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I disagree with pretty much everything said in this rant. We have better sci-fi now than at any time in years and I'm grateful for that fact.

And it's your right to disagree, but I personally make a distinction between a higher quality end product and higher production values created by the genre becoming more mainstream in recent years.  Transformers: Revenge of the fallen has very high production values, but it's still pish sci-fi with dubious depictions of minority characters.

Geek is a word with a specific meaning - it derives from sideshow performers who pretended to be savages by biting the heads off live animals.  It's an insult first, and a descriptive term second.  I'd also disagree that the stigma surrounding comics has disappeared, as comics are a very, very small niche in the otherwise massive entertainment industries and their fans will always suffer as underdogs because of that if nothing else - though if you want to see institutionalised dismissal of comics in action, try starting a conversation with an art college tutor about them and see how you get on - the unironic elitism of seeing the form dismissed as a commercial endeavor created by journeymen in a world of Turner prize-winners created not by the artist but by construction workers hired by their sponsors is often something to behold.

Trout's football analogy is also the same one I use all the time, though I note he restrains himself from pointing out that comic fans don't institutionalise homophobia while unironically hero-worshipping a group of men with no actual life skills in what can only be objectively described as a homoerotic fashion.  I'm also pretty sure comics fans don't have racially motivated riots at conventions - though in fairness BICS could yet surprise us.

Any fandom has its nutters and obsessives, it's just that with smaller fandoms there's a perception that the percentage of nutbars is higher.

[bit]

I skipped the last season of Fringe entirely after the Twin Towers ending of season 1 - an effective visual, but also opportunistic and cheap.

its only TV.

Rant ahoy:
You are absolutely correct, DD, but a little limited in your scope - it's every bit of sci-fi tv being made for the forseeable thanks to BSG being successful for five minutes and tv execs making shows based around its more obvious individual componants (shakycam, derivative stories, joyless, cyclical, disappointing ending) rather than the overall attempt to make a show for a grown-up audience.
It's already been mentioned how similar Event was to Flashforward, which in itself I gave up on because of the constant stream of visual and story rips (particularly from Lost and 4400) without the lampshade-hanging that's become a part of television's language of late not because of its use as a tool in deconstructing the tropes and idioms of the genre, but because the sci-fi audience is an insular, conservative and unimaginative one cultivated on the same few ideas for the last thirty years and lampshade hanging was a defence mechanism against accusations of plagiarism from an audience that, though it may have a low bar, is still literate in the language of sci-fi, and most - almost all - sci-fi has been feeding on itself to the point that now instead of an episode of a show based around 'day repeating itself' or 'character sees own death in a vision', we have entire series based around these concepts.  Sci-fi is like a snake eating its own tail, going round and round doing the same old thing but essentially it is feeding not on food but on its own arsehole to the point that sooner or later poo is not going in one end and out the other, it's just circling constantly.

Having said all that, I have no idea why I enjoyed Hawaii Five-0 so much, as it's just a whole shitload of cliches that don't even make sense in H50's own dumb-as-fuck universe: why exactly is a show called Hawaii Five-0 when it's not about cops but about a (yawn) specialist task force/death squad?  And why doesn't anyone think "you know, that mole in the police department nearly got us killed and there can only be about three people it could possibly be given the specific nature of how and when we were sold out, so maybe we should look into that".
Stupid, stupid, stupid show and I look forward to the next episode.

Happy birthday, Ush, and hopefully many more.

Whining about decade old storylines FTW!!!!

It's been that long since any Bat-book's had a major storyline worth commenting on in and of itself - 'events' since, like War Games and Batman: RIP have only been noteworthy in showcasing how insensitive DC are to gender and racial issues, or how compromised their production process has become even for top-tier talent.

You may as well ask why he let post-earthquake Gotham become a lawless warzone run by murderous criminal gangs for a full year rather than ask Superman and the Justice League to supply humanitarian aid or something.  I think there was an issue during all this where Superman turns up to help and Batman says something like "You and your 'flying in medical supplies and repairing infrastructure' - you just don't get it, maaaaaaaaaaan.  Gotham isn't like other cities." and Superman kinda goes away at the end rather than point out "fuck you, Batman, that's just stupid."

Apart from anything else, it makes Batman look like a pro-war hawk in putting the elimination of criminal gangs one by one ahead of the rebuilding of quality of life in Iraq/Gotham.  Yeah, fuck those orphans dying of starvation on the streets - operation: Enduring Batman is a resounding success.

Didn't they already make a Robocop tv series?



I did get a bunch of Dredd GNs from the local library several years back on a whim, and when I was finished reading them was utterly baffled why there wasn't a Dredd show already.  It was bunch of Wagner stuff around the time he first started getting wind of PSU being up to something - I could see that stuff seamlessly adapted to tv.

If it helps, Ade, you can lock movement along the horizontal or vertical axis by holding down the arrow keys while dragging objects.

Can we see any of your Sketchup work Prof B?

Don't have any.  I make up roughly what I need as basic shapes, PrintScreen and ctrl+v a screen grab into the pic and then wing the details.

edit: a bit like what BMB seems to be doing.

They're going for the soft sell, I see.  I wonder will Peeves be in this one?

[that's]

How dumb is Hawaii Five-0?  It's written by the guys who wrote Transformers and Star Trek, that's how dumb Hawaii Five-0 is.
It's also really good fun to the point that even though the eventual delivery of "book 'em, Dano!" was forced as hell, I still laughed at it.  The soundtrack is standard tv cop show stuff, making the (admittedly brilliant) theme stand out like a sore thumb and possibly reminding viewers that don't want their attention drawn to the fact that they're watching a big, dumb, cheesy pile of shit.  I said more or less the same thing on my blog, if you click the little wheel under my profile info ('cause I'm a mothafuckin' PEE EYE EM PEE).

As for The Event: FUCK YOU BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.  You've already ruined Stargate with your unwelcome 'po-faced cinema verite and flashbacks out the arsehole sci-fi bullshit' legacy and now you've gone and pretty much fucked every other genre offering for the next five years at least because sci-fi is a genre that rarely innovates, preferring instead to feed on itself by aping whatever's most popular to the point that we had a whole 90s of X-Files knock offs followed by a whole 2000s of wisecracking buddy-buddy Men In Black tv shows to the point that Doctor Who seemed objectively good rather than the BBC simply being late to the party again, and now we'll have a whole heap of 2010s tv shows where po-faced, joyless and unlikeable leads sleepwalk through plots that were old hat thirty years ago.
FUCK.  YOU.  ALL CAPS.  IN THE ASS.

Nice work, Kev!

I hate to be one of those grumpy old fuckers*, but I did download a previous version of Sketchup - the one that explained everything in 14 easy play-along steps - and thought it was the bee's knackers.  Until it asked me to update - like a fool I did so and the setup changed and the little footprints disappeared from the tool tray.  Previously, you could use that icon to 'walk' virtually around your model without going through walls and that, so you'd always have a sensible, not overly-dramatic view/angle that was a great perspective reference, but now there's just drag and rotate options, which aren't terribly precise and you often end up inside objects.

I do use it still, though, and the only advice I can really offer is that it might be worth taking time to make a few texture map jpegs both for the model and for dragging into the eventual artwork.  Also try to group items as componants in case you have to move them around or delete them to get a better view.  It also makes cloning stuff a lot easier for models like Kev's Meg, where you can get away with copying the odd vehicle a few times without impacting too badly on file size - dunno about anyone else, but any model over 3mb on my PC and it tends to freeze and hang.


*  This is a lie.

The economy is is the gutter and I know a few of you are looking for other work, so why not turn your retail experience and geek knowledge into a paying gig??

Forbidden Planet, the UK's leading Sci-fi retail Group is currently recruiting for a Store Manager for its Croydon store.

The successful candidate will be able to know what comics are so they can ignore them and sell Warhammer models and Spawn figurines instead.  Knowledge of passing Japan-originating anime fads also preferable, but we don't really care either way. Duties include not stealing money, showing up on weekdays (negotiable), ordering too few copies to meet customer orders, taking books from random customer stacks when you feel like looking at pictures for all of three seconds before throwing said comic back into a random stack, and reporting to Head Office that the store has not burned down in the absence of adult supervision. You will need to know what numbers are and be able to read at a Batman: Brave and the Bold level.  A basic grasp of commerce would be helpful. Ideally you will have worked for anyone before - anyone at all - and know how to treat paying customers who want to give you their money.  Failing that, an attitude of contemptuous tolerance bordering on hostility will suffice.  Disdain for Sci-fi or the genre is highly desirable, along with a working knowledge of how to use a radio's volume control.  Successful applicants must have access to a godawful music collection.

To apply, show up.

Fixed that for you.

Looking forward to this, now, but my hatred for Jim makes it galling to admit the restoration job looks fantastic.  I'd go so far as to say a book full of that aimed at kids would sell gangbusters in the current market as long as those involved dug their heels in against any potential moral outrage and actively sold it to children as some sort of sociopathy manual, preferably at a low price to compete with the free toy mags.

As for any follow-up strip - Kids Rule OK, Thirteenth Floor or Survival would be my suggestions, as long as they got the same treatment.

Where is this 'parody' everyone is talking about?  All I see is the template for every Daredevil story for the last twenty-five years.

Battlestar Galactica (the remake) also heavily borrows from 1980s anime Robotech (Super Dimensional Fortress Macross), right down to the 18 month time-jump halfway through and the resultant personal relationships between principal characters.