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A sufficiently awful pun, but where are the ugly AI avatars we all hated, Sharky? Every day used to bring us something new and disturbing.
It's as if you're not even trying anymore!

I'm too lazy to go digging, so remind me: when did we meet Hives the robo-butler before?

(Not getting my money's worth from the Meg these days, seeing as I've already paid for the TPBs of pretty much all the material being reprinted.
Arse.)

she was a bit of a looker (though her sister Anne was a stunner in her day).

They had their great-granny, Queen Alexandra (missus to Edward VII) to thank for that.



It was those classy Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs who saved the weak-chinned, pop-eyed Hanover-Brunswick/Saxe-Coburg Gotha uggos from their genetic fate.

The last time I did was when they used to give you a free bottle of iron-rich Guinness with your chocolate biscuits. 

Because I was living in the UK during the CJD crisis in the mid '90s I was ineligible to give blood back home. It was feared that I might have been contaminated by a filthy English pollution (the words of the Irish Blood Transfusion Service – not mine). Happily, it has since been deemed that after twenty-odd years of breathing pure Irish air and leading a life of Irish virtue, my blood has been purged of noxious foreign elements.

I like to think that my life essence will be used to save an innocent child, but for all I know they'll pump it into some lowlife skanger who's been stabbed by another lowlife skanger.

They only offer soft drinks now, and I'm sorry to say that the snacks are mostly by Nestlé. Donors are probably thought to be too self-sacrificing and unworldly to want Cadbury's.

—And for some reason the bloodsucking is all done to a soundtrack of eighties hits, which is odd because this is a college campus where the average donor is only about twenty.
'What is this?' the youth might ask.
'A-ha,' will come the answer, and they will be no wiser at all.

Just gave blood, so now I'm riding high on a wave of smugness and free snacks.

- nobody writes kids like Stephen King, apart from maybe Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Ha!
The comparison never occurred to me, but it's right on the money.
It's what Enid Blyton was missing: all that effing and blinding.

The exception that proves the rule being Revival. Brrrr.

OK, I've read Revival now.
Our Stevie's still got it.

Fortunately mass-produced AI systems can't climb ladders and paint murals yet. 

It looks like it's a race against time for you to produce your magnum opus so, Jayzus.
You know: the self portrait on the west face of Liberty Hall.
You, firm-jawed but avuncular, surrounded by happy workers, soldiers, peasants, and children in traditional costume, with a backdrop of wheat fields and hydroelectric power stations stretching to the horizon.
It's the mural that Dublin needs.

I just wanted to vent a bit.

Well vented, sir.

Armoured Gideon
(It's great)

Not wrong, Boots old man.
I've torn off the cellophane and got stuck in.
I'd forgotten how this story really found its mojo after the first series. Both script and art sing once things get coloured.

Very glad to hear it. Mine arrived yesterday but, beyond checking that they delivered the right books, I haven't had a look yet.
Armoured Gideon belongs to the darkening days when I was falling out of love with the prog, so I was in two minds about revisiting. I only bought it to bulk up my order and justify the outrageous postal charges that Brexit is inflicting.

The edits were due to uncertainty that the public would buy a book of such size from an unknown author, as opposed to edits for the flow of the text.

I stand corrected, Doc.

You say tomato, I say tomato.

Actually, I think you'll find it's 'tomato'.

King dicked around with The Stand, then?  Hopefully not in a George Lucas way.

He released a sort of author's cut which included all the bits that the original editor wisely deleted. I only read the start of it, but it was bloated even by Stephen King standards.
(In the proper edition, for instance, the action begins with a bunch of good ol' boys watching a car steering towards some petrol pumps. In the self-indulgent text, it starts with the driver bundling his wife and kids into the car a few days before, thus removing the tense 'Who? How? What the fuck?' of the proper opening.)

Then I gather he produced a version updated from the seventies to the nineties or two-thousands for no good reason at all. I for one like my Stephen Kings to be rooted in a minutely observed 1970s America. Indeed, I often think that most of what I know about the US comes from Sesame Street and early Stephen King.
Anyway, I hear this revision was unnecessarily awful.

Always listen to your editor, children, and just say no to drugs.

I'm reading Stephen King's The Stand for the first time.  I've really lost my reading habit and tried to get back into it

When it comes to getting back into reading, early King is always a good route, and The Stand (at least before he dicked around with it) is a grand satisfying wodge of a read.
There's a lot about the man's style I don't have much time for these days, but that's offset by the sheer amount of content he delivers. My habit now is to read one of his books until things start drifting towards absurdity and then I chuck it. As soon as he introduces stuff like space turtles I know I probably won't like how the story ends. But that doesn't matter because the book has already served up several hundred pages of human interest with spooky stuff added.

[The Sirens of Titan]

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

It's been a long time since I read Vonnegut because too much Vonnegut can quickly become too much of a good thing.
I'm enjoying this one just fine, though, getting a third of the way through in one sitting this evening.

But let me draw the Squaxxs' attention to the following:

'...there was a radio antenna under the crown of his skull, and that it would hurt him whenever he did something a good soldier wouldn't ever do. The antenna also would give him orders and furnish drum music to march to.'

See?
I just found out where the Different Drummers came from.