As you might have realized up to this point I am into all kinds of geeky stuff and as such I'm also a comic fan. Most of you probably know Superman, Batman, Spider-man and the rest of the DC - Marvel universe. Nowadays comics are not exclusively released in traditional comic books anymore but you can read a lot of them on the internet by now. Of course you have your traditional web-comics like Penny Arcade, HijiNKS ENSUE, Ctral+Alt+Del or Reallife comics but in the last few years a lot of Tv shows started to publish tie-ins on the web.
The popular scifi-drama Heroes is publishing small web-comics to show you different perspectives of their show. It is also used to keep the fans interested during the summer break. The stories are intense and the artwork is also exceptional and have been such a success that they are now released as paperback comic books.
All of Joss Whedon's shows (Buffy the vampire slayer, Angel and Firefly) are currently continued in comic book form. Buffy's season 8 has already developed over several magazines and it's a great way for the fans to find out what happened to the gang from Sunnydale after the impressive series finale in 2003.
The popular CW show Supernatural has also released several comic books that tell the story of the two protagonists' childhood.
I have played many games on almost any possible medium since my early youth and as a gamer, you are constantly confronted with people talking about “the next best thing”. Most of the time however these hypes don’t come through and you end up with a mediocre game and a foul aftertaste of wishing you had spend your money on something else. It is therefore even better, when once in a while a game comes along that not only lives up to the hype but manages to surpass every expectation. One of these games is the new GTA IV. Every blogger who has only the faintest interest in gaming is writing about the new Grand Theft Auto game by the developers Rockstar and so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and talk a bit about my recent source of sleep deprivation.
What makes GTA IV so different from its predecessors is not that it redefines gaming in any way. It does not include any extreme game play changes, nor does it change the way the story progresses. It still is and feels like a part of the previous installments. You have to pass missions for different NPC characters to advance in the story and gain money, power and become infamous amongst the different gangs and law enforcement agencies. The difference with GTA IV lies in the details and this is where the game really shines. You don’t feel like you drive through a computer generated city anymore with polygon characters that just populate the sidewalks, but you feel like you are in a real breathing metropolis. The pedestrians have conversations, talk on their sidewalks, look at shop windows, react to abrupt weather changes, scream for help when an accident occurs and react in a genuinely realistic way to foreign influences. If a murder occurs on these streets the other pedestrians won’t walk idly by as if nothing had happened, but they will react with horror and fear.
Rockstar improved almost every negative point of the previous game series. They have included a virtual cell phone that lets you plan activities with the friendly NPCs, you can take a cab to any location in town (which saves an enormous amount of time), and the radio stations don’t feel as unreal anymore due to the frequent news broadcasts that are introduced into the shows to talk about the recent happenings in Liberty City. Animation details like the way you break into cars, reload weapons and jump over fences are big plus sides of the game. The aiming system has also drastically improved and the characters new ability to take cover behind pillars and boxes makes it easier to survive in this world of crime and corruption. Which takes me to my next point: in-game violence.
Due to the realistic animations and lives of the population of L.C. you feel genuinely inclined to not harm any of them. They are for the first time really innocent bystanders and your conscience will prevent you from plowing through a populated sidewalk with your car. Furthermore the protagonist of GTA IV is not a cold hearted criminal anymore without any remorse or ideals. Nico Bellic does not come to America to live a life of crime, but to escape a violent past of war and poverty. The game also gives you the opportunity to spare the people that cross you and therein lays the key to a more likeable hero. Nico is not a dumb criminal anymore who does everything to gain power, he does what he has to, to help his family and to find the people who destroyed his life back home. The story telling fits in with movies like The Goodfellas or The Godfather and could also be compared to shows like The Sopranos or Rescue Me. The game includes strong language and violence and is therefore not available to minors and the responsibility lies with us adults to keep it that way. So if your teenage kid at home cries about how much they want to play this game, don’t give in. It really is not the right kind of entertainment for them!
This newest blog entry is comprised of the introduction of my last term paper on Edward Albee, a contemporary American playwright. I enjoyed the work on this paper because I like Albee's plays and have a deep respect for his person and work. If you have never read (or even better) seen any of his plays, you should keep your eyes open for performances near you.
Edward Albee is probably one of the most controversial, misunderstood and underestimated playwrights of the twentieth century. He landed enormous hits with his works Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The American Dream but a lot of his later plays have not re-established this early success, which is not to say that he is not a highly decorated writer. In 1967, Albee received his first Pulitzer Price for A Delicate Balance, and eight years later his second for Seascape. It took him nearly twenty years to receive another Pulitzer Price for Three Tall Women in 1994. Furthermore the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him with the Gold Medal in Drama in 1980 and in 1996 he received the Kennedy Center Honors as well as the National Medal of Arts.In 2005 Albee received one of the biggest honors in show business, the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.[1]
Already at a very young age Albee had an unusually high interest in writing and tried himself in different genres like poetry and prose fiction with nearly no success. Thornton Wilder, the American playwright and novelist, was a close friend of the Albee family at the time and suggested early on to Edward to become a playwright. Albee remembers: “He’d read my poetry and tell me to be a playwright, to save poetry from me.”[2] For the first thirty years of his life his writing was fruitless until he decided one day, in dire need of money, to write a drama. After several weeks of hard work Albee emerged from his apartment with The Zoo Story, his first play to have a major impact on his career as a writer. The playwright commented this event himself by saying that “something very, very interesting happened with the writing of that play. I didn’t discover suddenly that I was a playwright; I discovered that I had been a playwright all my life, but didn’t know it because I hadn’t written plays... And so when I wrote The Zoo Story, I was able to start practicing my ‘nature’ fully.”[3] As an infant, having been abandoned at birth, Albee was adopted by the millionaires Reed and Frances Albee of Larchmont, New York, a family with theatrical background. He was often surrounded by writers and other people from show business making him familiar with the theatre at an early age. Albee’s youth can best be described as “troubled”. He got expelled from multiple preparatory schools and then graduated from Chaote, a prep school in Connecticut, where his first literary works – short stories, poems and a play – were published in the Chaote Literary Magazine. Even though he later attended a college, he never graduated. Between 1948 and 1958 Albee worked a lot of different jobs which left him unsatisfied and without a career. Albee then once again took up writing by borrowing some paper from a Western Union office where he worked and finally came up with The Zoo Story. “Three weeks later, some fifty sheets of yellow paper had become a play, and I had become a playwright.”[4] Up to today he has written 31 plays.
[1]The Edward F. Albee Foundation: http://www.albeefoundation.org/Welcome.html
It’s weekend baby! And so we decided to take it easy on day three, took a long walk into town for some food and watched a movie later on (Voces inocentes), before we went out. Jen and Polo took me to a rock bar called Kelly’s and after some drinks we went to Kvarnen a disco type place. Once again the extremely high alcohol prices became apparent (27 € for 6 pints). Since we all had a good time the next morning did not start until 2pm. We took a walk to get some air and then went shopping to catch up on brunch which was extensive and delicious (Jen and Polo really are the brunch masters). Nothing much happened for the rest of the day, so I’ll skip to my last day in Stockholm.
Sadly the National Museum was closed which was too bad, because I was looking forward to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit. So I took on Kastellholmen a small island in the middle of Stockholm. It holds some beautiful buildings and a few other museums (which were closed as well).
I met Jenny for lunch and we said our goodbyes. I walked the streets of the Old Town some more, bought a few books and when I finally got bored I took the bus to the airport and safely landed at Frankfurt-Hahn later that night. Stockholm really is an amazing town and I deeply enjoyed my stay there. Many thanks again to Jen and Polo for their hospitality.
After a good night’s sleep we returned to Stockholm central, this time by metro. Jen showed me her workspace at the Danske Bank and then we parted ways again. I had planned to visit several museums that day, but to my disappointment they all didn’t open until 11 am. So I had to kill some time and I decided to walk around a bit and take in the sights and enjoy the sunny day. I noticed a small church with a graveyard around and while I was taking some pictures, a friendly older Swedish lady explained some of the floral work around the facility.
Around 11 I entered the Historika Museet and took an audio guide of the Prehistory and the Viking exhibit. Another attraction at this museum is the Gold Room, a round chamber that holds 52 kilos of pure gold and more than 200 kilos of silver. Furthermore you can see an extensive exhibit of medieval church art on the second floor. This was probably the best of the three museums that I visited this day. It gave a decent overview of the past and best of all it had every information in both Swedish and English.
Next up was the Armémuseum which covers wars from the Viking age to the present time. It holds a large collection of weapons and artillery from all the different eras. I really liked the thorough exhibit, even though only the major displays were translated into English. Non-Swedish speakers are often left to wonder what exactly they are looking at. It was interesting to learn that Sweden was in so many wars, yet managed to stay completely out of the Second World War.
Last and sadly least was the Musikmuseet. It holds an extensive collection of musical instruments and shows different ensembles in Sweden from the 17th century to ABBA. I was a bit disappointed in this exhibit, probably this was also due to the large group who was in there at the same time and made it impossible to study the displays properly.
I met up with Jenny around 17:00 but before we headed home we stopped at a beer store (yes they have stores only for beer in Sweden, because you can’t sell anything with more than 3 percent of alcohol at a supermarket). When we got back to the apartment, Polo’s girlfriend Marie had arrived as well and we all had some beers and watched some funny videos.
As I previously stated I visited my old school mate Jenny Roch in Stockholm and I thought I would share some of my experiences with you. I took a plane (Ryanair) from Frankfurt-Hahn and landed safely at Skavsta airport around noon. After an 80 minute bus drive I arrived in the capital and had the afternoon to myself (my friend was still working until 5 that day). I remembered the picturesque Old Town from my first trip to Stockholm (about 8 years ago) and so I decided to walk its beautiful streets and check out the different shops. I had a small bite at a tiny bistro and then started my walk, listening to The Cure.
The streets of the Old Town are narrow and filled with shops of all varieties, the best of them being a science fiction bookstore that had everything to satisfy the true nerd (Books, Dvds, RPGs and even Graphic Novels). After having walked the main streets up and down a few times I visited the Nobel Museum which also hosted the exhibition design4science (images of the world of molecular biology). At the museum, you can find all the information on the Nobel Prize, its founder and the laureates. After the brief museum visit I walked around some more and stumbled on the Royal Palace situated in the Old Town. It reminded me a bit of Buckingham Palace with all the guards standing outside.
Around 17:30, I met up with Jenny and we walked to her apartment, where I got to meet her roommate Polo. We had a typical Swedish diner (mashed potatoes, vegetables and meatballs with lingonberry jam) and I simply dropped into bed. More about my trip to Sweden later…
(To see all the pictures of my trip, click on the title of this post)
