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I've never heard of Wordery before, but that looks like a good bet to at least try in the future. As for the NC, I'm happy going direct and not against paying full cover-price (versus online discounts), but then when the costs mount up due to postage, it's harder to justify now we've a mini-IP in the house.

Form my understanding, if you use a payment provider, the onus is on them to deal with VAT changes; if not, you're screwed. It's a terrible change, ostensibly to benefit small businesses and stop larger ones getting away with selling from places with lower VAT levels; but the reality is the rules will do the opposite.

[Ichabod]

The ending of Ichabod was a bit odd. It was good, certainly, but not the sort of ending I expected. Felt a little rushed. Still think there's a real disconnect between the tone here and the early stories when there was no mention of any meta-narrative shenanigans whatsoever, considering how heavily the story leant on them towards the end.

Mm. I've really enjoyed this series from the start, but these past few episodes just felt... off. The bones are there of a decent conclusion, but, I dunno, it was like it was trying to be a bit clever, whereas before Ichabod had been a quite elegant and streamlined piece of writing.

Stickleback gets nice and creepy. I've got no clue what's Stickleback's going to do next week, which is nice - I hate being able to second-guess an ending.

This series has been so good that it's convinced me to buy the second trade, because I want all this stuff collected as soon as possible. The art is fantastic, the script keeps twisting and turning, and I also love that I've no idea what's going to happen next.

Yep. It's also similarly poisonous. I suffer from SAD in the darker months, and was absolutely thrilled when the Lighter Later campaign secured a surprising level of cross-party support for a private member's bill on looking into changing the British timezone. The bill, had it got anywhere, would have resulted in a report on feasibility, which itself could have eventually triggered a trial run of no clocks changing for a few years (i.e. always staying on summer time), or the UK moving to CET (matching France's timezone). Naturally, there are issues with that (not least morning darkness in the far north), but the benefits could also be huge.

The Tories, Lib Dems and Labour were all basically in favour of at least the report (if not terribly enthusiastic—there weren't really any major advocates), with the Tories then adding any change would require the agreement of every component part of the UK, clearly not wanting to piss off the Scots with the then looming referendum. But the Scots didn't scupper anything—instead, some fuckwit Tory from Cornwall used the bill as a means to argue Cornwall should have an opt-out and therefore become a UK region (or even country) by the backdoor. The bill was filibustered and died.

Really glad to see that, especially after Ordinary went for under a tenner. (Kicked myself on that, because I forgot the eBay reminder and had planned to bid cover price to at least hit that. Ah well.)

Whoever won that Dredd book really does have a one-of-a-kind there, and thanks to your sterling efforts!

My copy showed up today, along with Zenith Phase One. Both look lovely. Well, apart from The Book Depository having apparently dropped both of them on their corners. Gnh. To think I used to get miffed with Amazon—turns out WHSmith and The Book Depository (sort of Amazon anyway) are even worse when it comes to books arriving in decent nick. Is anywhere else any better? (I'd buy more from FPI, but they never seem to have half the stuff I want in stock.)

Apparently not. Still, one could easily enough dismiss this by saying the dinos were engineered to represent what people thought they looked like, rather than what they most likely did. Or that all the scientists were wrong, feathers never existed in dinosaurs, and birds somehow magically appeared at some point, contrary to all the evidence and, er, fossil remains.

Mind you, the raptors in Jurassic Park films are giants anyway, so they're clearly not normal.

Adding to that, a good way for Squaxx to filter US books is via pricing: they mostly end in odd numbers, due to currency conversion. By contrast, British books usually end in a 9 or 0.

I've found the 'reboot' pretty bumpy on the whole. The original approach, adapting Kreeler Conspiracy from a TV script, telling the 'true story', was interesting, but it very quickly reverted to being vanilla Strontium Dog with a few extra captions from archive robots, and then even they vanished.

The 'resurrection' at least brought back the not-knowing about the 'end', but through a US-style approach that grated when considering 2000 AD's usual philosophy of 'dead means dead'. The point here about lacking a soul is how I felt about the most recent run. I just didn't really care about much of anything in the strip, and it all felt a bit like going through the motions. I guess perhaps I always enjoyed the contrast Alpha had—that mix of deadly and heart that was apparent in Slavers of Drule or Incident on Mayger Minor.

Still, I imagine Alpha's not dead, and I hope Wagner can bring back the magic to what still remains one of the comic's strongest series.

Given that they include V for Vendetta...

Again, it's not that someone got killed off—it's the manner in which it happened. Osgood wouldn't have been dumb enough to have been caught out quite like that, and the guards were, what, from the simpleton brigade? And it also had that whiff of fridging that I'm noticing more and more in mainstream media. (Maybe had there have at least been a modicum of a struggle and less idiocy, it would have worked. I've no idea if it was a moment of iffy writing or dreadful direction.)

As for the theory, [spoiler]someone mentioned somewhere else that there were red and blue settings on the device Missy had, respectively for death and teleportation, but that Osgood was hit with red and is therefore dead[/spoiler]. No idea if that's the case or not.

Sometimes, a good character should remain dead to deepen the lives of others.

I agree (see: [spoiler]Wash[/spoiler] in the Serenity/Firefly universe), but what I didn't like here was how the character's very nature was bent out of shape in order to facilitate that death. Osgood would never have put herself in that position in the first place. It's also another example of fridging a woman, which is becoming a tiresome and unnecessary trope to showcase someone's evil nature and/or make the 'heroic' protagonist redouble their efforts.

Moffat's argument was: "One thing I was very determined about was that the Master/Missy would have to kill somebody we liked in the most cruel, heartless and terrible way to absolutely say that this person is shockingly evil."

Which is just garbage. It was already perfectly clear how callous and nasty The Master/Missy was; all his script shows is a casual disregard for characters that have a modicum of depth—one of his big weaknesses in a show increasingly full of cyphers. (And I say this as someone who broadly enjoyed this series.)

Well, "the title will resume soon so watch this space" doesn't sound like "it's all over—now bugger off" to me.

Killing UNIT scientist woman was irritating to say the least. She'd have made a good companion.

Some of the games are nearly impossible to play with a keyboard. The first one I tried was Defender. Not a good experience. Joust, on the other hand, plays fairly well.

I just did a big piece on that game for Retro Gamer. The issue with Defender is that it had a very specific control set-up that takes a while to get the hang of. It's a tough nut to crack.

Standard 'abandonware' process seems to be provide it till someone says otherwise then remove the offending roms. Hardly ever happens though unless its a licence still being actively developed.

Looking through the list, it's a weird mix of obscure and famous, but plenty are still IPs in active use—Sega mentioned just the other day it's updating OutRun for 3DS, for example.