Vincent, a short film from 1982:

Tim Burton and Vincent Price, what more do you need?

I’ll be flying up to Kamloops this weekend. My brother’s there staying with my parents for a short time, and I’ll be visiting with him. He seems to be doing quite well now.

Look, a dancing robot!

[via]

Lastly, a quick good luck to everyone starting NaNoWriMo this weekend. I won’t be joining you this year, unfortunately, but I’m looking forward to seeing you all sweat!

Anyway, off to play a little Fallout 3 before bed.

This is the first video for the My Day, Yesterday Flickr group.

[via]

We had a bit of a family emergency this last weekend. I was in Vancouver and spent a good portion of my time there in a psychiatric ward. My brother’s dealing with a lot right now, was unknowingly bipolar and unmedicated, and tried to overdose. The suicide attempt was really one of a few surprises this weekend, so it wasn’t fun.

The whole family was in Vancouver for this, and it was interesting once we were all together. All of us seem to have to have the same response to grief and stress, which is to try and laugh. As a result, the time we spent at the hospital was strangely hilarious most of the time. I spent ages cracking my brother up with padded wall jokes alone, although I’m told manics make for easy audiences.

He’s doing well now. Physically he’s fine, and I’m hoping the bipolar medication will help him level out and get back on track. Really only time will tell. It was very frightening, the idea that I could never have seen him again. If nothing else, this has made it clear that I need to make more of an effort to visit him. We’ve grown apart somewhat since we moved cities, and that’s unfortunate.

You might not hear from me for a few days, as I’m off to Vancouver tomorrow for the weekend. I’ll be heading to a Weezer concert tomorrow evening and then spending the rest of the weekend with some friends.

It’s a good time for a holiday. I’ll have my laptop with me, so it’s possible I’ll pop in on the weekend, but we might be too busy getting our Rock Band on.

Off to bed now, though. Early morning tomorrow.

Maybe I’m up too late, but I thought this was hilarious. A-ha’s* “Take On Me” with the lyrics changed to explain the video.

[via]

I always really liked this video, even though I probably didn’t see it for the first time until the early nineties. Rotoscoping is always fun to watch, and being sucked into a comic book is pretty awesome, even if it turns into a silly 80s romance comic book.

*Yes, I know their name is officially supposed to be lower case. I hate it when people try to do that, so screw them. They aren’t E. E. Cummings, and even he capitalized his name in most cases.

Terry Pratchett has long been one of my favourite authors. Last summer he was diagnosed with Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a visual variant of Alzheimer’s disease, and he writes about his experience with the diagnosis in the Daily Mail [via]:

I was extremely fortunate in my GP. I think she was amazed to find that of the two specialists in my area, one had no experience of PCA and therefore did not feel he could help me and the other would only take on patients over 65 - at 59 I was clearly too young to have Alzheimer’s.

I remember on that day of rage thinking that if I’d been diagnosed with cancer of any kind, at least there would have opened in front of me a trodden path.

There would have been specialists, examinations, there would be in short, some machinery in place.

I was not in the mood for a response that said, more or less, ‘go away and come back in six years’.

My wife said: ‘Thank goodness it isn’t a brain tumour,’ but all I could think then was: ‘I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven’t heard of anyone who’s got better from Alzheimer’s.’

He goes on to write about society’s view of the disease. People want to ignore it and think of it as just an unfortunate, unpreventable part of growing old, a view that hinders research and funding.

The stories in the report - of people being told they were too young or intelligent to have dementia; of neighbours crossing the street and friends abandoning them - are like something from a horror novel.

It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer’s you are an old fart. That’s how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.

I have to admit, Alzheimer’s really freaks me out. I used to volunteer at an extended care hospital when I was young, and I worked with dementia patients. Thankfully no one close to me has ever been diagnosed, but I’ve always dreaded the day I’ll have to watch a family member or friend slowly lose cognitive function. The sad fact is that many of us will have to do just that if something isn’t done.

Once he saw the lack of support and funding, Pratchett donated 1 million US dollars to Alzheimer’s Research Trust, hoping to, at the very least, get people talking. This is great for the millions of other sufferers who don’t have enough money or influence to raise any awareness.

Here’s a teaser for Terry Gilliam’s next project, due out next year:

This is the film Heath Ledger was making at the time of his death, so they filled the rest of his role with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell. I’d heard of this role switching a little while back, but what I hadn’t heard was that my most favourite person in the whole world was a part of this. Tom Waits is playing the role of the devil!

A project with both Terry Gilliam and Tom Waits is bound to be a trip.