Last year I said “I think 2010 may be slightly less weighted towards graphic novels”. Whoops.
How many of my 2010 books have you read?
Available as a poll over on Live Journal (you don’t need an LJ account to vote, just an OpenID account which means an account from WordPress.com, Google, Yahoo, Blogger, etc.)
It’s been a while since my last dinosaur miniatures roundup, so what’s new and exciting?
15mm is where it’s at. Khurasan Miniatures have continued to expand their Mystri Island range including the very nice T. rex “He-Who-Kills” pictured on the right. Also in 15mm, there are a few new additions to the M.Y.Miniatures Ice Age range. Splintered Light have blogged the greens for some raptors and sabre tooth tigers. Finally, Acheson Creations / Primaeval Designs will also be moving into this scale and have posted some photos of greens to their Facebook and Yahoo! Groups pages.
Speaking of Primaeval they now have a UK distributor in the form of Magister Militum. The prices are high as you would expect for imports but at least you don’t get stung by customs and post office charges on top of that. I picked up a few figures (Plateosaurus, Protoceratops, Feathered Utahraptor, Mastodon and both Megaloceros) from their stands at SELWG and Warfare. Now I just need to review them for Ragnarok and get my painting desk set up (ha ha, fat chance, my computer is still on the floor five months after we moved).
And in related news, the new season of Primeval airs on ITV on New Year’s Day. 🙂
As a follow-up to Desert Island Discs, the team at work have been doing our top ten films, and this week was my turn. The only condition was that one of the ten had to be set in London. Once again, I’ll be buggered if I’m writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.
I remember watching this, aged about 8, sitting on the floor at school during one of our headmaster’s film nights. As most people know, it’s Shakespeare’s Tempest mixed with a bit of Freud and set in outer space. The special effects contain some real “how did they do that back then?” moments. And notice that the starship is a flying saucer and the crew are all men – that was the status quo in almost all science fiction back then and would be for another ten years, until Star Trek rewrote the rules. The “sequel” is also well worth seeing 😉
My London film. Well the first half is set in 22nd century London (that looks awfully like 1960s London).
This is the second of the two Peter Cushing Doctor Who films, big(-ish) budget, technicolour, remakes of the first two Dalek TV stories. To be honest I prefer the TV version – the scenes of Daleks patrolling an abandoned London are much more atmospheric in B&W. But this film is more important because this was repeated on telly almost every summer holiday from the mid-70s onwards so several generations of Doctor Who fans grew up with this version in their childhood memories. So much so, that at least one later TV episode references events as they took place in the film, not the original.
(Also got some London bits) I haven’t seen the remake. Why would I want to?
Just a private enterprise operation.
Probably the best confidence trick movie ever. And parts of it are ripped off by almost every episode of Hustle.
I am a member of the Star Wars generation. This film came out at the exact moment in my childhood for me to be hooked. And that’s why we have the original here, not the “more grown-up” The Empire Strikes Back. This was when George Lucas knew how to have fun, before CGI, before the “expanded universe”, before we all became cynical.
There have been 11 Star Trek movies to date. Some of them are rubbish; some of them are good fun; two of them are really quite splendid. This is the film that saved Star Trek. After the worthy but dull and expensive Star Trek The (Slow) Motion Picture, this is the film that remembered that Trek should be fun and brash and really over acted. This is the film that gave us some of the finest Shatnerisms. (Including, of course, Khaaaaaan! )
I think that the Special Edition of this was the first film I owned on video tape. An incredibly influential film – twenty years later and films, comics, computer games are still playing with variations of the future-war look created here. “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
This was from a period when I was going to the cinema a lot and seeing a lot films that have really stuck in my mind (Unforgiven, Apollo 13, Once Were Warriors, Quiz Show, Strange Days, Ed Wood) but this one stands out. Repeated viewings are about spotting clues and inconsistencies but if you saw it first without any spoilers, watching the story unfold without knowing how what came next was something special.
(Also got some London bits) Best British film of the decade? If you grew up in the home counties, where winning village of the year was a big deal, then parts of this film are worryingly accurate…
Yesterday, I tweeted "According to my LibraryThing records I’ve read 141 books this year: 26 novels, 7 non-fiction, 102 graphic novels and 6 ‘other’."
Then I went out and bought another two graphic novels… But it must be said that most of the comics I’ve read this year came from West Norwood library, and now that I’ve exhausted most of their good ones, and some of their bad ones, I think 2010 may be slightly less weighted towards graphic novels.
Available as a poll over on Live Journal (you don’t need an LJ account to vote, just an OpenID account which means an account from WordPress.com, Google, Yahoo, Blogger, etc.)
Doctor Who on Christmas Day, that was a bit of splendid nonsense, wasn’t it? And not long now until we find out how it all ends.
I’ve been passing the time between parts one and two by dipping into the festering mire of DW fandom to see what crackpot speculation people have come up.
So some fans have decided that he must be Borusa. Because Borusa was, at one point, Lord President and, at one point, sought the secret of eternal life. I think this is rubbish. Borusa only went bad in his final appearance, before that he was cunning and sometimes ruthless, but basically a good guy. Many long term fans don’t like what happened to Borusa’s personality in “The Five Doctors” and even Terrence Dicks, writer of that story, has tried to redeem Borusa in a novel. RTD is more a fan of the 70s rather than the 80s so I think that he’d be unlikely to bring back the crazy Borusa from The Five Doctors.
Okay, time for my crackpot idea… Do you want to know who “The Narrator” reminds me of? Morbius. Warmongering psychopathic timelord obsessed with immortality – gotcha. Of course the timeline would be really screwed up if he was, but why not? In the middle of the Time War the Time Lords (willing to resurrect the Master after all) reach back in time and bring in a wartime leader.
(Of course, he’s also a version of the War King from the Faction Paradox encyclopaedia/novel “The Book of the War” but as the War King is actually the Master, this parallel probably won’t be followed through. Shame as we’ve had multi-Doctor stories in the past so why not a multi-Master story some day? As in multiple regenerations of the Master, not multiple copies of the same regeneration as we have as of the cliffhanger.)
Claire Bloom’s character, “The Woman”, is according to fans either Romana, the Rani or the White Guardian. Based on the facts that, in turn, she’s a woman, ditto, and where’s white. Every female character in the new series has at some point been claimed to be really Romana or the Rani. The White Guardian is definitely possible but having the White without the Black would be unbalanced, both in terms of mythology and storytelling.
My crackpot idea… (assuming for the moment that she’s far too po-faced and serious to be Iris Wildthyme) She’s Rose. An older Rose from many years hence who reaches back in time and across universes to help the Doctor one last time. It has a distressing ring of plausibility about it.
Wilf is a Time Lord who’s been transformed into a human and his real personality is inside his unfired service revolver. At the end, he will go off in his own TARDIS with his granddaughter Donna thus recreating the very start of the series. Except that this has already been done, and with better justification, in the novel “Sometime Never” where an alien empowered with some of the Doctor’s life force and the Doctor’s not-really but really really (don’t ask) granddaughter end up semi-amnesiac in a malfunctioning time machine in a junkyard with a superweapon thus providing an origin story for the Doctor, Susan, the TARDIS and the Hand of Omega in universe where the Time Lords never existed.
Having Wilf and/or Donna turn out to be another Time Lord would be heartbreaking. They are such wonderful, lovely characters and killing them to bring some Gallifreyan back to life is just tragic. I hope that Wilf turns out to be Wilf because there’s no one better he could be. RTD has shown in Torchwood that he’s not sentimental (except Rose…) about much loved characters so I’m somewhat prepared to be heartbroken.
Many people have speculated that the Time Lords are, in some way, stashed away inside the Master’s head, and there does seem to be some evidence pointing towards this. If this is the case, then RTD owes Lance Parkin, author of the novel “The Gallifrey Chronicles”, a large sum of money; because after the last time that Gallifrey was destroyed the Time Lords ended up stashed away inside the Doctor’s head (thus causing the longest lasting of the Eighth Doctor’s several bouts of amnesia). If the Time War in the TV series does happen “after” the Time War in the novels then maybe the Time Lords resurrected the Master for the sole purpose of using his talent for self-preservation in exactly the same way that the Doctor had used his own last time around.
So there you go, I’ve proved that almost everything that could happen in part two has already been done in the novels, and that I’m as anal and crackpot as any other fan.
I suspect that the reality of part two will be even more sane/crazy, predictable/unpredictable, clichéd/original than the above.
I’ve just finished watching the finale of Battlestar Galactica. Yes, I’m behind the times (oh I am talking about the new series, not the original one, that would be really behind the times). It’s been hard to avoid spoilers for the ending because of the very strong opinions it’s generated, hence I was watching it with one eye on the telly and one eye on my reaction: would I hate the ending as much as some people did?
Um, no. I have no problem with the ending per se. I thought it was rushed, but only to the degree that the last four episodes needed to be six or seven episodes (it struck me that characters like Tyrol and Helo jumped in and out of the storyline over the last few episodes).
The “Golgafrinchan B-Ark” part of the ending is fine by me. It fits in with the overall themes of both the new series and the original. A little more time might have helped to show how the fleet agreed to this solution so readily. One line about “blank slates” doesn’t really cut it but that doesn’t detract from the basic concept.
The Mitochondrial Eve part of the ending is worrying but in line with general “Hollywood Dumb”. The very concept of Mitochondrial Eve is merely the application of statistics in hindsight. Given a long enough period of time, such a person is likely to exist, but they were, in all probability, not at all special at the time. (And there’s no way that anything resembling modern science could tell whether a given fossil belonged to Mitochondrial Eve.)
The Head Ghosts/Angels part of the ending is obvious tosh. The coyness about God (“You know he doesn’t like that name”) means that we’re left with half an answer and personally I prefer the less than half an answer we got for the Starbuck story.
I don’t mind stories with mystical or supernatural elements, such stories are an important part of our culture, even if some people take them literally and apply mystical or supernatural explanations to the real world. BSG managed the tightrope between both the rational and the mystical over is run. It decided that both were part of its world. I don’t think it could have ended with a rational explanation for the visions, and prophecies that had filled the past four years.
It was one of the best pieces of television that we’ve had. Possibly the best ever in the SF genre. For all its faults, in the ending or in any part, I can’t think any less of it. If you haven’t watched it, do so; if you have, I hoped you enjoyed it as much as I did.
November has arrived accompanied by wind and rain and cold (and indeed a cold). How to spend the month?
Well mostly Lettice and I will be spending it buying a house. Or trying to. The other day we took a tame civil engineer to have a look round the place we’re hoping to buy (in a sort of “look for the massive faults before paying a surveyor” kind of way) and he could only see one potential problem. Fingers crossed that it isn’t.
Like last year, I’ll be taking part in NaBloPoMo as a form of half-hearted solidarity with the people who are attempting NoNoWriMo.
And I’ll be growing a moustache. Some banter in the office on Friday has somehow led to me agreeing at the last minute to take part in Movember. Now, despite having a silly name and being an Australian import, this is a very good cause so please make a donation. I promise to only post very occasional photos of the mo’s progress.
Finally I’ll be hiding from the bad weather and watching telly, not least Doctor Who which is back for a special on the 15th.
To describe someone as “the best actor in TNG” obviously falls into the category of damning with faint praise. 😉
What prompted my previous post was going to see Waiting for Godot on Wednesday, this production has a very impressive cast list: Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Ronald Pickup and Simon Callow. And it struck me that Patrick Stewart looked a little uncomfortable and stiff, in particular with the physical comedy aspects of the production.
Basically, what Linnie said.
I would sit down and watch Patrick Stewart in almost anything (but I gave up on Eleventh Hour after one episode ‘cos it was just dull) but there’s a certain type of part he does very, very well and outside of that he’s still good but not the greatest.
We only think of Patrick Stewart as a really good actor because he was the best actor in TNG.
Discuss.
Nicholas Grace used to boast that he was the only Sheriff of Nottingham who
Do you think the casting director told Clive Standen
Wasn’t Tuck incredibly active for someone who had an arrow in his shoulder at the end of last week’s episode?
They shouted “loose” rather than “fire”. Possibly the first historically accurate thing in the entire series (to the best of my knowledge people didn’t shout “fire” until after firearms were in use).