Last night, I finished all the issues of Batman:Hush. All but one, the very last of the series. I stayed awake until 3:30 AM, rereading the earlier issues again ( i had read the first three books ), zooming in and out to view the details of Jim Lee’s extraordinary artwork, breathing in deep, trying not to get goosepimples everytime something goosepimply happened, like that awesome mano-a-mano sequence between Superman and a Poison-Ivy-controlled Superman. Or Catwoman getting trounced by Lady Shiva. The sword-fight between Ra’s Al Ghul and Bats. Batman choking Joker to…death? I love fandom!

You know, for someone who’s grown up reading comics on a whatever-I-get-I-read basis, it’s kind of a zen thing, ignoring endings. It used to be painful, earlier. Issue 246 of The Fantasic Four would end with Franklin Richards’s eyes starting to glow, as he burns up his guardian robot. And there would be a TO-BE-CONTINUED blurb, and I would be left clutching the comic in hand and day-dreaming the rest of the class ( yes, comics were a staple in-class activity, especially when the teacher was boring and the day was barmy ) – wondering what happens to Franklin Richards – would he kill his own parents? How would they possibly bring his powers under control? The 80’s Justice League Cliffhangers were worse, with lots of random characters placed in near-death situations, which in turn get resolved by rather badly-plotted deus ex machinae.

Now, and for quite sometime now, reading cliffhanger-based literature been a very relaxing activity. Concentrate on the 22 pages, I tell myself, concentrate on what’s going on and not on what has gone past or what will and might happen. True joy lies in reading 22 pages of illustrated text, and trying to put things together and coming up with the “base” storyline all by yourself. True joy lies in being able to foresee what is going to happen in the next issue. That is, if I find the next issue someday.

I believe a lot of comic-book readers do not start reading a DC/Marvel comic only because on an average, a comic book is not a self-contained story.

I ended Hush at issue 617. The ending was an awesome cliffhanger, that has left me in a state of dazed confusion – kind of rare in a DC comics storyline. Either Jeph Loeb has gone bonkers or he’s leading this through to something pretty logical. ( reading the reviews has given me slight hints of how he’s blindsided readers, but again, I am leaving my options/ideas open. )

Oh, yeah. Five point five Gigabytes of comics just touched base, thanks to the collaborative efforts of Anil and Vasu. Thanks, guys.

The collection is awesome. Loads of Batman – includes the historic Dark Knight Returns, Batman:Year One ( both of which I have at home in Guwahati), some issues of Knightfall/Knightquest/Knightsend, Dark Victory, the Long Halloween, some crossover collections, the complete Catwoman volumes ( both the original 100+ Balent run, and the current take by Brubaker and Co. ) The best of the lot is the complete CrossGen print-run. CGE is a company that has been receiving quite a few rave reviews regarding it’s continuity-based storylines, and c’mon, this is awesome!!! ALL comics ever published by a company – woohooo!!

It’s like those wishes-for-a-genie I used to have – once upon a time – coming true all at once.

Learnt some important stuff too. For instance, there seem to be tonnes of comic-scans available on the Internet. ( one of the important sources being BitTorrent. Most of them are available in .CBZ or .CBR archives, and they can be read using CDisplay.

Google came to the rescue again, and a cursory search in the morning got me links to the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I downloaded four out of the six CBR files available, heh heh.

Sleep beckons.

Heh heh heh.

So this is what I did during the weekend. I had a great time, needless to say.

There was a great deal of trepidation involved in watching Blue Planet at the IMAX theatre. For one, my attention span nowadays is the equivalent of ….ok, I will ditch the hokey cliches and just say – it’s short. I’m not exactly the someone who enjoys National Geographic documentaries. Plus, I was sleepy, after all the traipsing throughout the day. But the visuals of Blue Planet blew me away. I wonder how I would like to see Return of The King on an IMAX screen. Aah!

I played a lot of games the past two days. GTA:VIce City is on hold for now, I wanted some gore and blood in my life, so Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal 2 and Return To Castle Wolfenstein provided them in ample quantities. Although all three are mostly about visual eye-candy ( i find that I prefer the original UT to the newer avatar), Wolfenstein was good, especially after the initial levels are crossed and the supernatural presences start appearing. I played it until 3 AM yesterday, with the lights turned off, and I couldn’t get used to how brilliant the graphics were.

And there was this two-volume set of The Complete Monty Python Scripts that I picked up from MR Book Stall. A collected edition of James Thurber’s short stories ( 90 short stories, to be precise).

And the first Elric of Melnibone book. It’s been a very, very long journey – me and Elric, and I felt really nostalgic when I read this book. It also made me feel quite old.

Also watched Pirates of the Carribean, which wasn’t as good as good as it was made out to be. Except for Johnny Depp.

Tehzeeb, Tehzeeb, Tehzeeb, Tehzeeb, Tehzeeb.

The cut-off for the 42-question prelims, at Indore, was 13.5. So anybody who got above 6 has a fair chance of making it to the finals. If you got about 9, you’re definitely through!

Some general trivia about the making of the Prelims.

a) The number of questions is 42 for obvious reasons – H2G2. In fact, all my quizzes have 42 questions in the prelims, except for the one at Spring Spree 2002. It was 21 questions then, and that because the Quiz was dedicated to the Souvenir & Bulletin Committee, and they believed in “Half The Truth and nothing But Half the Truth.”

b) Generally, it feels nice to have a theme-based question-paper. In the resident RECW ladies quiz, ( it was named Mascara:The Ladies’ Quiz and right now, I believe it is called The Udatta B Duarah Memorial Quiz ), the answers to all the questions were, you guessed it, women. and there were some fundoo quizzes I have been to where Question 1 has some relation to Question 2, 2 is related to 3 in some other way and so on.

So what happened was, I wanted to do something like that. Some kind of an in-joke, that not many people would get. And because there was a Saint question that I wanted to ask, and I remembered madhavn‘s ex-user pic, the first thing that popped into my mind was, LJ user icons. Ten of the forty-two questions ( eight of twenty-two) were based on my LJ friends’ user-icons. Thanks, people. ( yes, it did get a little weird, so I gave up after 10 )

c) Some beings that helped me with the making of the Quiz. psasidhar, for his invaluable posts and research, especially Classical Music. 2fargon, who graciously offered me part of his website to put up the visuals, in case there was some SNAFU. Udatta da, for certain visual questions, that led me to find out more detailed Qs. And heartfelt thanks to the Dark Gift and its Creators – Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. Thank you, gentlemen, for making 10 to the power 100 mean so much in the Trivial World.

Onward!! (cash, do not peek!)

Baazee.com has this neat music sale going on, and I ordered six cds online. The cds being Leftfield – Stealth and Rhythm, Bruce Springsteen – The Rising, Acoustic Alchemy – Acoustic Alchemy, Dixie Chicks – Wide Open Spaces, Johnny Winter – Saints and Sinners, System of A Down – System of a Down. Each of these cds cost me something like 150 rupees, and the total has come to 940. Not bad at all.

I finished watching Interview With The Vampire, which is kind of scary. Not the movie, I mean the fact that I finished watching it in two days, instead of two months. On top of that, I began watching Hyderabad Blues, and nearly completed the first cd. This is….unnatural.

Gump and Co is done. It’s a crazy book. Any book that has an orangutan fighting in the Gulf war and capturing Sad-damn Hussain alive is a crazy book. Gump meets up with Tom Hanks, who suggests that someone should make a movie out of his life and then proceeds to offer Gump a box of chocolates. The book ends at the Academy Awards ceremony, where the movie wins a ton of awards and Gump is invited to say a few words. He does. He says – “I gotta pee”. And then his son throws a soggy popcorn missile at David Letterman. Which starts a riot in the audience. Curtain. Heartwarming conclusion, I must say.

Just went and bought Unreal Tournament 2003 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Pirated, of course.

vrikodhara reminded me of Times bygone and Characters once-loved. Lobo, the Main Man. Ah, what memories! Once I named my cat Lobo after this guy. He of the long hair and the murderous tendencies.He who eats your entrails and thoroughly enjoys it. Fraggadelic, baby!!!!

Right now, the only things to do is to wait for the days to pass by until I get to Guwahati. I think I deserve a long rest. I also need 5.5 GB of DC comics to whet my appetite.

Anne Rice is this writer whom I have been unable to make up my mind about. Some of her books ( Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Servant of the Bones ) are so low-paced they can give Rip Van Winkle a complex. While others ( The Queen of the Damned, Vittorio the Vampire, The Tale of the Body Thief ) are white-heat. She also happens to write the darkest, most erotic bondage-themed fairy-tales ever ( The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, Beauty’s Release ) In Bombay, I had been to this shop, Lotus Books, that had an amazing collection, with amazingly high prices. Jeez! They actually increase the book prices every day with the changing exchange-rates. I found the Vampire Companion, a complete guide to Ms Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and the nearly tattered copy had a price tag of six hundred and thirty rupees. Bloody grave-robbers, living off the dead!!!!!

I got Blood and Gold for sixty rupees yesterday, which is a very low price for a book released last year. And last night, I watched the first cd of Interview With the Vampire. Anne Rice had written the screenplay herself, so there were no surprises, except that I didn’t know Brad Pitt plays Louis. I thought it was Banderas in that role. The story moves at a leisurely pace, much like the book, with the philosophical discussions ( which were so integral to all of Rice’s books – existential angst of the vampire community ) chopped down. Tom Cruise plays LeStat in a flamboyant manner, the character’s cruelty, his vainness, his moments of unrestrained joy at being a vampire being enacted quite well by Cruise. Neat scene: a “dance of death” with a corpse of a plague-ridden woman. In my imagination, ( and Rice’s, i think) Lestat was much more taller, much more handsome.

Again, the disadvantage of VCDs – the annoying hiss of badly encoded audio cuts down much of Elliot Goldenthal’s background score.

The highpoint of the movie so far was Kirsten Dunst’s role of Claudia, a cherubic vampire child. I found her very different ( as in looks and demeanour) from the chirpy role of Mary-Jane in Spiderman; pretty impressive acting, I must say. I wonder if the film didn’t run into censorship problems with the Lolita-aspect of the whole thing – Claudia was supposed to fall in love with Louis, about fifteen years her senior.

I am trying to get my nocturnal bearings straight before i go back home, in order not to disturb my parents’ idea of “daily habits”. So my go-to-bed time gets earlier, and so does my rise-time, and as Mr James Thurber once put it, it’s enough to make a man healthy, wealthy and dead, all at the same time.

In tune with the above theme, I dutifully switched off the movie after the clock struck 12 ( or rather, after the digital watch beeped once), and went to sleep.