mistake in every episode. The tale of a ghost, vampire and werewolf sharing a house began each episode in the manner of the trite sitcom that brief description suggests. Oh, the wacky adventures they must have! But as each hour-long story progressed, it became darker and darker, finishing with a dramatic cliffhanger that ensured you’d watch the next. And yet somehow by the next week it would have reset back to its kooky sitcom cheeriness, constantly betraying its own potential.

The final episode was different. (Spoilers follow.) Enough threads needed to be brought together that writer/creator Toby Whithouse was forced to begin with drama and stay there, and it was a dramatically better programme. Optimistically, the first episode of the second series managed the same.

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In our first Rum Doings of 2010, we don’t discuss whatever happened to Britain’s supplies of salt.

Enjoying a cocktail known as A Snowball For The Year 2000, we begin with an excellent description of Nick from a listener, that sets us off onto a discussion of alternative ways of pronouncing words, and the definition of “enormity”, and why using Windows is like being a tourist in Egypt.

Then, as was perhaps somewhat inevitable, there’s discussion of the weather. And weather forecasting. We’re enormously right. Moving on to thunderstorms, you’ll understand this brings us to discussing the Scouting movement. Which of course leads into a conversation about breakfast cereals. And Victoria Wood. And Armando Iannucci. And Chris Langham. Ending on a teaser for the next episode! We’re a serial drama.

Email us! About anything you like. Who knows, in about two months we may read it on the podcast.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

As ever, we depend on you to promote this. Please, take the time to retweet it, tell friends, or post about it on forums, that sort of thing. Ooh, and write us a review on iTunes. That sort of thing is very helpful. Go on. For the children.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of text messaging. To me it’s a tool. It’s a way of arranging to meet, or letting someone know you’ll be late. Or sending a pithy, clever insult. And it’s brilliant for that. Phoning someone to say something that can be taken care of in a maximum of two exchanges of 160 characters isn’t necessary. The text message takes care of it, quickly and efficiently.

However, if your conversation requires more than that, then it’s a bane. Having to try to orchestrate a complicated dialogue in minimal chunks is infuriating, and even more so because to do it you’re holding a device capable of telephoning someone. So telephone someone.

Perhaps an even larger issue with the text message is the apparent requirement to reply instantly. I don’t want to turn into some ghastly confused broadsheet columnist (wait, yes I do, that’s exactly the job I want – well, let’s assume I don’t want the ghastly part) who complains about how modern technology is driving us apart, because is it bollocks. It’s uniting us in incredible ways. But I do take issue with the immediacy of communication it’s engendered. If you need to get hold of me immediately, call me. The loud ringing sound will get my attention, and if I answer you’ll get my responses right away. If I don’t answer, you can assume I’m not able to, or don’t want to. For some reason we accept that an email may take a few hours to be responded to. But a text message, perhaps because of its relative informality, combined with its arriving on a device that follows us around (which of course is increasingly the case for email too), seems to come with a weight of responsibility. And one that arrives unsolicited. I don’t like that. While I find myself unable to remember how existence worked when phones were tied to the walls (despite living the first 20 years of my life in such a state – what did we do when we were going to be late for stuff?), I do remember that we weren’t commanded to instantly reply to everyone.

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Last year, when it snowed to any depth for the first time in my adult life, I made this. I don’t think I’ve topped it this year, but I had a good go. He’s a bit more clumsy, a bit less well shaped. But the spirit is there. Big props to Craig for suggesting brain matter and creating wall-based splatter effects. Oh, and coming up with the gun idea, too. I was just going to have his head caved open. Also, I’m sorry.

More angles here.

BBC News is on fire today!

First of all, a story about pi being calculated to 2.7 trillion digits is accompanied by this caption:

“Pi is an irrational number, meaning its digits go on forever.”

Um, not quite. I think you’ll find an irrational number is one that starts crying because the wallpaper’s the wrong colour, or something.

And then follow the headline, “Archbishop urges population cap” and you get this story about a group of MPs arguing for, I guess, culling, that at no point mentions the Archbishop. It’s a bold headline choice, suggesting the Archbishop wants to shut down our borders to all those Johnny foreigners. He might want to ask them about that, since it’s now their 7th most read story.

Presumably they’re getting a bit confused with a story from last October when the former moron Archbishop George Carey declared his delightful views on immigration. He explained that the reason the BNP were gaining popularity was because of our “open door policy” to immigrants. Never mind that the BNP’s popularity has waned in the last few years (I mean, why let that trouble your ghastly views?), but to suggest that the BNP might be becoming more popular because there’s too many foreigners coming into the country… Um, maybe someone can see the irony here? “If the mainstream parties begin listening to the voters,” he said, “the BNP can be consigned again to the fringes.” That’s right George. If the mainstream parties adopt the policies of the BNP, then we’ll not need the BNP at all!

UPDATE: They’ve now updated the linking headline to read, “Carey in immigrant ‘values’ call”. But haven’t thought to update the article to mention Carey at all. Is everyone at the BBC drunk today?