Kthaahthikha

This, however serious it may be, has left me considering the feasability of a hero in real-world context. On the topic of superheroes, I think one of the best realist treatment's is the film Unbreakable, but in terms of a actual practicality, the most realistic hero-templates are characters such as Dick Tracy, The Phantom, the original Sandman and perhaps also Batman.

Now, Batman can be ruled-out because no-one is that rich, and his costume is a bad idea anyway. The costumes were gimicks invented to lure-in children and add a bit of colour and distinction to the proceedings, because otherwise the original Batman would have shown-up all the more plainly as just another masked sleuth king-hitting purse-snatchers.

So that leaves us with Tracy, the Sandman and the Phantom. We can omit the Phantom because he rode a horse and his costume is, one again, impractical. Unless a hero has the ability to leap buildings and dismantle tractors bare-handed, stealth and incospicuousness is the key to success. This is what makes a vigilante - what we are ultimately left with - slightly more veratile than a cop - because cops have to wear uniforms and follow procedure, calling attention to themselves, whereas vigilantes can walk straight into those drug dens and start snooping, and even break-and-enter and then pretend their just lost.

So the ideal super-hero for the modern era is a plain-clothed one.

Now, in terms of wqeapons and equipment, the modern hero would require a case containing lock-picks, grapnels, a low-light scope (even video cameras have those these days), a police scanner, basic field forensics equipment, canisters of knock-out gas, a small quantity of c-4, a pistol, knives and the like. This should be concealed in secret compartments in the case, and only ever taken with the hero when they know they'll need them.

Now, on to methods. Patrolling is pointless. Wandering about, the chances of encountering crimes as they happen are slim-to-none, and the area to be covered enormous. The Guardian Angels could patrol the subway because there were tonnes of them, on a subway, but one person in a clapped-out sedan would have a little more trouble making an impact.

So what can a real-world hero do? Basically, they can listen-in on the scanner and investigate crimes that have already happened, in a manner more invasive and less well-regulated than the police could. That is to say, they can follow obscure hunches and the like and not worry about being court-martialed, or whatever the police equivalent is. They can also investigate criminal activities of which the police are unaware, or tip the cops off to them, and investigate activities that police corruption has buried.

So, really, the real-world hero is an extension of the police-force, limited by the lack of a large organisation to support it. A Justice League or Charlie's Angels style cohort might be slightly more effective, although a network of informants amongst the criminal classes could be just as useful.

So, really, there's not that much point to a real-world hero bent upon upholding the law. If they have their own moral code, this is different, but since I'm trying to come-up with a non-fascist hero that's neither here nor their.

Well, that was rambling and inconclusive.

She was born in Melbourne, but don’t hold that against her. In any event, she doesn’t live there now. It wasn’t her choice to leave, but looking back she’s not certain if she’d return, given the chance. Who wants to dwell in a brick veneer flat, selling black-market anthologies of the miscellaneous occult to drug-lords and the occasional vampire? Working a dead-end job as a librarian, shelving books she’s never had time to read whilst she wonders if she remembered to lock the trunk containing the seven silver serpents that sits threateningly at the base of her bed.

No, she’s striking-out on her own, now, with a clean slate enforced by several court authorities and the general consensus that things would be better-off without her. Never mind her protestations that the vampires’ll just go somewhere else looking for a score, that the drug-lords were buying, not selling, and not buying that, anyways. So she had to pack her bags, and bid farewell to her mother’s grave and her father, holed-up in a Highton retirement home trying to avoid being sniffed-out by Interpol, even though they’ve known he’s there for years and aren’t that fussed. She kisses her boyfriend fondly and gives her girlfriend one last screw for old time’s sake, and loads-up the car for a long drive inland, across the scorched earth till her gasket blows and she’s hitching rides off of Bedouin on mange-ridden caterpillars, exchanging cigarettes and sexual favours for the privilege of an uncomfortable, slow-moving perch.

But she’s all set-up for the big time now, in her fancy apartment overlooking the river that she bought to watched the bodies float by. Exiled, but with a few possessions to ease the pain, sold for a quick buck to half-drunk scarab-wranglers trying desperately to understand Qhlohthletik and no closer for shelling-out. She’s got her place, and she’s got her bookshop, and she’s got an ad in the local paper that dances and smiles and announces itself in four local dialects (most of which are just poorly-enunciated French). She’s five-ten with a delicate chin and glasses that make her look like a brunette Shelley Winters (no, not that one), or a younger her>. She dresses in tweed for no apparent reason and carries a walking-stick with built-in torch, pistol, main-gauche and grapnel. Her leather carry-all is rumoured to contain the Lemurian holy scriptures, and she uses it to great effect in her more daring cases.

She was once called upon to wrestle a crocodile, and did so with dignity, gravitas, and manic glee.

She doesn’t like peaches, except with cream, and as a book-seller antiquarian ninja-sleuth assassin she’s got the second-greatest job in the world.

Her last name is Overcoat.

Don’t laugh at her silly name.

This post inspired by JP's highly-entertaining list of desired readers, and boredom.

A number of exciting things have happened that revolve around myself, or rather one boring thing has happened to me and a number of exciting things may happen should I ever decide to set to work upon the various paths laid-out before me.

Firstly, I did a twenty-four hour comic for no good reason, which begins here.

It involves such exciting elements as spies, gangsters, monsters, 60s retro kitsch, head in jars and IVF substitutes.

Secondly, I was in the most prominent comic-shop in Melbourne two days ago and perused the Austrlian comics shelf. Whilst I ended-up buying a few issues of Nakedfella and something called Killeroo (which had pretty art but not much else, so i should have bought some western called 'Eldritch' instead), it also came to my attention that a blind monkey could get comics present upon the Australia Comics shelf. This was probably because it doubled as "local artists", but in any event I have decided that my abilities are greater than that of a blind monkey, and decided to use the extent of my comicular powers to try and make something that actually looks nice, and will get racked as a stand-alone that sells ten copies in a year and then decomposes of sorrow.

I have three months off, so I'm going to make it worth it. Needless to say, the comic will also be comparable in sanity and coherence to a hat full of miliners.

Why 'zine? Is magazine too complex? I have no irrational hatred of contractions but I've never understood the "cool" element of syllable-subtraction.

That said, i supposed "zine" is a pretty cool word.

I'm come-up with a nifty concept for a film shot in first-person perspective, where the character is an amnesiac who is never named and never recovers their memory, and whose age and gender is never specified. I think it'd make an interesting film where the viewer is the character, like a videogame. I had this idea because I was on my computer, supposedly doing homework but in fact watching the video for "Smack My Bitch Up", by the Prodigy.

Whenever I'm on the computer, doing homework that is frighteningly-close to being due, I start to get the urge to remix old Propellerheads songs and Aeon Flux. Now, an audio stripper is always a great device, not to mention a great name for a guitar-rock band, so all I have to do is conduct a number of felonious activities, thus aquiring Propellerheads recordings and Aeon Flux mpg files (because finding a decent AVI converter to burn with is hell). Of course, being me, this generally involves hopping the midnight flight to the United Kingdom to try and steal the masters from a vault deep beneath Will White's seven-storey quartz-and-steel behemoth that he sarcastically referred to as a "mansion" the last time he kicked me off of his grounds (and when I say "kicked", I of course mean "pursued with a flick-razor"; It is a little-known fact, but part of the deal to let the Wachowski brothers use Spybreak in the lobby scene of the first Matrix film meant allowing White to don an overcoat and extensive facial prosthesis and film the entire scene as Keanu's stunt-double, using convicted rapists and media spin-doctors as the stand-ins for the guards. He did this without the aid of special effects or a coscience, and my aluminium shin is in an excellent position to vouch for his martial prowess).

So naturally, I called in a few favours from a friend of mine. His name was "Didgets" Chafer and he was a former military scientist gone slightly madder. It was he who helped me to construct the elaborate spiderweb of iron, plastic, copper-wiring and half-empty bottles of 200-proof dark rum with which I intended to attempt my latest raid upon the towering fortress. It was a pretty neat vehicle. It had wings. Plus legs - and we all know how awesome a vehicle with legs is (unless it's an AT-AT - the designers of which, quite frankly, should be keel-hauled for overlooking such an obvious flaw in structural defense), so I was set.

I sat smoking a cigarette on the suede-upholstered divan, flicking the ash ostentatiously into the wind. It drifted on the warm breeze and I watched, delighted, as it tumbled down through the open mouth of the flashpan and I realised with a gasp that I had failed to fasten my seatbelt. I had only a few milliseconds to react before I the vehicle exploded into the sky, leaving me soaring on a carefully-plotted arc trajectory that would send me shattering through the plate-glass dome of White Hall and crushing through eight levels to land bobbing with a smug grin in the 200-meter Roman-style evian-filled bath in which White was known to keep his school of Patagonian alpine amphibious marmosets, and by which he would no doubt be lounging, sipping tea.

Using abilities that I had garnered from an ancient Bhutanese monk, I slowed my perception of time to a speed roughly equivalent with that of a Galapagos tortoise travelling at lightspeed in REM. Silently I thanked Abo Gregorio, whipping-out my pen to construct a hasty last-will-and-testament scrawled in an ancient lemurian cypher on the inner side of my left arm. As I finished, the plate glass of the sundome swam up from below me like a curious shark, and all I could think of as my titanium-frame open cockpit prepared to penetrate the window like a poorly-constructed prophylactic, the wind howling, the air whistling and the breeze murmuring gently through my hair was this:

"Why didn't I just fasten my seatbelt?"

Seriously, why not? Frankly, I deserved to die.

Strange things happen now and then, like when I go on my web-tracker just now and discover that 20 people went to my site yesterday, when the average is 2.

Why is this so?

I blame the failure of the democratic process.

National Novel-Writing Month forces a person to evaluate their interests. I've been delving into my psyche to try and construct an image of the kind of story I like, tying things together by connecting pieces of red and blue string between the various works that will influence me in this endeavour. My bookshelf is smothered by nylon that centres upon Borges and Ian Fleming, my Nintendo 64 enshrouded in blue wool. I have several characters lined-up before me, all dressed in hospital gowns over their idiosyncratic dress, ready to donate a face or a coif or a kidney towards the construction of my elaborate Frankensteinian monster. I've being flying an aero-barge over the cities of the mind, lifting buildings and pulling them apart with my army of aethereal WALDO arms. The world has become a jigsaw puzzle of metaphysical characteristics, and I've leaning heavily towards certain districts that in real life I would rather be furthest from.

So what do we have so far in regards to my designs? Surrealestate is expensive these days so I have to choose swiftly and wisely. I've gutted Joanna Dark and wrapped her skin around Sam Spade, crushing my own mind into the cranium after polluting it with noir and excessive illogic. My garb is that of a librarian and my den that of a book-seller, and my weapons are a curious combination of James Bond and Doom. The city outside the door, what little of it can be seen, is a strange admixture of the 1930s, the 2030s, and all of it levelled out by only seeming to be different from now, when now it is. So no flying cars, sorry, although the emissaries from Sirius B have been making sly hints that they could change it.

Well, suffice to say that I've got limited ideas, and this was just an excuse to ramble.

So I was drifting along the road of life in my anti-gravitational way, sipping a lemon sherbert and wishing I was more like my idols, instead of my fetishes, when up pops a man named Gerard whom I've only ever met in dreams and margarine advertisements.

'Hey there, cat', says Gerald with a style, or rather said, but this is all in idiom. 'Hello, Joe,' I replied, slapping him a high five and then wishing I hadn't - his hands are made of iron. The reason is a rhyme without sensibility, or something, which I am adverse to reciting due to the unfortunate limitations put upon myself by the greater Cook Islands Off-shore holding company, which is renowned for the numerous embargos which it enacted against itself in protest in the late 1980s. The success was mixed, as where the cocktails, the cause of the entire disagreement that had begun when a young lad tried to sell a molotov as a martini, and it was declared that vermouth was officially a leathal weapon. Despite several attempts to reinvigorate the night club scene with fluffy ducks and a host of publicity stunts by Daniel Glover, it came-out in passing that the Vermouth embargo was actually being master-minded by Terrence Delacroix, and that my good friend Gerard was in some way entangled in the whole nasty liquour-smuggling mess. I'm quite proud of finishing this paragraph without a pun, as it would cheapen the spirit of the proceedings.

So anyways, after I applied some dettol and got a tetnus shot, Gerard and I swung round the club in the hopes of picking-up a few chicks, although our success was mostly limited to golfballs. We slid along (he considered my drifting pretentious) and came in time to the hall of records where several dozen Bowie whitelabels were gathering dust behind a stack of INXS. Pushing Mickey's corpse aside I grasped the ultra-rare remix of Warszawa done by Tobe Hooper and Timothy Leary whilst on a drunk and hopped-up on several forms of East Indian toad bladder and anogramatically-powdered tishcafed mushrooms. The result was a four-hour long sojourn into strange regions of the mind best left undiscovered unless you're in the habit of bringing a magnum along on your reveries. I always take two, along with a concussion grenade and a box of thumbtacs, so when I encountered my own personal bugbear it was short work to put several rounds through its chin and pin it to the side of my frontal lobe. Sitting there, Gerard wandered up, and sat down beside his double with a supercillious smile. Seems that I was by the real one and the dream one at the same time, the one and other both being the same, and that the new one was actually Gerard's self-image, wandering through from Gerard's sub-conscious on the way up to the next astral plane.

We split cocktails, scratched our heads, and I steap back out through my remeniscences and climbed the lengthy stairway to the rectangle of light at the end of which was the world, and a smallish computer monitor that hapily whizzed things off into the aether to recirculate them through a few more consciousnesses and get all tangled-up in the spiderwebs and cherry trees of dissatisfaction.

Also, Perfect Dark is a truly-great game.

So it was time to fire the old blog up for a quick delve into remeniscence. He sat himself down by his computer, glancing nervously at the clock from time to time. He had better things to be doing - or if not better than more pressing. His unfinished painting mocked him from the bedroom, every passing moment reminding him that he was drawing ever closer to the deadline two weeks away.

But he sat at the computer, and he began to type, certain that he would think of something worth saying that was not merely a pointless critique of a film which he had recently seen. he had many filed away - his partial intention at one point had been to write a detailed review of The Proposition - a gritty and surreal tale of bushrangers in the Australian outback that had moved him with its intelligent use of violence and stunning technical merit. But instead he froze, staring at the monitor, his fingers dipping down only once or twice a minute to scatter a hurried stream of characters into the aether. It was perhaps for the best that he was uninspired, that the best that he could do was to ramble. Perhaps if he retained a cap on his typing, the pent-up ideas would unleash like a dam-burst when he sat to engage in NanNoWriMo in November.

But then perhaps not.

He wondered if people came here very often. he had possessed a hit-counter on an earlier blog but found it confusing, often recording his own passage as he frantically checked to see if anyone had commented on his comics and ramblings. Nonetheless he had enjoyed the experience - the maintaining of the site and not the seeking - and so it was that he had moved-on to produce a variety of different web-comics. Even now he had just come from putting the finishing touches to a web-comic on an independent server, sitting tucked-away under an image banner on his home-site, waiting desperately for someone to go and read it - although he would nver know if they did.

He decided to get a drink, take a shower, and put his electric guitar away. The accoustic sounded better, and he didn't have a distortion pedal. He was tired, and the damned painting wouldn't leave him be.