Category: General

This is the Story of the Review of the Trailer of the Film of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’

Over at ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ official movie site you can now view the first proper (i.e. non-teaser) trailer to the film of the book of the radio series.

I’m not convinced that it is good. The trailer, that is; I have heard good things about the movie itself, including a description of a second, more English, trailer that instead of mkaing the film appear to be an action comedy portrays the story as being about epic, weird things, usually about people with names that, if not faintly ridiculous, are wildly apocraphyl.

Marketting the ‘…Guide…’ film was never going to be easy because it is not your average story. It starts with the Earth being destroyed and ends with a riff on the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, with the pun being that we know the punchline but not the rest of the joke.

Thus we have what I will call the ‘American’ trailer… Still, I have hope. Apparently one of the deleted scenes on the already planned super-DVD release of the film is of Martin Freeman (the silver screen Arthur) playing his role as that of an action hero.

I suspect DNA would have liked that.

02/19/2005

Sloughing of the Skin

Today I recieved my copies of ‘Black Petals’ number 50, the very issue in which my story, ‘Sloughing of the Skin’ has seen print.

‘Black Petals’, a glossy covered A4 horror ‘zine located in the USA kindly took ‘Sloughing of the Skin’ off of me for a six month period for all of you, the public, to read and enjoy.

The story features a piece of art that shows that the artist, Billy Tackett had read the story before committing pencil to paper (always a good thing). I had no idea what the associated image was going to be for ‘Sloughing of the Skin’ and this piece is far more appropiate to the story than I had hoped for (and had been believed possible, from comments elsewhere about art in ‘zines). It captures the essence of narrative and probably does (I say probably because I know the story far too well to be able to comment properly) hook the reader in.


It is also oddly appropiate because ‘Sloughing of the Skin’ is a story about art and the effect it has on the both artist and the artwork.

Whilst I would hardly call it my favourite story it does have some nice touches that I am proud of. It didn’t end the way that I thought it would, and the original version had a subplot involving a next door neighbour who visits twice, both creating some interesting questions about the phenomena.

(In an ideal world you would all be singing the ‘Mamamnah’ song right now….)

However, the subplot added little compared to the amount of words it took up, and the ending the narrative forced upon me made more sense than whatever it was I had hoped for.

One down, countless more to go.

02/18/2005

Hey, Asshole! Link to Me!


The Thing
Originally uploaded by Brain Stab.

I am what is commonly referred to as a fidget. At work I have a specially fashioned fidgeting implement, made of an oversized paperclip and a hair pin someone left in my office. I call it The Thing. Whenever my left hand isn’t otherwise occupied, I’ll be twiddling it between my fingers in defiance of the tendonitis brought on by three years working a cash register as a student.

This little tic extends into non-tactile areas as well. I am, for instance, unable to go a week without fiddling with this blog in some way — re-organising the sidebar, adding functions, signing up to blogging services and so on. And now we have a links section.

Selected by the Brain Stab contributors via a mostly democratic process, they are subject to change in accordance with our mercurial dispositions. The first batch consists of blogs belonging to people we know, quality sites everyone should be visting at least once a week, and barely redeemable shit. You can sort out which is which for yourselves.

Obviously, this exercise is for the most part a naked ploy to get people linking back to us when they see our URL showing up as a referrer in their hitlogs. It’s so much easier on Livejournal: Just purge yourself of all dignity, beg to be put on others’ Friends lists, put up with tantrums and bitching over who you put on yours and away you go. Grown-up blogs require you to do your link whoring with a little more subtlety; being not so much a link whore as a link high-priced-call-girl. So make with the reciprocating, assholes — just no kissing on the lips.

02/18/2005

Charybdis Tarot

Manipulated Murdered Photographs by Richard S J Scholes

5 – 18 February 2005

The Depot Art Gallery

28 Clarence St

Devonport

Clicky for flyer

Right, shameless self-promotion flying in the face of all this site stands for. So delete me.

…I’m still here? Good. Art exhibition, very cutting-edge and outre and odd, features almost all the contributors to this site in one form or another. Some in two forms. Some in none. Scary stuff… Come see the prettiness, it is commanded.

01/10/2005

A quick poll…

I have a host of material that is in a near finished state, but before that…
     A few questions for my not-so-adoring public.

     1. Who is actually reading this?

     2. Why?

I ask because I have stats about this site (and its mirror) but often they are completely meaningless. So I ask for clarification.
     Some of you might be… hesitant to respond (I can think of at least one reader who might think twice about e-mailing me), but don’t be shy.
     I only want your mind, not your soul.
     E-mail me with your answers to this address.
     Next time (and soonish), either something on New Zealand TV or my thoughts on the new radio series of ‘The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.’

09/29/2004

Lord Morrisey Morrisey and his wartime chum Stickle in `The Resampled Six Channel Stereogram!’

Well, a good friend told me that I could put a Lord Morrisey Morrisey sketch online for the elucidation of all and sundry, and I thought the idea was good.

I was wrong.

The idea was sound; the problem is all about time.

A few weeks back my writing and lecturing partner, Jon, went to Australia to educate people about the evils of intellectual property rights, a worthy cause and one that also gave me free reign to teach as I pleased for an entire week. I had written a Morrisey and Stickle sketch for the Thursday wherein we would have an example of a conspiracy. Because Jon was to be away we prerecorded his dialogoue and I rewrote the sketch so that Commodore Stickle was giving information over the phone from the fictitious country of Rutultania.

Alright, enough background.

Last night I decided that it was just the right time to quickly bung together all the extant SFX and vocal work, quickly record the rest of the dialogue and then put it all together.

The word ‘quickly’ has never been so wrong.

To produce three minutes worth of work it took me over two and a half hours; had I known it would take so long I would have taken more time with my own voice overs, seeing that the Morrisey, Maxim and Narrator parts were recorded quickly and dirtily. I should have taken the script and worked out, exactly, what my voice should have sounded like at each moment, and I should have been more careful to make sure that the three parts actually sounded different. But, as I thought this was going to be the work of a moment to produce, I did not.

One hopes to learn from this mistake.

More importantly, for the long term, the process was educational. I was using ‘Cacophony,’ an OS X sound editor that supports multiple channels, which was a help when creating the different dialogue tracks and putting music into the background, but the implementation left much to be desired, as it was fairly awkward to place dialogue on to a channel and the inability to play all the channels at once without resampling down to stereo was a definite hindrance. The ‘Jack Danger and Trip Hazard’ material I plan to write post March of next year will be fairly complex pieces of sound engineering, and now I know that professional equipment (or professional software) is a must for this kind of work.

Enough of my worries; for those who want to hear the sketch, here it is: The Mysterious Case of the Aspirant Demagogue Be warned; it really is part of a pedagogy and thus probably only has value when appreciated in a lecture with the surrounding material.

09/29/2004