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.

Timothy Dalton’s character, “The Narrator”, is the Lord President of Gallifrey according to the preview scene on the BBC web site. He’s also clearly a bit of a nutter, vapourising a member of the high council and screaming “I will not die!”.

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, clichรฉd/original than the above.


2000

At the start of the year I was working Wicked Web in Clerkenwell, living in West Norwood and had been going out with for six months. We went on holiday to Boston and Tennessee. WW moved office to Old Street in the spring. I went to Las Vegas for Andy’s stag weekend.

2001

I took Lettice to Budapest for her birthday. WW started laying staff off towards the end of the year.

2002

WW went into liquidation and hence I was made redundant. I became self-employed and started freelancing for many ex-WW clients. Went to the south of France with Lettice’s family – first time I’d ever seen the Mediterranean.

2003

I spent the first part of the year working on a site for the BBC. Towards the end of the year I started doing contract work via an agency which meant that I got a large refund from the tax man, eventually. I went on a falconry day and flew a Harris Hawk. I asked Lettice to marry me.

2004

I started this blog and spent several months working for the Home Office.

2005

I gave up freelancing and started work at Visit London. I started cross posting this blog to LiveJournal and joined LibraryThing and Last.FM. I moved house to larger flat, ten minutes down the road from the old one, and Lettice moved in. We got married and went on honeymoon in Canada. ๐Ÿ™‚

2006

I learnt XSLT. ๐Ÿ™ Lettice also started to work at VL. I joined Flickr

2007

Relaunched visitlondon.com with a new CMS, clocking up a stupid number of days off in lieu in the process. I did jury duty. I joined Facebook. We went to Dublin and Amsterdam.

2008

We went to Venice. I learnt JSP and jQuery. I joined Twitter

2009

We went to Barcelona and tried to buy a house. I grew a moustache for charity.


Some bad news about Dazed Miniatures – the range is being withdrawn from sale. The silver lining is a 30% off sale to clear the remaining stock.

All that the story on the RLBPS web site says is:

Dazed Miniatures was a partnership and it has been been ended by one partner (the Sculpter) withdrawing the licence to produce any of the figures we made. RLBPS still owns the molds but can not run them.

I wonder what it is with Richard Deasey’s lines? He sculpted the second half of the the HLBS prehistoric line and then took it away to found DZ Miniatures, which vanished soon afterwards. The mammals, but not the dinosaurs, reappearing years later from Strategem/Trent Miniatures whose own tribulations made getting hold of them sometimes frustrating (but they are currently available via North Star). And now this. Is there any chance that some of the best prehistoric miniatures will be available from a stable supplier (one with a working e-commerce facility would be really nice)?

In the mean time I need to work out how much I splurge on miniature mammoths, etc., taking Christmas, moving house and exchange rates into consideration. Couldn’t be a worse time for a closing down sale.


Day 30. The end. Go on, give some money to charity, just ‘cos I didn’t shave part of my face for one month. ๐Ÿ˜‰

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Day 19. Coming out a bit multi-coloured, brown, blond and some black. Too much blond really so it doesn’t show up all that well. But give some money anyway!


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.


Part 1 of a few.

It seems that everyone has started talking about HTML5. I’ve recently converted sfsfw.org (still a work in progress) to HTML5 (ditto) and built a microsite at work in the language.

So, what parts of the brave new world am I embracing?

The new doctype

<!DOCTYPE html>, well that will save a few bytes per page. I’ve never tried to type a doctype from memory before, I’ve always cut and pasted from another project or from an authoritative source, but now I might just type it, saving a few seconds. I can’t help feeling that the lack of versioning information is a making a problem for the future (and let’s not get into the related area of all the things that HTML doctypes do/mean in comparison with what SGML or XML doctypes are meant to mean…).

The new character encoding

<meta charset="utf-8" />, again that will save a few bytes on those pages where I bother to include a meta tag rather than just trusting to the HTTP header (and I know why the belt and braces approach is useful, so long as they both tell the same story).

The new block level elements

<section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <aside> and <nav>. These are rather cool. Not immediataly earth shaking but they make code cleaner and debugging easier – less often will I be staring at </div></div></div></div> and wondering whether my current problem is caused by having too few or too many closing div tags.

The new input types

number, tel, email, url are already being used in several forms on visitlondon.com and it makes me smile ‘cos me and a handful of other Opera users get to see the benefit right now. I think these will be my favourite part of the new spec for some time to come.

There’s a lot more to HTML5. This isn’t meant to be a tutorial, just some personal observations and use cases. I’ll try to delve a bit deeper into how I’m using these pieces of code and why I’m using these but not others in future posts.

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Wargames Foundry Terror Bird

I’ve been updating my Dinosaurs in Miniature pages. The main differences have been the addition of the MegaMiniatures megafauna that I posted about previously, the continuing expansion of the Dazed Miniatures range and some new miniatures from Wargames Foundry, including the Terror Bird shown here.

BTW, Foundry have a 20% off sale until the 10th November 2009. So now’s a very good time to pick up these new goodies.

At SELWG last month I picked up a “new” Smilodon from the “old” DZ range sold by Trent Miniatures. It’s in a walking pose rather than the leaping pose that’s been available for a while. This range is now available over the web from North Star though this additional Smilodon isn’t listed.

There have also been a few additions to the 10mm DinoMight range form Magister Militum.

MY Miniatures ice age range seems to have melted away from the web with the close of Geocities. Does anyone know if they have a new web site elsewhere?

And finally, the Tusk rules are available as PDF via Wessex Games/Wargame Vault. You can still buy the paper version from Irregular but the new version has full colour photos throughout.

I am currently growing a moustache as all big game hunters should.

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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.

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Today was the SELWG show, back for the first time since 2006. So once again I had a nice stroll up the hill and then a few hours shopping and gawping at the games.

The renovated Crystal Palace Sports Centre meant that there was considerably more room for the Bring and Buy sale and for the first time ever I actually found something I wanted to buy. The B&B wasn’t helped by people standing in front of it chatting to their mates who were serving. Come on guys, I know that shows are a chance to catch up with old friends but not whilst they’re trying to run the most chaotic and crowded part of the whole show.

But the highlight was a buying these chaps and if you don’t get why they’re so exciting to me, take a look at the original paint scheme, and if that still means nothing to you then I can only say that this was a nostalgic trip back to my childhood.