It doesn’t feel like a whole year has passed since I started this job. Its prob­a­bly because I remem­ber the whole appli­ca­tion process like it was last week. I began writ­ing the appli­ca­tion two hours before it was due and only fin­ished it because I shut myself away from the world, put my head down and typed like a con­spir­acy nut. I had a week from when they called to organ­ise the inter­view to the actual meet, greet and inter­ro­gate and do you think I pre­pared for it in anyway?

If you answered ‘No’ you win the prize.

I barely remem­ber any of the inter­view any­way. I’m not sure if this is due to lay­ing my eyes on the fancy new digs they worked in or the cold ter­ror that clutched my heart as I realised maybe I should have writ­ten down some notes or something.

I must’ve said some­thing right dur­ing my 20 minute long ram­bling ses­sion because at the end of it they asked for my ref­er­ees. Then they asked again when I told them I hadn’t heard right the first time. I didn’t admit that what I had heard was a sort of rush­ing white noise sound. Pos­si­bly the sound of my blood try­ing to explode.

Hav­ing some­one call up and say “hey you got the job” surely rates as one of the great­est things to hap­pen dur­ing your life. Next to get­ting mar­ried, hav­ing kids win­ning a major sport­ing event. I’m assuming.

I still have that feel­ing every now and then. It’s the lit­tle things that bring it on, like no one telling me I have to attend train­ing courses I have no inter­est in just to meet per­for­mance plan goals; the view; the abun­dance of nat­ural (nat­ural!) light and finally my boss.

A boss that actu­ally lis­tens and offers advice; under­stands (but sadly doesn’t approve of ) my acute hatred of meet­ings; and wants me to be the best at what I do, rather than be mediocre at a whole bunch of vaguely con­nected tasks with­out offer­ing me any support.

Yeah, this place really is great.

We open on a small, stuffy meet­ing room. There’s enough room for a small round table, two chairs and not much else. Two men walk in and sit oppo­site each other, the DESIGNER and the CLIENT.

DESIGNER
Thanks for meet­ing with me.

CLIENT
My pleasure!

DESIGNER
Ok, thats enough of the pleas­antries. Lets get this started. Tell me what it is you want.

CLIENT
Bit of an open ques­tion isn’t it? Basi­cally I’ve got this website/blog/blog site/thing and I want to update design. Bring it into the 20th Century.

DESIGNER
You mean the 21st Century?

CLIENT
Yeah that.

The designer pinches the bridge of his nose tightly, takes a deep breath and flips through a stack of web­site screenshots.

DESIGNER
OK. So look­ing at this you’ve cur­rently rock­ing a two col­umn blog with a vaguely retro look to it.

CLIENT
This is true.

DESIGNER
Any thoughts about what look you’re after? What do you want the site to say?

CLIENT
Well I still like the retro look, but I don’t think it really goes far enough. I love the worn look too. Can we include that?

DESIGNER
(angry)
But you just said you wanted to bring it into the 21st Century!

CLIENT
While also pay­ing respects to the cur­rent design.

DESIGNER
(sigh­ing)
Mov­ing on. What about func­tion­al­ity? Is there any­thing you want the site to do?

CLIENT
A cou­ple of things come to mind. Bet­ter Twit­ter inte­gra­tion would be nice.  I tried daily Twit­ter roundups but that became a quick way to kill the site. Some­thing on the side­bar would be nice,

DESIGNER
Oh, so you still want the sidebar?

CLIENT
Er. Ah. Maybe we leave that ques­tion for later.

DESIGNER
Sure thing. That Twit­ter thing is easy. Using Twit­ter Tools you can have your lat­est tweets appear on the site and have a tweet sent out when you post on the blog. Any­thing else?

CLIENT
Gra­vatars, please.

DESIGNER
Great! Now we’re get­ting some­where. We’ll just install Gra­vatars on your site. Easy peasy.

CLIENT
Uhh…yay?

DESIGNER
Exactly. What about com­ments? Have you thought about that part at all?

CLIENT

I have. I was think­ing about mak­ing the Tur­ing stuff bet­ter. And maybe hav­ing my com­ments for­mat­ted dif­fer­ently to the others.

DESIGNER
Yeah. I don’t know what the hell you’re using for CAPTCHA now, but it’s pretty hideous. I can check out the for­mat­ting thing for you. No probs.

CLIENT
Just get­ting back to that sidebar…

DESIGNER
Yes?

CLIENT
Can that be view­able on the indi­vid­ual posts?

DESIGNER
Sure thing. But it’ll cost extra.

CLIENT
Fine. What­ever. While I’m get­ting gouged can you at least make the site looked dif­fer­ent to the stan­dard Word­press themes?

DESIGNER
Now you’re talk­ing! I’ll even throw in a chun­ked up footer and incor­po­rate your side­blog posts into the main RSS feed better.

CLIENT
So you’ll take the job?

DESIGNER
(not hear­ing the Client and start­ing to twitch)
I’ll rejig your whole con­tent. Big fonts! Whit­space! Pret­tier images! Block­quotes! Pull quotes! All on a can­vas that stretches to fit the width of the biggest mon­i­tor money can buy!

The Designer begins to cackle uncontrollably.

CLIENT
Are you OK?

DESIGNER
(still laugh­ing insanely)
Never bet­ter! Now get the hell out and don’t come back unless you’ve got a bot­tle of rum and a fat wad of cash. I’ve got designer­ing to do!

When I heard that they were going to make a movie of the Watch­men graphic novel. I had to ask why.

I’d only read it for the first time this year, but it still had a huge affect on me and I can see how peo­ple two decades ago would’ve shit bricks after read­ing it. There’s just so much story packed into the 12 issues that any movie ver­sion would be just a mere shade of the original.

Then I saw the teaser and it blew my mind (well every­thing except the god awful Smash­ing Pump­kins song they used to pro­mote the Bat­man and Robin movie). It looks like they’ve cap­tured the gen­eral feel book at least. For the first time i wasn’t qui­etly mor­ti­fied about the idea of a Watch­men movie.

But then Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury Fox smelled money and raised up from the black pit wav­ing the “true” rights to the Watch­men fran­chise and ask­ing for their share. Surely they could’ve let every­one know they might have an issue with this movie being made with­out their per­mis­sion a year ago. Before they started film­ing the god­damn thing.

So if they’re going to be dicks, then I can as well. I’m hereby boy­cotting all Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury Fox movies until this crap gets sorted out. There’s a few big block­buster movies in that list:

• The Day the Earth Stood Still
• X-Men Ori­gins: Magneto
• S. Darko
• Halo
• X-Men Ori­gins: Wolverine
• Night at the Museum 2: Bat­tle of the Smithsonian

I won’t be watch­ing any of these. Not in the cin­ema, not even a screener. I’m that serious.

For most Vic­to­ri­ans (and some inter­state folk) today is the day. Thou­sands upon thou­sands of peo­ple gather in houses and bars. Some in a giant sta­dium. They eat ham­burg­ers and sausages charred black on a bar­beque grill and stuffed into bread rolls. They drink cold beer in stub­bies pulled from a bath­tub full of ice.

Then they hud­dle around the tele­vi­sion or radio and they lis­ten and watch. For two hours all the trou­bles in their lives are for­got­ten as a greater bat­tle is fought on a grass green field just south of Melbourne.

And when it’s all over the peo­ple will laugh, joke or cry. They’ll wake up tomor­row still buzzing with excite­ment or dev­as­tated by loss. But they wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m enjoy­ing DC books a lot more lately, it’s just a shame they don’t keep to a decent sched­ule. From the Octo­ber solic­its it looks like all the good DC stuff hits around the mid­dle of the month.

Oh well at least I’ll have Wiz­ard to flip through this week.

Hell­boy: The Crooked Man #3 (of 3)

I came into the Hell­boy comics fairly late in the game, but I’ve been enjoy­ing the hell out of these lit­tle self con­tained stories.

All-Star Bat­man and Robin, The Boy Won­der #10

Holy late comic book, Bat­man! They finally got around to releas­ing this. It would’ve been out a cou­ple of weeks back, but appar­ently there were some prob­lems.

Legion of Super­heroes #46

The Legion book is finally start­ing to turn around. Seems like the team is finally free of the gov­ern­ment con­trol that hob­bled the last few months of sto­ries that could be con­densed into this exchange: “We must help them!” “But we can’t. They’ve taken away our fund­ing!” ZZzzzzz.

Trin­ity #17

It’s hard to write notes on Trin­ity. Mostly because of how incre­men­tally the story moves. At least they’ve finally con­firmed Engima’s iden­tity instory.

Avengers Ini­tia­tive #17

This has to be one of my favourite Mar­vel books. Fill­ing it with all new non-legacy char­ac­ters means their fates are far more uncer­tain. Ant-Man has to be one of the biggest jerks in the Mar­vel Uni­verse too.

Ms Mar­vel #31 

Two Ms Mar­vel issues in one month? No com­plaints here. This book always seem to lose a bit of momen­tum after each event tie-in. I hope they’ve fig­ured out how to cor­rect that.

Cover-wise we say farewell to Greg Horn cheese­cake and hello to rel­a­tive unknown Frank Mar­tin Jr.

New Avengers #45

Hey at least this issue sort of, kind of stars some Avengers. They’re alter­nate ver­sion though, so that shouldn’t really count.

Thun­der­bolts #124

I never picked up the Thun­der­bolts one shots, writ­ten by Chris­tos Gage back when War­ren Ellis wrote the main book. But they must’ve been pretty good as they slot­ted Gage into the main book once Ellis was done with it.

Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four X-Men Annual #1

This is the sequel to Ulti­mate x-Men Fan­tas­tic Four Annual #1. Rather than mark is as #2, they’ve just switched the team names around. Incred­i­bly confusing.

Ulti­mates 3 #5 (of 5)

In this, the final issue, they have to explain who killed Scar­let Witch and why, what the robots want, who Black Pan­ther is, why none of the story meshes up with Ulti­mates 1+2, Ulti­mate X-Men AND Ulti­mate Ori­gins. And then it has to explain why we should care when the uni­verse is basi­cally get­ting reset after the com­ing Ulti­ma­tum mini.

X-Force #7

Before this title came out I didn’t think too much of it based on the ini­tial pre­views. Now that the first arc is com­plete I’m happy to have been proven wrong.

X-Men Legacy #216

Isn’t dig­ging your nails into a captive’s scalp a vio­la­tion of the Geneva Con­ven­tion? Not that Emma Frost ever had a prob­lem with break­ing laws.