John Mortell’s blog

Here’s a link to a Rammstein concert. It’s an hour-and-a-half long but what I’ve seen so far of it is good quality.

The apology is for the lack of ’serious’ posts. I’ve been trying to keep the content of the site fairly updated but with work lately geting time to do some reading to find things has been difficult.

With the return of the Dail soon, the silly season should start again and then hopefuly there’ll be more to discuss.

Does anyone else think that the new design/music for the RTE news is well…. terrible? I mean I resent the TV licence enough but this is just taking the piss….

Was having a look at the matrix sequels again and while they have improved somewhat compared to my original assesment of them they’re still not great.

But could they ever have been?

Probably not. So in that case you have two real options when you do sequels – either try a direct continuation of the story or go for something similar but different and I think your better off with the second option.

No, I’m not being stupid.

What I mean by this are sequels which keep the bulk of the same charachters but change the focus and/or the style.

The two best example’s that come to mind are Bryan Talbot’s ‘Luther Arkwright’ and Rob Zombie’s ‘House of a 1000 Corpses/Devil’s Rejects’.

While I’m realy not sure how many of you will be aware of ‘Luther Arkwright’ I’ll start with that. The first book ‘The adventures of Luther Arkwright’ is a black and white, heavy line art science-fiction comic focused on the charachter of Luther. The second book ‘Heart of Empire’ is in colour, has a more traditionally ‘comic book’ style and focuses on the children and former lover of Luther instead with Luther himself only gradually coming into the series.

‘House of a 1000 Corpses’ is a grindhouse horror, with it’s main charachters being a group of teens, with little action (guns, fights etc.) and a focus on gore. ‘The Devil’s Rejects’ is more of a road-trip movie, focuses on the villians of the first film, has a fair bit of action (several shootout’s) and goes more for psychological horror than gore (though there still is gore – even so it’s a different type of gore)

What both of these things have in common is that you don’t realy need to have seen the first book/film to get the second one (though it helps) and they don’t realy keep the style consistent across the series. And yet in both cases the sequels work precisely because of that fact.

Which has me wondering.

Would the matrix sequels have worked better with their main focus being on Trinity and Morpheous rather than Neo? Prehaps pushing Neo into that subway station for the bulk of the two films? I mean a messiah isn’t realy that relateable to. And should they have had more of the type of fights with swords and blades etc. just to keep it from being too similar to the first one with all its gunfights?

But in general, with sequels (excluding series/franchises) are you not better off making something that’s quite different from it’s predecessor(s)?

Got the best of Rob Zombie cd along with ‘Mutter’ and ‘Reise Reise’ from Rammstein.

Heard both before on the ‘Matrix’ soundtrack and was quite interested to see what they’d sound like outside of that.

Zombie is someone who will grow on me I suspect – the dvds of his music videos were extremely creative and actually gave me a greater appreciation of his music. Rammstein are interesting but some tracks can be almost too ironic, ‘Amerika’ being my personal favourite of these ‘ridiculously ironic’ tracks.

anyway Rammstein – Amerika

and Rob Zombie – Dragula

Bit of a strange one here but can anyone recommend a site or book for me about when different guns appeared and how far they spread?

To clarify, an example would be why in many films/dramas set around 1900 or so things like pump-action shotgun’s and automatic pistols are around and yet why were many armies still using single-shot rifles until the early 1930’s?

Obviously I know films and the like aren’t the most accurate sources of information but even so there must be some truth to it. Anybody know more?

Watched ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’ today.

Not the best of Leone’s movies that I have seen – the plot is pretty hard to follow and it feels like two seperate movies jammed together (which according to what I’ve read online about the film seems to be the case).

Still though the cinematography is up to Leone’s high standards and parts of the film are quite good.

Now all I need to do is watch ‘Once upon a time in America’ and I’ll have seen pretty much the whole lot.

I’ve enjoyed many of Ken MacLeod’s novels in the past and was quite interested to come across his blog here.

The article ‘against civilised warfare’ which is the most recent post is very interesting and well worth a look.

Anyway, enjoy.

Heard this on the radio today – didn’t believe it so I went onto the BBCnews website for confirmation, even though it had that ring of ’so dumb it must be true’.

I am now trying to figure out how to booby-trap these potential monstrosities in order to kill anyone who buys it.

You have been warned.

UPDATE: Had a debate with myself whether to put this into the ‘music’ catagory or whethter to create an ‘abomination’ category. Decided that i’d leave the ‘abomination’ section alone until election season….

Given that there’s an election coming up I’ve started to think about Irish politics again.

And as ever, my thoughts have returned to the same basic problem. There’s not much choice in the parties realy. I mean, the two ‘central’ (in a historic sense and in the way they will generally be the ‘centre’ of whatever government is formed) parties i.e. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are actually the same party.

Oh sure, I imagine that there will be some of you that disagree Continue Reading »

As any of you who know me in the real world will be aware, my luck with regards to technology is… bad, to say the least. My current object of aggrevation is Cinergi, our broadband provider.

Our wireless internet USB connection (the part we plug into the PC so it picks up the internet signal) has been broken nearly since we got it. So today after our replacement turned out to be faulty, I rang them.

It’s impressive, given that there are only 3 different places you can be put through to on the number they give you how many times I was sent from one department to another.

Anyway, my Dad and I composed a rather threathening letter (scary I know) which will be in the post by Monday morning so hopefuly that’ll be the end of that.

But I would love for a piece of technology I get to just work.