Toons and Runes

There's a definite shortage of good new cartoons on telly right now. It's high time someone came up with a good one. In fact, the best new cartoons I've seen recently were on the internet, so I thought I should advise anyone who's old-fashioned enough not to know the world wide web's greatest producer of silly cartoon things, FilmCow to follow that link.

Many many years ago, the supremely silly 'Charlie the Unicorn' appeared on the net, followed by three sequels, and more recently an epic continuation (funded, also many many years ago, by a Kickstarter and finally coming gradually and slowly into existence now - not that I'm complaining when someone provides me with entertainment for free; really, there should be a lot more people who do that!) It's perhaps an example of what happens when you take a one-off story and try to build a universe around it, and large parts of this grand finale rather fall flat, but it's worth it for some hilarious moments with Nyx and Norwell in the first two parts, and the upcoming conclusion might well be brilliant, so stay tuned.

A similar piece of taking a one-off great idea and revisiting it can be seen in the video game Deltarune, chapter 2, which I've been playing this week. It's actually kind of dull, mostly, but has its moments, and again as far as I can recall I got it for free (it's not a complete game so much as a preview). It's not technically a sequel to the brilliant Undertale so much as a game by the same creator which references Undertale, but it falls firmly into the category of "games" where you're essentially watching a cartoon and just pressing a button now and then to move onto the next sequence. Undertale subverted that idea nicely, but Deltarune plays it rather more straight.

But if those two examples are the best I can come up with for cartoony novelty in 2021, I clearly need to discover something new. I'd be very open to any suggestions people might have!

Red Dwarf new and old

When asked about Red Dwarf (or, more frequently, when not asked at all but talking about it anyway), I tend to say that the golden era was series III to V [roman numerals are traditional when it comes to Red Dwarf series], and after that it generally went downhill. This is at odds with a lot of people on the internet in this modern era, who tend to group VI in with those three as if they were all one big unit, but I always think of that one as a much later kind of age, somehow, and I realise that that's just because of how I got into Red Dwarf in the first place.

The first time I watched Red Dwarf was series III - and not the first time it was on (although I might maybe have seen bits of it), but the repeat airing in October/November 1990, having heard good things from people at school. 1990 somehow still doesn't seem all that long ago, but I suppose it was - my 14th birthday came in between "Marooned" and "Polymorph".

You have to remember that in those dark and distant times, there was no internet, no streaming, no satellite TV worth speaking of, no constant repeats of classic shows. Not even any videos of Red Dwarf available to buy or rent. "Someone at school says it's good" was pretty much the only way to find out about something like this. But having found out about it, and watched the third series, I made a point of watching series IV when it was on telly in February/March the next year. And by then, it was something everyone at school was talking about! People who'd watched the first two series, and remembered anything about them, were very much in demand, although thin on the ground.

Series III came out on video in late 1991, adding to the mystery of those first two unseen seasons, we got series V on TV in February/March 1992, and then that was followed by series II on video at last, letting the newcomer fans glimpse how Red Dwarf looked in prehistoric times! So by this point I'm as big an expert on and fan of the show as it's possible to be without the internet or a really good book on the subject.

And then in 1993, there came a really good book on the subject!

Yes, the much-thumbed book is still in my bookcase. You modern people with your websites and wikipedias have no idea what it was like in the days when you had to learn things from actual books. But this one was awesome! And that's really what completed my education as a Red Dwarf fan, leading to lots of watching and reading about the first five series, and meaning that everything that came after it was always going to be a footnote to the golden age.

Red Dwarf VI eventually hit the screens in October/November 1993 ("Legion" was broadcast on my 17th birthday), only 18 months after the previous season, but too late to be anything but "not as good as it used to be" in my mind. I mean, it was all right, but it's not real Red Dwarf like it was in the good old days...

Even so, I'm glad it's still going on, and looking forward to the next series, if any!

Not a sound from the pavement

So, what's happening in the world of memory competitions lately? Well, live ones are starting to pop up again, but for the most part it's all been about Memory League this past year or so.

I've talked on here many times about the coolness of Memory League, but for 2021 we've had a more formal structure to the friendly online play than existed before - each season of the league is followed by an epic knockout 'Slam' tournament over the course of a weekend, which to make it fair each happen in a different time zone. We've already had the Pan-American Open (eight hours behind British time) in May and the Asian-Oceanian Open (eight hours ahead) in August, and the African-European Open happens in November - no need to compete in the middle of the night that time, if I qualify for it.

And qualifying for these things is tough - it's sixteen competitors, and I scraped into the last one as sixteenth seed, which is probably close to the best I can hope for here as well. So many people in the world are so much better at memorising things than I am, nowadays. But I'll keep my loyal bloglings, if any, informed about what's happening, and how to follow all the action on the always-exciting live streams!

Contracts exchanged

 I really hate to admit it, but I'm buying a house. In fact, I've bought a house. As of tomorrow, I'm a homeowner.

I really do feel that this is a violation of all my deeply-held principles, but I go wherever fate prods me, and it happened to prod me into buying the house I currently live in, when the owner put it up for sale and asked me if I wanted it. I said no, but thanks very much for asking, someone else bought it, but the sale fell through for some mysterious reason "higher up the chain", and so I, being entirely unchained, bought it at a slight discount. When an offer comes along, and you've already got a bank account piled high with money that hasn't been spent on travelling around the world for a year and a half, what can you do but agree to it? Fate prods.

I do get some satisfaction from knowing that the big list of things I've just received from the lawyer, detailing all the things you need to do when you move into a new house, doesn't apply to me at all because I've been living here for three years already. The only real change is that instead of paying rent every month, I'm paying a very slightly smaller amount in mortgage repayments, for the next 25 years. I should live so long. And we'll just pretend that aforesaid big pile of money never existed, because let's face it, saving money isn't my thing at all.

Imre, incidentally, was delighted at the weekend because he'd just finished paying off a 25-year mortgage. It seemed to me that he'd not know what to do with himself now, and I suggested he should take over my brand new shiny mortgage instead, but he didn't seem to think that would be a good idea.

Still, this is rather a cool house to own. It's a grade 2 listed building, you know, so if someone comes round and tries to hard-sell me an extension or a conservatory I can say that I'm literally not allowed to build one!

Othello's coming home

 Real live othello competition returned to its British homeland of Cambridge at the weekend! The British Othello Championship had to interrupt its proud every-year-since-1977 record last year, but returned with a bang in 2021. Well, the kind of polite and restrained bang that's acceptable in a nice place like Cambridge, obviously.

We had twelve competitors, a nice number for the Junior Parlour and for the traditional evening meal at an Indian restaurant, and a great time was had by all! I've been playing quite a lot on eOthello over the past year or so, and thought I might be on good form for this glorious return to live action, but I was actually pretty rubbish all weekend. I did have a nice win over Roy, which takes some doing, and was quite pleased with how I played against David Hand on the Sunday, with only one particularly bad choice of move messing things up for me - although I can't in all good conscience allow the "surely deserved to lose" in his account of the tournament to stand; he was a lot better than me.  We ended with Imre top of the table with a perfect record, and David his opponent in the final on tie-break. It was the opposite way around in 2019, and the final went the opposite way as well, with David becoming the new British Othello Champion!

 1: 9 pts [657] LEADER Imre (79) {GBR} 

 2: 7 pts [646] HAND David (2357) {GBR} 

              [591] BECK David (6437) {GBR} 

 4: 6 pts [612] BARRASS Iain (2047) {GBR} 

 5: 5 pts [578] TURNER Ian (2036) {GBR} 

              [534] PRIDMORE Ben (4019) {GBR} 

 7: 4 pts [506] ARNOLD Roy (2006) {GBR} 

              [483] CHAPPELL Digby (100052) {GBR} 

 9: 3 pts [517] KYTE Bruce (2078) {GBR} 

 10: 2 pts [440] CHAPPELL Fraser (100057) {GB} 

 11: 1 pt [406] CHAPPELL Graham (100050) {GBR} 

              [402] CHAN Cheuk Wing (4123) {HKG} 

 FINAL RESULT: HAND 38 vs LEADER 26

Now we need to update the trophy - it's about ten years out of date with the little shields added to the back bearing the names of past winners, and move on into a bold new era of proper othello tournaments! I really should see if I can get one arranged here in Redditch...

Journal of the plague years

Okay, so, having decided to stop writing my blog mainly in order to punish the human race for being so stupid, I did rather expect the whole stupidity thing to have stopped by this point. Perhaps "until the world stops being stupid" was too strict a requirement to set for starting to blog again. There are some slight encouraging signs, though, and more importantly there was a memory competition in Germany, there's another one scheduled for France next month, and there was a British Othello Championship in Cambridge on Saturday and Sunday just gone, that I really would like to write about.

So I'm reducing humanity's sentence, letting you off for good behaviour, and starting to blog again, as of now. I do have plenty of things to write about, after all. Stay tuned!