Review -- Ephemeris: Part Circle

The first in a series from Aussie authors Martin Nixon and Robert J. Camp, Ephemeris: Part Circle is a preposterous space adventure wrought with danger, weird aliens, and trivial irritations. The story began its life when the writing duo were just a pair of sci-fi-fuelled teens, and was an attempt to harness their extensive archive of endlessly escalating private gags into something tangible. As such, it reads like something banged out by Douglas Adams that time he was secretly two excitable kids in a trenchcoat.

The tale follows the authors' fictionalised selves through a colourful and slightly grotty world filled with a supporting cast of time-hopping space cadets, safety-obsessed ninjas, and a car with a mean face. When hapless Martin falls off his bike and accidentally summons a cabal of interdimensional and demographically inclusive baddies, our heroes are left homeless and seriously peeved – and their only chance at reconciliation is an epic final boss showdown on the moon. Their adventure takes them to secret island bases, skybound petrol stations, and countless joyfully acknowledged movie tropes.

More so than the story, the text itself pulses with the kind of breathless energy that follows several hours of role-playing games and fizzy pop. Every thought inspires its own flabbergastingly obtuse tangent, creating an interwoven maelstrom of in-jokes so dense that it's impossible not to applaud. Action sequences are conveyed in such exhaustive detail that even the most frenetic end up spanning several chapters. Throwaway details are expanded upon in footnotes which probably account for a third of the novel's text, describing everything from a what a guy's shoes look like to historical accounts of racial tensions among insects.

It's this admirable (and deranged) insistence upon wringing every molecule of comedy from an already fun situation that makes the heart and soul of this book, and it could only come from two mates screwing about and trying to make each other laugh. The fact that Messrs Nixon and Camp have thought to write down their mental ramblings since adolescence – and even more impressively, translate them into a fictional universe as cohesive as it is cacklingly bonkers – is worth admission alone.

Ephemeris: Part Circle is a hypercharged Hitchhiker's for the internet age; an ADD assault of delirious exuberance bristling with nerd affection and an unshakable sense that we're definitely in on the joke. It's like they smashed up a bunch of Red Dwarf and Doctor Who DVDs and glued them back together with liquid Nintendo.

Exhausting, enthralling, irresistible.

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Transformers I Flogged (And Why I Don't Regret It)

So this last year has been pretty messed up. It's felt for a long time like things are changing in a big way, and a couple of months ago I found myself suddenly far less attached to my beloved Transformers collection than I had previously been (which was pretty friggin' attached). Whereas it had for years been my pride and joy, not to mention my main source of self-worth, it suddenly felt like a giant weight around my neck, tying me down to places and habits I'd rather get the fuck out of.

After a fair slab of soul-searching and a few hours digging through instructions, I reached a point where I'd decided what (considerably reduced) shape I wanted my collection to take and that a lot of the ballast just had to go. Below are a few of the robots I ditched - most of them for far less than their worth - and why I couldn't give a rat's nut that they're gone.

Salvaged review: Playskool Go-Bots Buzzer-Bot

(I just found my original draft of a text review I did for the now-defunct Transforming Block blog that I got involved with a while ago. I still feel awful about that whole affair; I could have tried so much harder. But anyway, here's this thing!)

Playskool Go-Bots have always seemed a little bit horrible to me. Released by Hasbro in the early 2000s, at the height of my hatred/dismissal of all things not-G1, they were simplistic, inflated-looking weirdos created with the sole purpose of getting a generation of pre-schoolers hooked on the plastic crack before they even had time to know what the Hell was going on. Looking back today, I could retro-actively claim that I rejected the Go-Bots through righteous anti-consumerist disgust, but in reality I just thought they were bollocks.

And then about a year ago, I found one in a charity shop and honestly he fills my world with a loveliness so pure that if I died tomorrow I don't even think I'd mind.

Thew's Six Albums of 2012

Okay, look, I'm gonna begin by straight-up admitting that I don't really pay much attention to music anymore. There was a time when I'd buy ten albums a week, but that was a time when I really, really gave a crap about metal and hardcore and mathcore and metalcore and death metal and grind and deathgrind and aggro-grind and genres and sub-genres and micro-genres and meta-genres of supposedly varied music that actually is just metal and shut up.

But that time is long past, and I now keep track of an embarrassingly tiny number of artists. I am old and I am bored and I am jaded, and it's time to admit that there is no difference between Ion Dissonance and Through The Eyes Of The Dead; Viatrophy sound like Caliban sound like Killswitch Engage sound like Hatebreed; Arch Enemy sound like Shadows Fall sound like Devildriver sound like FUCKING CHRIST I AM SO OLD, SHUT YOUR FACE.

So given my devastatingly low interest level in the music I once fawned over and lived for, you'll forgive me for only buying six albums in the last year. These are not my top six albums of the year; they're the only ones I could even be bothered to check out. Here's what I think of them, in reverse order of how much I like them.

Cameras, Skyscrapers and Rumblin'

So last week I train'd it through London and down into deepest, darkest Kent for a location shoot, wherein I'd be filming some dreadfully tedious customer testimonial vids for a client. The day of shooting went as smoothly as could be expected, everything got done and it was all cool. I even nabbed a quick Instagram of the Shard on the way there:

I was like, "Oh yeah, this is here."

Thing is, I rocked up at like 3pm on the Monday and we didn't have anything to shoot until the following morning, so I was confronted with a long evening to kill in Tonbridge, which is as drab and pointless a town as any small overspill community you care to mention. (Nice castle, mind.) After paying £5.30 for a fucking pint of Peroni and my A-Team DVD wouldn't play on my laptop, because it turns out my work laptop doesn't play DVDs, I remembered that I'd packed my newest robo just in case I got really bored. So here's my super-HD review of Prime Rumble, shot in a hotel room using my work equipment! Holy crap!

So, having achieved such deliciously crisp HD quality glory, where now? How can the webcam I normally use possibly live up to this? I mean, it's a pretty good webcam, but it's still a fucking webcam. Fortunately, it'll only be around for one more review because (a) it's my birthday and (b) my dad fucking kicks ass. Guy got me a new friggin' camera for my 29^th, 'cos he's incredible. Says on the front that it's a Canon PowerShot SX220 HS, and it's pretty friggin' great. Dunno if it'll be as good as the almost-pro quality of the vid above, but believe me when I say it's a marked improvement over the webcam's frame-dropping pixellated antics. It shoots in full HD and it's got a motherfucking super-slow-motion function.

This is it, folks. TATFR has entered the HD age for real! I've one webcam-shot review to finish off, then we'll be hi-deffin' it all the way. Hold onto your fucking socks.

OVERCOMPENSATRON

Yesterday I flopped a giant half-hour vlog onto the Youtubes, in which I responded to a clutch of questions from some lovely people who cared enough to ask them. Here it is, I guess.

Vid: Grimstone

Fancy some dinorobos? Of course you do:

This vid was a really long time coming. I actually started working on it as soon as Ian kindly sent me this awesome set way back in December, but I kept hitting a wall with it and for some damn reason I just couldn't get it finalised. So I left it to stew for a bit and came back to it last week, and it's like, what was the problem? It was probably the easiest one to make for, like, a year!

This was the first vid I made using my new editing software, the snappily-monickered Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11, which is a friggin' amazing tool. I mean, it came with a bunch of other stuff like Sound Forge and like a thousand sound effects, it was super cheap, and holy crap the things come out in actual HD. It's the futuuuurrrreeee

Super big props to the guys who got in on the mighty morphin' voice thing: Brent, Pat, Joe and Ian himself! They weren't the only folks who gave it a shot - I put a call out on Twitter for some voice action which about 15 people were awesome enough to answer, and it was a bit of a shitty job to pick the ones that made it. I mean, there wasn't a single bad one. Everybody really went for it! In the end, I just went for the ones that sounded the most Power Rangery. Nice job, everybody.