Latest Chris & Trilby comic: #86: And So They
Set Off
11/7/05:
Raising Bran
Okay, let me
first say that I had Notepad open and was just
about to start writing another update about
superheroes when I remembered what my last five
thousand updates were about, so now I'm going to
attempt a bit of a gear change and get us moving
on another track.
Okay, ready now.
I really enjoy
historical documentaries. Feudal Japan, court of
King Henry, ill-fated voyage of Captain Scott,
you name it, I'll watch it. I have to say,
though, that no-one does historical doccos quite
like the BBC. How can anyone compete with a bunch
of actors in period garb wandering around
gardens, stroking their beards and staring off
into the middle distance while the narrator
rambles on?
I especially
love those documentaries hosted by that one guy.
You know who I mean, the really serious-looking
guy with one hand perpetually pocketed who looks
like he went out of his way to dress like a
grammar school history teacher. The one who
glares at the camera like the operator just
called him a wanker and he's determined not to
rise to him, and who talks like any minute now
he's going to shout "Stibbons! Are you
CHEWING?!"
I was watching
one of those programmes the other day, about one
of those standard medieval periods in English
history, and I found myself wondering about some
of the phrasing the extremely serious history
teacher used.
"And so,
Richard of Something escaped from prison, raised
an army, and prepared to march on Bumfuckshire.
Meanwhile, Sir Daniel Makepeace, loyal to the
King, also raised an army and went to meet
Richard's forces -"
What I'm getting
at here is the casual nature in which 'raising an
army' is referred to. I don't know, it seems like
'raising an army' would be kind of complicated,
but the way these documentaries refer to it,
people almost do it as an afterthought, like it's
the last thing on the things-to-do list after
taking out ye olde cat and buying ye olde milk.
As far as I'm aware, employing a formidable group
of fighting men is something that spawns five
hundred simultaneous headaches. First there's the
interview process -
"So, why do
you want to join Sir Daniel's army?"
"I'm really interested in brushing up on my
key maiming skills."
Then there's
tailoring a nice suit of armour and forging a
nice sword. And then there's feeding the little
tykes:
"Ten
thousand ye olde extra value meals, please."
"What, feeding an army, or something?"
"He knows too much! Ye olde stab!"
And you want
your army to be any sort of use at all, you've
got to do all this for something like ten
thousand individuals. I'm sorry, I just don't see
how this is as easy as it's made out to be,
unless every noble in ye olde England has an army
kicking around his basement next to the toasted
sandwich maker he bought years ago and only used
once. Or maybe he just rides around his
constituency and gathers up all the reasonably
beefy farmers, but even that would be difficult.
I'm not aware of a single incident wherein a lord
meets another lord on the plains of battle and
one of them says "Sorry, can we leave it for
another time? I'm not quite finished raising an
army yet." It seems to be relying just a bit
too heavily on the British reputation for
politeness.
The only
explanation I can come up with for the ease with
which ancient British people raised armies is
that the British Isles are the source of arcane
magicks taught to each generation by the
descendants of Merlin. Whenever a British lord
required an army to defend her shores, all he had
to do was sacrifice a black she-lamb to an altar
of Belenos and scatter a thousand acorns onto
salted ground. After the incantation, every
single one would grow into a fighting man. See,
literally raising an army. Then, when
christianity started spreading, Britain rolled
their eyes and pretended to go along with it so
they could secretly use their pagan magick to
kick arse in war for all time.
See, the world
has been allowed to form this complacent view of
Britain, considering them little more than posh
yobbos who eat bland food and watch too much
football, when in fact this is all an extremely
well-maintained facade. In reality, the British
people were appointed by the Ancients as Sacred
Defenders of the Timeline, and when a British
citizen comes of age they get issued a Tardis to
help fight the constant attempts of the evil void
monsters from dimension zero to break into the
human realm OH SHIT I'VE SAID TOO MUCH
- Yahtzee
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2/7/05:
The Spider-Jerk Refuses To Leave
I know that my
last update was about Spider-man, but I feel
there is still material on the subject.
Spider-man 2 is one of those games that I seem to
notice something new about every time I play it,
and one thing that I recently stumbled upon was
the frankly absurdly detailed 'statistics' page.
It records everything from how far you've
travelled to how far you've fallen without
hitting the ground with a wet thud.
One of the stats
that caught me eye was the 'gallons of web fluid
used' stat. With this information, I thought, I
could do some speculative mathematics on ol'
Spidey and finally find a use for that maths
GCSE.
To put some sort
of focus on proceedings, I am going to attempt to
answer the following question: How many
quarter pounder cheeseburgers would Spider-man
have to eat per day?
According to the
game, then, Spider-man produces exactly 0.005
gallons of web fluid for each thread he spunks
out for swinging on a building. Bear in mind
that, in the game, like in the film on which it
is based, Spidey generates web fluid organically
inside his own body. I hate working with heathen
imperial measurements so let's translate that to
something a little bit more metric. I'll colour
my calculations pink to add an air of gaiety to
proceedings.
0.005
US liquid gallons = 18.927059 cubic cm
Now, let's
assume that the average distance between
Spider-man and a tall building when he's sailing
happily through the air is 25 feet. So let's
stretch those 19 cubic centimetres into a cuboid
25 feet long. First we convert 25 feet into
centimetres.
25
feet = 762 cm
So now we divide
the volume by the known length. Before I do that,
though, I'd like to thank Windows calculator for
their contribution to this project.
19
cubic cm / 762cm =
0.0249343832020997375328083989501312cm
We'll call that
an even 0.025cm. This figure is the area in
centimetres squared of a web-line's
cross-section. That's roughly one quarter of a
square millimetre. Since the square root of 25 is
5, then (if I'm doing this right) then the width
of an average thread of web line is 0.05
millimetres. Go take a look at the nearest
convenient ruler - a millimetre is really titchy,
isn't it? Now divide that titchy space by 100 and
multiply the result by 5. That's too titchy to
think about. If Spider-man really does only use
19ml of web fluid in one line, the line would be
so thin it could be used by amoebae as a gallows
rope.
Now let's
consider that this line has to support a
full-grown human, which opens up a whole new can
of worms. According to wikipedia, the average
weight of a US teenager is 99 to 141 pounds.
Spider-Man is fucking built, o'course, so we'll
say he leans towards the latter value and give
him 140lbs. Once again I find myself swimming in
the treacherous Imperial Sea, so let's get that
converted into God's own metric.
140lbs
= 63.502932kg
We'll call that
63 and one half. Now to calculate the pressure
being applied to the webline in kg/square cm:
63.5
/ 0.005 = 12700
And with one
last bit of mathematical magic, we'll convert
that into Pascals, the preferred unit of
pressure:
12700
kg/square cm = 1245444550 pascals
So that means
that Spider-Man's web fluid needs a tensile
strength (as in, how much it can support without
breaking) of AT LEAST 1245.44 megapascals (MPa).
According to Wikipedia, spider silk has a tensile
strength of 1150 MPa. But then, this isn't
strictly speaking spider silk, this is spider
silk scaled up to the kind of gooey spunk a
human/spider hybrid would produce. So it wouldn't
be completely out of the question for it to have
a higher tensile strength than standard spider
silk. Damn those smartarses in the Spider-man 2
research department.
None of this, of
course, answers the question of how many quarter
pounders Spidey would need to eat every day.
Since we have no idea of the exact nature of web
fluid we can't really work out its density, so
let's pluck a completely arbitrary number out of
the air and say that the density is 1.5g/cubic
centimetre. So 19 cubic centimetres (the average
volume of a webline, remember) weighs 28.5g.
Didn't I say this would be fun?
Now we have to
figure out how much of the wretched stuff
Spider-Man uses while out on the town. He
maintains a double life, so we'll say he divides
12 waking hours exactly between his two personas
and that he spends 6 hours of the day on patrol.
Now for some completely made up figures for what
he does during one hour of crimefighting:
Weblines
used for transport - 50
Number of weblines needed to web up a thug - 20
Number of thugs webbed up - 15
Total number of weblines used in combat - 300
Total number of weblines used per hour - 350
Patrol
= 6 hours, so number of weblines used per patrol:
2100
And the total
mass of all those weblines? 2100 x 28.5 = 59850g,
or 60kg, very nearly Spider-Man's entire body
weight. And you can't just generate spunk fluid
out of nothing, dear reader - all of that has to
be produced from the nutrients in Spider-Man's
sexy, sexy bod. So, how many quarter pounder
cheeseburgers would Spider-Man need to eat before
his patrol in order to prevent himself from
becoming a poorly-dressed emaciated husk in ten
seconds flat? Let's convert back to the hated
imperial system to find out.
60kg
= 132.277357lbs
132.277357 x 4 = 529.109428
A grand total of
529 complete quarter pounder cheeseburgers and
maybe a bite or two of another. So, if a skinny
youth ever pulls up to the drive-thru and orders
five hundred cholesterol combos, take a moment to
shake him by the hand and thank him for his
service to justice. Or assume the London
Philharmonic sent him out to pick up lunch, or
something.
FUN
FACT: In the comics, Peter Parker's
webshooters were technological. Sam Raimi opted
to have organic webshooters in the Spider-man
films because he felt that an organism capable of
generating seemingly limitless amounts of miracle
adhesive from bodily nutrients and shooting it at
high speed from glands in his wrists would be
'more realistic'.
ANOTHER
FUN FACT: Sam Raimi went to university.
- Yahtzee
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25/6/05:
Here Comes The Spider-Jerk
Yeah, sorry
about that last update, it was probably a mistake
to write with an uncapped Pritt Stick on the desk
in front of me. Hopefully I can make up for it
today.
Lately I've been
playing a lot of Spider-man 2 on the Gamecube.
While I of course loathe the capitalist tie-in
culture for which it stands and hope everyone
involved dies of facial lacerations, there's
something primally enjoyable about dressing up
like a packet of Wonka Nerds and swinging around
the city fighting crime. And of course, Bruce
Campbell's narration makes it all the more
scrumptious.
 |
There
is one thing I take issue with, however,
and that's an incident towards the
beginning when the narrator is talking up
the open-ended nature of gameplay, then
suffixes it with the phrase "But
remember, you can only be a hero".
Well, I said, what if I don't want to be
a hero? I know Spider-man has the usual
superhero death-of-parental-figure
backstory, but gosh darn it I don't have
the same sort of motivation. My gran died
a few years back, so at most I might feel
motivated to wage a one-man war against
old people, but most of the time I'd
rather just use my powers to be a jerk. |
Fortunately,
the nature of Spider-man 2's gameplay leaves a
lot of leeway for jerk behaviour, and so, for the
benefit of everyone who's has bored as I am, I
present:
YAHTZEE'S
GUIDE TO BEING A JERK IN SPIDER-MAN 2
1. Bash
up people who drive too fast
There are times
when you don't even have to try to be a jerk when
the game expects you to be one anyway. One of the
'petty crimes' that occasionally take place which
you can choose to interrupt is 'road rage',
wherein an otherwise blameless citizen starts
yelling out of his car window and driving above
the 10mph speed limit. I don't know if Spider-Man
is taking kickbacks from Mothers Against Drunk
Driving or if the programmers all lost family
members to angry motorists, but Spider-Man's
method of solving this problem is to leap onto
the roof of the car and smash it with his fists
until the driver stops. Smashing the fuck out of
things is some kind of universal cure-all in
Manhattan, not unlike sex in most Hentai games.
2. Upset
small children
Another of the
'petty crimes' you can solve is when a child's
balloon criminally attempts to escape into the
wild. While there are certainly more important
things you could be doing in the game's rendition
of New York (a city with an estimated
pursesnatcher density of 0.6 per square yard),
superheroing is 50% public relations, and
stopping for a second to bring laughter to a
preschool ingrate can only do good. Of course, it
should be noted that attempting to bring the
balloon down to earth with a strand of webbing
causes it to burst, which in turn causes the
former owner to do a little bursting themselves
(INTO TEARS!!!). A nuisance to the hero, but
comedy gold to the jerk.
3. Be a
dreadful ambulance
There are
missions where you have to deliver pizza, and if
you do too many rolly-stunts then the pizza gets
destroyed. That's good. The game understands that
there are consequences for going flip-ti-psycho
while carrying extremely fragile items. Why,
then, is there not a similar system for the
missions in which you ferry injured pedestrians
to hospital? I wouldn't think that sailing
through the air would do extremely unwell people
much good, let alone smacking into buildings and
doing forward-rolls at high speed along solid
concrete. Pretty much the only jerky thing you
can do is drop them in the ocean, which I find
disappointing. I'd have really liked to turn up
at the hospital and apologetically present a pile
of misshapen flesh and teeth.
4.
Mistreat criminals
| It's a
very black-and-white world Spider-Man
lives in. Fifty percent of the city's
population is infected with the 'evil
gene', which comes free with a Glock and
a pipe wrench, and everyone else minds
their own business, except when dobbing
in members of the former. Spidey has no
time to consider individual motivation or
the justification of theft in extenuating
circumstances - nope, it's just good
solid haymakers for all and sundry. Of
course, the game makes a big thing out of
the fact that Spidey pulls his punches to
not smash the thugs into red paste with
one blow. Luckily, I don't have any
similar qualms with murder, so I found a
way to find lethal uses for Spidey's
moves. |
 |
-
Web up an enemy and slam them against a wall at
full speed. Then do it again. You can do this as
many times as you like, even after they're
unconscious. How did you pull those punches,
Spidey? Hm? Can your superpowers somehow reduce a
person's momentum before their spines snap in two
like graham crackers against a brick wall? Can
they? Hm?
- Grab them, web
up to the highest point in the city, then kick
them off. Keep an eye on your radar as your
enemy's icon makes a beeline for Mother Earth.
Did you ensure they survived the fall, Spidey?
Hm? Did you arrange a pile of nice mattresses
beforehand, did you? Can you telepathically make
the ground less solid just prior to their bones
powderising on impact? Of course you didn't, you
fucking hypocrite. See also: webbing them up to
the highest point in the city, then piledriving
them fifty storeys into the ground. Be warned,
though, 'cos they sometimes survive this.
Presumably they make bandanas out of adamantium
in the Marvel universe.
- And then of
course you can punch them into the sea. Being fit
young adults they can probably swim, but I choose
to believe they can't. I choose to believe that
the water level is steadily rising from the
growing layer of Crips I am creating on the
riverbed.
It's the mark of
a good game if the physics permit you to be a
huge jerk. I may even devote future articles to
other games and creative ways you can blow off
steam in them. Until then, keep swinging, stay
calm while driving, and don't come pursesnatching
in MY town if you don't want your skull reduced
to the exact size and shape of the pizza I
delivered this morning.
- Yahtzee
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23/6/05:
The Evil That Simon Does
[DIGRESSION
#1 - I added Chris Livingston's delightful new
comic Concerned to my list of greatest webcomics because it is good.]
[DIGRESSION
#2 - You'll notice that I changed the photo of me
on the About page, because it was
badly out of date. The new one was taken today
and showcases my lovely beard.]
Ask someone who
the most evil man who has ever lived is and
you'll get a lot of largely predictable answers.
Adolf Hitler will come up frequently, as will
Judas Iscariot, and some people with ill-informed
political leanings might give the names of
current world leaders, but only I know for
absolute certain the identity of the most evil
man who has ever lived.
His name is
Simon Ducard.
Simon Ducard is
so unrelentingly, irredeemably evil, that he can
make babies shriek and dogs howl just by sitting
quietly in an adjacent room. He has so few morals
that they go into negative figures, a phenomenon
only hypothesized by scientists, creating a
literal moral vacuum that triples the crime rate
in every block of flats he has ever occupied.
Simon Ducard has used up so much bad karma in
this lifetime that he will die 1.24 seconds after
his birth for his next two hundred incarnations.
Simon Ducard is
so committed to evil that he doesn't even try to
take over the world, as most evil people do.
Simon knows that the purest evil is mindless and
destructive, and he suspects he wouldn't be able
to really enjoy his evil if he knew he was
actually achieving something with it. Simon
Ducard works as a white slaver for a living,
kidnapping the children of privileged caucasian
families and working them to death in
back-breaking labour that doesn't actually need
to be done. Just the other day Ducard had them
peeling potatoes for sixteen hours when he had no
intention of eating them. Instead he covered them
in fuel and immolated them before the eyes of his
famished servants.
Everything Simon
Ducard does is calculated to spite another human
being. He knows that only small fry blackguards
murder other people, as that would give them a
blissful release from this veil of tears, so
Simon engineers it so that his elderly parents
are kept alive in a state of physical and mental
anguish equivalent to a Danteesque vision of the
Stygian pits.
Simon likes to
ensure his continued dominance of evil by putting
aside a little time in each day for all seven
deadly sins.
- Simon wakes up
bright and early at 6am, but since he reserves
Sloth for the morning, he doesn't actually get up
until 11. He fills the intervening time by
shouting blasphemies while furiously
masturbating.
- After getting
up and washing his hands, it's time for Greed, so
he runs off to do his morning paper round even
though he doesn't really need the money. It goes
without saying that he ensures that every single
one of his customers is dissatisfied by his
performance, because the papers arrive very late
in the day and often smeared with cat food.
- Lunchtime is
the period Simon reserves for Pride. He prepares
himself some Angel Delight and relishes every
spoonful, ruminating loudly on how well it came
out.
- It's after
lunch, and what better time for Gluttony?
Although full, Simon buys a hot dog from a street
vendor and gobbles it down in one go. When
pressed for payment, he kicks the vendor in the
face and dances away.
- Not long
afterwards it's time for Envy. Today, Simon has
chosen to envy the beautiful home of his friend
and work rival, Jeremy Von Kroy. He stands
outside for several hours shaking his fists and
stamping his feet in generic rage.
- Wrath, of
course, goes hand in hand with Envy, and Simon
pays a quick visit to the petrol station next to
Jeremy's house. The police later have to identify
Jeremy from dental records.
- The last
deadly sin is Lust, which is of course best
committed during the hours of darkness. At night,
Simon stands outside shops in red light districts
and fiddles with himself through a crafty hole in
his pocket. Note that Simon does not actually go
inside, or solicit the wares of the whorish
denizens, because he cannot live with himself if
he at any point contributes to the livelihood of
another human being.
So the next time
someone tries to make out that Adolf Hitler
deserves the title of the most evil man in
history, just scoff obnoxiously and tell them of
Simon Ducard. He lives in a cottage inside my
brain and he is currently trying to make me go
out onto the lawn and bring something large and
blunt down upon the skulls of the screaming
children who keep trying to peek through my
window.
Excuse me, I'll
be back in a minute.
- Yahtzee
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18/6/05:
Batman Begorrah
| With
the recent release of Batman Begins
(short review: dead good) there's no
doubt going to be a huge surge of Batman
interest for a while, and hopefully I
will be able to draw search engine
johnnies to this site like lambs to the
curry shop if I write an update about it.
So, in celebration of someone making a
Batman film that doesn't suck so hard
that every lollipop in a ten mile radius
disappears down its throat, I've decided
to share ten amazing and true and amazing
Batman Bat-Facts! |
 |
1.
Batman, invented by famous-for-bugger-all-else
comic book writer Bob Kane, is of course well
known as a wealthy playboy who wears a batsuit
and fights crime from a cave. The character was
based on Ian Batman, a man Kane was acquainted
with, although he wasn't a wealthy playboy. And
instead of a batsuit he wore an old coat that
smelled of piss. And instead of living in a cave
he lived under a roof awning. And instead of
fighting crime he fought cyclists, some of whom
may have been criminals.
2. Robin the Boy
Wonder was introduced while Bob Kane was making
plans to retire Batman as a crime fighter.
Believing that the superhero fad would soon die,
Kane had decided to spend the rest of the comic
series focussing on the adventures of Bruce Wayne
after he takes over as manager of a small
patisserie in Toulouse, with Robin intended to be
his apprentice pastry chef. Fortunately the
publishers of DC comics dissuaded Kane from this
idea by smacking him around the face with a
rolled-up newspaper.
3. The campy
60's series of Batman starring Adam West was
originally filmed as an extremely dark and
disturbing gothic series full of violence and
rude words. The colourful, more child-friendly
version that came to our screens was the result
of creative editing on the part of one the show's
directors, a young George Lucas.
4. The decision
to make a film out of Batman in the 1980's was
met with extreme reluctance by Hollywood movie
executives after the recent bombing of superhero
film 'Jimmy Molten Lava Trousers'. Tim Burton
managed to talk producers into it by holding them
hostage with a gun for a period of eight days.
Police finally took down the famous director with
tranquilliser darts, but by then a contract had
been signed and the wheels were in motion.
5. Many fans
criticised the casting of Michael Keaton as
Batman on the grounds of him being too short. In
actuality, Keaton is six foot five, and camera
trickery was used to make him appear smaller in
line with Burton's retarded 'vision' of the Dark
Knight. It has been a running joke in Hollywood
ever since to use special effects to portray
extremely tall actors as extremely small ones.
Warwick Davis is six foot eight, and the bloke
who played 'Mini-Me' in the Austin Powers films
is an eight foot barrel-chested stallion of a
man.
6. As a joke,
wily funnyman Billy Dee Williams poured a box
full of starch into the washing machine while
Batman's cowl was being laundered. As a result
the mask became too stiff to move in, and Michael
Keaton was unable to rotate his neck at all while
in costume. Williams was not in the least
apologetic for ruining the only costume, and
spent much of his time on set playing pranks on
Keaton, such as making an obscene gesture
directly above his head where he couldn't see it.
7. Crispin
Glover was originally intended to play the Joker.
Jack Nicholson got the role by turning up on set
in full make-up and refusing to leave. Tim Burton
opted to drop Glover, because it was that or fall
victim to Nicholson's team of attack dogs.
8. Keaton's
problems with the batsuit only became worse in
Batman Returns. Whenever he got too close to
Michelle Pfeiffer in her skin-tight Catwoman
outfit he would immediately get a colossal and
powerful erection, which the armoured batsuit
codpiece could not accommodate. After the third
incident in which production was halted for
life-saving crotch surgery, it was decided from
then on to only shoot the Batman-Catwoman scenes
above the waist, so that Keaton could be free to
remove his troublesome pants.
9. Joel
Schumacher is credited with ruining the Batman
franchise with his two films, Batman Forever and
Batman and Robin. As a small child, Schumacher
accidentally set fire to a gypsy pram, and the
gypsies cursed him so that he could never make a
good film as long as he lived. Slightly baffled
by this extremely specific curse, Schumacher
decided to drop his plans to take up dentistry
and became a film director purely out of spite
for the gypsies and their supposed magic. He has
gone on record admitting that this was probably
poor judgement on his part.
10. The worst
thing about the Burton-Schumacher Batman films
was that the iconic villains were always killed
off in the end, leaving Batman Begins with only
lesser figures such as Scarecrow and Ra's
Al-Ghul. For his next Batman film, Christopher
Nolan will have to use two even less well known
villains - Jam Jeffrey, a lunatic who commits
jam-related crimes, and The Box Ottoman.
- Yahtzee
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14/6/05:
Spinal Fantasy
For want of an
update, here're a bunch of images I made for a
photoshop thread on the Something Awful forums. The theme was
'take cheesy fantasy novel cover art and add your
own titles'. I came up with four:
1 - 2 - 3
And finally:
That's it.
- Yahtzee
updates - features - essays - reviews - comics - games - novels - about - contact - forum - links
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|
