Continued playing Portal today, finally polishing off the tutorial levels. It’s all very clever, and some of the puzzles are really proving quite difficult for me to get through.

But the puzzles feel very nearly beside the point compared to the world you’re doing them in. There’s a very nice touch involved in the whole laboratory set-up, with the computerised voice warning you about side-effects (such as death) in its calm manner. Particularly good are the sentry guns which have these extremely sweet voices and talk to you as they shoot at you. So there’s this very pleasantly bizarre environment in which you do your portaling.

I was a little disappointed by the end of the tutorial zone, though. Obviously, the laboratory turns out to be evil, etc., and wants to incinerate you. Fine, fine. But it was a bit ham-fisted compared to the subtleties of the tutorial world. It’s very, “Look! Behind you! A post-apocalyptic world where nothing is as it seems!” I could live without that, not that I have any constructive ideas about how you avoid that kind of issue.

Put together the comic “Potato Chips, a dream” based on… a dream I had a while back (in Canada) and recorded in my then dream-diary. I really like the surreality and fast-cutting nature of dreams, or at least my recollection of them, and it seems to lend itself well to comics, so I plan to pursue this more over time.

The comic as a whole went comparatively well and gave me the opportunity to experiment with a few stylistic elements I haven’t used (much) to this point. Particularly, using some grey tones to tint bits of the image, rather than the usual flat line drawings, and continuing to work on drawing comics without tracing from photos.

Ultimately, I was glad to get the comic done, but was disappointed with the overall effect of it (I’d thought it was a lot funnier in my head). I did feel quite pleased with the drawings of the two Polaroids, however, so that was a win. I’ll continue to try to draw these up quickly, I think, and just get better at it.

We recently finished watching the lone season of Nathan Barley, an absurdly good British comedy about a guy who is the epitome of cool. Somehow. The show is all about parodying popular culture heroes and trends, but also manages to make the people out there “being cool” feel very charming and well-meaning, too.

One issue with this has been a potential damaging of our ability to watch at least the more mainstream American media offerings. In particular, we recently started watching both Julie and Julia (the movie) and Breaking Bad (the TV show). Both are currently coming across as creepily empty of meaning, and it seems like that’s at least in part thanks to Nathan Barley’s general puncturing of the usual media expectations and so on (Brass Eye is also partly responsible for the same reasons).

Having seen a guy accidentally sweep a pair of scissors of a table only to have them stick, point down, into a pet cat’s head (Nathan Barley), it’s become rather difficult to take the very American ‘cancer intervention’ scene in Breaking Bad or the self-pitying histrionics of a would-be lobster killer (Julie and Julia). It makes you think, why are these people and these movies/shows taking themselves so very, very seriously?