Month: March 2010

The Pantheon of Plastic

SUCCESS IN FILM AND TELEVISION can bring seats at the priciest restaurants and entry to the fussiest clubs, but there is one coterie so exclusive that even the most well-known and successful are unable to gain entry, try as they might. Yes, we here at AdditiveRich hold that the true measure of a star’s greatness is their membership in this particularly elite group – THE PANTHEON OF PLASTIC.

The criteria for membership is quite quite simple: the performer must have played at least two different roles for which his or her likeness has been immortalized, in molded plastic, as an action figure.

(An action figure. NOT a doll.)

Note that it has to be an action figure of the actor as the character. Those James Bond figures that used the same mold regardless of movie don’t win a prize for Roger Moore or Sean Connery. Or George Lazenby even. Animated characters also don’t count, even if the animation is based on the performer. These are our rules! They are carefully-considered and cannot be violated!

This is a 2001 draft of the Pantheon of Plastic intro. It shows its age – in fact the whole concept of the PoP shows its age. As plastic molding tech has improved and action figure markets have matured, the PoP has lost its exclusivity. There are now action figures of all sorts of folk. The barricades have been thrown down! The Pantheon has been debased!

Here’s a screenshot showing the first inductee into the PoP… from 1978, it’s… Lorne Green!

Why am I here?

The illustrious David R, proprietor of additiverich.com for most of the last decade, is pulling down the blinds. I have migrated over here to isprettyawesome.com, which is run by Svend – who is, happily, another member of the additiverich.com posse.

So I gotta thank Svend for generously welcoming me to his isprettyawesome crew.

And I really gotta thank David for all those years of hosting. Providing a platform for us additiverichers isn’t trivial. There’s updates to install, system conflicts to resolve, the endless march of the spammers to halt, and many more troublesome duties. Not to mention the costs of hosting and hardware and so on. All of this was provided with much generosity and good humour.

When David was first talking about setting up additiverich, back before most people had ever heard of blogs, we discussed a special feature of the site on which we’d collaborate. It never came to pass, like a number of projects we’ve talked about, and it’s a shame. So I want to deliver at least a small part of that project as a thank you to David.

So tomorrow, you’ll be introduced to… the Pantheon of Plastic.

Thanks, additiverich!

Friidaay Liinkyy

Go big linky, drop it at the bomb:

One drawing for (on) every page of Moby Dick

Best infographic evar? properly appreciating Mega Shark

Wife blogs the things her husband says in his sleep

Unconventional childrens’ books: e.g. Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?

A few months back The Onion ran a series of articles about History. This was my favourite: a collection of images showing art through the ages.

11 photos where black people were awkwardly photoshopped in or out

This made me happy: recreating childrens’ drawings in real life

Neat short doco on Chatroulette, which is the New Thing

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

A ha, so this is where the delightful Edward Gorey’s Trouble With Tribbles came from

THE AWESOME POWER OF RUGBY TECHNO: a website that syncs up random youtube rugby clips to random youtube techno music. 90% RAD.

Chap-hop history by Mr B. the Gentleman Rhymer on the Banjolele.

Choose Your Own Adventure Books, analysed and visualised.

Science geek girl makes her own wedding a biochemical experiment

A subsubsubculture you never knew about: competitive book-cart drills for librarians (via Salon)

Via our friends at Filament – UK media ignores sexiest male farmer, lavishes attention on sexiest female farmer

Relatedly, girls in bikinis perform The Big Lebowski. To sell bikinis, apparently. But I dunno man but watch it but.

Repton last week made two posts that I really appreciated: this one about anonymity on the web (technical stuff here, beware) and this one straight after about some highlights from the Lateral Science collection of wild science-related things.

Where media slant comes from – with graphs

Have you seen this video showing just how much TV is shot green-screen? Will blow your mind. When filming TV, it is now easier and cheaper to hang up a green curtain in a back lot and CGI the street in, than to actually go down to an ordinary street corner.

And you have probably seen this wonderful music video featuring a human-sized Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson contraption, too, but if not:

And finally… via high priest of this blog, David R: Bob Dylan and Stephen Merchant perform Mama Said Knock You Out for LL Cool J.

House Things

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. This weekend just gone, Cal and I decided to put a toe in the water of house-hunting. We’ve been saving up a deposit for a wee while, and although we love our apartment we’ve been talking in general terms about looking to buy.
We do some reviewing of the house listings (well, Cal’s been checking them regularly for a while and showing me the choice cuts) and find a few open homes to check out. We’re thinking suburbia, and our price range is telling us the same thing, so we decide on Sunday to check out a few spots in the Hutt Valley.
Spot one – open home is cancelled. (This was the one we were very keen on.) Spot three – smaller and less cool than expected. Spot two, however, was nicer than we were expecting. It ticked all our boxes. It needs work, but not crazy work, and it felt good. We spent about twenty minutes looking around it.
So we decided to make an offer.
And here we are, three days into househunting and we’re already heading into a meeting with the real estate agents for negotiations. We’re acting in good faith – we could live there, and three days of reflecting on it hasn’t changed that view. But we’re in no hurry. We’re not madly in love with the house, we won’t do anything to get it. We could let it go, spend another 6 months to a year in our apartment and be pretty comfortable with that. That’s something in our favour. (Also in our favour: my brother is a lawyer who does this sorta thing all the time. Cheers big bro for the advice so far.)
But despite this, I am a bit unnerved. It seems incredible and ridiculous to me that you can get this deep into real serious financial process based on twenty minutes of walking through an empty house. Man, I take longer than that to pick a library book. But this, apparently, is how it’s done.
So, internets – advise me. What do we need to know?
And what the heck are we getting ourselves into?
And does quoting Bill and Ted make me more or less qualified as a potential home-owner?

Review: Jitterati collection (2009)



Jitterati is Grant Buist’s strip comic of life in a cultured, coffee-drenched festival-heavy Wellington. It runs every week in the free local paper the Capital Times, and in Grant’s own words it tends to go like this.
I have a lot of love for Jitterati, no doubt because I am a coffee-drenched festival-going Wellingtonian with pretensions to culture. It speaks my language and talks about what is going on around me, and that’s cool. More than that, it’s important; we need media content that reflects our local environment or something in the feedback loop between person and community starts to break and you end up with the weirdness of everyone using packaged American culture as their reference point (as everyone who remembers the 80s and 90s will no doubt attest).
(Since this is a review, it’s also worth pointing out that I have known Grant for years, although for most of those years our relationship has been stable at the “say hello to each other on the street” level. And I’ll send him a link to this review. Hi Grant!)
I picked up a copy of the collected edition at Zinefest last year (along with a few other treats that I really should blog about too). It covers the complete run of Jitterati from its launch in 2001 through to 2009, reprinting about 75% of the strips (complete with marginal notes to explain the many, many topical references), as well as several short text pieces talking about stories from behind-the-scenes.
It’s a handsome A4 collection with four strips to a page, black-and-white interiors (with lovely print quality that makes full use of grayscale), and a card cover with colour spot illo. The title of the book was apparently stained on with coffee, which is a nice touch. Nicer still is the CD in the back, which contains the full run of the strips in colour, and two short films.
The Zinefest edition also came with some free Havana Coffeeworks coffee, which I finished off the other day. Lovely.
Grant’s art is extremely polished, as you’d expect after a decade-and-half of solid cartooning. He’s become extremely comfortable with the four-panel format, making good use of the limited space in every panel and getting lots of physicality and geography out of a strip that is basically three characters sitting around a table. Around the middle of the decade the strip acquires the photographed backgrounds that are now its trademark, and the mix of photographed background and illustrated foreground works beautifully to give the strip a nice sense of place. (It reminds me a bit of Herge’s Tintin, which used stylized clear-line character drawings set against highly detailed and realistic backgrounds and made them work smoothly together.)
The collection shows an increasing comfort with the four-panel gag strip format, too, with a good mix of gentle fun and outright cynicism. Lots of jokes about local politics and the theatre and arts scene, and now and then some variations from the standard patterns to mix things up.
I really enjoyed reading through this collection – as a tour of Wellington’s noughties culture, it carries a surprising amount of heft and is very enjoyable read as a bundle. The best part of this for me was reading over the years when I was in Edinburgh, and getting a nice cafe-level view of what was exercising Wellington at the time. (The controversy over the braying portaloo had somehow passed me by!)
So – I recommend it, unreservedly, to Wellingtonians. Inner-city latte-sipping theatregoers should get hold of copies and sit them on their coffee tables. Every cafe in town should purchase a copy to keep with their reading material. This strip is a mix of pop-art and journalism and it’s funny and it’s ours, and I give it a hearty thumbs up.
If you want to get one – well, they’re out of print at the moment but Grant informs me he’s doing another run in time for Armageddon Pop Culture Expo at the start of April. You can reach him through his blog and ask him to write your name on a list or something.
(Aside for any non-Wgtners who’ve come this far – does your town/city have a comic strip about what’s going on there? I’m curious…)

Unexpected world


This is the poster for Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 movie The Girlfriend Experience, starring Sasha Grey, who works in the porn industry.
At this link she can be seen playing D&D with a bunch of other people from the porn industry. (All links are totally safe for work, btw.)
The blog Playing D&D With Porn Stars, and the D&D game described therein, are run by Zak Smith, who also illustrated every page of Gravity’s Rainbow. The D&D w/ Porn Stars blog is an excellently thoughtful and creative blog that is closely tied to the Old School Renaissance that has hit D&D since Gygax passed away, with James Maliszewski’s blog Grognardia as its totemic centrepiece. (Grognardia is here described briefly on the blog of Seattle’s alternative paper The Stranger).
Zak Smith and some of his players recently got into an honest-to-blog feud with a gaming podcast, said podcast being more attuned to the Story Games RPG community, which is kinda the hipster end of gaming but without the irony. Substance of feud: story games people didn’t give due respect to the breadth of Zak’s gaming knowledge and understanding.*
Point being: culture is fragmenting as the potential for internet communication to create asynchronous non-geographical communities beds deeper.
Or, more succinctly: porn stars just battled elite role-playing game nerds over geek status. You’re not living in your father’s culture any more. Heck, you’re not living in your older brother’s culture any more. The world is getting weirder and wilder all the time.
That’s a feature, not a bug, by the way.
* Feud since resolved.