Food for Ghosts

I had a headache last night, so I didn't want any alcohol, but I had a serious yen to chill out. So instead I watched Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away again.



Something about the relentlessly beautiful and intricate imagery of that movie gives me a singular bliss. Blade Runner has a similar effect on me. But the animation is another beautiful factor for Miyazaki's films--the fact that virtually every movement, colour, and shape is made by human hands infuses them with character in ways you just don't get with the perfect calculations of those things by a computer in the worlds of cgi movies. Spirited Away is about a world of magic on the other side of reality, but when the movie starts out with the magic of a girl, her family, and the forest around them built entirely by the impressions and hands of artists, all the magic is utterly credible in ways unlike any other kind of filmmaking.

My plan for the fortnight was to draw, ink, and colour one page of my comic a day, except on Friday and Saturday. I'd planned on drawing and inking a page on Friday, and then colouring it on Saturday. But I ended up finishing the page on Friday, so I decided to take Saturday off, a decision that seemed even more logical when the headache appeared. I suspect this particular headache is from compulsively staying up an hour or so later than my body wants to lately.

I went over to Tim's again last night and played more Fallout 3, graduating from fighting ants to fighting zombies and mercenaries. The game's version of zombies are called ghouls and some of them are sentient. In a sewer, I found a large one who'd arranged garden gnomes around his room as some kind of silent guardians. Inside, he had a small shrine to Nuka-Cola, the game's version of Coca-Cola, consisting of a banner, a bottle shaped lamp, several glass bottles, and two toy Nuka-Cola delivery trucks. The game tells stories so much better through these little details than it does through its dialogue. But I haven't been talking to many NPCs--the game's stirred up all my Doom and Quake instincts--it's been a very long time since I've enjoyed a game like this.

Last night I watched the twelfth episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season. Not a bad episode, though I'd have liked going my whole life without seeing Adama and Roslin in bed together. I loved Starbuck talking shit to Gaeta.