A sheep and a faint and a statue

Sixteen hours.  That's how long it takes to drive to Edinburgh and back.  That's how long I spent in the car this weekend (fortunately in the back seat and able to nap).  And that's why my leg muscles are absolutely killing me now that it's Monday, the morning after the morning after the night before. 

The things you have to do when you're a human statue...

Comics update

Habibi, by Craig Thompson, is out.  Progress reports have been coming up on his blog for an age and a half, taunting us with these gorgeous, intricate images and all the stages of the publication process.  I read his Blankets a few years ago (and had to save up for the privelage, my local library isn't big on comics) so I'm really looking forward to this.  It shall be mine.  Oh yes, it shall be mine.

Also in the news today, the animated adaption of Marjane Satrapi's comic duology Persepolis has been causing fights and court cases in Tunisia.  The comic was ground-breaking enough in the West, giving us a personal look at life during the Iranian Revolution through the eyes of a young Marjane, but closer to it's home it's even more challenging.  The animated movie was shown on television in Tunisia, and includes a scene where Marjane speaks with God, who is portrayed in the classic white-and-beardy-and-fifteen-feet-tall fashion.  For us and for her it seems like an obvious way to show the kind of relationship she has with her creator, but for most conservative Muslims showing any image of God or Mohammed is a massive no-no.  The TV broadcasting station came under attack and is currently on trial for "insulting sacred values".  Anyone care to suggest that cartoons are only relevant to kids?  No, I thought not.

We're so used to being allowed to say whatever we think or believe in Britain (and sometimes we say too much as a result) without life-threatening consequences that the idea of a country where showing a programme that contravenes one such belief results in out-and-out violence (thereby contravening other beliefs about love and peace in that same religion, one would think) is frankly very bizarre to me.  It seems almost backward, and I want to make indignant statments that begin with "How can it be, in this day and age...?", as if people now are any less impulsive and fearful than they have always been.

As a Christian I get crossed by people every other day, promoting beliefs that can directly oppose mine and sometimes be very offensive to me, but I don't get to go attack a TV station and I wouldn't expect to be able to either.  Beating someone to a pulp is no way to convince them that they were wrong, just to set them against you even more.  It's a bit like that time they put Nick Griffin on Question Time; it was right to give him the freedom to express his ideas... and equally right that he was immediately shot down by the rest of us for being a narrow-minded nationalist muppet, but no one commited arson on his office over it.  Besides, we're British, we don't attack broadcasters, instead we stoically stiffen our upper lips and join the queue to the complaints booth.

I've been watching... Bellowhead!

A few months ago I had a dilemma.  It was nearly Christmas, I was pretty skint and on a firm budget and yet... and yet...  Bellowhead, a band I had been dying to see live for two years were going to be touring in 2012.  Their closest stop was the New Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham, and although the ticket prices were decent the date and distance made me do a lot of hmming and haaaaing.  "But it's on a work night.  Can I really spare the money?  No one else I know wants to go..." and then "Oh SCREW IT!  How long have I wanted to see them for?  And when will they next be so close?  Stuff it all, I'm going."  So I very naughtily bought myself a Christmas present with money I didn't exactly have spare yet and went on my own this evening.  Drove up there on my own, had dinner on my own, went to the concert on my own.

I loved it.

The video I've linked below just does not do them justice.  From the moment the first band member walks on stage they start to build up this slightly nutty energy which floats along through the entire gig and infects the audience (not that we needed the help.  It seems that Bellowhead fans are the kind of people that grin and giggle a lot).  It's helped by the motley combination of players too; for frontmen you have Jon Boden - who is hugely tall and stands there crook-kneed and slouching like a walking Tim Burton character, the most enthralling stick man you've ever seen - and John Spiers - who is in a tweed jacket and looks more like the beaming offspring of Stephen Fry and Mr Mole, but a quite bit cooler than either with his fingers flashing up and down the melodian keys with an ease that is so awesome it's sickening.  You continue looking round and although you always expect it from the drummer clearly the rest of them are just as bonkers (in the good way.  You should see the brass section dance!), and you can't help thinking 'Thank goodness they all found each other.  What on earth would they have done otherwise?'

(but like I said, even you can see them better this video doesn't really do them justice  To watch it live was a bit more like this)

Every one of the band seems to be able to play at least three instruments frustratingly well, and to swap between them with such speed that unless you're staring right at them as they do it you never actually see them move.  Although they're a folk band playing old shanties and jigs most of the song arrangements have the kind of progression you'd expect from a classical orchestra, bridges pinched from jazz and ska, and musically speaking they are just so tight.  Barely a millisecond out of place, despite some pretty funky key signatures that would throw most people off even if they had the sheet music infront of them.  You can see how aware of each other they are as a band; there's all these little glances and nods and gestures shooting round the stage that connects them all together.  Even when the drummer mistakenly started a different song to the one that the others thought they were playing, no one so much as blinked.  Instead they all immediately cracked up laughing, someone yelled "Ok, let's do that one!" and everyone scrambled for the right instruments for a grand total of three seconds before they were off again without missing a beat.  The set had all the good stuff.  They began with Jordan and Whiskey is the Life of Man, and the encore was New York Girls...

And then for a second encore they did Sloe Gin Set...

And then Parson's Farewell...

And then Frog's Legs and Dragon's Teeth...

"We can probably squeeze in one more!" yells Boden.  Finally we ended, for real, on London Town.

By this point the entire audience, who had been trying very hard to sit in it's seats like the well-behaved British music-lovers that we were for at least the first half of the show (why they thought it was worth booking a venue with chairs in it when the music was clearly the kind of stuff you had to stomp along to at the very least, I have no idea), had long since given up decorum and been dancing in the rows and clapping our hands raw since somewhere after the first half.  When we eventually left the theatre we were very sweaty and smelly and pleased.   We all had a stonking good time.

Many happy returns

...to the four people I know who had birthday parties last weekend.  What a great way to spend your days off work!  Two nights out with friends and one trip to London to see my Dad who is *mumblemumblemumble* years old this year!  Hooray!  Here's the card I made him:

I'm particularly proud of the guy's armpit hair.  Yes he may be wearing a leotard, but he's a Manly Man!

The link here is that we all went to see Cirque de Soleil's Totem, which is the current show residing in the Royal Albert Hall.  They usually bring a different show every year, and I've seen the previous two as well; Quidam and Varekai.  None of the rest of the family had been before, and I think Totem was a great show to get introduced on.  Varekai is still my favourite because it has the strongest plot built into it (and as we know, I'm all about the narrative) whereas Totem has less of a story and more of a general theme that they danced about, but the skills were fantastic, as you would expect.

Royal Albert Hall from Mornington Crescent

It always amazes me not only that people can learn how to do these things, but that they even had the idea in the first place.  I mean, who looks at a human being and thinks to themselves "I know, we'll build a one-wheeled vehicle to use instead of walking.  And then we'll make that unicycle eight feet high.  And then we'll get people to pedal them using one foot.  And on the other foot we'll give them some bowls to balance.  And then to throw.  And catch.  In a neat stack.  On their heads.  Yeah, that'll be fun."  WHO DOES THAT???  WHO DECIDED THAT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE!!!  I love it though, the sheer nuttiness of it, and the way that the performers just pick up everyday objects - crockery, a ping pong ball, a pair of rollerskates - and reappropriate it, finding qualities in it that I didn't even realise it had, turning it into something amazing.

A little bit of inspiration

My housemate Emily and I went for a walk along the canal to Barrow last weekend.  It was a perfect January day, a little muddy but everything cold and bright and frosty.  It's a nice easy walk and I really enjoyed being able to share it with her and spend so much time with her, all 7.5 miles of it...

...but that's not what I want to post about. This week there's been more to celebrate as Emily has just reached a significant milestone after spending the last few months putting herself through what I would describe as a mild form of torture.  Food Deprivation and Voluntary Self-Exhaustion...  Basically, she's been trying to lose weight.

It took me a while to get on board with the idea.  Having spent so many of my post-teenage years trying to see myself as a reasonably-normal-shaped human being and not some flabby mutant monster type thing, I find weight-loss quite a tricky concept in some ways.  "You mean after all that practise at accepting who I am, I now have to admit there's something wrong with me?"  Everybody has a problem with a bit of their body.  Everybody wants to be 'OK' so that people won't run a mile as they approach, and it's taken me a while to understand that actually I'm fine.  There's nothing really wrong with me, and in fact there's a lot right with me.  I've not got the perfect body, if such a thing even exists, but 'not perfect' is definitely 'good enough'.  In fact there's some bits of myself I really like now.  My legs are pretty good,  I like my hands, and I get my wrists and neck from my Mum.

Also I'm inherently lazy.  Ok, that's not true, but I am a Deliberator.  I spend a lot of time in my own head and I'd rather be knowledgeable than thin or sporty, so this whole exercise business holds less water for me than most things when I could be sitting in my room being pretentiously cerebral instead.  And I get bored doing the same thing over and over again.  Exercise just for the sake of exercising is not much fun.  However if I'm doing something else that is interesting, and exercise happens to be a bi-product of me doing it, then that's fine.  Hence all the walks and general outdoorsness of the last few months.  Outdoors I like.  It's worth incidentally exercising to get myself Outdoors.

Trying out new recipes.  We made fritatta!

All that said, Emily's stellar efforts have been rubbing off on me and made me think.  Since she began her challenge I've started adopting ideas I see her trying out.  My portion sizes are generally smaller now. I make almost all my own food from scratch.  Fruit has re-entered my lunchbox.  Also I've realised that while for the most part I don't feel the personal or ethical need to be particularly slim or fit, I need to make sure I remember what my body can do.  Maybe I'm not going to challenge it physically a lot of the time, but it does still need to be in good working order so that I don't get in my own way.  If you don't run much, and insist you're "not a runner", eventually you'll convince yourself of it so much that you won't ever try and run, even if it's just a short dash down the street for the fun of it.  Maybe I don't care about being the perfect weight, but I do want to be able to climb staircases without getting out of breath.  I don't want to be sporty, but I want to be active my entire life.

So in fact, while I liked Emily at 13+st and I shall like her just as much at 11, what she has been doing is really quite brave.  Rather than finding something she doesn't like about herself and silently fretting about it, she's challenged herself to improve, she's stuck with it, and she's winning!  I'm constantly impressed by her determination and discipline - something I could definitely stand to get a bit better at.

If you want to check out her progress, introduce yourself, or say something nice to her (yesterday was her birthday), you can find progress updates on her blog, Thin Girl Breaking Free.

'Nuff said

A Softer World comes through again.

The Problem Finale

I try not to be too much of a fangirl on this blog (or ever. To me fangirls are terrifying squealy creatures) but these past three weeks I've not really been able to help myself. All because of some lanky detective with a bad attitude and a silly hat...

WARNING: SUPERMASSIVE SPOILER ALERT

I don't care what anybody else says, I thought that the final episode of Sherlock, series two, was a masterful piece of television.  As usual the main focus has been on the two main actors, but credit where credit's due; the story was solid, cunning, and well written (especially considering that it wasn't written by the show's co-creators, who have penned all the strongest episodes so far), the direction and shot composition was fantastic, the production was great, and it hadn't really hit me what the team had done until yesterday - all six episodes are an hour and a half long each.  They've made us six movies.  The film industry has always had more pomp and glitter surrounding it than British television, so to see a show that can hold that amount of interest for that amount of time when most movies can't even make a decent sequel is no mean feat.

It was a strange episode though, in some ways, and not one that's easy to take on face value.  I've heard a lot of little niggles from people (Is he really dead/not dead?  Why was the Sherlock/Jim monologue so long?  Who gave Sherlock's Supposedly-Homeless Network all those camera-phones?  I wasn't surprised by the jump from the roof.  Doesn't showing him alive ruin the cliffhanger?)  I've got some thoughts on all that, not that I think anybody cares so I've hidden it behind the Read More at the bottom.  I just think too much about these things and like the sound of my own voice :)

I figure Holmes finally got popped in the nose for being such a smart-alec

All in all it's not bad going for a man who once said "Heroes don't exist, and if they did I wouldn't be one of them." However I tend to agree with him.  Heroes are hard to find and often they aren't the ones in the limelight. If there's going to be any real heroism around here it mostly comes from the stalwart soldier in the cardigan who puts up with Sherlock for a year and a half, does everything he can to help him, and then stands quietly on the sidelines and lets his friend take all the glory.

Yeah, you heard me.  Sherlock may be fascinating to watch in action, but if I had to pick a dinner date I'd go for the good doctor every time.

How on earth-

-did I forget about this!


After graduating, I was approached by a friend of mine who was setting up an online business and wanted a 'How To' video.  It had to explain the concept to people of the website to new visitors in under two minutes.  That website was Staywimi, a meeting place for people with rooms and beds they were willing to rent and people looking for an alternative to pricey hotel rooms, particularly with the Olympics coming up.  He asked me to make that video.


It was definitely a big learning curve for me.  I was fresh out of uni with a lot of enthusiasm but not much experience of the real working world, or the process of dealing with a client.  With both of us new to our professions and little or nothing to go on, every step of the relationship between me and Ali was a fresh experience and often a challenging one.  I found out things that old hands will think ought to be painfully obvious:

• How to write a contract, and what your terms should be
• Intellectual property
• Rules about using other people's logos in your ad. (Basically, DON'T DO IT!!!)
• Why you should ALWAYS have a fixed script before you begin animating.  We started drawing out ideas before the narrative of the script was really set, only to have other stakeholders come in later at several different points and request changes.  Even the final video you see now is not quite the video I handed over.
• Using Illustrator and Flash, two programmes that I'd dabbled in but never really had much occasion to get familiar with.  Man am I familiar with them now!
• Matching motion and scenes to the timing of a soundtrack.  To be honest I've never been told about this but have always done it instinctively.  As a musician the idea of counting beats and fitting different instruments together harmoniously seems natural and obvious.  I feel that music and pacing are key elements that can make or break an animation, but making things fit to words was a really fun thing to do.  I drew charts upon charts marking where words came in, and where the animation needed to be at that point in time, and it worked!  I still like the pacing of this when I rewatch it now.
• Deadlines.  What a realistic time is to set for particular tasks, and why it's important that you keep to those - or are honest with your client if you realise that you can't.  I was job-hunting at the time and overestimated my ability to juggle both, so the first few weeks of the project involved a lot of give and take, and my friend was very generous with me while I figured out the ropes.  Hopefully now I'm a lot more aware of timescales and how long particular jobs will take me.

Looking back on it now, over a year later, I'm still pretty proud of it.  There's a few moments where I wince and think 'Ooh, thats a bit clunky...' or 'Argh, I can't believe I didn't spot that glaringly obvious error', but I guess that's called growth.  It just means I've improved since then, and learned more about my art.  The whole experience was fantastically helpful and goes to show that the best way to learn something is to simply do it, then screw it up, kill yourself fixing it, and emerge exhausted and victorious.  Seeing it live on the website is a huge honour, and I'm grateful to Ali who gave me that chance to try something new.


When I gave them the finished video the website was still in it's beta phase, so it didn't get uploaded straight away and I simply got caught up with other things and forgot to check for it.  What a great surprise to find it today!

In the meantime...

Argh, I really want to post a birthday card I did, but I can't put it up until next weekend or the person it's for might see it...  so here's some photos of something else instead.

After Christmas and before New Year I went down to the south coast with my family to visit some friends of our who have moved to Worthing, a bit west of Brighton.  We went for a walk and within an hour the scenery went from this:

To this:

Don't you just love Britain!  It was kicking up a gale I can tell you.  Fortunately we could take shelter in Al's Diner, an American style cafe just east of the pier.  Don't be deceived by the board outside claiming that their special is an Egg-Mayo sandwich, go inside and they have the biggest menu I have ever seen for a place that size.  Try their pancake breakfasts, and then their milkshakes.  Between me and my sister we made our way through a raspberry one and a peanut butter one.  Amazing.

Pitstop

All my posts recently have been really long, so I want to do a short post for once.

John (of Johnny Wander fame) has a formspring for giving his own unique brand of advice - called, oddly enough- JohnAdvice.  Most of the answers are snarky and cynical, which is wonderful, but occasionally he does come up with something rather profound.

The bottom one I included just for fun :)

(Also I have realised that the fire-poi girl I drew in the post below looks awfully familiar.  I have totally pinched the hairdo of Maggie McKay from Friends With Boys.  It was unconciously done so please take it as a compliment of how much I like the comic)

On Fire

I wanted to do a little blog of Fever, the circus skills society I joined when I started university.  Now I'm working I don't get to go to practice sessions as often as I used to and since most of them are students and it's been the Christmas holidays I've missed them while they've been away.  You know you've got circus/fire withdrawal when you accidentally draw this...

I've been part of this group of utter nutcases for what... five years now?  It mainly started due to an unhealthy liking of fire, and I still love performing with glow- and fire- poi and hula hoop, but besides that there's been some great friendships made and any number of parties.  I was going through some oldphotos, so under the Read More below is a very condensed version of five years of me dancing about waving flaming (or glowing) objects round my head.  Mum, if you're reading this, look away now...

It's Sunday again...

... and you know what that means!  I'll be flicking over to BBC1:

Come on, admit it, if you could introduce yourself like that you definitely would :)

I have a lot of love for this show, which is strange because I'm not really into detective stories or crime novels usually.  I think for me it's the witty dialogue that does it (the writers throw out banter like confetti) and the character development, which is something I've missed with characters as iconic as these two.

I did read the Sherlock Holmes books as a teenager and liked them (The Speckled Band and Blue Carbuncle were my favourites), but I never got on with the Rathbone and Bruce portrayals of the crime-fighting duo, which are probably the most well-known.  I think my problem was that I always found TV Watson to be a bit dense when in the books I really liked how astute he was.  Since the purpose of Watson is to be our viewpoint of the incomprehensibility of Holmes, we often see him not understanding clues or needing explanations, but he's not supposed to be dim-witted.  Yes he looks slow next to Holmes but everyone has that problem.  Watson's had a career in the army as a medical doctor so clearly he's very intelligent, resourceful, and physically fit, allowing for his war wound.  But for a long time the typecast for Watson has been a rather portly, jolly sort of fellow who is in a constant state of bedazzled awe.  He's not Holmes' colleague, he's his porter and fanboy.

What the BBC reboot Sherlock has done which I admire is that it's given the relationship a dynamic where Holmes' eccentricities from the books are played up and his intensely analytical mind comes at the price of his emotional awareness, as genius often can.  Even in the original stories when Holmes does show particular charm or concern towards others it's often an attempt to manipulate them into giving up clues for his latest case.  In the third TV episode of Season One, The Great Game, he comments on how caring about the world at large is a waste of time and energy, as it would compromise his ability to think properly, at which John is duly shocked.  Watson is in awe of his colleague's reasoning skills, but also in constant frustration at how insensitive he is to people's feelings.  Season One begins with Sherlock and John as Mad Genius and Awestruck Groupie respectively, but by this second season you see that a shift has taken place.  Previously they were flatmates.  Now they are friends.  John continues to be impressed by Sherlock but no longer gushes over his every exposition, will firmly chastise him when he goes too far, and navigates the human element for them both (manners, decorum, empathy) since that's the one area of life Holmes struggles to comprehend.  In turn Sherlock has become genuinely fond of his "blogger"; he accepts that his friend has qualities that he doesn't (he can aim a firearm for one thing), delegates to him on cases so that they work together rather than one merely spectating -although he still uses him shamelessly when the need arises-, and may even aquiesce with some good grace when John corrects his behaviour.  In the space of just one episode, 'Scandal in Belgravia', he says both "Please" and "Sorry", I think for the first time ever, as well as jumping to the defence of his landlady when his brother Mycroft insults her.  At Christmas they have visitors!  Actual visitors!  Who want to be there!

I wanted to subtitle that episode "In Which Sherlock Has Friends", or perhaps "In Which Sherlock Ceases To Be A Heartless Machine".  It's a nicer, more complex, and more balanced combination than Genius and Bumbler; Holmes' whirling mind and mad exploits give Watson's life a much needed kick, while Watson's loyalty and solid reliability keep Holmes from spiralling off into the blue unknown.

The rub now will be this; Sherlock has shown his Achilles Heel.  The combination of Holmes and Watson broadens them both as people, but also makes them increasingly susceptible to attack as they rely more on each other.  And now we have Jim Moriarty in the picture.  I'm more than a little concerned.

The fact of the matter is...

... that this may be the most vital function I perform as a housemate, ranking higher than cooking or cleaning.  

There's a skill for you!  Despite being a bit rubbish at forming my own sentences, I seem to be good at sorting out other peoples' (like my youngest sister, I'm a bit of a grammar Nazi).  It's actually gotten to the point now where if someone gets stuck on a word they'll glance at me and I'll fill in the gap - all the time appearing as if I wasn't even listening to begin with!  If I was going for Miss United States, this would probably be my talent.

In aaaaaawe...

You may have noticed that the left-hand column on this blog is getting full of webcomics.  Duuuude I am so obsessed with webcomics (although I'm very picky about which ones I follow), but my newest find and latest contender for current favourite is Friends With Boys by Faith Erin Hicks.  It follows Maggie McKay, who is moving from home-school into public school, and all the challenges that brings... while simultaneously being haunted by the ghost of a sea captain's wife.  Just to throw in a curve ball :)  The characters are well rounded and the artwork is great (I'm particularly enjoying the variants of facial hair on Maggie's three brothers).  It's actually already a completed comic book that gets released in February, but in the meantime because all the pages already exist she's been uploading one every day.  EVERY DAY!!!  This NEVER HAPPENS with webcomics because most of them are drawn in realtime -that is, every week/fortnight/whatever the artist will draw the next page of the comic and upload it, and then the next page the following week, and so on.  So to have an update every single weekday is just MAGIC.

Updating when you say you will is pretty vital for a webcomic's success because nothing makes us comic fans angrier than denying us our expected dose of awesome.  One of my other favourites, The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal (Rated 18+) has never missed a week without giving notice, even when the artist was in a motorbike accident and on serious medication with a leg full of pins for a fortnight.  That's how dedicated these people are.  Most days I check for the new pages even before I check my emails.

But just as interesting to me at the moment is the blog that leads up to Friends With Boys.  Faith Hicks started blogging during her animation course at university in 2001, and the pages cover the last 10 years up to the online launch of Friends With Boys as a webcomic.  Right now I'm at a point where I don't really know what I want to do with my "career" (whatever that is), or even if what I do want is achievable.  I'd love to have a job where I get to draw for a living but professionally speaking I know I'm up to scratch yet in a lot of areas.  I reckon that to get that point of not being perfect (will never happen) but good enough to make a go of it will take several years, so to have a public diary of someone who is a practicing artist which starts at art university and continues throught that process is hugely encouraging.  You're watching someone grow as an artist, seeing them learn things that you have learned, or need to learn, and think thoughts that you've thought yourself.  Very surreal, but strangely comforting.  I'm also loving the little anecdotes because I'm such a nerd so I get all the jokes!   I'm near enough in age that I remember all the things she got excited about in her posts (most of which are new movies coming out or the discovery of great TV shows and comic books/graphic novels - Lord of the Rings!  Dune!  Firefly!) because I got just as excited!  How cool, to know that while I was a girl in England doodling away and obsessing over animated movies, there was a marginally older girl in Canada doing the exact same thing. Woooow...

I went as far back as I could and started reading in 2001.  I'm currently mid-2004.  I don't know what I'm going to do when I catch up with the present.  That's gonna be a sad day.

I've been reading...

...The Hunger Games Trilogy, which was completely fantastic (in a gruesome sort of way).  I borrowed them off my housemate, stormed through all three in about two days, and then spent another day just mulling it all over.

While trying not to give too much away (although someone's making a movie of the first book now, so I guess the premise is pretty easy to come by) I have to say that the series really made me think.  The first book is mainly about man's inhumanity to man, and also how  you can NEVER TRUST THE MEDIA!  Seriously, I'll never watch television the same again.  It was like reading a Ben Elton book, only with death instead of sarcasm.  In the second and third books it becomes more about what happens when you upset the status quo, the emotional and psychological toll violence and hardship takes on people and how it changes them.  The end chapters of the final book were really quite sad and poignant because while we see (some of) the characters go on to live out their lives, we also find out that they're so irreparably damaged by what they've experienced that they are unable to enjoy the freedom they fought for.  Even grimmer is the fact that in some ways they have taken on the very characteristics that angered them to the point of rebellion earlier on in the series - they have become the kind of people they were trying to beat.  You see several characters make a decision about whether or not to treat the losing side the same way they were treated at the beginning of the books.  The motivation is partially to make them understand what they did, but mostly it is revenge.  Some vote Yes, some No, and it is genuinely hard to blame those that agreed.

I am very fortunate to live in a country which hasn't seen war on it's own land for over sixty years, but it's happening in other places as I type this, and it would be very naive to think that it will never happen here again.  I wonder what atrocities will we stoop to when it happens, and how the victors will treat the defeated side in the aftermath.  At the end of every conflict there has to be a delicate balance of justice and mercy to account for those wronged, but also provide the conditions for a peaceful future to grow, but when it's your own neighbours or family who have been hurt it must be extremely difficult to be objective.  Take the gap between the First and Second World Wars; the Allied powers got that balance wrong, bringing Germany to it's knees in a combination of debt and shame that contributed to the economic depression and starvation of the 1920s.  That desparation in turn paved the way for a more radical leader who claimed he could restore his people's wellbeing and pride.  Which he did.  It was just a shame that he also wanted his own revenge too, not to mention dictatorship over the free world.  Oops.

Not that history is ever that simple to dissect, but the anger of one set of people leads to anger in another, and soon events begin to spiral out of control.  I think it might take the end of the world before we break that cycle.