Japanese Techno-Pop Makes Me Wee Rainbows

(via the ever-giving wellspring of EPIC WIN that is Metafilter)

So yeah today I watched these performances from an 80s Japanese kids' TV show, three Techno-Pop bands, P-Model, Hikashu and Plastics. The sound quality is mildly anus, but you get the idea:



Everything I know about J-Pop and all its bizarro corollaries could be written on the back of a postage stamp in fat-nibbed magic marker, but regular readers of my blog (I'm looking at you, Mum) will know I reckon proggy girl trio eX-Girl are rather spesh. (you should check out Waving Scientist @ Frog King - it's probbo my fave track) Wikipedia reveals that the first band on in the vid, P-Model, are fronted by Susumu Hirasawa, who did the soundtrack for spooky millenial angstathon Paranoia Agent. I got sent a review copy of part of the series when I was writing for NEO, and I can confidently say it's one of the best, most unnerving anime series I've ever seen. It follows a succession of people who get attacked by a rollerblading, bent baseball bat wielding kid known to the media as Lil' Slugger, and explores estrangement, insanity, and people's pasts coming back to haunt them. It's endlessly inventive and manages to have a great sense of humour while being genuinely disturbing.

I remember even finding the opening credit sequence upsetting for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on, but it provides a great opportunity to show how Susumu Hirasawa's music helps create an atmosphere of weird uneasiness:

Kings Of Power 4 Billion %

Look, my question to you is simply this: have you watched Paul Robertson's Kings Of Power 4 Billion %? No? THEN DON'T COMPLAIN YOUR LIFE ISN'T EVERYTHING IT COULD BE!

It is special. You could watch it on Youtube:





But actually the quality of the compressed vids is pretty shitty. My advice? Be patient, go here, and download the full-quality avi file. You might need to download a little codec to make it run on your video player, but fuck it, you're a capable kind of person, you'll manage it. Don't worry, you're not pirating it or some zany shit like that - the creator, Paul Robertson, has been distributing it from his blog. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know I think he's a golden god, also being the dude behind Pirate Baby Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006.

I mean come on. Just the soundtrack to KoP4B% is a work of insano J-prog majesty. Obviously I love the video game aesthetic and all the little nods, both to games, and to nuggets of pop culture. This is clearly a guy who loves his Metal Slug, an ideological stance I can get behind with considerable gusto. I gaze upon this video and for a few, fleeting minutes the technicolour vomitworks that I laughingly call my mind seems somehow normal. Anyway, enough gushing. I think it's good. You may not. But then, you may be a gormless pranny.

MS Paint Adventures

So, a while back, the ever-awesome Metafilter put me onto this exchange, between gaming legend Tim Schafer - who worked on Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandago, amongst others - and joystiq.com. In it, Tim and his interviewers turn a simple email exchange into an adlibbed mini text adventure.

It's a lovely, rich format for collaborative storytelling. Joe Dunthorne tried his hand at something similar, adopting the old Choose Your Own Adventure 'forking paths' style with his middle-class adventure 'You Are Happy', which you can play on his website. He's performed it a few times as part of our show about video games and hiding from reality, Infinite Lives, getting audience members to choose what to do next. I've particularly enjoyed watching the supporting schtick develop - one thing a text adventure can't do is demand that the player provide an explanation for their choice of path.

All of which is a preamble to this. Hey. You should go read MS Paint Adventures. After an entire year of inputs, the latest adventure, Problem Sleuth, is finally complete. When I read the last few frames, I felt kind of choked up and elated all at once.


Basically, it's an interactive webcomic, presented in the style of the Sierra-style text adventure/point n' click hybrids, like King's Quest or Leisure Suit Larry. Readers post suggested commands on a blog - e.g. 'Examine phone', 'Open safe', 'Get key', etc - then writer and artist Andrew Hussie picks one to draw next and develop the story.

The eponymous Problem Sleuth starts off locked in his office, and the first order of business is working out how to escape. Like any great storyteller, Mr Hussie's awesome at subverting expectation. Here, someone suggests punching through the office door's glass window:


Only to discover that it's not glass, but a piece of paper with his initials written backwards on it:


Watching the dynamic between Andrew and his audience develop is fascinating. As their attempts to solve the puzzle grow more and more creative, so his tactics for frustrating their attempts become increasingly elaborate. The result is a wonderful - if tortuous - piece of collaborative improv, full of cool narrative flourishes that draw from a plethora of disparate cultural sources to make something weird and technicolour and awesome. I don't want to spoil it for you, but suffice to say that soon there are multiple player characters, a host of mighty allies and a nasty-ass monster horde to be defeated. You probably won't have the stamina to read it all in a single sitting (it is a year's worth of posts, after all), but you can Save and Load your progress from the buttons just beneath the pictures. Click each command to advance to the next frame.

Go on, go. Read it. Seriously. Go. I'll wait.

A Cone By Any Other Name Would Spin As Sweet

A couple of people have asked me where this blog got its name. Well, the answer certainly isn't this:



For me, this video dances on the event horizon where 'utterly shit' and 'strangely intriguing' seem to blend into one. I find lots of small elements weirdly compelling - the fact you can hear the creak of someone switching the camera on, the snippets of directorial advice from out of shot, their marked ambivalence to being on film, the crappy editing, and the way 'Dario's' pubescent voice rollercoasters from high to low and back again. Somewhat inexplicably, they seem to have filmed it once, then run the whole lot back through a PC monitor, which they've filmed a second time, before putting it on youtube - as if the shitty quality was by design. I love the section with the world's slowest, jerkiest stop-motion animation on the Lego man.

I don't know. Maybe it reminds me of my own forays into film and animation as a teenager. I made a stop-motion Lego man animation on the family camcorder, called Pobin Nood And The Time Machine, which was as shitty as it sounds. I put it onto VHS and sent it to Aardman Animations, the creators of Wallace and Gromit. They wrote back with an encouraging letter, which I promptly exploited to secure a grant for better equipment. My friends and I also did live action projects - the Vietnam War satire Who Gives A Nam, the psycho-thriller Brain Damage, and the martial arts spectacular Fucking Solid Kung Fu Bastards, amongst others. They were all shot without scripts, using mostly improvised props, and lots of ad-libbed fight scenes. We had two 12" LPs that we had found under some boxes in the school Drama department, one of soundtracks by the BBC Stereophonic Workshop, and one of BBC sound effects. These appeared, in some capacity, in every film we made. By the time Sixth Form started, I had given up film making forever. On the other hand, my partner in crime, Will, now has his own film production company.

But I don't think bleary-eyed nostalgia quite describes what I'm feeling when I watch the above video. It's closer to parallel states of fascination and complete boredom. Those two sensations don't usually run in tandem, and perhaps that's what makes it such a singular experience. Despite the mundanity, there's a mildly uncomfortable intimacy to it. After I showed it to my girlfriend, she said: 'I feel like I just watched the video out of The Ring.'

Best of all, I know that it lacks all the necessary elements of a viral video. It's too long, there are no payoffs, it's not spectacularly bad, just mediocre, and we don't quite get the delicious frisson of feeling we're privy to something that we weren't meant to see, because they clearly made it for an audience. Yet, even though it was pretty boring the first time through, there's something about it that makes me want to watch again. Most perplexing.