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Gage Chapter 3 ‘Colony’

Ok ok, in pretty good spirits today, although in the good spirits where I can’t tell my head from my arse and I really don’t know what to do with myself but it’s something.

I got the first nice little chunk of Diana After Dark, might be sticking with that name after all, I dunno, more sleep needs to be on it. And I’m kind of in a tizzy over what to do now, I’ve started reading the witcher books and I was hoping to be struck by some inspiration lightning and it isn’t even raining yet.

Nevertheless I finished the first go around of a plan for the second Diana book and I was triffling with ‘Delta Gamma Di’ or ‘Delta Gamma Diana’ because it’s all about her going through college and joining a sorority to track down a killer that’s using their front lawn as his own personal stage for displaying some cut on girls on. But now I might go with ‘Dearly beloved Diana’ or something like that.

As I said more sleep is needed on top of that, but how much sleep can a man have when there is work to be done.

Work time which I spent playing kingdom come deliverance as it teases me with a penultimate chapter only to throw a fetch quest at me, a series of boring fetch quests right before a big battle. I mean wtf.

I do love the game though, this just feels like padding, which tbf is understandable because it’s followed by two huge battles in a row and then a stealth sequence which had a mandatory failed state which pissed me off. I made a stealth character and then they give you a stealth sequence where your failure is unavoidable. Just fu game haha.

Nah but it’s all good, it’s still an awesome game, I love it and shall review it but I fear my passion won’t be matched by my hateful reviews, I tend not to want to analyse things I like and feel incapable of not analysing things I hate haha.

So I’ve got a lot to be getting on with, first and foremost I need to start putting a package to try and sell Diana to a literary agent and I need to stop dreaming about writing and get back to actually doing it. I think I might just go back to that lovecraft piece I dropped just to keep sharp until I get hit good and hard by a lightning bolt.

That’s about all.

See you…

~

*For the purposes of this record and continuity a transcript from Dram Johanessen (a close personal friend of Gage in his early life) original diary has been added to the text as a first hand account of events and Fords account has been removed as it was noted to be riddled with contradictions, over-exageration and outright fabrications.

September 13, 1848

Oh god’s it’s horrible, I saw it happen but I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe she’d actually do it. As soon as that tall man walked away and got into his carriage I went to his side sure he was dead, his face, oh god his face. I prayed he was dead, his suffering could no doubt be immense.

But by god he lived, his breath in his chest. His heart beating like a steam engine’s hitting the tracks, his will to live reaching up out of hades to grab at life jealously. With the use of Madame Souchang’s carriage we got him into town as quickly as we could. He reacted to no stimuli the entire hours journey and I was sure he couldn’t hold on much longer.

But there was that steady breathing through the hole in his face. There was very little blood, the hole it seemed was quarterized at the moment of penetration. But who was to tell the extent of the damage it had done to the vital organ inside. He’ll certainly never see again out of his left eye, as far as I can tell it’s completely destroyed, oh god. My stomached kicked everytime I looked under the sheet we put over him.

Madame Souchang was inconsolable, she acted almost like it was her brother that ordered it. She claimed no responsibility and was reticent to speak at all about what transpired. Fearing my own head I pressed no further and thanked her for the use of her for the gracious use of her personal motor carriage.

We got into the town of Porterville proper. Which was at the time was simply two rows of wooden victorian style building facing eachother with a well trod dirt road inbetween them.

The sawbones of the town had a practice next to a large furniture store and a grocery on the otherside. It had big protruding castle like struts with what I could only assume were weathervains attached to them. Which to me reminded of something of those books written by Shelley of the monstrous man that came back to life through arcane scientific practice.

Me and a few other of the men took him down from the motor carriage as easy as we could. The large man we had come to call friend who was once as strong and tall as an oak was layed low and meak and lifeless as we carried him through the thin wooden door of the doctors practice.

The inside of the doctors smelled stale, the wooden floor was stained with splotches of god knows what. The doctor was sat with his back to the door at a small writing desk, we set Gage down on a large wooden inspection table of which he barely fit on with his legs dangling off the edge.

The nurse was hanging off the edge of the desk smiling at us as we came in.

The doctor took one look at him as we took the sheet off and his eyes got very narrow and curious his nurse let out a silent scream holding her mouth open. Covering it with her hands screaming quietly with her eyes and then rushing out of the room bounding clumsily into a cabinet stocked with oddly shaped bottles of medicine. Almost knocking it over as she evacuated the room with a loud sound of stair foot falls and doors slamming.

The doctor was a short squat man with bared hairy fore arms under a grey shirt with rolled up sleeves, all of the hair of which was white and grey. A stern appearance with a pair of circular glasses placed at a peak of a receding hairline. He looked confused and angry at first and said something like; “What you bringing that here for? The morticians the street over! Get!”

After we’d assured him the man was still alive (which took some doing) he told us to lift him up on the table as if to humor us. He must have thought we were mad or stupid and if I were him I wouldn’t believe it either for at the time it looked like a train had run over his head or a horse had stomped it in.

He took out his instruments with a sigh and an aggrieved air of wasted time and started to poke and prod at him and then was seemingly struck by a curious itch. He reached back to get his stethoscope which he was about to warm but then thought better of it and placed it on the man’s chest after ripping his shirt. He took it away and his face turned as white as a sheet and he mumbled something the exact line from Shelley’s story, or so as my memory recreates it.

“He’s alive!”

After he’d got over the initial shock of it he started to lick his lips pointing and motioning hurriedly at a drawer one of the men was next to. A young man by the name of Gotfried.

“Get a bottle!” He instructed.

The young lad reached inside and pulled out a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and brought it over. The doctor wrenched it out of his hands like it was the last drop of water on earth and took a long drink and then slammed it down on the table. After he’d sighed and belched a few times he wiped his brow and went about collecting together knives various saws and articles I couldn’t quite identify as a layman. And he yelled for his nurse who was still in the back vomiting.

Eventually she came out and took one look at his face again and rushed back upstairs.

I looked at all the knives and saws that he collected in a metal dish. He coughed and then looked around for something before letting out an aggrieved sigh and bathing the instruments in a splash of his bourbon.

I asked him what they were for and he said almost with an air of incredulity “Surgery, he needs surgery.”

I was confused, not a man of great learning especially not of the medical variety so I asked again, “surgery for what?” thinking he didn’t need to lose more of himself and then it struck me as he said it.

“Goddamit can’t you see the thing sticking out of his damn head?”

Oh god his head was such a mess it didn’t even cross my mind that the rivet would still be lodged in his skull. It was shot right up under his chin and the spike of it was coming right out of the top of his head through his left side and out the top right out of the front like a horn.

“Oh god” I said.

The surgery took hours, but it felt like days, we sat in the doctors while Gage was worked on without anaesthetic in the surgery in the back room.

We didn’t see any of it but we could hear it, the sawing and the smell of hot bone. The shock of it sent some of the men outside and some who were lodged in town decided to head back and rest leaving just me and Gotfried.

20th September 1848

It was a week before he opened his eye again and I would swear in front of a jury it was not the same man. It was like someone had plucked our Phineas Gage and replaced him with another man entirely. He’d been sleeping, fed only liquid solutions administered to him by the nurse. His face mercifully bandaged. Unmercifully the doctor was unable to remove the rod itself. Fear further damage remove the thing might cause. And the black metal horn tip could be spied sticking out of the bandage.

Besides all that there was something about him that was just not right. The way he spoke, the way he looked at me. I’d never known of him to have a temper or a violent streak but he brought one back with him, from wherever he’d been. He snapped at anyone and everyone and I feared that if he were not unable to move he might do injury to himself and others.

I was almost hesitant to wire his wife in new Hampshire. Would it have been kinder to tell her her husband was dead than introduce her to this misshapen shadow of the man she loved. I wondered about their children, without the money he sent how would she care for them?

The doctor said the changes in mood were the result of his injuries, his brain was damaged. Specifically something about his nerves were severed he’s lost almost all sensation in his body. He can’t feel heat or cold or pain or even touch. The affects to his mood he did not further elaborate on. But it’s as if all his other non-tactile senses are heightened and his mental state is not comparable to the man we all knew.

2nd October 1848

His wife Catherine came up from new Hampshire today although I had told her to leave their children with their grandparents. The shock of seeing their father mangled like that would have been too much for them. But when she arrived Gage wouldn’t see her. He outright refused. I thought about what she would think about his face but not just that. The room he occupied had been fitted with a tubescope to keep him occupied during his long recovery but he’d smashed it almost as soon as it was installed. I’d noticed also all the newspapers I’d brought him he’d shredded. And it seemed like any knowledge of the outside world enraged him enough to put him in fits of unadulterated anger.

3rd October 1848

I put Catharine back on a train this morning, she’s a lovely woman, delicate in features and manner. It is truly saddening to see her go without meeting her goal of seeing her husband, but I honestly didn’t know what to tell her. All I could do was assure her that he would be well enough to work soon and we both hoped that once routine took hold he would return to the old Phineas Gage we once knew.

31st October 1848

After nearly two whole months of convalescence the doctor says Phineas should be well enough to continue his life and more imporantly his work. The doctor even made up for him a remarkable prosthesis to cover his scars so as not to alarm the general public. It was a piece of a light wood and some waxen substance painted and moulded to resemble a part of a mans face. He made it from a picture of Phineas we had supplied to as closely resemble his face as possible. Although minor changes had to be made, he was never a spectacle wearer but now a lensless pair was used as a frame to hook the prosthetic on so that the arms of the glasses would hook around his ears to hold it in place. To cover the horn he was instructed to wear a wide brimmed hat at all times.

The rest of the scars and missing hair could be easily covered in the same manner. It looked a lot better than I expected and from a distance you could be mistaken for thinking it was the man. But up close it gave the illusion up as the one unblinking staring glassy eye seemed to follow you around the room.

I felt for the man I truly did. It must have been even more of a crushing blow that his injuries and the time spent off work had resulted in a demotion and I had taken over his role and would do so for the foreseeable future.

Although this did not seem to anger him as much as effects of his surgery. His lack of tactile senses made it very difficult for him to complete the simple tasks I had set him. Many times he would injure himself and others and not even notice. It became very off putting for the men and resulted in vicious conflicts in which Gage was invariably the bloody victor. It was a horrifying sight, he seemed to have reverted to some earlier state of man, a vicious throw back to an earlier age.

His physical presence was also off putting yes but he also seemed to have strange new idea of life and the ruling government which was very unsettling for the men and struck up tensions between the men and the luggers.

He seemed to have gotten it into his head that there was some grand conspiracy of some sort. And that all the news was manufactured lies concocted to keep humans from rising up or some such nonsense.

15th December 1848

Unfortunately today at the behest of the company I had to let Phineas go.

The doctors had cautioned him about drink but he did not care. The great stress sent him deeper into the bottle and unfortunately I had no choice but to fire him.

It has burdened me with a heavy heart but he had become too much of a liability to keep on.

Nevertheless the company has awarded him a sizeable severance package and an early christmas bonus, although I fear he will only drink that.

I feel responsible for all of this I really do. When I told him he was to be let go he didn’t even seem angry, he almost seemed like he expected it.

A great melancholy grips me as I doubt we’ll ever meet again. I suspect he’ll return to his family in new hampshire and grow old and die a happier man now, I hope for his sake he does.

*Ford’s journal continues from here.

After that Gage fell off the face of the earth, he didn’t feel human, he wanted the earth to swallow him up.

He became a wanderer and a thief and a rogue, a bad gambler and a cheat only making enough money to keep his belly full of whiskey and his head dulled and stupid. Returning to his family would have been a lie for he did not feel like the same man. The old Gage was dead and in it’s place this man shambled on.

Sometime in the start of the new year He found himself in a small mining colony in Arkansas, in a town called Rush. They mined zinc up there, the stuff is used in certain alloys they use to make weapons for the capitol.

Needless to say it was a fairly rowdy town without a conventional form of law enforcement but people ususally kept to themselves. a It wasn’t in any great threat of bandits as zinc wasn’t high on their priorities to rob. And most of the miners money was pissed away on booze or women or just gambled.

Miners are off a disposition that any day there could be a cave in and kill them all, so they live each day as if they could be buried under rock the next.

Something Gage seemed to admire, moreover it made it easy to blend in with the revellers who on a good day couldn’t see further than their own feet. Not enough to notice a stranger with an oddly mask like face and a horn on his head.

Although on this night they were especially jovial as a recent election had taken place. A new president had been appointed, A man named Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Spanish American war. It was amusing to them as he had been somewhat of a colourful character before his presidency. Not only that but he’d riden a rising wave of anti-alien sentiment and people were sure that this would mean things would improve for their kind. To them he was the warrior messiah they had hoped to pull them out of their perdition. Although all alien media at the time had done their best to assure humans that things were better than ever for them and they were exceedingly priviledged. There had been a growing resentment formenting in the humans. As although they could fill their bellies for the most part and they were kept distracted with sportsball and a dull harmonic suggestion given off through their tubescopes. They had on an instinctual level felt control of their destinies slipping out of their hands. Sadly they were right but completely unable to understand how right they actually were. And not being smart enough or awake enough as a group to realise this it fell to petty concerns about their jobs. Replacing humans with luggers or with the coming of the industrial revolution high tech machines who would work for less. Bringing the prices down of all goods but destroying the class of people that could buy them. But it was to mask the feeling that they were no longer at home in their own world. So this election had given them hope for some kind of change and reversal of fortune for them and theirs.

The alien media had cemented this notion in them by elevating Taylor up to the level of a mustache twirling villain. A speciesist who would round up aliens and un-normals and send them to die in quarries. Bringing up the history of their supposed persecution Cyclon had underdone from the humans of the past who were to them barbaric and cruel. But this resentment the media had for him and their attempt silence him made the public clamber for him all the more to know what they were not meant to know.

But Gage could not share their optimism and joviality as to them this was a sign that the system was not corrupt. For how so could it not be a democracy if this man who the system hated could be elected to lead it? Sure that proved to them that the system was indeed impartial and this man could free them of corruption.

Gage who could see and was far more cynical and could understand. This was exactly the kind of move the system would make to assuage the fears of corruption in the populace. That this entire conflict was manufactured by the system itself. The previous eleven presidents They’d had were at least partially or ambiguously human. And each time promised the humans whatever they wanted and when their vote was assured carried on whatever policy the president before him had carried out in an unbroken chain of control.

How could there ever be a true democracy when the freedom of choice was between two alien puppets. The freedom to choose being an illusion created for this very feeling the miners were feeling now, of hope and change and a brighter future. And then within the next couple of years they’d be cursing this new president and blaming him for all the problems the system created. And then before anyone could notice they’d swap him out for someone else and the whole thing would start over again.

One thing that was key to the Cyclon agenda was that humans had a short memory and could be conditioned to forget the past. Dooming them to repeat it, allowing them to be kept in an ideological stasis. Never moving forward and always being just on the cusp of acquiring everything they wanted but never fully being able to realise or bring it into reality.

This election was different only in that it was a false triumph. A move calculated by the Cyclon to make the humans think they had beaten the system entirely by simply engaging in it. Thus deflating the rising tensions between human and aliens by making the radical human element think they’d won. At which point the majority of the useful idiots in that movement would think the fight was over and stop entirely. Leaving the more radical elements without a force behind them which meant they could be disposed of without causing too much of a fuss. The radical voices asking for changed would be exposed and defeated by their own victory. The normal people would happily put their heads back in the sand safe in the knowledge that the future for their children would be sunshine and roses from then on. Purely for their signing their name on a piece of paper.

Gage knew better than that, he knew as all men instinctually knew but had been bred to forget. That no change worth having comes without blood, torrents of blood, rivers of blood. Human and alien alike, mountains of corpses that a king would set his throne atop and then and only then would his people truly be free. Only when the system was entirely torn down and burnt to ashes and every alien and human traitor lay dead would there be hope for a brighter tomorrow. And it was this reluctance to accept this price that found Gage living like Jonah but instead of being in the belly of whale he was trapped at the bottom of a bottle.

He could not hope to see his wife and children again because he was not the same man they knew. And he would not burden them with this new terrible knowledge he had. He would forever cloister himself away in the cave of his consciousness with whatever booze he could get his hands on. For fear of what his realisations could bring about for the world and for himself and his family.

By that time booze had become his only comfort, without it he feared he might go mad. Although another man might blurt out what he had come to realise about the world he lived in, he did not. But was secure in the idea that even if he did, it would be considered the raving conspiracies of a mad drunk with a pickled brain.

Later that night he found himself in a card game with a number of these ruddy faced miners who were or at least reaching the same level of drunkiness as Gage himself. Gage was cheating, badly, but everyone at the table was too drunk and happy to notice or care.

All but one man who silently seethed under a firm cowboy hat that looked new and unused which covered most of his face. He was an odd little man with a slightly tanned aspect but with very deep blue eyes that seemed to behold everything with the most profound disdain and curiosity. Through clasped hands he rested his rounded unstubbled chin.

His manner of dress was strangely costume in it’s appearance. Resembling what a cowboy of the previous age might look like in one of the serial fictions they had in new york that cast cow chasers as these romantic figures. Killing villains and romancing farm girls in between eating lots of beans by the campfire. He wore a long black duster a white shirt with an indio looking pattern and a brown waistcoat below it with a necktie with a steerhead clasp. With his hat pulled down he smoked long black cigarillo’s that must have been imported. Nobody paid him any attention least of all Gage who was a long ways into a raging drunk almost falling over himself to spend his ill gotten winnings on more whiskey.

The man with the piercing blue eyes in the unusually tanned face that made him look like a spaniard eyed Gage vociferously. He stubbed his cigarillo out to chew a wooden toothpick in its place. Never once taking his cruel cold steely gaze off Gage who laughed and cracked up with the other drunkards happy for a fleeting moment in their meaningless existence.

After the man had lost a great deal which didn’t seem to bother him all that much. He got up from his chair and bid everyone at the table goodnight with a tip of his rigid cowboy hat before clasping his hands behind his back in an unnatural gesture and clomping his way out of the saloon.

The room went silent for a moment as they watched him go and then burst into uproarious laughter as they assumed he was out of ear shot on the otherside of the saloon door. Which to anyone but a drunken man made perfect sense.

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First impressions of Fallout 4 (totally not a review)

I’m a little ashamed to say I’m on my second play through. Not because I have no life but because when I got into work, one of my friends told me he was on his fourth and I was dismayed.

I’m gonna try and refrain from fangirling too hard because that makes me sick and it just isn’t me. And this is by far a perfect game but its pretty freaking close.

The game itself didn’t take too long to install and load up although I wished I would have just downloaded it so I could have had my own private mini midnight launch instead of waiting feverishly for the post and deluding myself that it might have come a day earlier like that one time ages ago I may have imagined. Although obviously I fucked it up and had to reinstall it because I let it download the update mid installation so it was all installing from the net and I couldn’t see the entire loading bar which drove me nuts so I had to reinstall for sanities sake.

But when it was finally loaded, I started and found myself oddly gripped by the opening live action cinematic and then created my character of which I based on David Morrissey’s depiction of the Governor from Walking Dead. And before you jump down my throat calling me a philistine for using that version and not the fu manchu moustachioed comic and novel version (all of which I’ve read exhaustively, except the latest novel I think), I say fuck you David Morrissey is better looking, face it.
I think his face and his depiction of the Governor is also a lot more rounded and likeable and I was actually sad to see the show stick with the comic storyline and his death, when they went off the rails mid season and used the books a little I thought he might have been remodelled into an ongoing character and that would have been more interesting than just sticking to the source material with a few deviations.
I think his character was perfect for the character displayed by the voice actor for the male protagonist in fallout 3 Brian Delaney. I was initially sceptical about the voiced protagonist as the previous games had silent protagonists and voiced protagonists in rpgs like mass effect can get a little annoying and break immersion slightly because it feels less like you are the main character and more like you’re watching the main character do stuff.
But I have to say it really sold the immersion and the emotion at the start of the game, the game didn’t kid me and expect me to care about the main characters wife or kid (like in fallout 3 where you’re supposed to care about your fictional dad played by Liam Neeson) but I was very aware purely through the voice actor’s acting that the main character did care about his wife and child and that sort of sold the emotion of the game.
And when the ‘event’ happens, I really felt like someone who had been tossed into this hostile landscape, whose home and everything he’s known had been destroyed and had to sleep on the floor of truck stops office while it rained and radiation clouds blew through with only a dog to keep him company. It really felt morose and beautiful and that you had to live another day to get revenge and to rebuild a life for yourself and make something beautiful out of all the ugliness that surrounded you and I really loved it.
Despite that, I was proved right about the downsides of the voiced protagonists, mainly and I see a lot of chatter about this, it’s almost impossible to be evil.
Now I suppose you could just kill everyone but its hardly enslaving people and eating babies a la Fallout 3 is it. And the evil dialogue options just sound angsty and mean in Brian’s voice, he just seems too nice a guy to do all that fucked up shit. So twinned with my David Morrissey Governor smooth talking gunslinger character, he came off less monstrously evil and more misunderstood monster. Less Count Dracula more Frankenstein’s monster.
And to be honest I really dug that, good and evil are so subjective so losing the karma system and making good and evil more ambiguous seemed like a step in the right direction. If anything the karma system just evolved into the companion approval system, so depending on which character you pick to come with you, determines what you want to say or do to impress them. But again not one companion is Hannibal fucking lector, where would be the practicality of that? Every character, evil, cruel, vindictive or not has to be in some way likeable or redeemable so that you enjoy their character and want to follow their progression and I think Bethesda delivers on that well.
The factions are also really interesting and have their own sort of style; on my first play through I sided with the minutemen and set about uniting the settlements of the commonwealth, basically creating a people’s army. I don’t know what it is about this game that’s different from elder scrolls, in Skyrim and Oblivion I really didn’t see a problem with joining the mages guild and using the magic I learned for a little bit of thieving on the side. Or joining the fighter’s guild and then turning those talents to assassination, but in F4 the factions are a little more involved, a little more compelling. I couldn’t swear allegiance to the minutemen and then swear an oath of service to the Brotherhood of steel, it really feels like you’re either one or other and each faction is heavily tied into the main plot of the game unlike in Elder scrolls where each faction is its own quest line in a way. I can’t say which I like more to be honest; I think they both have merit.
The game play is great, the exploration (which is always the crux of rpgs like this) is top notch, the anal crafting is minecraft levels of addictive, I literally had to pull myself away from it just to actually play the game main game it’s so intoxicatingly addictive.
I think they really nailed the levelling and perk system too; it’s perfect for someone like me that likes to create a lot of distinct characters and loathes everyman grinders who spend ages making a character that’s good at literally everything. I’m sitting her playing my talker, small guns character and I can’t wait to start a big guns character who swings bats at people, now I’m playing that character and I can’t wait to play my slashy stealthy character who uses silenced weapons and crafts his own explosive traps.
But the game as a lot of people have said; is not really an rpg, the dialogue wheel is a little stunted and the voice actor does make it seem like you’re further away from the actions than you’d like.
Overall, I’m enthralled by it, I want to get lost in it, I almost feel like I rush it just to try and absorb everything I can get, I want to experience everything and I can’t wait for dlc.

 

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Hype… hype never changes.

I, like probably millions of other manchildren (and maybe actual children) are hyped as fuck for Fallout 4 which releases next Tuesday, by released I mean I get to wait half the day for it to install on my Xbox one -_-.
I just thought I’d have some fun rambling about it because I’m constantly in these facebook groups either bitching about New Vegas (I won’t shake that fucking tree here ha-ha) or laughing at people comparing it to modern shooter graphics.

I’m almost at a loss for the levels of fanboyism I’m holding in, sheer unadulterated pure uncut 100% Columbian hype.

But I can’t help feelings a little bit iffy, I don’t know if it’s just because Fallout has become so mainstream over the years. For a title so niche to gain such mainstream appeal is good but also troubling to me, I hasten to add I didn’t play the original Fallout games until I saw Fallout 4 was being released and I needed an outlet for my building hype.
So I’m by no means an OG Fallout gamer, but I’m not a dirty casual either, I’m a console peasant who played his first Fallout game on a ps2, yeah it was Fallout BOS. I liked it because it was like Baldur’s Gate with guns and powerfist and it’s actually the first and only Fallout game where you got to play a ghoul.

After that I saw Fallout 3 come out and being a massive Oblivion fan it completely had me and had me bad, for months. I truly loved that game, the music, the atmosphere, the guns. Although overall it ranked as something of a letdown but as the constant apologist I blame myself for building it up so much something I’m desperately trying to resist with Fallout 4.
It was mainly the story and the levelling system I took issue with, coming out of Oblivion I found just putting numbers into a stat sort of unsatisfying as opposed to actually practicing the skill to build it up in Oblivion. Which I found more realistic; the more you swing a sword the better you get at it, but in Fallout it didn’t matter you just levelled up for completing missions and could spend skill points however you wanted even in skills you didn’t use.
But I had issues even with that system in Oblivion to be fair because I couldn’t resist once I had trained with one skill to the max to train with another until I mastered them all, which took some of the punch out of the game. The new levelling system for Fallout 4 looks pretty interesting and I’m actually really happy that it’s been streamlined and something that always annoyed me about previous Fallout games has been addressed.

Pistols, they never get pistols right, because you find one at the start and use it until you find some super mega blaster or some huge shotgun and then you never see it again but finally Bethesda have made pistols their own skill as opposed to just reducing it to small guns and big guns. So in a way they’ve streamlined it but also made it more intricate since every type of weapon not just its class has its own skill so you have a small guns skill but then an individual pistol/shotgun/assault rifle skill that focuses on one particular type of weapon with its own special attributes. Which I think is such a great idea because now you can literally make and use any gun you feel suits you best and your play style. Whether you want to be a long range sniper or a hip shooter pistolero or a shotgun surgeon. I think it’s just a great idea that gives every weapon a use and a purpose as opposed to just being something that clutters your inventory and is never used.

All games have their problems and they all reach a state of terminal velocity where they can’t satisfy the way they could at the start.

Also I had problems with the story of Fallout 3, not necessarily with the quality, I have taken to taking videogame storylines with a pinch of salt as of late, because they will always be secondary to fun gameplay and I’ve come to accept that. Waiting for an emotional rollercoaster of a game that Spielberg would be proud of is just too much to ask and games that try are hit and miss coming somewhere between tear jerking if a little tacky Last of Us vs. Engaging if completely insane pretty much any game by David Cage (Heavy Rain, Fahrenheit Syndrome, Beyond Two Souls) but I digress, I’ll get into that in more depth in a later blog probably.
The problem I had with the story is that there wasn’t very much of it, and that’s not to say they weren’t lots of quests and characters, what I mean were there were certain main quest lines that had achievements attached to them. And the problem I have with that is it just makes the game seem less fluid, less pick up and play, I liked how in Oblivion you could literally walk into any tavern or come across a stranger and be swept up in a harrowing quest and then get a piece of special equipment.
There are elements of that in Fallout 3 but I just felt like it was more rigid and a little less forgiving. But regardless of that I still found myself just exploring for hours completely ignoring the story for the most part. I spend probably 80% of my time on Fallout 3 just exploring and making up or piecing together stories from the surroundings and things I find and I think that’s a great strength of all Bethesda games. A lot of the times they just sit back and let the surroundings tell the story, they give the gamer the pieces and they have to put it together themselves which makes them that more engaged in the story.
That was just one thing I worried about looking over the leaked achievements for Fallout 4, they’re doing the same thing with the main story quests, giving them achievements for completion. I dunno, I just think money and the xp and the fun alone should be reward enough, but it’s just a pet peeve.
Another thing that worried me is the changes to the dialogue, it’s changed from a box of text where you select lines, to a more Mass Effect style dialogue wheel, now I see a lot of ‘genius’s’ and gaming hipsters saying this is Fallout ‘Dumbing down’ and to an extent when games fall into the mainstream there is a level of streamlining they go through to maximise their appeal like with Skyrim. But to anyone with common sense, the reason dialogue wheel replaced the text box is because we have a voiced protagonist for the first time in Fallout history and he only has so many words he can say, so unfortunately dialogue will be more limited.

Whether this improves immersion into the game or makes it worse I can’t say until I play it on Tuesday (More likely Wednesday, fuck took like a week to install eso and now I never play it -_-). I can’t say listening to Captain’s Shepherd’s monotone voice for hours on end with its varying inflection from anger to *shudders* flirtation increased anything but my threshold for cringe.

But this is Fallout, this is Bethesda, Bioware is but flies compared to Vigo!.. I mean Todd Howard.

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Breakdown of the first issue of Three Ring and some Reviews.

I wanted to blog about the first issue of Three Ring Samurai and Bat Country in more detail but I think I’ll tackle them separately and talk more broadly on how I feel about first issues because I find I feel quite strongly about them.

To me the first issue of a comic is like an introduction to an essay or a film or anything of that nature, it sets up the plot but it also has to stand almost on its own. I read so many indie comics who see the first issue as almost a hurdle to be jumped as swiftly and as neatly as possible to get to the ‘good bits’ but if you have ‘good bits’ why aren’t they in the first issue people will see?
You have to give people a reason to want to get to the ‘good bits’, I’m not going to read your entire graphic novel and then decide whether or not it was worth my time at the end. I’m going to see what the first issue is telling me and decide from that moment whether to keep reading or not.

So in my mind the first issue should almost encapsulate everything you want to say or achieve throughout the entire comic. It’s not the start of a story, it IS the whole story. I read quite a few comics that start at the beginning despite nothing really happening, and slowly building to that point.

A comic is not like a novel, you have to grab people’s attention as soon as possible or you’ll never have it. I’d structure it so it started at or after the inciting incident and work backwards, it’s a common device but that’s because it works and if you think you can’t make a common device work for you or you can’t make something like that fresh and exciting or scoff at cliché’s you really shouldn’t be a writer. Because that’s all we do, nothing is original, nothing is new, everything is a cliché, we’ve been on this planet for thousands of years as a species, we have to keep recycling and keep mixing things up to keep… LIFE interesting. It’s not what you write about, its how you write about it that makes what you do interesting.
Now my post apocalyptic diesel punk samurai clown epic, Three Ring Samurai, if I may be so modest has an oddly modest first issue in comparison from where the story goes. I see the premise, and the elevator pitch alone is incredibly flamboyant and done by anyone else it would too silly, too wacky and just wouldn’t work. I wanted to go for a more anime like feel, where there can be silliness and there can be wackiness but you always understand that there are real world consequences and life and death and it’ll be at its core a serious story because in my opinion those are the stories I like and want to tell.

I think seriousness and sadness and humour work off each other well and in some instances deepen eachother. It’s like twin peaks, again; you have all this wackiness going on in the episode but by the end you have to remember that Laura is dead and that’s what the show is about, it’s a comedy surrounding a tragedy and only the end can truly define where the pointer lands.

So with the first issue I really wanted to undersell it and be as subtle as I possibly could so that I could contain the bombastic title and concept and really blue ball the reader, as well as giving them a little something that would make them want to read the next issue (which is still being drawn) and give them a feel for the tone of entire series.

I really had to restrain myself because the concept is so rich and so fucking explosive, it’s almost too tempting to take it and run and just burn yourself out. But I wanted a really plodding and structured approach. And I know I said I hated comics that took a long time to get going but I think this comic had enough momentum behind it in terms of interest with the unique subject matter to cut me a little slack if just for the first issue. To be a little mysterious, a little enigmatic even in a comic that is so tongue in cheek at its core as this.

So the first page, I read that and I hear Ron Perlman’s voice saying ‘War, war never changes’, and I just can’t resist, the zoom out on the post apocalyptic setting, I really wanted to give a feel of scope and loss with the idea that people were still clinging on to something which is Fallout at its heart.

We’re introduced to these two kids, like the wastelands answer to tin tin, two innocents bounding onto some dark strange discovery and this is how we’re introduced to our hero. I tried to use this to set the tone in terms of the fact the kids didn’t find it strange to find a dead body, the light normality of death being so prevalent in a harsh wasteland.

Pookie is almost like an alien or a baby or a fish wacked on the head and brought back to life. With the scenes of the shack, I almost wanted a sleepy feel, a sort of cool peace that fell on the wasteland at dusk in contrast to the chaos of the day.

I had a lot of fun with the kids, sneaking in exposition and building up to the character of Pookie by essentially mocking him in this cartoony anime sort of way. I want him to be this figure of fun, a silly character that can fall on his ass and make a fool of himself because he’s not afraid of being a fool because he knows when it comes down to it, he’ll have the last laugh.

The grandpa character is a sort of wily comic relief, someone to bounce weird jokes off the kids (fuck just noticed a spelling mistake haha). Someone who plays dumb to lull people into a false sense of security but secretly knows more than he lets on. And then we can have this hushed voices real talk between him and Pookie, nods and gestures of two people in tune in some way.

The dream sequences are something I plucked directly from the opening sequence of David Lynch’s Elephantman. I wanted something surreal but also very silly, and I really can’t get away with genuine serious surrealism. I’ve always been more drawn to comedy surrealism like Luis Bunuel and to some extent David Lynch, I find he takes his surrealism (besides possibly Eraserhead, that movie freaks a lot of people out but I found it quite silly and funny in a way) very lightly and with many pinches of salt.

I think if I remember correctly, the reason I made it elephants is mainly because I loved the way Ike (The artist) drew the elephant on the opening page and then I took the opening sequence from David Lynch’s Elephantman, which is a pretty fucking weird intro and ran with it. I’m pretty sure it’s an elephant rape scene, or that’s at least what he’s hinting at, I wouldn’t put that past him to be fair, he’s done weirder shit than that.

I shamelessly stole the Musashi joke from Champloo. I have no shame, it’s just too funny and I read the book of the five rings before I started writing this, so why the fuck not?

We’re introduced to Pookie in earnest, I always like characters with silly names, it almost makes it twice as amazing when they do something incredible, I almost wish I came up with it but I think that was all Ike as is the original concept.

Only 11 pages in do we get to the meat of the story. Pookie has been robbed and the natural imperative of gramps is just to let it go, some stuff isn’t worth your life and Pookie is injured, but Pookie is not like them. Someone takes something from him, he gets it back. He is almost an alien, dropped into a dog eat dog world with an inordinately large set of teeth. This is where I like to think I injected some of the Cain in Kung Fu elements I wanted to bring forward. A lone wanderer, from a strange culture, a warrior with incredible skill plucked out of a fantasy; an almost mockery to human potential, an anime character walking Deus Ex Machina.

The main purpose of this issue is that Pookie was essentially destroyed, his life, his past. He was killed, reborn and everything he knew stripped away from him. So now he has to find himself, he has to decide who he is in this new world, without the world he’d come to know. The first thing he’s drawn to is his sword and violence because that’s all he’d known all his life.

In a lot of ways this is a coming of age story, someone thrown out of their old life like Kung Fu and thrust into a strange new world, forced to make sense of who he has to become to survive.

This whole issue is essentially about Pookie’s rebirth (fuck that’s pretentious), he’s trying to establish who he really is, because for so long he was one thing (no spoilers); it was his whole world, his identity and in one moment it’s taken from him and now he has to re-establish his identity and who he is as a character. As a writer it was and is a tricky character to write for because he’s almost forming himself with every page, piecing himself together like Doctor Manhattan.

I’m oddly proud of the sword, a sword with a handle like one of those cheesy laughing boxes Jack Nicholson joker has at the end of Batman. He always gets the last laugh even if he dies. I sort of wanted to mock the idea of swords in general.

A katana is as clichéd as you can get these days, so saturated in popular culture. I wanted to make his sword out to be some ridiculous piece of joke shop crap, a silly show piece, a gimmick for laughs, a sword that laughs for a man that doesn’t need to.

It’s also sort of homage to my early knife collection. I bought this crappy machete from Doncaster market when I was like 13 I think. It had a dragon or lions head handle with glowing led’s for eyes that lit up when you pressed a button, jesus what the fuck was I thinking?

The combat I wanted to keep as theatrical as possible, death is a show, it had to be fairly flash but also brutally inefficient. He’s a monster, a vicious killer, who expects applause for his butchery, someone shaped by the brutality of the vicious curiosity of a bloodthirsty crowd egging him on to further heights of gut-wrenching violence. To him violence and killing is a parlour trick, it’s almost a joke, like hitting someone in the face with a custard pie.

That’s how I wanted to capture this element of silliness in this very grotesque and ultra-violent package. I really wanted to hone that feeling of 80’s action movie ultra-violence, like Robocop. Someone is torn apart in this ridiculously over the top death sequence but it’s wrapped up in this really silly camp vibe that makes it all the more sinister and weird.

Ok maybe the ending with the cheesy ‘see ya around kid’ was a little too much but I couldn’t resist. I wanted to end it in a way that made it uncertain where he was going, he was just going somewhere, anywhere to forge a new Pookie, one that followed his own rules and didn’t need no stinkin’ circus.

Well how did I do? haha. Fuck I waffled on like a man possessed, if you read this far through I commend you.

All in all not a lot happens but I think it’s a tight and tidy package, I’ve got a handful of positive reviews for it under my belt already and I feel confident it was a solid first issue. but it gives enough, succinctly I think, to grab the attention for another issue or two.

Reviewses!

http://comicsgrinder.com/2015/08/26/webcomic-review-three-ring-samurai/

http://madness-inc.tumblr.com/post/127810697999/review-three-ring-samurai

http://www.comiccrusaders.com/webcomic-wednesday-review-three-ring-samurai/

Well I hope you like it anyway, I’ve rambled enough for a lifetime, as always you can check it out for free at; http://tapastic.com/series/Three-Ring-Samurai

Thanks for reading, peace out.

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Blue Velvet

It sounds more and more pretentious every time I say it but one of my biggest influences when I write right now and in the creative process in general is David Lynch.

Which is odd to say it’s pretentious because Lynch’s work, I find remarkably unpretentious, so distinctly odd without necessarily trying to be, just unrestrainedly uncommon and intriguing. Every one of his films and Twin Peaks is almost like someone took the idea of film making or a tv show and handed it to an Alien and he made his own interpretation that was like what had come before but so drastically but indescribably different. Something you just couldn’t put your finger on but it was rolling around in your brain itching in the corners of your eyes and just couldn’t get it.

I’m not a lifelong fan, I had seen the Elephantman and Dune but I think I was too young to have been caught up in Twin Peaks at the time of its release and those two movies are probably the worst ones to watch in retrospect. Both films are constrained by one being true and the other being based on a sci-fi novel.

So he slipped through the cracks, while I was quite happy with my Tarantino’s and my Scorcese’s and whomever else grazed my adolescent movie palate.

Until I saw a film that really struck an odd note with me that sticks with me even now and no it wasn’t actually by David Lynch *plot twist* it was by Jennifer Lynch, his talented daughter. The movie was called Surveillance, a really haunting off kilter thriller, I love even to this day. But what really stuck with me was the sound track.

The music was haunting and jarring and really something else, I couldn’t help tracking down the soundtrack and finding my favourite song from the film which was called ‘Speed Roadster’ written and performed by… David Lynch.
Who was this alternative/electro/country sounding singer I’d never heard of but couldn’t get enough of; oh what he’s the director’s father? And he’s a writer/director (/among other things, painter/actor) as well? Wow.

Then rather ashamedly I started to put together the dots and I had heard a lot of talk about I think True Detective and how it was ‘like twin peaks’ which in some respects is true. It does capture that haunting sorrow of the unavoidable nature of life and the boundless horror of the unknown (a little Lovecraftian in that respect too, despite it being based on the Yellow King mythos). I may be rewriting my own history here, I can’t be sure, so instead of watching True Detective I watched Twin Peaks (And then eventually True detective) and I was captivated, a little bored/confused at times but I had to keep watching.

There was just something about it, something that made me want to laugh but also cry bitterly and it held me in this state between sorrow and a drunk sort of happiness and each emotion seemed to feed off the other and deepen, the depths of the humour dug larger holes for the sorrow to hide and when the credits rolled over Laura’s face you remembered why you were here.

Frankly I was amazed that such a compelling show could be written about one murder, I can hardly concentrate long enough through an episode of csi or the walking dead where the cast drops like flies.

It was amazing that one fictional person’s life could touch so many people in so many different ways and although she wasn’t technically a character, Laura was the show.

So I initially got into David Lynch not even knowing he made films or tv shows, I just thought he was a weird old guy that made cool music. I loved introducing my brother to Lynch because we watched all his films together and I can’t remember if we watched the Twin Peaks movie Fire walk with me first or not but he hadn’t seen the show before watching. There’s this bit where some weird shit happens and my brother turns to me expecting me to know what the fuck it means because I watched the show and I was like; ‘Dude, I don’t fucking know’ and it was pretty funny.
I was told it didn’t matter if you watched the movie or the show first but I’m glad I watched the show first because it completely depicts Laura’s murder, something I think should never have been done.

In the classic Poe style mystery, the greatest mysteries are the ones that go unsolved.

But producers and ratings and money and bing bang boom, they ruined the whole mystery and then the show limped on after until it eventually keeled over with the help of Billy Zane??

Season 2 in my opinion is a complete clusterfuck, I hold out hope for the reboot, but I intend to keep my expectations as low as possible and coddle myself in the warm embrace of my favourite Lynch films, Blue Velvet being one.

The thing that separates Lynch from any other of my influences is that I not only learnt a lot about story telling from him but also about the creative process in general. I think it’s in a Tom Waits song (Of which the name escapes me) where he says David Lynch told him that he had to sit in a comfy chair and close his eyes and wait for the big one to come along.

Although he may have been alluding to his transcendental meditation woo of which I am not subscribed (I can sit in a chair with my eyes closed without paying like ten quid a month to some swami or whatever) as a fan of Lovecraft this struck a chord with me.

There’s a part of me that is deeply sceptical of woo, all things woo but there’s another part that believes that stories are located in a river in a different dimension and when we close our eyes and concentrate we can catch the odd big fish.
All stories are essentially the same in structure but the core principals of the story come from somewhere else, they’re pieced together from dreams and movies and conversations and some ultra-terrestrial other or just plain pulled out of your ass.

But sometimes I can’t help feeling that I’m not creating stories, I’m just uncovering something that was already there or giving life to something long dead and that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, despite it most likely being bullshit it gives me a nice Lovecraft boner, like I’m in my own story and some ungodly horror is going to burst into the room and tentacle rape me.. what was that noise? On the stairs, it can’t be…*gasp* my eyes, my ey..*indiscernible screaming*.

Check out more strips at Jeffrey Dahmer and Greg the comic strip
And my Lynchian mystery comic here Bat Country

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Walk the Earth like Pookie in Three Ring Samurai.

Forgive me in advance for the rambling nature of this blog, I really don’t have a plan, I just have two words ‘Kung fu’.

For those not familiar with it, Kung Fu is a tv show with David Carradine playing a half Chinese half American boy raised in a shaolin temple after both his parents are killed by a tyrannical Emperor.
The story is based around his travels to seek out his family in America after his master is killed he must flee china wanted for killing the emperors son in an act of hot on the spot vengeance for the unwarranted killing.

He travels America looking for his family, evading the snare of the emperor and getting into scrapes and adventures, meeting interesting people along the way. With each new adventure a piece of his teachings is called upon to assist him and make sense of a world he’s only just coming face to face with.
Secluded all his life Caine is as a child with the fighting skills of a shaolin priest, through a series of flashback his past is brought to light to help him overcome and decide on certain courses of action to aid him in his adventures.

~

I initially watched the show out of the blue, maybe as some form of research for 3 Ring, I know I definitely shamelessly ripped a lot off for the issue plan, I borrowed a lot of ideas and I in an upcoming arc and I decided to completely parody the montage of Caine’s training in the shaolin temple and make it Pookie’s ridiculous clown training, I just couldn’t resist.

I really, really loved the style; the way the story was structured in the first season was perfect, calling on back-story applying it to current plot. It worked really well because you learned more about him every episode in a way that felt very consistent. And every episode you learnt a valuable and somewhat touching lesson.

It padded the main plot nicely as we learned about Caine throughout his various adventures and then kept us interested in the search for his brother and the threat of the Emperor on his heels and for a guy that had never done kung fu before kung fu David Carradine isn’t half bad as an actor or a fighter coming from someone who knows kung fu. He wasn’t amazing and he did use a stunt double in season one I believe but ditched that for his own stunts in later seasons.

Long story short I loved the show and I wanted the same feel for 3 Ring Samurai, I wanted every arc to be a self contained movie, something that engaged people and had action and drama and suspense and just enough thread of main plot to keep people reading but not enough to overwhelm them.

Sadly the second two seasons of Kung fu really fell short for me and I must admit I almost breathed a sigh of relief, I’m not proud to admit I take pleasure in the downfall of other but I think a lot of people feel shadenfreud a lot more than they’d like to admit. I was relieved to see the show fall because to live up to that, for it to continue at that level of quality would have rendered my endeavours to emulate it seem futile.

I don’t blame the show for this, I blame the times and the idea that writing staff are disposable, they chose to change the writers for season two and with the nature of television in the seventies I feel like they had to make it more consumable for people to watch as re-runs.

Tv wasn’t like how it is now with netflix and the internet, you couldn’t choose to watch a tv show whenever you wanted, and watch them in order, you watched them when they were on, in the order they were on and if you missed an episode you had to watch it in a rerun. You couldn’t just buy the boxset on dvd.
So each episode had to be standalone and almost interchangeable in terms of the timeline of the story so someone could watch any episode in any order and still keep up and enjoy the show.
This change of writers and restructuring of the show is a noticeable decline in cogent plot and although I watched each season through it didn’t measure up in any shape or form to season one.

I don’t know why but my mind keeps drawing back to Twin Peaks and the dire mistake of revealing the mystery around the death of Laura Palmer half way between season two which without a doubt killed the show. Lynch himself said he never wanted to reveal the mystery and I and Edgar Allen Poe would have agreed that the greatest mystery is one that goes unsolved. It was the fault of the producers of the show that forced him to reveal the mystery and then have the show limp on to the end without much a hook to keep the show going.
It’s almost amazing to even think that an entire tv show could be framed around one murder or one person’s life like Kung Fu. But it can because people themselves can be unsolvable mysteries.
And every time the credits rolled over Laura Palmer’s picture I would feel a pang of sorrow for the mystery of her life and even more so for the tawdry reveal of that perfect mystery and then the shop bought replacement mystery awkwardly wedged in its place.

I think if Kung Fu were re-made today it would be an incredibly feat but also a really rewarding one, (Note to self, call Keanu Reeves ;)). This is the golden age of television where the possibilities for stories and budgets and scope and acting talent are virtually limitless and at a time where there is so much pressure on the structure of films and now games it’s really necessary.

So please forgive the faux fanboy ranting, I just wanted to give some perspective to the narrative structure and style of 3 Ring, think Kung Fu meets Fallout 4 haha.

Peace out people.

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Indie comics, clown samurais, post apocalyptic swashbuckling in very used cars.

Read issue one for free.

I work on a couple of indie comics; I’d say each is a little piece of me, each with its own life. This is sort of a dark reflection of my love of anime and bastardised Japanese/Asian culture.

3 Ring Samurai is a diesel-punk clown samurai revenge story. It’s basically like Caine in Kung Fu if he was a clown and… err a samurai and not a Buddhist monk… or bald..or a clown??

Pookie is left for dead and discovered on a pile of trash by some scavenger kids who with the help of their creepy grandpa nurse him back to health so he can begin his long road to revenge and trying to find some shoes that fit.

It’s based in a world a kin to fallout, but instead of the brotherhood of steel, an order out of the military applying Knightly codes to a post apocalyptic world to bring order out of chaos, the focus is on a group applying a circus code on the wastelands bringing entertainment and blood to the wastes.

The circus is like a travelling Show-gunate (get it? Right yeah killing myself, I’ll stop, just unsee that) bringing justice, a literal bread and circus circus, where criminals are put to death by the code of the circus entertainers trained to murder in really interesting ways.

But teh’applecart has been upset and Pookie has been cast out, accused of a heinous crime and now he’s to be hunted by his ex-brothers in arms for a crime he may or may not have committed.

Terrible overview over, this comic came about when I was trawling those hapless comic sites on facebook, where people huddle around the digital equivalent of a trashcan fire trying to keep their creativity warm while working for a living as a barista giving out double mocha handjobs or whatever.
So I squeezed my way around the garbage fire and threw out a few of my short stories and some of them hit home and I caught the attention of Mike (Now Ike, there was already a Mike Golden) with a weird clown story of my own about sexy killer clowns and electric kitchen knives and menstrual blood and that’s enough of that.

We bumped into each other again in a grindhouse style facebook group talking about commissioning some little grindhouse stories that never got off the ground (as is the case with most indie shorts) and in a few other debilitatingly depressing comic groups where people try to rub their creative spark between their fat middle age thighs hoping it’ll catch fire and pimply teens with ‘gender issues’ write the most banal tripe that would turn a donkey to Braille.

So of course as in love with me as Mike was (;)) he jumped at the chance to work with me again at which point, I was like, ‘Why don’t we just do our own thing?’ since we were both tired of being let down by the flakes of facebook. We connected over a similar work ethic and a love of all things martial arts. Him being into those fancy named Filipino arts with sticks and sharp sticks flailing about and me with my taekwondo and kung fu and fencing for all those years.
We thought we could put something together that would blend post apocalyptic punk tongue in cheek fun and classic kung fu movies and samurai flicks into one odd package.

So I set forth on a journey of rediscovery, I’d done kung fu for a number of years (4 to be exact) and taekwondo since I was about 12 but oddly I was never that into martial arts movies. The only one at the time I watched more than once was Romeo must die and that’s only because it came with our first dvd player so it was the only one we had.

But maybe a year or two ago, I started getting into obscure 90’s rap for some reason and I find a nice niche in the Wu Tang Clan which lead to a fascination with the RZA, being a fan of some of his scores from movies like ‘Ghost Dog’. I felt obliged to watch his attempt at a classic kung fu movie ‘The man with the iron fists’.

Needless to say it was fucking atrocious, and I never want to see a movie with Russell Crowe in it ever again. But I fell in love with the style and I wanted to explore that more. So I started watching movies like ‘Fist of the white lotus’ and ‘Five Deadly Venoms’ and my personal favourite ’36th Chamber of Shaolin’ (Or anything thing with Gordon Liu in it tbf) and I couldn’t get enough. The style, the fights, the minimal yet effective stories.
Then I watched ‘Kung Fu’ the tv show with David Carradine playing Caine the stoic shaolin monk and it was sealed. That’s not to say that I don’t see why it was cancelled, the last two seasons are awful but I don’t blame the show for that. It was made in the wrong time I think, each episode was designed to be easily consumable on its own, like a mini movie for the purpose of reruns, so you could just watch a random episode and enjoy it without having to know the context leading up to that point (Whereas today you have the internet and netflix so you can have a flowing story and watch the episodes in order to keep up with a consistent plot). And because of that it lost its grasp on a main plot and then when it tried to rekindle that, it fumbled it horrible.

But the first season I found spellbinding and I realise if I keep going on about it, this blog is going to be three times as long as it has to be. So I’ll wrap it up by just saying, I found every episode of the first season emblematic of everything I want to do with 3 Ring; Punchy and fun and enigmatic, with a strong mysterious story that clings to a tight back story slowly unfolding episode to episode filling out the character of the hero and propelling the story forward in a way that keeps the reader/watcher coming back for more.

that keeps readers wanting more and more.

See you…

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