… but this year is special. This year is the only (touch wood, cross fingers, and so on) year in which I get to send St Valentine’s Day love to my fiancée.
More dino miniature photos
Posted on in Dinosaurs, Miniatures.Here are some more dinosaur miniatures, two that are waiting to be painted and one that’s finished. The hunter figure in each is from the Foundry 28mm Darkest Africa range.
From left to right we have Baryonyx (DZ Miniatures), Iguanodon (DZ Miniatures) and Tyrannosaurus imperator (HLBSCo). Only the last of these is currently available from the manufacturer.
If you have the time…
Posted on in Books, Doctor Who.It’s likely that the new series of Doctor Who will start of Saturday 26th March. That gives you six weekends between now and then. Here’s a way to spend five of them. Watch one of the following stories (main picks are all available on DVD) each weekend to get yourself in the mood for the new series.
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
The second Dalek story and featuring one of the most iconic moments of all – the Dalek emerging from beneath the surface of the river Thames. London would see many alien invasions over the next two decades but this was the first and most striking – the Daleks had already conquered and subdued the earth before the story began. The brainwashed Robomen and scruffy resistance fighters made the parallel between the tin pot dicatators and the Nazis clearer than it would be in any story until “Genesis of the Daleks”.
Alternative William Hartnell pick – “An Uneathly Child”, forget the cavemen stuff in parts two to four, just watch the opening episode.
The Tomb of the Cybermen
This story gave Peter Davison nightmares as a kid and the scene of the Cybermen silently awakening and emerging from their ‘tombs’ is another prime iconic moment. By this time the “base under seige” format had been done to many times but the extra twists used her and sheer quality of the whole production raise it above all the others.
And ask yourself – how much does the Doctor know what’s happening in advance and consequently how much is he manipulating events? It’s a theory more often applied to the seventh Doctor rather than the second, but…
Alternative Patrick Troughton pick – “The Mind Robber”.
Alternative Jon Pertwee pick – “Spearhead from Space”.
The Ark in Space
Featuring one of the most embarrassing monsters in a long line of embarrassing monsters (it’s bubble wrap painted green!) this may seem like an odd choice. But it highlights all the nobility, compassion and courage in the human race – all the qualities that inspire the Doctor to love and protect Earth and its inhabitants so much.
Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It’s only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds. They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life. Ready to outsit eternity. They’re indomitable.
Alternative Tom Baker pick – “City of Death”.
The Caves of Androzani
The fifth Doctor was the gentlest and most compassionate (and as one fan put it – the only one you’d feel safe taking round to your mum’s for tea) and here he gives his life to save the life of a single human – compare with the fourth Doctor who died to save the whole universe.
Alternative Peter Davison pick – “Kinda”.
Alternative Colin Baker pick – “Timelash”, the new series will always look good in comparison no matter what.
Remembrance of the Daleks
Encapsulating everything that was wrong with 1980s Doctor Who (more then anything an over-reliance on continuity) and everything that was starting to come right in the last two years (epic storytelling, a more alien Doctor) this tends to be either your favourite Dalek story or your least favourite.
Alternative Sylvester McCoy pick – “Damaged Goods”, a novel by new series supremo Russel T Davies that places SciFi horror side by side with the horror of life on a council estate in Thatcher’s Britain.
Alternative Paul McGann pick – “Alien Bodies”, I can’t say why it’s brilliant without spoiling a dozen things. This book kick-started the new mythology that has driven the novel line for the past few years, the series will almost certainly ignore that mythology but read it anyway ‘cos it’s great.
And what should you do with the remaining weekend? Watch some more of course!
Painting, cont.
Posted on in Dinosaurs, Miniatures.As promised here are some photos of my current painting projects
Nanotyrannus
Yeti
Lots of work still to be done.
Painting
Posted on in Miniatures.Picked up a paint brush for the first time in ages. Working on some lovely minis from Copplestone Castings – a Nanotyrannus and a pair of Yetis. So far it all looks good. Pictures soon.
Know any nice spaceships? The sort you'd invite to a wedding?
Posted on in My Life.One of the ideas we have for the wedding (I’ll leave it to you to decide which half of ‘we’ actually came up with this idea) is to name all the tables at the reception after famous spaceships from TV and film. Here’s a partial list:
- Enterprise (from Star Trek)
- Defiant (Star Trek Deep Space Nine)
- Voyager (Star Trek Voyager)
- Serenity (Firefly)
- Liberator (Blake’s 7)
- Scorpio (Blake’s 7)
- Moya (Farscape)
- Lexx (Lexx)
- Andromeda Ascendent (Andromeda)
- White Star (Babylon 5)
- Excalibur (Crusade)
- TARDIS (Doctor Who)
- Discovery (2001)
- Leonov (2010)
- Galactica (Battlestar Galactica)
- Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)
- Heart of Gold (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)
- Valley Forge (Silent Running)
- Saratoga (Space: Above and Beyond)
- Prometheus (Stargate SG1)
- Roger Young (Starship Troopers)
- Nostromo (Alien)
- Narcissus (Alien)
- Sulaco (Aliens – yes, all the ship names in the Aliens films are Conrad references)
Some of these are great names but not really suitable for a wedding, some of these are really terrible names. We won’t know how many we’ll need until we work out the seating plan. Anyone got any other suggestions? I’m sure I’ve missed loads.
It would be fun to come up with wedding themed names along the lines of those used by ships from Iain Banks’ Culture.
Lies, damn lies and train times
Posted on in The World.The Post, the free local paper that gets shoved through my letter box every week, contains an article about a rail users group who want the local train services to run with tube-like frequency. They seem to have overlooked the fact that most tube lines have very few branches and junctions whilst many different rail lines join together and use the same tracks in South London. The train operators showed admirable restraint when they said “it is difficult to say whether their demands are reasonable or unreasonable until we sit down and look at the timetable.”
Elsewhere in the article there was a survey of “almost 200 commuters” which found that:
- ninety-five per cent of them used the service four or five days a week
They’re commuters, of course they use the service four or five days a week!
- sixty-four per cent were dissatisfied with the service
- 98 per cent thought it was unreliable
In the spirit of Josh from The West Wing, taken literally that means that 34% think that the service is unreliable but are still satisfied with it.
A good week for science?
Posted on in Dinosaurs, Science, The World.Highlight of the week is the landing of the Huygens probe on Titan and the amazing pictures it sent back. This is a world a billion kilometers from Earth with a surface temperature of -180°C; but whilst the wind and rain may be composed of ammonia and methane, the patterns of erosion and drainage are remarkably similar to those found here on Earth.
And back on Earth the discovery of dino-swallowing cretaceous mammals adds a new twist to our picture of the mesozoic. No longer were mammals timid creatures scurrying in the dinosaurs’ shadows. At the risk of sounding trite, that is the truly amazing thing about science, even the science of the distant past – we are always discovering new parts of the big picture.
Which is something that’s totally lost on the proponents of Intelligent Design. This, as Richard Dawkins once wrote, is how creationism has been “excitingly rebranded”. The rebranding is necessary in the USA because the first amendment prohibits using state funds to promote religion, so teaching creationism is banned in state schools. A judge in Georgia has ruled that the addition of stickers stating that evolution is ‘just a theory’ to biology textbooks is religiously motivated and hence illegal. The judge’s ruling is somewhat rambling and no doubt there will be interminable appeals, but this is a blow to the ID movements ‘wedge strategy’ of sneaking creationism into schools via the back door. Read more at The Panda’s Thumb.
Meanwhile in the UK we have the Vardy Foundation whose academies are funded by the state and have replaced comprehensives. In these creationism is taught alongside evolution (and if evolution wasn’t on the national curriculum I bet they wouldn’t teach it) and the government seems to see nothing wrong with that. In contrast with the US the issue has hardly registered with the press or public over here.
The US has separation of state and religion, is one of the most Christian countries in the world and has a very public battle between neo-creationists and science. The UK has the Church of England, is for all practical purposes a secular state and is allowing openly creationist organisations to run state schools. I don’t know which is worse.
SELWG report
Posted on in Games, Miniatures.Yesterday was the SELWG wargames show at Crystal Palace. I went along for a few hours to look around and buy stuff; overall I think it was an improvement in last year’s show which I wasn’t very impressed by. Some people thought it was rather good whilst others found it not so good.
I bought Rebel Storm boosters – the first boosters I’ve bought (though I have been buying large numbers of canon fodder types on eBay). Got the very rare Princess Leia, Captive figure in one of them which was lucky. Various traders were selling boosters for prices between £8.00 and £12.99 – I got mine at the lower price because I remembered that it always pays to walk round every stand at a show before opening your wallet.
The only thing I bought were some MoFo minis from Gripping Beast – five packs of UK Falklands War troops to add to my UNIT force and a pack of SF characters based on Stargate SG1. The MoFo miniatures are little bit smaller the Harlequin UNIT troops but once based and painted up the same should fit in just fine.
There were some good games on show, the most striking being Diamond Geezers – a game based on old telly shows played over a very good recreation of a 1970s street scene.
SELWG is the last show of the year for me, there’s nothing now until Salute in April. You never know I may actually get round to doing some painting before then.
Books for the good doctor
Posted on in Books, Doctor Who.I’m very pleased to see that The Discontinuity Guide has been republished by Monkey Brain Books. Along with the forthcoming updated edition of A History of the Universe from Mad Norwegian Press this is splendid news for Doctor Who fans.
Top five non-fiction Doctor Who books
- A History of the Universe by Lance Parkin
- The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping
- I, Who by Lars Pearson (all volumes counted as one)
- License Denied by Paul Cornell
- The Television Companion by David J Howe & Stephen James Walker