Graeme: Hi Chris, you have a new account. Your username is chriseng and your temporary password is forestocelot.

Me: I want my new pen name to be “Forest Ocelot”. It sounds like a character from Metal Gear Solid… a character who sneakily eats a lot of Doritos and covertly watches Buffy from inside his blanket fort.

Graeme: That sounds like the best activity. I loved the cardboard box suit in that game. ‘oh, don’t mind me, i’m just a cardboard box someone left here’

I can totally imagine the game controls too. Like you have two views, one is ‘fort view’ where you have a little /\ slot to peek through and you have to use some combination of index finger paddles to strafe and zoom, and analog joystick to view the screen, and if you stay in the same position for too long then your arm starts to hurt so it glows red on the little body of the man on the top left corner of the screen, and if it gets too sore then your view starts to waaver and you collapse, so you have to shift from one arm-lean to the other all while keeping your view zoomed in on the television. while you covertly watch buffy, you have to zoom in untill you can see the relevant action on the tv, and a counter starts to run on the bottom of your screen indicating how long you’ve watched for, but you loose points for watching commercials, so you have to quickly not look at the tv, and guess how long the commerials are gonna be, and eat as many doritos as you can. but here’s the catch, you run out of doritos halfway through the first commercial, and so you have to_leave_ the blanket fort, but you don’t want to, so you have to sneak out of the fort, and make your way to your backpack (doritos are not in the kitchen, that is stupid, who keeps doritos in the kitchen). and make it back before the commercials are over. So it switches to godview perspective, and you’re limping because your leg went asleep.

.. yah, forest ocelot. totally best videogame charater ever.

My first installment as film columnist for This Magazine is on newsstands now and online for the electronically inclined (which will no doubt be most of you). If you were wondering how I felt about the portrayal of Vikings in the upcoming movie Pathfinder, well, this is your chance to find out all the gory details.

So, what’s new this week? More writing, more research (should that be “Mo’ Writin’ Mo’ Reserch”?) and Mrs. C is off in delightful Calgary getting drunk with her co-workers.

There’s really not a lot to report on other than that (I mean, I could tell you about all the research I’ve done on volcanic phenomena, but I’m pretty sure you don’t wanna know), so I’ll just post a couple of links:

PlanetQuest: New Worlds Atlas: How awesome is it that you can check out every single planet that NASA knows about, zooming in and getting info on them in a 3-D model? Also, how awesome are belly-dancing punk-y astromoners? The answer to both questions is a not surprising “super-awesome.”

Philip Straub: I think he is one of my new favourite artists. Check out all of his stuff, but take special care to flip through his “Concepts” section. This is my new desktop wallpaper. “Hey, Philip. That was my mind. And you blew it. Thanks so much. No, really, thanks.”

And, finally, I’d like to say that this never stops being funny. Ever:

“Sy Hoyven…den…sen.” Brilliant.

It’s been a little more than a week since I last checked in, but here’s some of what’s been up with me.

Personal:
- I woke up at 7am yesterday morning, when the alarm went off. I dutifully got up and started puttering around the house half-asleep, dimly aware in the back of my mind that something was not entirely right, but unable to put my finger on it. After about ten minutes I figured out that it was, in fact, my day off and the alarm was for my wife. I went back to bed and slept restlessly for another couple of hours. That sucks.

Books:
- I’ve ploughed through a whole pile of graphic novels lately and I’ll be posting another installment of the books I’ve read pretty soon to catch up with the backlog.

Music:
- I saw Polysics last Friday and they were everything I’d hoped they’d be and more. Seriously, I haven’t had that much fun at a show in ages. Probably years. I could go off for pages telling you why they’re amazing, but in the interests of saving myself 1000 words, I’m just going to post a picture that my friend Brian did of Hiroyuki, the lead singer:

I Love My Friends, Cont.:
- Lisa surprised me after All-You-Can-Eat-Sushi on Friday night with another late Christmas present–two cases of Squirt brought up from the States. Man, I love Squirt and I love my friends. They are both good to me.

Writing:
- This is what’s been taking up the lion’s share of my time. I’ve been working on something original, neat and fun. It’s the science-fiction project that I hinted at a few entries back and it’s starting to coalesce into something tangible. There should be something concrete to show the world within the next month and I’m chomping at the bit to get it there. Right, back to work on it.

As a final note, though:

You know, for all my g33kiness, I never got into hard sci-fi that much. I read fantasy, modern fantasy and less science-based science-fiction, but I never spent too much time reading books on interstellar conquest and colonisation. Now I’ve got a new project I’m working out the details for and, as a personal challenge to myself (since I’ve never played in this particular sandbox), I thought I’d try my hand at space opera.

So, with that in mind, I trotted down to my friendly neighbourhood used book store and traded in some old books for a few new ones. I picked up:

- Armor - John Steakley
- Ringworld - Larry Niven
- Janissaries - Jerry Pournelle

Now here’s my question to you–my local literary advisor (Chris Brayshaw of Pulp Fiction) has recommended Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds to me as leading practitioners of the genre (and I will be picking them up at my earliest possible convenience), but do you have any favourites? Any authors or titles (new or old) that make you think, “Chris must read this if he is truly to understand the nuance of the space opera”? I’ve read the Wikipedia entry and it has a number of suggestions, but I want some advice from my trusted friends. Thank you.

EDIT: Mrs. C’s dad gave me some recommendations:

- Force of God and Anvil of Stars - Greg Bear
- Footfall and the Known Space series - Larry Niven

And my step-dad’s favourite series right now is the Honor Harrington books by David Weber, so I’ll probably be giving one of those a try soon.

Wow, it’s been a hell of a week. Not in a bad way, mind you, just in the way that everything decides it has to happen at once. Here’s the pertinent bits in point form.

Personal:
- Mrs. C has left for two weeks on business and I’m left holding down the fort. This means that I can get more writing done, but it also means that my best friend isn’t around for half a month, and that pretty much sucks. And it also means that I have to get groceries alone in the snow and that the cat is even more crazy because she misses her mom. Foo.
- But as I mentioned before, more time for writing, which is awesome.

Writing:
- And speaking of writing, I’m the new film columnist for This Magazine, so be sure to pick up a copy of the next issue when it hits the newsstands–it’s sure to be a keeper.

Tech:
- Everyone else on the planet has developed an acute case of logorrhea regarding the iPhone, so I won’t bother to go off about it, but I will say that while I don’t usually care for convergent technology (why do you want a 3MP camera in your cell phone? why?), this is pretty p0rny. Yes, I want one.

Cartoons:
- I know that Adventure Time was just produced as a one-off “Random Cartoon”, but can it please become a regular series? PLEASE. Because it’s truly awesomazing and Jake the Dog is my new hero.

Movies:
- Available online for free now: Darkon. If a documentary about weekend warriors (and by that I mean fantasy LARPers who do it mostly on the weekend) is at all intriguing to you, load up your browser with this. Laughs and sympathetic embarrassment abound.
- I just managed to find a copy of the hideously out of print, shot-in-Vancouver-when-not-everyone-and-their-dog-did-it classic film Ladies and Gentlemen… The Fabulous Stains, so I’m blissing out. Punk rock raditude.

Music:
- Dear Friends, you know I love metal, so why didn’t you tell me about Mastodon earlier? Like last year. Or before. Everyone else has been rockin’ and I’ve been missing out on the best metal in ages. You suck. Yours, Chris.
- Ghostface Killah’s last two albums are fucking dope.

Obits:
- Iwao Takamoto: the artist and designer behind such notable Hanna Barbera series as Scooby-Doo, Speed Buggy and Atom Ant.
- Momofuku Ando: the creator of the Cup Noodle (whose story is told in this surprisingly gripping manga).
Between cartoons and Cup Noodles these men forged my adolescence. RIP, gentlemen; you will be missed.

I’d be the first to admit that cranking Zep while writing about Vikings is some kind of horrible cliche (you know, “Immigrant Song” and all), but it’s still hard to discount the fact that listening to “Heartbreaker”, “Living Loving Maid”, “Ramble On” and “Moby Dick” in a row cultivates a pretty kickass mood.

Hammer of the gods, indeed.

The comic people got back to me and told me that after long, hard, difficult and considered deliberation, the project has gone to a different writer. Finally I can fully commit myself to the other projects in my life that need doing without worrying that they’re going to get derailed by a white elephant of a writing project looming over my shoulder. I have literally never been so glad to be turned down for anything in my life.

The payment I received from them for my preliminary proposal paid for a recent trip to my best friend’s wedding in Calgary. Thank you very much.

Now, then: next.