My favourite kinds of imperialism

We’re getting close to the end of The Sopranos. Both Rome and Carnivale only have one more season to offer us. And at the speed at which we’re going through West Wing, President Bartlett will have finished his second term in record time.

How to find good, new series? Used to be, I could pretty much get three out of four HBO series on DVD and be happy for the next year or so. Even if some of them found an untimely end, the journey was absolutely worth it.

Now, though? Can’t say I’m all that interested in Hung, and I’m not sure I would enjoy Big Love (which may be due to my lack of trust in Bill Paxton’s acting abilities – “Game over, man!”, indeed…). What about all these new series starting on other channels, though? The Elmore Leonard series Justified sounds like it might be fun, and I’m definitely hoping to get Caprica, provided that it doesn’t get cancelled after one series.

However, HBO seems to be stepping up its game, with not one but three series premiering this year. The one I’m currently most excited about is the one I only found out about five minutes ago: Boardwalk Empire, by Sopranos alum Terence Winter and Martin Scorsese – yes, you read that right, the Raging Bull of mob cinema himself! Check out the trailer, which looks like the murderous bastard child of Once Upon a Time in America and The Sopranos:

Also looking quite promising, although in a more Norman-Rockwell-meets-Interracial-Slaughter way: The Pacific, which seems to be a sort of companion piece to Band of Brothers. Oh, and it stars the little kid from Jurassic Park, all grown up. Listen, boy, you should know better than to return to island jungles! (Cue bad “Doyouthinkhesaurus?” jokes about jungle warfare…) Again, let me peruse YouTube:

Finally, the creators of my favourite series (it shares the pedestal with Six Feet Under) are doing a new show on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s called Treme and it’s got the usual awesome cast of actors, including Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters. It’ll be good to see Lester Freamon and Bunk Moreland back in action!

It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

Warning: if you’re not interested in my video game musings, you may want to skip to the end of this post. And now on with the regular programme…

Who doesn’t like a good post-apocalypse? There’s something about nuclear wastelands peopled with desperate survivors and mutated wildlife that brings a radioactive glow to the most hardened geek’s heart. And The Day After has been a topic dear to computer gamers ever since the heady old days of Wasteland, and it’s produced one of the most memorable games of the last five years.

In the ’90s, two spiritual successors of Wasteland, the original (and highly pixellated) post-apocalyptic CRPG (computer role-playing games, for those of you who aren’t fluent in nerd), came out, called Fallout and (somewhat uninventively) Fallout 2. They were ugly beasts at first, with a forbidding user interface and graphics the colour and consistency of irradiated cow dung. However, they were crafted with a wicked sense of humour and created an atmospheric world that was basically the mutant offspring of ’50s sci-fi, the “Duck and Cover” lies of the early Cold War and Mad Max, with Robbie-the-Robots and cathode ray computers sitting side by side with two-headed cattle, wasteland scavengers and slavers. And Fallout 2 had one of my favourite ever ironic uses of music – Louis Armstrong’s A Kiss to Build a Dream On.

Fallout also introduced one of video gaming’s most iconic phrases, delivered by none other than “Stupido Salavtore”, Hellboy, Beast: Ron Perlman himself. If I think of the world after the nuclear bombs have fallen, what comes to my mind isn’t a very young Mel Gibson pulling a Rorschach on the men who killed his wife, or even a touchingly naive elderly couple drawn by Raymond Briggs. No, what comes to my mind is this: War. War never changes. (Do it in a Ron Perlman voice and it suddenly changes from a trite phrase to- Well, listen for yourselves.)

So what’s brought on this attack of love for Fallout? It’s this: I’ve recently started playing Fallout 3, a monster of a computer game. I’m probably a dozen hours into the game and I’ve barely scratched the parched surface of the wasteland. I’ve already disarmed an unexploded nuke in the charming scrapmetal town of Megaton, I’ve ended a plague of firebreathing ants, I’ve faced mutants and feral dogs and giant scorpions. And I’ve lost my dad, as voiced by Liam Neeson, which makes me think that I must be some nucular Leo DiCaprio scouring the irradiated desert in search of a post-apocalyptic Bill the Butcher. It’s weird, but I haven’t enjoyed myself this much in a game in a long time. (Oh, and if you want an explanation of the title of this post, this video should help.)

Ahem. If you skipped all the rest of this post because you’re not interested in video games, I hope that you’re at least a fan of Rube Goldberg machines. If not, I’m afraid I haven’t got the slightest clue why you’d be reading this blog… Anyway, here’s the video of OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” – enjoy!

(Stolen from the Twenty Sided blog.)

Diagramming Denzel

Words aren’t required, as this one pretty much speaks for itself.

(I stole this one from /Film, who in turn stole it from somewhere else – and thus the internet fulfils its purpose yet again.)