Just the start of it all

I think that the existence of this hymn conclusively proves that Ace's dialogue is entirely realistic there was at least one other person in the late '80s/early '90s apart from Ian Briggs who thought that teenagers talked that way.

(You're probably not supposed to call that sort of rubbish a hymn. I don't care.)

ETA: If you thought the words were bad just by themselves, check out this YouTube rendition.

There was a story in DW S5 that was a prequel to Ghost Light set in prehistoric times with Nimrod and Light in it and it turned out that Nimrod knew Ten before he knew Seven and so on. It slipped around in that weird dreamlike way: first I was watching it, then I was in the story as like I dunno the pseudocompanion or something (but still aware that it was a story), then I was a VIP set vistor somehow (but I didn't know Light was going to appear and got very excited when he did and they had to stop filming), then I was acting in it and the dream ended with me doing pretend-falling-unconscious.

Mostly I am writing this down so that I don't convince myself in six months' time that I read it as a spoiler somewhere and get all excited.

And I still have no Ghost Light icons, which is ridiculous.

OK, so until just now I never thought I'd stop reading a comic to hug it to my chest because one of the characters had just revealed something heart-meltingly lovely.

And I never, ever thought the character in question would be Drax. ( Tiny Guardians of the Galaxy spoiler. )

Also, yay for staying in hotels with actual proper fast wireless broadband. (Almost 10MB! It is liken unto a dream.) I shall probably eschew the delights of sightseeing and stuff for being able to watch the iPlayer properly. Sad, sad me.

ETA: OMHFG, it's downloading the whole of last night's Silent Witness in less than ten mins. Is there anything at all the BBC have done in the last seven days that I should be d/ling? (Also, I am going to have to catch up on SJA, what with having discovered that I missed the window to get Day of the Clown pt1, I shall have to watch Last Sontaran so I can then watch that from here where it won't stutter.) The only thing that's slow is connecting to my BTish webmail facility. The hotel's supplied by Virgin, so what I want to know is who thinks they're making whom look bad?

1. The Fall Fandom Free for All is a fantastic idea, a multi-fandom exchange of anything and everything running for the next two months. I already have, thanks to the unbelievable awesomeness of doyle_sb4, this here icon of Izzy and Fey kissing at the end of Oblivion. It is so shiny, you guys. Also, I am really looking forward to doing the things I've signed up for, though they're going to have to wait in line behind bluesuit_fic (which I have finally come up with a plot for, hurrah) and dw_femslash. (My requests are here, if any of you are feeling ultra kind. I really would love some proper Bonekickers meta, btw. There are so many different things you could go into: the show's schizoid gender poltiics; the phallocentricity of The Sword; the way the relationships between the core cast are like archaeology in and of themselves, layers and layers all built up on top of their earlier history; how plausible the conspiracy theory is or isn't. Or it could just be canon trufax proof of Gillian's kinkiness, I'd be down with that too.)

2. Even if you are the sort of person who never ever reads comics, you must read Y: The Last Man. It is unbelievably good, and I don't have time to rave on about it at the length I want to but OMG so very very good indeed and well worth looking at. Hell, it's gorgeous to look at: Pia Guerra is an amazing artist and I cannot wait to see her work on the new DW comic. I finally managed to get hold of the last four books of Y and devoured them all in less than 24 hours. (I almost cried at the big spoiler near the end, though weirdly enough Peter David's She Hulk managed to make me actually cry, which I was really not expecting. Incidentally, David has so been watching Torchwood: ( spoilers for the She-Hulk: Jaded collection ))

Most of the spam I am seeing at the moment seems to have (untrue) inflammatory politcal content for a subject line (e.g. "Bush detains Obama under terrorism legislation!", "China bans black athletes from Olympics!").

I would like to think this is, in its own twisted way, saying encouraging things about levels of political engagement in our supposedly apathetic times, but I suspect it's just that the filters have got too good at noticing that that's not really a picture of Anna Kournikova in the attachments.

So, I have this thing where I deliberately stopped watching old school before I completely ran out of stuff I'd never seen before, so I could always have more to look forward to.

But it's been a couple of years since I made that decision, so I think I'm probably due to watch one. (ETA: Actually, I'm ignoring the ones that the DVD release schedule has made the decision for me on, because what that category consists of is Time Flight and Warriors of the Deep.) But which should it be?

( It's not very long, but I cut anyway )

So I've barely done anything useful this week thanks to gaming.{*} Never mind Civ IV; thanks to james_nicoll, I realised that my new laptop would probably be able to play Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords (hereinafter KotoR2 to save my colon key from wearing out), which I bought ages ago in the forlorn hope my old machine (which only barely managed to run the first game) might just cope with it and it does, though without any sound or movies thanks to Vista being so very backwards compatible.

( Cut for large pictures, cheesecakiness, and the fact that it's massively self-indulgent )

{*} Don't worry, people I owe betas/fics/Anji ravings: that's all under control. Sort of.

So I just impulse bought a bunch of DVDs at Virgin Megastore Zavvi because they were on sale for £9. Double figures are clearly an important psychological barrier.

1. Primeval Season 1 Nine quid for nearly five hours of entertainment can't be bad! Can it? I caught half an ep of S2 a while back and Wikipedia-ing it later to try and make sense of WTF was going on made me think that maybe there might be things in the worldbuilding and the conspiracy theorising I'd enjoy. Plus I always secretly liked SClub (Don't Stop Moving got me through finals revision, so it did).
   
2. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer Entirely because I want to see how they did Galactus. After the first film (which I'll admit I saw in the non-ideal conditions of in-flight entertainment), I have no expectations of anything non-Galactus other than constantly re-recollecting that the actors have been much better in other things. And I'm probably going to be disappointed by Galactus. Annoyingly, I discovered later that this was only £6 at HMV. But never mind.
   
3. Inferno Unlike the other two, this was not bought in the expectation of it being a bit shite, really. Inferno is one of my rotating Top Who Stories Ever and one of the few in that category not to be a Seven and Ace story, and the only reason I don't already have it is that I do have it on VHS and I've been trying to be good about not duplicating. But it's Inferno, dudes. It's got evil parallel universes (who needs goatees when you've got eyepatches) and dodgy werewolf-like-things and the sound of the planet screaming out its rage and all-pervading doom and Liz and Evil Liz and Pertwee BRINGING IT in the way that he often didn't later. (You are safe from eyepatch-related picspam, though, 'cos my DVD drive is still refusing to cooperate, bastard thing.)
   

Also, I finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean III over the weekend (only a squid to rent it for a week, that's how far behind the times I am). It was surprisingly rubbish, really. It did manage to keep all the plot threads from the previous two films together more coherently than I'd generally expect from a big Hollywood sequel while still introducing new stuff, but it had very little in the way of the sense of fun that was what attracted me to the Pirates films in the first place. Very grim, really, all in all; possibly a victim of everyone taking it a bit too seriously? ( Tiny spoiler that makes me look like a mad shipper even though I really don't care either way; I just have plausibility issues with a particular plot development. )

Ha! the hits are playing Dr Jones (yes, the Aqua song; I've already admitted to liking S Club 7, there's not much further for me to fall is there?). Despite the fact that the existence of Martha often makes me think of this song, this is the first time I've actually heard it since S3 started.

Who stuff

( Torchwood 2x3: a disordered list )

I'm halfway through The Silurians on DVD at the moment. First time I've seen it since the '90s repeat run. Season 7 really is good, isn't it? I do love Liz, and Pertwee's great when he can be bothered.

Before we leave Who: Tat Wood in About Time 6 is wrong about several important things. But not Ghost Light. And he is normally quite funny even when he's wrong. (Yes, I have had a nice package from Mad Norwegian recently.)

This week's comics

( House of M Avengers #4 )

( New Avengers Annual #2 )

( Green Lantern #27 )

( Suburban Glamour #3 )

Silly Big Event comics from a while ago

I had a look at, but didn't buy, ( the Civil War script book -- warning, rant )

Oh, and earlier in the week, I finally caught up with ( Infinite Crisis, which I'm not sure why I'm spoiler-cutting for, but here we go. )

For some reason, the "how to write Freema" link on freemaagyeman.com always makes me think it's going to lead to advice on RPF characterisation ...

is that I now can't take Impact seriously in any context.

Last night's Spooks had a vaguely Impact-like font -- complete with the black edging on white text -- for its time-placement captions and it made me sporfle each time.

And when I was at a Welcome Break the other day I realised that their new font is very similar (assuming they haven't just taken an incredibly popular off the shelf one, but maybe they have) and so I couldn't help imagining the sign saying "Paninis" really saying "My Paninis, let me show you them" etc.

I owe various people replies to comments; will get to them sometime this evening or tomorrow.

Completely off topic: I did not just hear Condoleezza Rice giving the fact that no substantive Middle East talks have taken place for the length of the Bush administration so far seven years as a plus point for the current ones with a straight face ... did I?

1. Freema Agyeman. Obvs.
2. Leonard Nimoy. Also obvs.
3. Jeremy Paxman whose eyebrows have more skepticism than the entire Randi Foundation.

Yes, I am watching Newsnight right now.

When adverts say something happens "in seconds" (for instance, "moneysupermarket.com searches the market in seconds") is there some sort of regulatory upper limit on how long the process should take before that claim becomes dubious? 'Cos strictly speaking, any time span longer than one second can be said to be "in seconds". The Sun will turn into a red giant "in seconds", just 150 million billion of them.