The Geekorium

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This video is in sepia - mostly to hide the awful colour and lighting. It’s also echoey. It was a lot more rushed this time.

Slacks!

The Perry Bible Fellowship is the comic strip of Nicholas Gurewitch. It’s at times very dark and always absolutely hilarious. There are around 200 strips on his site, and it’s well worth the time to read through them all if you have time, but today I’d like to introduce you to him with just a couple of the ones that I find very clever.

He doesn’t have a very easy way of embedding his strips into other pages and it’s not clear that he wouldn’t mind me embedding them in my page so I’m gonna link you to them on his site instead - please click through and read them.

Here they are counting back up toward my favourite one:

Number 5 - Les Douleurs de la Morte. This one I like because in the second panel the Grim Reaper is acting so smug, waiving goodbye and almost chuckling to himself. In the final panel you just know he’s thinking “Well… Shit.” It was actually a toss up between this one and Lord Gloom for fifth place.

Number 4 - Falling Dream. Reading this one again made me want to share PBF with you, so maybe it should be higher in the list. It’s simple and elegantly done - the joke is perfectly executed.

Number 3 - Hug Bot. Hugbot has elements of the best PBF comics - an innocence corrupted, a devastating twist, and dreadfully effective art that conveys exactly what it needs to and no more to make the point. If I had to show you only one PBF comic, it’d be Hugbot. The next two just tickle my fancy a little more.

Number 2 - Freaking Vortex. As a sci-fi fan (especially of the paradox/corruption of time-space variety of Sci-fi) this one is enormously rewarding. Note the extra knife twist at the end.

Number 1 - Guntron Alliance Force. I find this one particularly hilarious because of how well he captures the essence of Voltron - where he got his inspiration. This is the best explaination I can give of why I find him so clever - by the third panel he’s managed to convey enough information that I can figure out exactly who these people are and why the green guy looks so worried, without having to explain the history of Guntron/Voltron or who Skorpex is.

Hopefully that’s enough of an introduction - do have a read of some of his other strips. Check out Colonel Sweeto in particular for the strip that seems to have inspired the title of his new book The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories(THE TRIAL OF COLONEL SWEETO AND OTHER STORIES: A COLLECTION OF THE COMIC STRIPS OF THE PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP). The book contains a bunch of new strips that can’t be found online either.

Have Fun.

I have just started reading Psycho by Robert Bloch. Actually, I think I may have read it before, but it’s hard to tell. Of course I’ve seen the movie, which confuses the issue further, but I can’t help feeling like I’ve compared it to the movie before. Please understand, it’s not that I remember reading it, just comparing it to the movie…

So now I’m all confused. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie: Why not? Do yourself a favour. Those of you jaded by today’s clichéd Hollywood movies, rent this and see it tonight. Don’t get the colour remake, get the Alfred Hitchcock original. It’s a masterpiece. The story (courtesy of Robert Bloch) is stunning, and in Alfred’s hands could have only be made even better.

So no, it doesn’t matter that I haven’t read it. Or don’t think I have. Only that I’m going to.

Update: 2006-03-14 I’ve finished reading it now, and I made Mil re-watch it with me (I ignored her protests - it’s not scary

It really is great. I didn’t understand what people meant when I first watched it - but it truly is a remarkable story, in both forms. If Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings couldn’t convince you that a book can be made into a movie without some of the bits you’d think should be kept, then maybe Alfred’s treatment of Robert’s story will. And Mil loved it too.\