Ben Paddon

Blog

  • “Would you like a Jelly Baby?”

    I’m back in the UK, and have been for about two and a half weeks, traveling around and generally seeing the sights with Michelle, which has been an absolute delight. Together we’ve seen much of London, a lot of Bath, the best bits of Liverpool and, so far, a bit of Edinburgh. It’s been fantastic and I couldn’t ask for a better travel companion, but there is one disappointment that has surfaced as a result of this trip.

    I have discovered (or, perhaps more accurately, re-discovered) that I am allergic to Jelly Babies.

    It’s quite devastating. I’ve always been drawn to them. They’re quite possibly the single finest sweet the UK has to offer, and so when I see them I invariably end up buying a bag and deciding that I’m going to make it last a few days. Then, within an hour, I’m staring at an empty bag thinking to myself, “Ah well, maybe next time.”

    Then I start to feel quite Sick.

    Now, you could look at that scenario and say, “But Ben! You’ve just eaten an entire bloody bag of Jelly Babies. Of course you feel sick.” Allow me to expound on Sick. Sick is not just an upset stomach. Sick is not just a sleepless night. Sick is three, maybe four days of inconsistent stomach cramps, a sore throat and, depending on the weather, the occasional headache. Let me try to quantify the feeling for you. Imagine that, just before you go to bed, you discover that your stomach has been removed and replaced by a haggis, your throat feels like it’s played host to a horny hedgehog and his cheesegrater lover, and your head feels like it’s been closed for necessary repair works by loud, heavy, annoying repairmen who have been itching to try out their new jackhammer.

    It’s quite unpleasant, and I go through it every time I have a bag of Jelly Babies (or more than one pack of Rowntree’s Fruit Bastilles, which leads me to believe that maybe it’s an allergy to gelatin). And yet somehow I manage to forget this every time I see a bag of Jelly Babies, up until the point where I’m doubled over on the bed clutching my stomach and groaning like a very talkative caveman with a lot to share.

    Oh well. It’s worth it.

  • Bookless

    I’ll be leaving for the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing in London within the hour. I didn’t hae enough money to have tee-shirts printed up and now, thanks to a mail delivery snafu, I don’t have any books to sell either. Our artist can’t make it and one of our writers (Paul Varley, who wrote the current issue of Jump Leads) will be arriving in the early-afternoon. As if that wasn’t good enough, I’ve been told I’m on a panel at 11am, but I don’t know what the panel is for or who else will be on it.

    But y’know what? Despite all of the bad news that has unfolded surrounding this year’s Thing, I’m still positive about it. It’s always great to spend time with one’s peers (I would’ve been at the New England Webcomics Weekend were I not flying out to England from LAX on the 23rd) and hopefully today will be no exception.

    Jetlag woke me up this morning at just after 5am, so I’ve spent most of the morning sitting up surfing the Intertron on my laptop and eating the leftover prawn crackers from last night’s Chinese takeaway. Probably not the healthiest option but I followed the law of They Were Just Sitting There which isn’t, I think, that bad of an option. I’ll likely have something healthy on my way into London. I wonder if that Cornish Pasty place in St Pancras International will be open when we get there?

    Right, I should probably go wake Andrew up or something.

  • Concerning Endings

    There have been a few endings in the past couple of weeks. The big one, the one people likely care about, is the end of the SciFi Channel’s flagship series, Battlestar Galactica. I caught the ending on Saturday night via Amazon Unbox* and I absolutely loved it. Without wanting to ruin it for anyone, it didn’t tie up all of the loose ends. And, y’know, I actually prefer series finales like that – real life doesn’t let you tie up all the loose ends. Real life doesn’t answer the questions. Real life won’t explain to you why your son asks you for nothing but a red ball for his birthday every year. So frankly, I’m glad there are still some elements of BSG that remain mysterious. If Ronald D. Moore and his team of wacky sidekicks had chosen to give us all the answers then, well, we’d have nothing to talk about.

    The other ending that came recently was, of course, our own Boomer’s Day Off, which concluded back on the 19th. You may have already watched the ending but if you haven’t, here it is. The response to the finale has been somewhat mixed, but one of my big annoyances so far has been the number of people who were pissed off that Frank the Tank never made an appearance but, honestly, what did you expect? It should’ve been clear from Part One that we were hardly blessed with an overabundance of money, and squeezing the Tank in – be it a costume, or CG, or whichever – is very clearly not within our budget.

    There have been other concerns raised, which I’m sure Michelle and I will be addressing in a future video update of some sort.
     

    * As an aside, Amazon Unbox’s download client is infuriatingly slow, and the online streamer likes to stop and buffer the video eery eight-to-twelve seconds. I’d shifted from iTunes to Unbox because I wanted my videos in a format I could watch on my Xbox 360, but the next time I decide to buy a show online I may have to defect back to Apple’s crappy software. It may obfuscatory and unreliable, but at least it downloads videos at a halfway decent speed.

  • “We Ain’t Found Shit”

    I recently decided to have another look at scifi-comedy, past and present. There’s a lot of it I’m already familiar with – Red Dwarf and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy are not only what I consider to be pinnacles of the genre but are also at the top of my list of favourite novels and TV shows, and the Back To The Future trilogy is, I think, the best trilogy ever commited to film – but there’s some stuff I haven’t seen. I’ve only seen about four episodes of Hyperdrive for instance, and although it’s not fantastic it’s hardly as bad as most Red Dwarf fans seem to think.

    A big example of scifi-comedy, one that has always been recommended to me, is Spaceballs. I’m a fan of Mel Brooks and yet I’d never seen this film. Thankfully it’s on Netflix’ Watch Instantly service, so I added it to my queue and loaded it up on my Xbox.

    Oh dear.

    It’s one of those films that I imagine was rip-roaringly funny when it first came out, but the entire thing felt really badly hewn together. The jokes were flat and uninspired, leaving me feeling that the horrendous Date Movie would have been a better choice – I laughed once during the entire film, and that was when Tim Russ, whilst combing the desert, angrily declared that he had been thus far unable to locate anything with his giant comb.

    He was a little more succinct with his report.

    The conclusion I drew from this was that Spaceballs is a terrible, terrible movie. I’m sure it wasn’t once upon a time, but now it’s awful. This film, this terrible catastrophe of a motion picture, left me wondering if Mel Brooks has ever been as funny as I thought he was. The first film of his that I saw as a kid was Robin Hood: Men In Tights, which I adored, but that hasn’t aged well either. Was I wrong? Has Mel Brooks always been terrible?

    I inadvertantly found myself watching The Producers two weeks later. I was, in fact, trying to watch the fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the last episode of which contains some chunks of the Broadway musical (season four sees Larry David getting cast in the show by Brooks and partially revolves around the rehearsal process). I watched…

    …and I laughed. A lot.

    And my faith was restored.

    Earlier this week I picked up Blazing Saddles on DVD. This was my favourite Brooks film until I’d seen The Producers, and once again I find myself too scared to watch it. I don’t want to ruin the memory I have of it being a fantastic, funny film. I ruined ThunderCats by going back and re-watching it on DVD. I ruined Mighty Morph’n’ Power Rangers by watching clips of it on YouTube. Somehow clinging on to the nostalgia is more important to me than trying to prove myself that the film was worth watching the first time ’round.

    Y’know what? I think I’ll watch it tonight. Hopefully it’s still funny. Dear Glod, I hope it’s still funny.

  • Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

    This is just a small excerpt from a huge piece I just spent half an hour writing. It’s rough and it’s unfinished and it’s going to get a lot bigger.

    It was Philip K. Dick who, in 1968, posed the question of whether or not androids dream of electric sheep.

    The answer, of course, is “No.”

    This is not because androids are incapable of dreaming – far from it – but rather because most androids other than the seldom-seen Hyperpedia Deluxe XLi, a model of super-intelligent robot owned only by the seven richest men in the solar system, have no idea what a sheep is, or what its electrical counterpart would look like.

    To say that androids, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence are bound only by their programming is, again, a rather narrow-minded view of just how robotics actually works, because behind the code that makes the AI function the way it does is the program language to allow the robot to be able to interpret that code in the first place. It’s perhaps the closest thing artificial life has to a subconscious, and it’s always, always buzzing away doing something, even if the program itself is idling. Especially if the program itself is idling.

    So from there we can deduce a more interesting question – how long can an android go without any form of programming, without any code for that scripting language to interpret, before the script starts to write it’s own code? How long before what is essentially a blank android begins to imagine a sheep, electrical or otherwise?

    I’m re-reading it now and it’s starting to lose its coherency. I’ll tackle it again in the morning. In my sleep-deprived state, I actually just thought of another question – “Do Androids wet-dream on electric sheets?” I think I’ll let someone else answer that one.

  • Spectacular Spider-Man #183

    specspidey

    Seb Patrick is a lucky bastard indeed – he helped plot a story for issue #183 of Spectacular Spider-Man, a UK-exclusive Spider-Man comic/magazine thing aimed at kids. The 11-page story, “The Amazing Spider-Boy”, was written by Ferg Handley with art by Carlos Gomez and Gary Erskine. It’s in stores across the UK now for the rather pithy price of £2 and should be available for the next three weeks.

    Honestly, you’ve no excuse not to pick it up.

  • Boomer’s Day Off Part 4

    The finale to Boomer’s Day Off is up. Please share and enjoy.

  • The Lifeboat

    There are a number of events which stick out in my mind from my High School days. I remember leaving Karen Sutton an “anonymous” valentine’s card in Year 8 that she very quickly figured it was from me (probably because I, y’know, gave it to her myself). I remember my friend Jason tackling me against a fence because I’d moved his bag from somewhere it could’ve been kicked during a lunchtime game of soccer to somewhere it wouldn’t get kicked… by kicking it against a fence. I vaguely recall someone hitting me over the head with a chair, and I vividly recall hitting someone else over the head with a science lab stool.

    Don’t worry, I’m not a violent person anymore. My Parole Officer said so.

    One thing from my High School days that has been fluttering back to the surface area of my brain, besides the fact that I still have a crush on Karen Sutton, is a debate exercise from my GCSE English class. Our class was divided into groups of between six and eight students, and we were given a hypothetical question – a ship is sinking. There’s one lifeboat left with a finite capacity, and too many people to fit on the boat. I forget the exact figures here, so for the sake of discussion we’ll say that there are eight survivors but only room for four on the boat.

    We were given rough backgrounds for each of the characters. There were a smattering of pretty generic characters all with their own strengths and weaknesses but the one character I latched onto, the one character I was adamant had to be saved, was a former criminal. He was involved with organised crime up until he was arrested, tried and sentenced. He served his time and was released from prison where he went straight and tried to forge a new life for himself. Now circumstances had led this fictional character to this fictional situation where he may wind up dying. Well, I wasn’t going to have that.

    I argued this man’s case for the entirety of our alloted time. Yes, he had a criminal past. But he’d served his time and he’d gone straight – surely he deserved a second chance?

    Nobody else agreed with me. In fact one girl in our group tried to argue that “going straight” didn’t mean he’d given up a life of crime but that instead he’d turned to drugs. This was a Bad Man, everybody else agreed, and he deserved to die.

    Once the time was over our group was supposed to present our final decision to the teacher, the Mr Duffy – a brilliant man with a very wry sense of humour and deadpan delivery, like if Jack Dee were a Vulcan. Only we didn’t actually get to give him our final responses – we sat down in the library, which is where he was seeing each of the groups away from the classroom, and proceeded to continue our debate about whether or not My Friend The Convict deserved to sail off into the imaginary sunset.

    I believe that we collectively failed that particular exercise (I received an overall C grade for GCSE English, with a B for “English Speaking & Listening”), but the discussion continues to rattle on in my head. I was contemplating the scenario only earlier today, deciding briefly that the ex-con should have to decide for himself and then remembering that, in this hypothetical scenario, it probably wouldn’t be some vague, overseeing third-party but instead it would be the group of eight deciding amongst themselves. It’d be tough as Hell for them to be even remotely rational about the entire thing, depending on their own character and ability to cope in stressful circumstances. Most likely most or all of them would have their decision process tarred by fear, or anger, or anxiety. They could try to decide who among them deserves to live under these circumstances and, if my experience with my former classmates has taught me anything, it’s that people do not think a former conman deserves a second chance. He’d likely die.

    Still, in reality I imagine they’d all drown trying to rush the lifeboat so it balances out, really.