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I’ve never really been into comics. I recently saw The Dark Knight, and it was awesome. I used to watch the Batman cartoon when I was a young and have always been really into him. Before The Dark Knight began one of the trailers which was shown was for Watchmen. Before then I had only really heard of Watchmen in passing a couple of times from friends. The trailer for the film looked really cool, if only for the special effects (trailers don’t really tell you much about the story). I ended up borrowing the Watchmen graphic novel from a friend, and tonight I just finished reading it.

I think what made me enjoy the graphic novel so much was the writing and plot. I’m still not that much a fan of the illustration even though there were some really clever touches to it. I just found the plot to be fantastic and ridiculous - events in the book could never really happen in real life. The loved the way the politics and war were portrayed, and how the characters were never simply good or bad, but doing what they did for their own reasons.  And the ending was just superb…

This next paragraph contains plot spoilers…

… But I find it difficult to believe the movie ending will remain as it is in the book. I don’t know if American audiences will want to see a New York that’s been bombed (by a huge fake alien!) and with 3 million people dead. Even if the movie is good it will never be able to live up to the graphic novel. I’ll still go and watch it though.

I’ve never really read comics before and when I started reading Watchmen I disliked having pictures with the words. I used to read a lot of novels so the dialogue driven method of story telling felt weird and unfamiliar to me. It took me a little while to get over that aspect of it. However, now that I think about it a little bit, it occurs to me that Tarantino films are pretty much entirely dialogue driven too, and I like those a lot too.

I don’t think I will all of a sudden start reading comics as a result of reading Watchmen, but it’s given me an appreciation of graphic novels as a medium. They bridge the gap between novels and films, but have a unique feel of their own.

I’ve always played computer games. My first interaction with computers was playing the original Prince of Persia on a computer running DOS when I was 5 or 6. I have now decided that I will stop playing computer games except for very rare LAN sessions, where it is more about the socialising than the gaming.

Over the years I’ve spent a large amount of time gaming. Too much time. Instead of gaming my time on computers will now be spent doing productive things, hacky things, fun things, open source things, things that I could have been doing and learning so much from doing if I hadn’t been gaming.

Gaming is great, but it’s such a waste of time. I used to equate the amount of time I spent gaming to how other people spend time watching tv, almost as a means of justifying it. When you’re on a computer it’s already so easy to waste a lot of time not doing anything productive. Gaming, for me, just compounds that scenario.

A recent post on /. featured a review of a graphic novel called Hackerteen. Hackerteen, it is explained, is not just a graphic novel but “an edutainment program created by the Brazilian company 4Linux”. The reviewer goes on to state that:

“The curriculum… arose out of a desire to deal with three problems.

1. Excessive time spent by young people playing computer games on the internet.
2. Young people committing digital crimes on the internet.
3. A lack of professionals who work with networks and computer security.”

Obviously I’m not alone in the amount of time I (used to) spend playing computer games. There’s so much other cool stuff you can be doing using computers instead.

To spend time playing with computers and learning about the cool stuff they can do and how they work,  instead of playing computer games is my belated new year’s resolution.

Oh and Cory Doctorow’s novels are awesome :)