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[A NOTE]

The great re-shelving project moves along, and a cull has become necessary for a number of reasons.  I'm giving the board first shout on taking various GNs off my hands before heading over to eBay, so PM me ASAP if you're interested.  Open to discussion re: price, but first come first served – this is only the tip of the mountain that I'm shoveling towards eBay, and then charity shops.

A NOTE:  Ming, maryanddavid, The Cosh, Commando Forces, Pete Wells, Colin YNWA, Mogzilla, and Mikey can all take your pick free gratis and for nothing (not even postage), by long overdue way of returning past generosities. 

A WARNING:  All prices quoted exclusive of postage.  Postage within Ireland (including NI) is about EUR€2 for a softcover, €3 for a hardcover (although if you're in the Dublin area I'll drop it round for free), to Great Britain is about STG£4 for a softcover, £6 for a hardback, so think hard.

The Act-I-Vate Primer.  Gorgeous hardcover containing the 12-page prequel to Lilly Mackenzie and the Mines of Charybdis When Lily Met Cosmo, by Simon Fraser, and 15 other stories by various folk including Dean Haspiel and Jennifer Hayden, foreword by Uncle Warren.  Perfect condition, a lovely, lovely thing, and sorry to be even thinking of trying to flog it.  EUR€10.00/STG£8.00.  Make me an offer, I'd much rather see it go to a good home.

Powers Vols 1 to 5. Bendis and Oeming.  Softcover collections in good nick.  €3.00/£2.50 each or €10.00/£8.00 for the lot, plus postage.

After the Snooter.  Eddie Campbell, Eddie Campbell Books softcover edition from 2002.  Eddie confronts mortality in a series of tales covering the period when he was drawing and then self-publishing From Hell and Bacchus, with guest appearances from Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Chris Staros, Sir William Withy Gull and Quentin Tarantino's mom.  Includes 'The House that Jack Bought' and 'The Magus is House-proud'.  An absolute cracker.  €3/£2.50.

Star Wars:  Tales of the Jedi - The Collection.  Tom Veitch and various artists, including David Roach!  Softcover Dark Horse collection from (I think) 1994 – including the original Knights of the Old Republic story that started it all.  It's in okay nick, but I have read it more than once.  €2/£1.65.

Star Wars 30th Anniversary Collection Vol 1:  The Freedon Nadd Uprising. Tom Veitch, Tony Atkins and Denis Rodier.  A lovely shiny black hardcover edition from 2007 of the 1990's stories that follow on from the Tales of the Jedi collection.   Perfect condition.  €10/£8.00.

Preacher Vol. 1:  Gone to Texas. Ennis and Dillon.  Softcover in good nick.  €2/£1.65.

The One.  Rick Veitch. King Hell softcover edition from 2003 (Washing Powder look).  Rick's pre-Watchmen entry into the deconstructed superhero genre.  It's a curiosity to be sure, and in excellent nick.  €3/£2.50.

Zopittybob-Bop-Bop's apparent Facebook page lists his interests as 'Eating', 'Standing', 'Walking' and 'Thinking'.

http://thedailyedge.thejournal.ie/beezow-doo-doo-zopittybop-bop-bop-arrested-in-wisconsin-323710-Jan2012/

Even T. B. Grover couldn't make this one up.

I'm stuck combining and compressing (or compressing and combining) a large pile of PDFs of CAD drawings incorporating photos into one, or at worst a 3 or 4 part document.  Each individual page is in the range 2-5MB and I really need batches of 10 (ideally 30) pages to weigh in at no more than 5MB, for e-mailing purposes.  Normally I'd compress from the source programme into PDF, but I don't have the original files.  There's a text bit too, but that's fine.

I'm trying to do this in Acrobat 9 for the Mac, and after an hour and a colossal headache, I just can't work it out.  Sometimes 'Reduce File Size' means they shrink 10% or so, sometimes nothing at all.  I know I've done this before.  I'll be printing them all full res for the client, so I'm not too bothered about loss of quality at this stage, but I do need to send some sort of a digital version for review first.  I doubt they'd appreciate 30 indiviudal 5MB files...

Help!

So the time has come, we've decided to go for a Wii.

My mother, always disturbingly enthusiastic about new technology (other than microwaves and tumble-driers, which are apparently the work of Satan), has insisted that the family pool its resources and get a Wii for the Boy's 5th birthday.  The fact that she does afterschool babysitting for us four days a week has nothing to do with it, I'm sure.  We're completely stony broke ourlseves, but between grandparents, grand aunts, uncles and aunts, it should be manageable.  Shades of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory here.

My role in this operation as Delta Male is to get the goods.  By Thursday.  And I'm completely ignorant.

So I'm looking for suggestions as to pros and cons of models/versions, most appropriate peripherals, controllers (and how many), starting games etc.  No-one in the family is a current gamer, but my own side is heavily into sport, and grandparents are likely to be pressurised into play as that's where the Holy Thing is most likely to reside.  A 20-month old will probably also want to get involved.  Lego Star Wars is a given.

EDIT:  Just realised I should have posted this in Games.  Good start.

[Camelot]

Just watched the opening two episodes of joint Irish-Canadian effort Camelot, which turns out to be Excalibur:  The Series in all but name. It's flawed to buggery and utterly daft, but somehow it's also terrific fun!  And it has Eva Green's [spoiler]boobies[/spoiler]!   Mild spoilers follow.

Not satisfied with borrowing Excalibur's rather specific version of the Arthur legend, it also uses some of the same shooting locations (to great effect, it must be said).  Judging by the dialogue and some of the costumes the setting is a magic-infused post-Roman Britain (which is occasionally and inexplicably called England), which the quite-good sets rather miss the point of, choosing instead a post-medieval look of run-down towerhouses and bawns with the Rohirrim thrown in for good measure.  Happily the fantastic elements mean this doesn't really matter, and its dark-ages aesthetic is refreshingly far away from the plate armour and chateaux of First Knight or Merlin.

The central cast is mostly great, the supporting cast mostly terrible.  Most importantly Merlin is excellent, an impish thug with a dubious vision, Arthur has a not-unappealing Cary-Elwes-lite  thing going on, and Eva Green's Morgan... well, I'd watch her read the telephone directory and be happy to do it.  OTOH Gwendolyn looks to be a charisma-void (but has a nice bum), Claire Forliani as Igraine and Sean Pertwee as Ector both look utterly lost.

Incredibly the weakest part of the enterprise isn't the ropey CGI, incompetent villains or wooden backing cast, it's James Purefoy.  Don't get me wrong, I love the guy in most things, but here he's just playing his sublime Mark Antony character from Rome again, right down to the costume, naked buttocks, Season 2 beard, insults,  and sexual positions.  When the credit music is cogged from Rome, when his opponent is an Octavian-like whippsersnapper and his ally a Cleopatra-like slutqueen, it's just a bit to close to be anything but completely distracting.  I keep waiting for Polly Walker to show up in her bath.

What really charmed and surprised me is how wonderfully old-fashioned it all is.  The credit sequence makes an embarrassing play for HBO status, being a shameless mix of Rome and Deadwood,  but the closest the actual programme gets to those lofty heights is ladies' bottoms and the occasional 'fuck off'.  Instead, it's just solid '80's fantasy TV drama, with lots of location shooting on the edge of golf courses, dry ice, dodgy filters and unconvincing underpopulated villages.  I'm hooked - they don't make 'em like this anymore.  You should give it a go.  

Truly appalling events in Japan this morning - I know many boarders have family and friends in Japan and around the Pacific, and I sincerely hope that they have escaped the worst of this disaster.

Should be a good view of the Space Station and the docked Shuttle Discovery tonight from Ireland and southern Britain - after 18.45, look west and you should see them zooming over, almost directly overhead.   Extra plus is that there's a spacewalk ongoing at the mo (not that you'll see that).  Brighest thing in the sky, moving fast (17K mph).  Say your goodbyes to Discovery. 

Well, the crew's safely on board and just this side of 9pm GMT tonight the last  launch of the shuttle Discovery should take place.  I remember watching poor Columbia that first time in a hotel lounge in Sligo nearly exactly 30 years ago, and now 132 launches later, the first of the fleet will be retired.  She's carried nearly 250 crew, she's survived 38 missions and nearly a full year in space, she was the first ship back into space after both Challenger and Columbia, and now her day is almost over.  Godawful inefficient deathtraps, but they are so very beautiful.  

Watch the beginning of the end of the shuttle era live here:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-hd-tv

If you've clear skies and a view of the south-eastern time horizon, now's the time to start looking. Don't look directly at it please, pin-hole in a piece of cardboard, project it onto paper, you know the drill.  Cue PeterWolf railing at Health and Safety Directives gorn mad!

This lunchtime I had the unusual and very welcome duty of lodging a substantial cheque in the company bank account that will permit me to pay the wages of my colleagues up the 31st December, which until now had been several months in arrears.  The cheque was for a last-minute state project which I secured through part-knowingly part-ignorantly claiming that I knew a great deal more about database design and implementation than I actually did.  A long period of discovering my limitations until successive 4ams followed.

Happily, Pete McCosh took pity on my mewlings and sent me several e-mails containing specific solutions to my VB problems, as well as encouraging noises.   I may have got there eventually on my own, but I definitely wouldn't have got there by the absurdly tight deadline, and thus we wouldn't have got paid this year.  

Pete, you have our public and sincere thanks for your off-the-cuff generosity in sharing what I now know to be hard-won expertise, and (if they knew it) the thanks of 10 other families who otherwise would have had a very bad time of it over the next month.  As my wife put it, thanks to Pete: "Tiny Tim* gets to see Christmas Day!".  Just try not to think of it as enabling subversion of the government tendering process.




*I repeatedly ask her not to call it that.    

Warning:  not a thread about Greg.

We're doing Christmas at our place again this year, for a likely fractious 10, at a table that sits 6.  Mastered the main dishes years ago, but always struggle with the starter and the roast spuds.  

After a lifetime of dull Christmas starters that involved melon or salmon or tasteless prawns, I've decided to go for something we both actually enjoy, a nice salade de gésiers.  This is usually a main in France, but given that our supply of duck gizzards is limited, I reckon a smaller portion will do fine as a starter:  sauteed gésiers and some chopped apples and walnuts on a bit of rocket and lettuce, with a mustard vinagrette.  Yum.  However, I'm getting cold feet at the thought of my 83-year old aunt, small-and-large-c-conservative English father-in-law and pinko-animal-hugger mother being confronted with an unusual body part.  

So.  Any suggestions for interesting but possibly less controversial starters for a Christmas dinner?

Also, while we're at it, any suggestions for achieving boarders' favourite roast potato styles?

Just read Daytripper 9, the last-but-one issue of Moon and Ba's most interesting approach to fictional-obituary-as-biography.  This has to be one of the most original comics of recent years, and I'm dying to see what the final issue brings.  If you haven't been following it in floppies, be sure to get the trade when it arrives - it's a great compliment to Vertigo that they took on something as oddball, mysterious and serious as this. A sort of reflective Moorcock meets restrained Marquez, excellent stuff altogether.

It had to happen, Wipeout Jones-lookalike and 'edgy' Jedi Master Quinlan Vos is due to appear in Season 3 of The Clone Wars, and by way of a preview his action figure comes with a "speederboard" (TM, one presumes). Skysurfing Star Wars action ahead, I fear.



Check out that gnarly Chopper-esque chest/shoulder armour!

http://www.yakface.com/

So, it looks like MC-1's Cursed Earth townships are thriving, and will continue and possibly expand.  Add this to the Correctional Facilities (of which we've seen two now )and their decontamination projects, the damned Rangers, Koburn-style circuit judges, possibly Salem, and the various farming enterprises that we've seen at least as far back as 'Tarantula'.  

How does an ever-increasing MC-1 presence in the Cursed Earth affect the life of a Long Walk judge?  Things seem very different from the days of Dredd's original trek, or indeed Helltrekkers or Dredd's own Long Walk, when one step beyond the West Wall meant near certain death.  In tackling the mutant rights issue, Dredd seems to have asserted the City's responsibility to address the mess Booth created.

What kind of reception can a Long Walk judge expect at these Cursed Earth outposts?  Would he be welcomed as a long-lost colleague, as auxilliary manpower, or is there an element of disgrace hanging over the role?  Could he use them for resupply, or even for a base?  Does 'bringing law to the lawless, until death' proscribe straying back into MC-1's sphere of influence?  Thoughts?

I know Bob Byrne has a certain marmitey quality for many squaxx, but if you're not following his current autobiographical webcomic then you're really missing out.  A lot of the texture is just spot on for my own memories of suburban Dublin in the early 80's, but the themes seem pretty universal.

Archive here:

http://clamnuts.com/spazz/category/michael-landon/

And with issue 70, I think I may have parted company with this book. SERIOUS SPOILERS FOLLOW



I'm intrigued by the mystery of how Washington enclave works (Lawns without vegetable plots?  Have we forgotten about the threat of hordes and/or jealous rivals?), and the crimes of 'Davidson', I like atmosphere of dread in an idyllic suburban setting, hell I even like Rick's new haircut but...

... by devoting what felt like many pages to recounting in sickening detail one of the most disturbing crimes I'd ever read about in the real world, Kirkman crosses a line for me.  He uses this appalling piece of real child abuse to add weight to his fictional horror, and I just can't go along with that.  As long as all the awful things Rick and Michone and the Mayor do to each other are fiction, I can enjoy it, even revel in the grossness of it all.  When I'm asked to enjoy being creeped-out by a tragedy from the real world, I can't do it.  This isn't From Hell, this isn't about how the world parses and repurposes real crimes, this is a fictional exploration of how people behave in extremis, and what people might do to survive in the face of utter disaster.  I don't see how that scene would have worked any differently if the crime recounted had been a fictional one.  Other than the fact that I wouldn't now be considering dropping the book.

So I was leisurely drifting through the arsomniss that is the John Wagner Facebook page, and I got to thinking about the forthcoming Alpha strip.  

John has said it'll include the Archive Computer concept from The Kreeler Conspiracy (which is nice in itself), but I was wondering what else we might have in store.  The title suggests at least an element of biography, along the lines of Portrait of a Mutant, but I imagine Wagner has something more complex in mind than an 'edited highlights' of Johnny's life.  Then it occured to me that Johnny already has a willing biographer in the triple-breasted reporter from Blood Moon.  Johnny has promised her an interesting story when one presents itself, and also that she could tag along with him - something we haven't yet seen, IIRC.  Note also that Johnny (as a young man) explains the use of time bombs to her in Blood Moon, something he returns to himself in the sequel-of-sorts The Mork Whisperer.  

Could the new story be told from the reporter's PoV as she writes a biography/biopic, or from the Archive Computer's recitation or discussion of her unpublished notes?  Could she use time-travel to explore key points of Johnny's life, and maybe, just maybe, change (or at least gloss) the way it ends.

Blood Moon seems to me to be a significant story, in that it opens up the period between Johnny becoming established as a bounty hunter, and partnering with Wulf (fnar).  For this reason I'm thinking that otherwise throwaway lines may be foreshadowing or the start of future plots.  Johnny also seems to be more easy-going with the ladies than at later points in his life, and perhaps more sociable and in touch with his revolutionary roots and buddies.  What happens to change this?  Are we about to find out?

Thoughts?  Hopes?  Fears?

I know a few of us have read this now, and was just interested in what other folk made of it...  The following contains solid gold SPOILERS, about the end and the fate of the characters, but I'm not going to black it out.  You have been warned.

SPOILERS

I started off enjoying it greatly, but was expecting something in the way of an explanation of what was going on, which I didn't get. The Tem/d'Ortolan/Mulverhill/Patient 8282 plot I understand, all well and good, but how Transitioning works, and what Banks was trying to achieve here I'm still at a bit of loss.  I can't help feeling he's trying his hand at magical realism rather than SF in this one.

So, some questions:

How did Tem and Mulverhill transition to a world that was devoid of all life, which only Mrs. M had apparently discovered.  Didn't they need bodies to transition into, and if so, how did those bodies get there?

What was the deal with Mrs. M's eyes?  I assumed she was from some odd parallel where cat-eyes were the norm, or possibly was even an alien (although the end makes this seem unlikely).  However, she seems to have had them in most of her incarnations, not just on Calbafrac, so how would that work?

Okay, I understand that because there are an infinite number of worlds, a transitioner can usually find someone near their location who fits their physical type to flit into.  But if they have to go to a particular parallel on a mission, how does this work?  In the Venice finale, everyone ends up in odd bodies because they have no choice in where/when they are going.  But at the start, Tem flits into someone sitting at the 'same' table as him in the same Paris café where he is to meet Madame d'Or (presumably on the one-and-only accessible version of Calbafrac), and yet their types conveniently match.  

This rather fantastically convenient technique lead me to believe that Banks isn't really interested in the mechanics of his central conceit, but instead is just using it as a way of visiting alternate earths so he can use them to comment on his real themes, to-wit:

Two of the characters, Adrian and the Philosopher, seem to mainly exist to expound Banks' commendable views on the twin evils of Limited Companies and torture respectively.  Both meet ludicrously  poetic ends that seem to confirm their limited function, but along the way they fairly eat up pages.  Tem spends some time musing on these aspects too.  Were the clever attacks on the war-on-terror and capitalism the main point of the book?

Any thoughts?  

Nice piece on over-reaction to the Black Dossier's naughty bits:

http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2009/11/09/alan-moore-destroyer-of-librarians/

Except... as bored readers will know, I do have a problem with libraries and their shelving of comics.  Black Dossier is pretty rude in many places, not least in its liberal use of linseed oil, and it shouldn't be stuck on the bottom shelf right beside Essential Spiderman, as it is in my local library.  And that's just the fantasy stuff - Joe Matt (a Tordelback favourite) has the most explicit and affecting account of his porn addiction in The Poor Bastard set right beside The Powerpuff Girls.  Maybe a bit more thought, eh?

Was reading the Total War trade in the library the other day (superb stuff), and noticed that the episode breaks and titles had been removed, much in the style of the old Eagle reprints.  Personally, I don't care for this.  Dredd is a story told in very short chapters, and pretending it's an unbroken narrative just makes it feel awkward, with repeated panels and oddly placed splashes.  I like my "Next progs" and logos, but what do other people think?