See them here.
Hear him here.
IGN's Top 50 Lost Loose Ends
and at the slow, slow, slow rate it'll be the year 2050 before they answer them all.
Seriously - too much padding and way too many flashback backstories. People have stopped caring already.
the iPod Zune wars.
For crying out loud - they;re just digital media players. Get a sense of perpective. Argh.
Torchwod season one starter episodes
Um. Oh. OK...
First Day.
The sex-starved mist alien. This reminded me way too much of an episode of new ’Outer Limits’ where a meteorite containing a alien crashed into a young woman’s bedroom then took over her body and turned her into a veracious sex monster nymphomaniac who absorbed men into her body as she was bonking them (much in the same way as the Absorbaloth did).
Cyberwoman.
Seven of Nine in a hi-tech basement in Cardiff. Oh well, since Star Trek NG did sort of nick from the idea of Cybermen for the Borg - nicking part of the idea back again seems fair enough.
Fairies.
Oh. Meh. I wasn’t keen on this episode. You know what would’ve been more scary? That if they’ve kept the whole original fairy look as they went around killing people instead of making them into big ugly gangly demons. That was too easy, too cheap a shot. Written by Peter J. Hammond too - he of ‘Sapphire and Steel‘ fame. I expected better somehow.
Countrycide.
The sci-fi channel showed the remake of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ only last week not so long after Channel 4 had shown it a few weeks before. So y’know, already I was a bit burnt out on the whole cannibal family thang -especially as it was better done there. Not much made sense in this episode - why where bodies being left out in the open all other the place? Isn’t that going to call lots of outside attention to the village? A whole village gone cannibal? There seemed to be something missing from the plot there. It smacked of a quick re-write having been done on the fly.
I think another problem I’m having is that I’m just not warming to any of the characters so far. They’re all a bit monochromatic.
So now the big question is… are they building up to do a Doctor Who style big two part finale - or is it just going to plod on like this? I.E. A Cardiff based version of the X-files endlessly reworking old horror film clichés every week? If you ask me it needs a bit more Doctor Who and a lot less nicking from other shows.
Oh well - early days.
First Day.
The sex-starved mist alien. This reminded me way too much of an episode of new ’Outer Limits’ where a meteorite containing a alien crashed into a young woman’s bedroom then took over her body and turned her into a veracious sex monster nymphomaniac who absorbed men into her body as she was bonking them (much in the same way as the Absorbaloth did).
Cyberwoman.
Seven of Nine in a hi-tech basement in Cardiff. Oh well, since Star Trek NG did sort of nick from the idea of Cybermen for the Borg - nicking part of the idea back again seems fair enough.
Fairies.
Oh. Meh. I wasn’t keen on this episode. You know what would’ve been more scary? That if they’ve kept the whole original fairy look as they went around killing people instead of making them into big ugly gangly demons. That was too easy, too cheap a shot. Written by Peter J. Hammond too - he of ‘Sapphire and Steel‘ fame. I expected better somehow.
Countrycide.
The sci-fi channel showed the remake of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ only last week not so long after Channel 4 had shown it a few weeks before. So y’know, already I was a bit burnt out on the whole cannibal family thang -especially as it was better done there. Not much made sense in this episode - why where bodies being left out in the open all other the place? Isn’t that going to call lots of outside attention to the village? A whole village gone cannibal? There seemed to be something missing from the plot there. It smacked of a quick re-write having been done on the fly.
I think another problem I’m having is that I’m just not warming to any of the characters so far. They’re all a bit monochromatic.
So now the big question is… are they building up to do a Doctor Who style big two part finale - or is it just going to plod on like this? I.E. A Cardiff based version of the X-files endlessly reworking old horror film clichés every week? If you ask me it needs a bit more Doctor Who and a lot less nicking from other shows.
Oh well - early days.
So Yahoo is in a bit of a mess is it? (link one. Link two.) Hell, I could have told them that ages ago. From years of experience I've never liked Yahoo much - from it's humble beginnings as a yellow pages-style web directory where you had to submit your own links to them for consideration (a tedious and laborious chore to slog through). I signed up for their free e-mail at a time when everybody and their dog and cat were setting up free web mail accounts for everyone... and I still occasionally use it - despite having a new ‘improved’ clunky interface that rather annoyingly refreshes every other second in order to serve up some more adverts at you... Yahoo has always been good at serving up intrusive banner ads . I was a member of their yahoo groups after they had bought out the excellent E groups - only to then set about systematically removing all the things that had made E groups good in the first place. Anyway I digress - frequently I would get an email from a group where the picture advert attachment was miles bigger than the one or two line of text the message contained… which would be followed by miles of text of Yahoo proclaiming how wonderful they were and how you too could sign up for their web mail as well. Hello, isn’t that near identical to spam?
Then there was the time when my ISP merged with Yahoo (I’m guessing BT got too lazy and flustered trying to be the internet/content providers for it’s customers and so asked Yahoo to do it all for them. Mmmmmm. Great idea getting an American company to serve British people’s needs.) and just how wonderful the Yahoo toolbar was - it added lots of flash-ridden widgetty type things all over IE - which completely trashed all my personal settings that I’d spent years getting to how I liked them. Then to add insult to injury the wretched thing wouldn’t uninstall properly. It took going back to a restore point to get rid of it completely.
It’s not that I haven’t repeatedly tried to give them a fair go either- I’ve tried My Yahoo and 360 or whatever it’s called - their clumsy half-assed version of blogger. Their Yahoo photos section is just lamentable. Oh I could go on and on. It always seemed to be that Yahoo were trying to do too much and they were doing everything pretty badly. In effect trying to actually be the whole Internet like too many companies before them. Somehow they just don’t ’get it’. They come across as mired in a deeply uncool corporate culture - and everything they do is wrapped up in acres of lawyer-speak.
But I guess lots of people must like them. Or perhaps they don't know any better.
In fact the only good thing I can say for them is that I'm glad they have left Flickr relatively intact - although being made to sign up to yahoo and have a yahoo ID (hoping you'll wander on to their other services no doubt) is teh suck. If they do have a cull though - I wonder which will go - flickr or yahoo photos (I wouldn't be surprised if they make the stupid choice)
Then there was the time when my ISP merged with Yahoo (I’m guessing BT got too lazy and flustered trying to be the internet/content providers for it’s customers and so asked Yahoo to do it all for them. Mmmmmm. Great idea getting an American company to serve British people’s needs.) and just how wonderful the Yahoo toolbar was - it added lots of flash-ridden widgetty type things all over IE - which completely trashed all my personal settings that I’d spent years getting to how I liked them. Then to add insult to injury the wretched thing wouldn’t uninstall properly. It took going back to a restore point to get rid of it completely.
It’s not that I haven’t repeatedly tried to give them a fair go either- I’ve tried My Yahoo and 360 or whatever it’s called - their clumsy half-assed version of blogger. Their Yahoo photos section is just lamentable. Oh I could go on and on. It always seemed to be that Yahoo were trying to do too much and they were doing everything pretty badly. In effect trying to actually be the whole Internet like too many companies before them. Somehow they just don’t ’get it’. They come across as mired in a deeply uncool corporate culture - and everything they do is wrapped up in acres of lawyer-speak.
But I guess lots of people must like them. Or perhaps they don't know any better.
In fact the only good thing I can say for them is that I'm glad they have left Flickr relatively intact - although being made to sign up to yahoo and have a yahoo ID (hoping you'll wander on to their other services no doubt) is teh suck. If they do have a cull though - I wonder which will go - flickr or yahoo photos (I wouldn't be surprised if they make the stupid choice)
Cool Tool: Cintiq
Oh. At last they've finally got around to making what would be my ideal computer
Seriously, for years I've had my own fantasy of what a computer should be like and -hey! this is a big step in the right direction. Not a stupid graphics tablet where you're drawing in one place and having it appear somewhere else. I remember mentioning in a comment to a review of the first tablet computers - on how I thought with a bit of tweaking they should sell well to graphics artists (whereas they're still being designed and marketed to ordinary folk who still need a keyboard because they mainly use their 'puters to input text. D'uh.) Of course the reviewer hadn't even thought of that - and said the graphics people at work didn't seem to mind the disconnect. But that says more about the adaptability of humans rather than computer designers. Anyway. I want one - but it's another one of thoe things I'll never be able to afford, much less be able to find one.*sighs*
Regenerating an original Doctor Who
Oh no.... I'm so going to have to buy this. I've only seen the grainy version from the bit torrents.
Oh someone in the music industry is finally getting the message?
It's taken him long enough - and it's only one of them so far.
Gah.
Eyeroll.
It's taken him long enough - and it's only one of them so far.
Gah.
Eyeroll.
Random thought:
About music
In most ordinary people’s world music is (or used to be) something you shared - it was a social thing. In the old days people gathered around the piano, then the radio, then the record player. People still go to concerts and clubs together. There’s the business of following an artist or a band means you’re like part of a tribe - all with a common interest. Then along came the Sony Walkman and music became personalised - intimate. For your ears only, well, apart from the tsssst-tsssst-tsssst sound. But people are still up for joining together to share listening to music. Then came the walkman killer - the iPod and the mpg player. To the music industry music isn’t something to be shared - it’s to be locked into one device and one device only. Music isn’t owned - to these people it’s considered rented for a limited time only. It’s a comestible product that they need to squeeze every last penny out of you for.
In most ordinary people’s world music is (or used to be) something you shared - it was a social thing. In the old days people gathered around the piano, then the radio, then the record player. People still go to concerts and clubs together. There’s the business of following an artist or a band means you’re like part of a tribe - all with a common interest. Then along came the Sony Walkman and music became personalised - intimate. For your ears only, well, apart from the tsssst-tsssst-tsssst sound. But people are still up for joining together to share listening to music. Then came the walkman killer - the iPod and the mpg player. To the music industry music isn’t something to be shared - it’s to be locked into one device and one device only. Music isn’t owned - to these people it’s considered rented for a limited time only. It’s a comestible product that they need to squeeze every last penny out of you for.
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