I don’t often sling Youtube videos up here, but this band – solo violinist Owen Pallett – has not only covered this song and made it his own, but also written an album called “He Poos Clouds”, which is about the magic system in Dungeons and Dragons.
I get unstuck when people say that they think the new Doctor Who is good. The TV program itself is a fairly mediocre production, which lurches from set piece to set piece with some spectacularly bad character development. I think people are so attached to it because it’s one of the few programs that are exist today that you are allowed to be a fan of – you’d look a bit silly in an Eastenders t-shirt, and there isn’t a lot of PM merchandising available at the BBC store. No matter how many letters I write asking for a “Team Eddie” badge set.
This new Doctor Who is guilty of one of the worst things about contemporary TV; it talks down to it’s audience. Whereas really old Who episodes had an educational feel about them, any educational content in new Who is about as didactic as you can get. This isn’t to say that I like old Who a huge amount either; it’s super-clunky and very often boring. What I like about Doctor Who are the things that stray off the accepted TV path.
In the 1960′s, in the first burst of Doctor Who’s existence, the program was very popular. This led to two Doctor Who movies staring Peter Cushing, because there was a common movement of British TV shows being turned into films around that time. The films don’t really follow the accepted story, but all the right elements are there, and I find them amazingly fun to watch.
After the cancellation of the show in the late eighties, the novelisations continued. As there were no new adventures of Doctor Who, writers were allowed to make up their own adventures for the character, which eventually gave birth to one of my favourite ideas in SF: Faction Paradox, an evil time-travelling organisation, who lived in a dimension split off from ours in the spare days caused by the shift to the Gregorian Calendar… complicated? You bet. This is one of those times that even reading the wiki page won’t give you a full rundown.
But that’s what this new Who won’t have: the guts to make things complicated. It doesn’t have the background of Star Trek, or the building of mythology that we saw within Buffy… instead, every episode has a few cursory nods to the in-show history before producing this weeks nifty explosion.
I think I’ve narrowed my future career path down to these few options:
Wise Urban Shaman
Bedroom Nerd
Wise Bedroom Nerd
Sadly, I don’t think “Bedroom Shaman” will come up as a career option any time soon.
Answer: the opportunity to make a catalogue of your books and then graph the costs of them! I know I’ve done this before, but it never fails to make me happy! Of course, this graph doesn’t show all my books – I’m still packing them, a process which takes slightly longer when you decide to scan all of them into Delicious Library. But hey, I gots me a graph.
(Click above image to see full-sized chart!)
Addendum: It seems that Confederacy of Dunces is now worth £40 – I’m not sure if that’s quite the edition I’ve got, but here’s my review of that novel.
I decided to go to Mashed08 when I was stuck in my invalid bed by my dislocated knee, unable to really move, and so the offer of travelling to a far-off Alexandra Palace in London for a developer conference sounded really fun.
This morning, however, it’s a different story. It’s also a story that starts at 2am, when myself, Brian and Alistair got picked up by a specially laid-on bus. However, there was, er… just us.
It got even better when we pulled into Sheffield at 4:30am, by which time it was completely light owing to the solstice. Lovely views of the city, which looks like a really fun place, but there were no nerds to be seen. Again, we had the entire bus to ourselves.
Essentially, the mashed08 bus from Newcastle was an all-expenses paid lift for me and my mates down to London (but only because no-one else showed up). I’m referring to this as the “Jonathan Ross Economic Trickledown Effect”.
