Father's Day

I have refrained from posting endless amounts of comments with my thoughts on the upcoming Scottish Independance referendum. Sure I’ve commented in passing here and there but I haven't shared the multitude of scaremongering posts from the No campaigners or the perhaps overly patriotic Yes campaign. That said I made my choice long ago and regardless of the outcome, change needs to happen whether it's as a whole the United Kingdom or as an Independant Scotland the country has gotten to the point where many things need changed before the existing system completely collapses.


My Dad was a very patriotic man, perhaps overly so and I didn't ever understand it growing up. Perhaps the result of a lot of resentment for being forced to listen to too much bagpipe music or The Corries in the car when he drove us places, or with the insane number of castles or battlefields in the highlands that I was dragged around regardless of the weather. I probably became somewhat disillusioned with the notion of patriotism because of all of that, but a part of me was always proud to be Scottish. Scotland as a nation has a proud heritage of innovating inventions, pioneering advancements in science from the very beginning to the present day. As both a Scot and a scientist I am extremely proud of these achievements of our nation, so I guess some of the patriotism stuck after all!


So why have I refrained from commenting on the referendum quite as vocally as others, because the vote takes place on the anniversary of my Dad's death.


My Dad died on the 18^th of September 2007 and the day they announced that the vote would take place on that day my heart both sank and swelled with pride. If my Dad was alive today he would have been marching on the side of the Yes campaign and quoting the Declaration of Arbroath at any given opportunity (something he did so regularly as I grew up that it's ingrained in my brain for all eternity) and I would have loved to have seen him do all that, even if I did spend most of my days rolling my eyes at it. I know my Dad would be very proud to share “his day” with the possible start of a new independent Scotland and that when the day came I would be proud to stand up and cast my vote in his place, not because I felt obligated to fulfil his wishes but because I had come to realise that he wasn't all that ridiculous after all.


So yes, I will be voting Yes on the 18^th of September and if that is the majority then I hope it is the start of something magnificent, that our great and proud nation can soar even higher if given the chance to change for the better. We've done so much in the past, we can do even more in the future and I can't wait to see what exciting adventures that might bring. If however the vote rules in favour of the No campaign then I hope they have the grace and humility to continue to move Scotland forward as a nation and not resort to even more cruel and unnecessary bullying of those who don't agree with them.


For some of us, the 18^th of September is a much larger day in our lives than this vote and I am scared for the future, that the results of the vote may result in a day that already means so much to me and what little family I have left being turned into nothing more than a cruel joke that mocks the man we mourn on that day. So whilst I respect that my friends have to make their own choice on this day and I won't judge them for making a different choice from me, I hope they understand and respect that I have a whole lot more riding on it than most.


I wish you were here to see this Dad, 

Happy Father's Day.

Teenage Mutant Ninja... Shrek?

Since their creation back in 1984 the world has seen many incarnations of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Every generation has THEIR turtles, being only one year older than the turtles myself I have witnessed first hand most of them as I am unashamedly proud of my early years obsession with all things Ninja Turtle and have kept a close eye on the ever evolving revamps they've had over the years.

From the original comic book, the first animated series and live action films of the 80s and early 90s the franchise was never limited to just one style, genre or even age group even from the very start, so it's hardly surprising that it has been constantly rebooted over the years. It's also no great leap to assume that hollywood's latest obsession of rebooting and remaking existing franchises instead of coming up with new material would eventually make it's way to yet another big screen outing for our mean green fighting machines!

So who could possibly take a product of the 80s with a large childhood following that are now conveniently in the key age range that most action blockbusters aim for and make it gritty and dark and well basically do what they did with Transformers and make an 80s cartoon into a movie for grown men... with lots of fighting and presumably some explosions, boobs and maybe a vague resemblence of a plot incase anybody isn't destracted by all the action! Oh I know, lets just hire Michael Bay and he can do everything exactly the same as he did on Transformers... including hiring Megan Fox!

Yup, as soon as that news hit, geeks all around the world thought Megan Fox was going to be the thing that ruined the new Turtles movie... guess what folks, it turns out she probably isn't going to be the worst thing in the movie!

The release of the trailer for the movie started out looking and sounding so much like a trailer for a Transformers movie that you would be forgiven for thinking it was just that until you got far enough into it to see a glimpse of Turtle! Now I know film makers have distinctive styles and it's to be expected to see similarities but come on... when the trailer even sounds like a Transformers movie, that's probably not a good sign! Now don't get me wrong, I actually kind of enjoyed all three Transformers movies, not because they were good films, but simply because they made my inner child and outer geek very happy with all the shiny exciting "real" looking Transformers! plot wise, yeah they pretty much were all stinkers!

Despite the blatant Transformers rip off feeling to the trailer, even that wasn't the nail in the coffin to my excitement for the new movie, I was still getting excited and totally prepared to give it a chance as any true geek and lifelong Turtles fan would! That was until I saw the face of Michaelangelo!

Look at it, that is not our beloved, dorky, pizza eating, skateboard riding, sewer surfing party dude! That's Shrek with a turtle shell!

Now I completely understand they wanted to go darker, more mature, take a slightly different route with the film to make it worth rebooting again, but what the hell were the designers thinking! It barely looks like a Turtle, if it didn't have a shell I really would just think Shrek, Ogre, hell I even thought for a second that it was the most hideous thing i'd seen since I was traumatised by the appearance of Sloth from The Goonies as a child!

The over all appearance of the Turtles looks pretty good, and it's really only the face that seems to let them down, with the brief glimpse of Leonardo immediately before Michaelangelo looking less grotesque but more like the The Dragon Lord (from the short lived live action Turtles TV series of the late 90s) and still not really very Turtle like!

I have to say I am really dissapointed in this discovery and I can honestly say I don't know if it will be possible to sit through an entire film where beloved characters from my childhood have been turned into hideous Shrek like creatures, I think the constant distraction the hideous appearance will cause will just constantly rip me out of the moment and cause myself and others to simply not enjoy the film.

I always feel bad slating the hard and presumably very time consuming work all the animation team have put in to create the Turtles in this film, to map them over the live action actors who wore those huge bulky suits on set - so I will say this, I am absolutely not criticising the quality of the work. From the brief look at the quality in the trailer it sure does look like they have done a great job to blur the lines between reality and CGI and for that I applaud them, but I cannot forgive the horrific disfigurement of my beloved childhood characters!

Have a look at the trailer yourself and let me know what you think about the new appearance of the Turtles and if you agree that Megan Fox might be off the hook if this one absolutely fails at the box office!

The Slayer's Return - A look at the Comic Book continuation and Review of Season 10 Issue 1

When Buffy The Vampire Slayer left the airwaves back in 2003, many were left heartbroken as many geeks are when a beloved tv show gets cancelled or runs it's course.  In the case of Buffy, the story seemed somewhat complete with the complete destruction of Sunnydale. This wasn't of course the end of the story of these characters and for one more year we got a few glimpses into the new world order of the Slayer line with the continuation of the spin off series Angel.

It wasn't long of course until Buffy returned in full canonical glory. albeit in a new format, with the 2007 release of the Season 8 comic book with Joss Whedon himself back at the helm. Having ventured into the Comic Book format during the run of the TV show with many non-canon stories, The Buffyverse did briefly have a canonical stint in this format with the futuristic spin off mini series Fray about a Slayer in a less than perfect future version of earth. It was in the Fray mini series that the Slayer Scythe featured in Season 7 of the TV show first made it's appearance. How do we know the world of Fray is canonical? Well that's easy because midway through Season 8 fans of the mini series are treated to a Buffy/Fray crossover story arc which does not disappoint.
 
Season 8 took us on a wild overtly fantastical ride where the extent of the writers imagination was no longer limited to what the television show's budget could stretch to producing believably. This of course  got many fans excited about the new possibilities for storylines but did admittedly aim a little too big on occasion such as giant mystical deities and let's not forget the giant Mecha Godzilla/Dawn hybrid - whilst the latter was an amusing homage to the Japanese Kaiju/Mecha cinematic culture the giant deities were perhaps a step too far! Season 8's 40 issue run (plus 3 one shot releases) ended in 2011 with Season 9 following shortly after and this time everything came back to basics after the writers also felt Season  8 had gotten a little far from the core Buffy style and had taken the opportunity granted by the destructive climax of the Season 8 Finale to shake things up rather dramatically once again.

Season 9 separated the gang and had everyone off solving their own problems, including the introduction of the Angel & Faith comic book into the mix as well as 2 mini series runs for both Spike and Willow. These were all written with the intent that the fans could read as many or as little as they liked of the books released under the Season 9 banner and not lose out if they chose to focus on only one release as key elements that were relevant to the overall story line were always summarised where necessary when something had happened in another book that you may not have been following.

Overall both Season 8 and 9 were both fantastically enjoyable reads for the fans of the show who wanted to continue with the characters storylines and don't detract from the TV show at all, however that said, both 8 and 9 always felt like a seperate entity being in a new format and had having just re-watched the tv series yet again from the beginning in it's entirety it's clear some aspects of the show didn't always translate to the new format quite so well.

This last week saw the long awaited release of Season 10 and without giving anything away, the first issue had me laughing out loud many times as I read it and was very pleased to discover it had truly captured the missing spark of the TV series that was occasionally lacking since the format change.

With pop culture references, jokes and characteristic snarkyness being totally on point throughout the issue as well as a few surprise returns of familiar faces, I had a smile on my face from start to finish of issue one and was left excited and very optimistic for the future of the Comic Book Buffyverse. Season 10 looks like it's going to be a fun ride!
 
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If you haven't yet read any of the comic book continuation of the Buffyverse you can find trade paperback collections of both Season 8 and 9 at your local Comic Book store, large chain book stores and online retailers and you should be able to catch up by the time the first trade paperback of Season 10 becomes available if not sooner!

New to the comic book format? not sure if you'll like the change in style? well there's even a solution to help ease you across to the new format. The first 19 issues of Season 8 were also made into what is known as Motion Comics, artwork from the comic books is taken and converted into a video format, occasionally animating some elements and adding an audio track with voice actors performing the roles of the characters. Sadly no more than the first 19 have been produced at this time but the ones that have been made are available to purchase on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download and are a great way to get through the first half of Season 8 very quickly!

How to celebrate a life: The Musical

I've told you the story of how I grew up in a home where each day was welcomed with a song, where a mother who was so full of love and light, would wake me with a smile on her face and a song quite literally in her heart as she warbled out some little song so delightfully sweet she could have been mistaken for a Disney princess... on happy pills!

Days were filled with old black and white films starring the beautiful Marilyn Monroe singing her little heart out about diamonds, or the colourful and tropical South Pacific, or her favourite The Sound of Music! This love of a world where stories were told with a song was shared and encouraged in me and as I grew up during the great Disney renaissance where they once again returned to their roots and started making and releasing new films based on the old traditions and styles of the classics like Snow White and Cinderella, I was thrown into a world where musicals were once again relevant to the younger generations like myself.

I didn't grow up in a wealthy family so I wasn't one of those kids who had every single Disney movie on VHS, in part because back then they did that annoying retail trick of "buy it now before it goes back in the Disney vault" all so they could re-release it every now and then at full price instead of ever having to sell it for a low price! So being from a lower income family my Mum never fell for their annoying marketing ploy, but she did always buy me a plentiful supply of blank VHS tapes as part of birthdays or christmas so that I could record my own from the television, and as the early stage geek that I was... I actually preferred that, it was fun to record them and label them myself!

So being actively encouraged to enjoy all things musical it's little wonder that now as an adult, I never grew out of it, I still watch Disney movies and sing along with the songs, at least a third if not more of my iTunes music library is made up of original cast recordings from stage musicals, Disney films, movie adaptations of stage musicals and yes... far too many songs by the cast of Glee! and I'm not even remotely ashamed of that.

I was given a gift growing up, the ability to see the world as she did, a world where heartache and despair often drowns out the important things in life, a world where people don't always share their feelings with each other, a world where people don't always have the words to share how they feel even if they want to. What's the gift in that? I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, but these are all things that musicals excel at sharing or explaining with the world! If everyone lived life like a musical, things would be a lot simpler, a lot more honest and things would probably get done faster and more happy endings might even happen!

This is why I start the day with music, or use music to share my feelings when I need help doing so, this is why I celebrate my Mum's memory and life with music on every day that was a part of her life, the day she died, the day she gave birth to me, the day she was married, and most importantly today, the day she was born.

11th November, a day where I could easily be heartbroken and mourn, but I choose to smile through my sadness and let music bring us closer together just like it would in a musical.

So today, I ask of you one little favour, live, dance, sing and share your favourite songs from any and all musicals with the world, with strangers and with people that you love. Maybe even leave little post it notes with lines from your favourite songs in strange places for people to find. Use your imagination and let the world be just that little bit brighter today, because that's what she would do!

I love you Mum, thank you for letting me be a part of your world.

How a VHS Tape made the world a better place today!

Before my Mum died I happened to buy my first digital camera and I happened to record a short 13 second video of her sitting on the couch and waving her arms around as she did a little dance for the camera. She doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t look very well either as she’s just started a second round of chemotherapy to try to fight of the cancer which had come back, but I treasure that video with all of my heart as it was the only thing I had to remember her by that showed her alive and moving. Photographs are wonderful, but you get so much more of a person from even a tiny little short 13 second video clip.

As I’ve spoken about before, my Dad died a little more than a year later and in that time I had gotten a much better camera because I realised how important it was to take photos of things you wanted to remember. Unfortunately my Dad was the kind of person who would just make a silly face or hide behind a newspaper the minute you pointed a camera at him, so I never got a video of him before he died and that upset me.  But I figured there was nothing I could do about it, just like I couldn’t change the fact that Mum never said a word in the one I was so very lucky to have of her, so I spent the last 7 years only ever seeing them move about or talk to me in my dreams, and getting upset by the fact that the sound of their voices had started to fade from my waking memory.

That all changed today.

I have been working on clearing out the attic for a while now, getting rid of all sorts of clutter that has been saved for one overly sentimental reason or another. Mum was always the one who could take a Zen like frame of mind and periodically decluttered the whole house when I was out at school or university. She took charge of the problem that was my Dad’s hoarding tendencies, the fact he couldn’t throw away anything that might be useful some day, and that problem doubled when I came along and inherited his hoarding gene filling the house up with even more knick knacks and trinkets with sentimental value, assorted geekery collectables or craft supplies. Things squirreled away from holidays over the years, things that whilst dreadful or tacky I just couldn’t bring myself to part with. Especially true after their deaths and I was left as the heir and protector of all that remained of the lives of these two people who were no longer here to protect it themselves.

For seven years so many boxes have lain unopened, their contents a mystery and now that I am at a place in my life where I am less dependent on the past and able to begin to move forwards, letting go of many of these boxes and their once precious contents.

Today I got to a box which contained a few stray VHS tapes, one an old cartoon compilation tape I got for Christmas when I was probably only 6 or 7 and a video we bought on holiday in Gran Canaria when I was about 13 or 14 years old.  I took one look at the tapes and very nearly just threw them both into the bin, there was nothing of value there, just some childish cartoons and a video which triggered one thought “oh god not that awful video".

You see, that second video was part of a tour my parents and I did, where we went out to a banana plantation, followed by a local alcohol distillery of some sort out on a ranch in the islands sand dunes where the tour ended with a trek through the sand dunes on camels. The tour promoters filmed the whole camel trek and then charged us extra money for their poorly shot and incredibly poorly edited video of the whole thing. Both my parents and I thought this video was dreadful and watched it only the once and yet it ended up being protected all this time thanks to my Dad and I hoarding away things with even the slightest bit of sentimental value.

I have never been so grateful for this shared trait and that dreadful video until today, because seconds before I put the tape into the bin I realised that this awful thing had been hiding a wonderful gift all these years.

Video footage of both my parents

I jumped down from the attic faster than I have ever moved in my life, and for the next 30 minutes I sat in front of my television crying catching little fleeting glimpses of my parents here and there.  5 seconds here, 10 seconds there, another 5 here but this time they were smiling, 5 more and I was watching them laughing… all the while listening to the cheesiest music playing over the footage with no other sounds.

I hadn’t been so happy or grateful for such a long time, I had cried so many tears of joy I didn’t know how I still had any tears left to come out.

Then as the video was nearing the end, the most unexpected thing happened. The cameraman walked right up to my Mum as she was getting off the camel and she was suddenly right there in the middle of the frame, practically looking right into the camera and started to talk.

Just three little words, that’s all, nothing spectacular, but way more than I could have ever dreamed of hearing again in my lifetime.

It has been 7 years and 25 days since I lost my Mum, probably another week or more on top of that since I last heard her beautiful voice and today, when I had long since given up hope of ever hearing her voice again she spoke to me and told me…

“That was brilliant”

and it was.

Depression, friends and coping mechanisms

Depression and anxiety are a large part of my life and have been since I lost my parents, but this blog isn't about the cause, this is about living with it and what it means for me in what I do and say or just general coping mechanisms I use that you may or may not have noticed me doing if you know me in real life.

I think this might turn into a blog of multiple parts, so I'm only going focus on a few areas here in this first one. How depression effects me, my friendships and social life, and some of my coping mechanisms which may or may not interfere with that. Hopefully it will help others with depression understand their own feelings too.

Having a depression that has a cause, my loss and subsequent problems caused by both the loss and the depression itself. I am constantly in a state of flux, never quite sure how I'll feel when I wake up or what song playing on a shop radio might set me off. Some days I'm good and feel like I can do anything, these are the days where you might see me being creative or going on an adventure with friends. But some days everything will have gone to hell before I even wake up, my dreams have always been very vivid and for the most part quite lucid leaving me feeling very intense emotions as I wake from them. Sometimes I'm lucky and I wake with a sense of peace from the dream, where I'll have maybe seen my parents in a happy situation, but more often than not it'll be a distressing situation, a bad memory or I'll have started with a nice happy dream and have lost them again by the end of it – or sometimes the worse option is it'll feel so real that it's waking that steals them away from me all over again and the day is just left feeling empty.

So the day can start any number of ways, and it can change swiftly throughout the day too – and whilst that is true for everyone it's especially true for people like me who have problems with depression. But what do you do with the days that are bad, I hide, I distract myself to keep the negative thoughts at a distance. I deliberately lose myself in a fantasy world, doing things I cannot avoid on auto pilot. I welcome outside influences that can take me away from my world for even a little while, I long for them, but they don't always come because in hiding myself away from the world to avoid my own pain I have alienated myself from friends. I have unintentionally distanced myself from the very people who keep me afloat in a sea of negativity. I have lost lifelines and lights of hope and I feel like an outsider staring in at a life fading away. In hiding myself away from pain, I’ve inadvertently caused myself and others more and I'm hoping that realising this is a step towards fixing things and towards healing myself too.

Some days I'm very defensive, take every little thing to heart and end up saying things I regret. I say things I regret a lot, my emotions are very near the surface at the best of times, but when I'm having a down day they are completely on the surface and friends and family often take the brunt of those emotions, then the anxiety kicks in and I stress out about whether they were really offended or if they understood why it happened. 

I've always had trouble meeting new people and coping with new situations, anxiety has always been a part of my life, but more so since the depression first hit. I started getting panic attacks and some of my friends have witnessed some of them, but not the worst ones. I try not to talk about them, maybe out of embarrassment maybe just because thinking about them makes that horrible tight feeling rise up in my chest again. Thankfully I haven't had any really bad ones for a long time now, but they still happen and even writing about them just now is making my chest feel tight. It's almost a conditioned response now, it makes me run and hide from whatever makes those feelings kick in. This is one reason I make excuses about not being able to do things or go places, fear. Not the there's a dinosaur chasing me and I really don't want to get eaten kind of fear, but just as powerful because it's not a dinosaur, but it is a monster. For me the anxiety and depression have become intertwined, each causing the other to be stronger or scarier and that itself is enough to cause the fear without any other outside influence.

Depression isn't something that you can just cure and it's gone like a disease, it's like that analogy of bullying with the crumpled up piece of paper, you can unroll the paper and flatten it out but it'll never be the same again, it'll always be damaged. Alcoholism is a pretty close analogy too, you can stop drinking but you'll never stop being an alcoholic.

So to my friends reading this, please don't think that just because I haven't seen you for a while or tried to make plans with you that I don't care, or that I've forgotten about you, I’m still here and I still care, I might just be stuck in a dark place hoping someone will help me find my way out again, hoping that you might know where to look.

Apocalypse... maybe?

What if the world really did end on the 21^st December 2012 and our consciousness was simply transferred to one of our other bodies in a multiverse system?

The Mayan Apocalypse was, as apocalypse's go, pretty pathetic... at least to our perception, and we've all had fun joking about it failing and us still being here or using photoshop to make pretend fire and brimstone all across the globe. I too took great delight in taking two beloved fictional characters who are known for saving the world a lot into a work of photoshop fun to imply that they saved the world together. I mean what geek doesn't want to see The Doctor teaming up with Buffy the vampire slayer...

But all joking aside and back to my original point, what if the world really did end yesterday and we just don't think it did because of a perception complexity we just cannot fathom. Multiverse theory works on the theory that every possible option or outcome does happen splitting off to form an infinite number of possible universes because everything has to stay in balance so to simplify it if something can be “on” there has to be an option for “off” in existence, or “up” must be paired with “down” etc. These multiverses don't necessarily all last as not all options are viable in life, so it is possible that once a multiverse has reached it's end it recombines with the last universe it split from where the option chosen was successful.

So how does this effect us on a perceptual level, well consider the possibility that our consciousness is connected across the multiverses on some level and when a universe fails the consciousness is recombined with it's last split point just like the rest of the universe. Now assuming in this situation that this was true and a perfectly benign recombination led to absolutely nothing noticeable to your perception you probably wouldn't even know this system was happening... but what about the abnormal recombinations such as universes that got out of sync with each other for some reason leading to one getting further ahead before it failed, what then? Well one option could be an explanation for moments of Deja Vu or perceived Precognitive abilities, a glitch in the recombination of memories would be inevitable if there were memories in existence for one universe than hadn't happened yet in the other – potentially leading to a moment of Deja Vu and in effect giving the person an instantaneous glimpse of at least one possible outcome of their actions for the duration of the time overlap or in some cases simply a feeling of familiarity when they themselves walk that same/similar path for the first time in their native universe.

So what about a huge multiverse ending event that was of apocalyptic proportions, would that be noticeable? Would we ever have even the slightest idea that it had happened at all?

Well that would be entirely dependent on the type of apocalypse...

Instantaneous vaporisation of Earth and all it's inhabitants – unlikely, even if the universe was drastically out of sync an instantaneous destruction on this scale would presumably be over before we even noticed it began so it's memory would be non-existent and therefore non-transferable.

Slow fire and brimstone, lightning storms, fireballs or meteors falling from the sky, hell even good old zombie apocalypse – probably, memories of this type would surely be existent in at least some if not all people as people would die at different times as would the multiverse they inhabit personally.

So what can we take from this analysis of apocalypse's and multiverse theory... well unless anyone reports disturbing memories or moments of Deja Vu... I think we can safely assume our multiverse counterparts were instantaneously vaporised and felt no pain!

Of course we'll never know for sure and this is all just the vaguely scientific rambling of someone with absolutely no professional training in the field of physics...but hopefully it entertained you if nothing else, so until next time - If the apocalypse comes, beep me