You're just part of everything that's happening tonight and it's all bad

There's just no point in doing things by halves, is there, Vista?

Aw hell naw, dawg - he's using my own metaphor against me!

For health reasons, I'm on a diet that excludes alcohol and replaces it with lots of fresh fruit, and I can't say I'm enjoying it - at one point I thought I was having a panic attack because I have that much extra energy.

I miss being hungover at six in the evening, I miss that drink-induced feeling of "fuck it, I don't even care that it's Jeremy Kyle on telly right now, I CANNOT BE BOTHERED TO CHANGE THE CHANNEL" and let's be honest, that's how he's got his audience over the years and it'll be interesting to see how the Tottenham riots have impacted upon his figures because while it's a no-brainer that his entire audience of slack-jawed cider-swilling knuckle-dragging spouse-beating ram-raiders would be out looting, from the tv footage I can see they're all on the rob for bigger television sets, so the figures are kind of like Schrodinger's Cat if you think about it.

In years to come people will be saying Jeremy Kyle made them think about quantum science - between that and China being the new world superpower these are frightening times to be alive.

don't get cocky, it's gonna get rocky, we gonna move down to the next ya jockey

No screen grabs today as I've been kicking it old school with paper and pencil (as one might phrase it WERE ONE A MORON), so I'm returning to my old habit of padding out the daily updates with any old tat I have laying about that hasn't appeared on this blog in particular just yet.
So here's some sketches I ran up for the Themed Art Blog, this week celebrating the 1980s action movie and leaving me literally spoiled for choice in terms of subject even though all the obvious candidates like predator, Aliens, Indiana Jones, Robocop and Big Trouble in Little China have already been covered, since there's still the Die Hards, American Ninjas, A Team... a great decade for action heroes, the 1980s, though the 90s was good too, while the less said about the 2000s and the rise of the music promo action sequence the better.
From top to bottom, the themes were Star Wars, Dinosaurs, and Exorcism.

ten bucks for the gilded lily, 20 for the Roman Holiday, 50 for the old Walrus n Carpenter, and for 75 you can sleigh ride down Kilimanjaro

If I woke up looking like that, I'd walk towards the nearest living thing and kill it

I love you,Vista. Oh wait, I meant the other thing - GOD DAMN YOU TO HELL.

Strange symmetry is afoot in my 'toon watching this week as Futurama, Naruto and Thundercats all feature the same plot and I'm not sure which bit of signposting I liked better - Thundercats' obsessive sea captain shouting "for hate's sake I spit at thee!" or Futurama just calling this week's episode Mobius Dick and being done with any pretense at all.
I like Thundercats, although it's been only three episodes so far and some of the logic is baffling, but it's great to be able to point at cartoons nowadays and make serious observations about narrative techniques and use of themes rather than how utterly stupid something is even as an idea, and when you can point to individual episodes of something like Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated as sub-par because it doesn't advance the series arc enough or is too continuity-heavy to work as an episode of tv in and of itself, it's almost enough to be able to admit in public that as a grown ass man I still watch cartoons. Almost. As anyone in the creative industries will tell you, the internet doesn't count.

Anyway, Thundercats is best described as Avatar: The Last Airbender meets Lord of the Rings, and as much as I enjoy it, there's something fishy about the royal lineage element of the backstory that strikes me as off and contrary to some of the character development in the first episodes. It's contrived in how it pushes characters together and doesn't quite work in isolation as it's clearly a reinvention aimed at those with knowledge of the previous version of the franchise, but at least it's nowhere near as heartbreakingly terrible and straight-up disturbing as that comic book reboot they had in the early 2000s, where Mumm Ra was keeping the two kid Thundercats as his personal sex slaves (and you can Google that shit - someone actually wrote it, got it approved by the Thundercats licensing bods, and then actually went out and published it). I sound negative, but this here cartoon is good fun that takes time to breathe before the fights break out, with slow pans over desolate vistas and an occasionally mournful soundtrack atypical of current animation and more like something that you'd expect to have been made in the 1980s when we all thought we were gonna die and got fixated on putting nuclear apocalypse allegories in almost everything. But time passes and Cold Wars end and left without topical allegory, Thundercats looks to the precedent set by Lord of the Rings' false history that never was approach and seems to be doing okay so far with it.

Idle hands spend time at the genitals, and you know how much God hates that

Damn long shots (I'll never learn) - some texture and a good colouring will settle your hash...

You think you gonna live forever, but you won't. Someone'll kill ya. Someone'll kill ya with a knife.

As regards Love Bites, I suspect I may have brought the wrong chromosone to this pilot.

Her off Ugly Betty, playing more of a human being.

"Vampires would have a cold penis."

I like how the writer shorthands that this character is supposed to be an asshole by making her a vocal Battlestar Galactica fan.

Her off Eastwick. She likes dildos. Apparantly.

JJ Abrahms' man-wife. Was also in LA Noir.

I honestly cannot think of a single thing that I have seen that starred Jennifer Love Hewitt apart from this right here.

Mh. All's said and done, not a great hour of television, though it started well.

The last story just kind of dragged on forever and dulled the memory of the decent opening.

Seems an okay show.