Ben Paddon

Blog

  • On death, television, and Ianto Jones

    SPOILER ALERT! This post contains spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer season six, and spoilers throughout the entirety of Torchwood. (more…)

  • Words

    I’ve been thinking tonight about the stories I want to tell, largely because I decided to sned my friend Tealin the email equivilent of lunging at her wild-eyed* and yelling “WE… MUST COLLABORATE!!” Her response was positive, which is good, because she is an incredibly talented artist and the idea of creating a world with her is exciting. I’m excited.

    I’ve sat down and thought about the stories that I want to tell right now. One of those stories has actually been floating around in my head for quite some time and tackles the subject of religion, but I can’t figure out exactly what I want to do with it or, indeed, what the message is behind it (although I’m closer to knowing now than I was when I first came up with the idea). Tealin has pointed out, though, that there’s a risk of it becoming “vindictive”, and that’s definitely not what I want this story to be. I need to let it stew for a little longer, so back in the Corpse File it goes.

    The other story that pops into my head is very loosely autobiographical in nature. I’ve mentioned this before, and I almost started working on it last year. The problem there, and again I may have covered this in a previous entry, is that it touches upon elements of my personal past that are long behind me now and that I don’t feel a strong connection to anymore, even though those elements really only contribute to the back-story and not to the actual goings-on themselves. I’ve sat down a number of times to write this story, but nothing ever comes out.

    So where do we go from here? I find myself wondering what sort of thing I want to write. I’m hesitant to do more scifi and I’m not sure I’d feel confident tackling fantasy. I have a few ideas in my head but nothing’s really leaping out at me at the moment. Maybe I just need to write something and see what my brain thinks.

    * For some reason this sentence put me in mind of any time during the Back to the Future trilogy where Doc Brown had to tell Marty something catastrophic. I truly believe that Chris Lloyd is the hallmark for wide-eyed craziness.

  • A pressing desire to save the world

    I’ve been neglecting this blog in favour of its Tumblr cousin, and that simply will not do. I’d like to use this blog to catalogue my creative endeavours – that’s what it’s for, after all – so I’m going to make an effort to do exactly that, right now.

    Firstly, I’ve been writing. Not just Jump Leads, but a couple of things. I’m working on an autobiographical book about growing up in a Pagan household. I wish I could say was my idea but it was actually my dad’s. He suggested I write a fictionalized account but I rather think that getting my actual thoughts, feelings and memories on the page will have more value – for me, at least. Once I vomit it all out I can work on reorganizing it and, if I think there’s a good narrative in there, maybe turning it into something less autobiographical.

    I also wrote a short sketch last week which I’ve been meaning to film for about a week. I’m hoping to actually do that this week. It’s on my Weekly Goal List, along with encouraging myself to use my Ficly account more. My aim is to write three Ficlies this week.

    There are also two Jump Leads scripts that need polishing – one by myself, the other by Andrew. I’m also writing a brief, ten-minute mini-pilot thing which, Glod-willing, someone important will be looking at later this year.

    I’m planning on recording a scratch track for my friend Tealin’s attempt to animate the hanging scene from the start of Terry Pratchett’s “Going Postal” – I’ll be voicing Moist von Lipwig, easily one of my favourite recent additions to the Discworld mythos. I’ve always enjoyed voice work, and I think it’s only my crippling fear of rejection and a worry of “feeling silly” that’s stopping me from pursuing it further. Dino reckons I’d be good at it, so who knows? I guess I just need to get over that insecurity.

    And I want to do more video stuff. And I want to do more acting. And I want to try writing a proper novel. And…

    …oh Glod, so much stuff I’d like to do that I can’t push forward on because of my own petty worries. Blimey, is that who I am now? Is that the guy I’ve become? I need to sort that out.

  • An accidental horror

    As much as I love horror – and when I say horror I mean actual horror, not “OH NOES HERE COMES A GUY WITH A KNIFE RUUNNNN” horror, or Saw-esque Torture Porn – I’ve never really considered myself any good at writing it. Nevertheless I accidentally found myself writing some horror this afternoon on Twitter after the sound of a yelling homeless man outside echoed through the building.

    Originally I just tweeted about that. Then, as a joke, I decided to tweet that I’d barricaded the door. But it didn’t stop there.

    Here’s the story in full:

    I hear the rambling and moaning of one of the local homeless people. But it sounds like it’s coming from inside the apartment building…

    I have locked and bolted the front door. A chair is propped under the door knob. I hear him salivating on the other side. Terror, panic.

    Scratching at the door. I peer through the peephole to see a creature, perhaps once human, covered in hair and tinfoil, looking back at me.

    He examines the door, the peephole, momentarily transfixed. An indecipherable cacophony of dead language shrieks from his maw.

    An eye, red like a ruby with a yellow dot-like iris, presses against the peep hole. It is sudden, unexpected, intimidating.

    I can almost smell his hatred seeping through the door, as no doubt he catches the scent of my fear.

    I am pressed up against the peep hole now, too terrified to move, too transfixed by the creature to look away.

    His head suddenly jerks away, looking elsewhere. He sniffs the air, eyes closed. A slight smile creeps out from under his beard.

    He skulks away down the hall, mumbling otherworldly nonsense. He has found better prey than I.

    It is only now I become aware of the sweat on my brow. I wipe it away, relieved – I have been freed. But a neighbor will not be so lucky.

    The building fills with the sounds of garbled screams, of crunching bones and gnashing teeth. A fleck of blood splatters across my window.

    I open the door and peak down the hall. The creature, its belly filled with flesh and its mouth filled with blood, cries out with joy.

    A singularly abhorrent sound that seems to penetrate the mind and reverberate through the bones.

    I slam the door shut, retreat to my bedroom, shut the door, hide under the duvet. I wasn’t spared at all. I was chosen to be witness.

    I think it loses something being transcribed in this nature – I got a few messages after I’d wrapped it up thanking me for a nice bit of a creepy suspense, and at least one from my friend Pascalle asking me if this was really happening) – and reading it back like this doesn’t feel anywhere near as exciting as it felt while I was writing it on-the-fly.

    Anyway, here it is. Archived for your pleasure. Or something.

  • IM-MI-GRATE!!

    There are two types of immigrants. There’s

    • the Culture Vulture, who absolutely loves the culture of the country they’re living in and takes every opportunity to show off their expertise about said culture, and there’s
    • the Perpetually Dissatisfied Homelander, who for some reason is able to find at least one thing that’s inferior about everything in the country they’ve chosen to move to in comparison to the stuff they left behind, begging the question of why they left in the first place.

    Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft is a prime example of a Culture Vulture; a Texan who moved to Japan some years ago and has made a career out of talking about how great Japan is.

    By contrast, most Perpetually Dissatisfied Homelanders are usually elderly British men, traditionally actors or comedians such as John Cleese. It’s worrying, then, that I appear to be fulfilling this role as of late. I can’t walk into a supermarket without having a little moan to my girlfriend about how American Kit-Kats just don’t seem to be up to par, or how import stores seem reluctant to bring in British Rolos which are immeasurably superior in every possible way to their American counterparts.

    Perhaps even more baffling is that since I arrived in the US I’ve actually watched British television almost exclusively, with the exception of 30 Rock and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (which I used to watch in the UK anyway, so it almost doesn’t count). I’ve kept up-to-date with Doctor Who and Torchwood, I’ve enjoyed new shows like The Inbetweeners, and I’m even revisiting old shows I haven’t seen in years like Goodnight Sweetheart.

    It’s an absurdly negative way to look at a country that I chose to live in, to dismiss its culture and positive elements from almost the day I arrived. America has lots of fantastic things that Britain doesn’t have, such as Burger Kings that sell edible food. And Cheap buses. And more than seven theme parks boasting more than four types of roller coaster.

    So I’ve decided that as of tomorrow (which is actually today, what with it being 1:15am as I type this) I shall endeavor to find more of the Good Things about being in America. Ideally I’d like to do this by driving across the country, America Unchained style, and exploring more of it, but sadly I haven’t got two dimes to rub together at the moment. Or rather two dimes to rub together is more or less all I have. The point is I don’t have a lot of money, and as there aren’t any pubs nearby in which to make a drunken bet in, it doesn’t seem likely to happen.

    Nevertheless, positivity here I come and all that.

  • The Springfield Files

    I’ve had an idea for a website in the back of my head for a while now, but I lack the know-how (or, indeed, the encyclopedic knowledge) to put it together. So I’ll outline it here, and maybe someone much smarter than me can put it together.

    The basic idea is this: With so many episodes of The Simpsons, it can sometimes be tricky remembering which episode your favourite moment happened in. Or maybe you remember a few elements of an episode but you can’t remember which episode specifically it was. The solution to this idea is simple: A website that allows you to basically input what happened and have it spit out the relevant episode.

    The syntax would be “The one where [character] [action] [modifier]“. Those three variables would be drop-down menus, with the options [action] and [modifider] changing to reflect the selected options in the previous drop-downs. For example you could set [character] to “Homer”, and then [action] would consist of a list of vague things like “joins the Navy” or “starts a bowling team”, or specific things like “gets stung on the bottom by a bee” or “dreams he’s a giant made of solid gold”.

    Once you’ve set your three variables, you then click a button that says something pithy like “Find it!” and you are taken to a page that says “Were you thinking of… [episode title]?” and accompanies it with a short TV Guide-esque synopsis of the episode, the original airdate, the season it’s included in (with a link to buy the relevant box set on Amazon) and links to the episode on Wikipedia, IMDB, and whichever Simpsons wiki people actually use. If the thing in question occurred in multiple episodes (e.g. “The one where Marge gets a job”, or “The one where Bart falls in love”) it gives you a list of the episode titles, which you can click on to view the aforementioned details.

    The coding of such a site probably wouldn’t be too difficult for someone in the know. The really time-consuming thing would be sitting down to watch every single episode (and the movie) and writing down everything that every single character does.

    Anyway, this idea has been floating around my noggin for some time now, and I’m glad to finally get it out of my skull.

  • Sexist loves Maria incompetently

    Following the fairly reasonable success of Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits, I’ve started two new Tumblrs. One is about game design, and I won’t be linking to that one just yet. The other is about endemic sexism in advertising, and is called If Your Product Were Any Good, You Wouldn’t Need Sexism To Sell It.

    My screenplay adaption of Rene Engström’s Anders Loves Maria sort-of died a terrible, horrible death during the Spring, but I’ve reinvested myself in the project with renewed candor. I haven’t touched my adaption of Rob Grant’s Incompetence in a while either but, to be fair, I know that story inside and out and I reckon I’ll just nudge it forward to next year instead. Right now I’m intent on re-reading ALM, taking notes, and basically doing what I did to the Buzz Lightyear action figure I had as a kid – dissembling it, putting it back together, and hoping the wings still pop out.

  • The Tooth Hurts, Doesn’t It?

    If God is real (and I maintain that he isn’t) then maybe someone out there can explain to me how he can design something as wondrously complex as the human nervous system, but totally fuck up something as simple as teeth.