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Jim, look at it this way: you watched it so that I and many others wouldn't have to. We appreciate your sacrifice.

I like to take one for the team every now and then... :-)

The point of the original story isn't that the war is any kind of arms race, it's that Britain/humanity is unquestionably routed by a technologically superior colonising force and only saved by a divine irony over which they have no agency

Yeah. I thought of all the many things I didn't like, that was possibly the most craven and objectionable.

[SPOILERS UNDER THAT BLOCK FOR STUFF NOT YET AIRED ON THE BBC.]

Ah, well... don't say I didn't warn you! Wait until you get to the last hour or so when...

[spoiler]Much of the time is spent with whatserface moping around an incredibly cheap-looking apocalyptic wasteland while in the invasion sequences we're basically treated to three people hiding under a kitchen table.[/spoiler]

SPOILERS UNDER THAT BLOCK FOR STUFF NOT YET AIRED ON THE BBC.

Honestly. I've seen it. Save yourselves three hours of your life, because it's fucking terrible. Spoilery rant below.

[spoiler]I see now why it was delayed. Someone completely bottled the 'faithful adaptation' idea. They clearly went back and inserted a bunch of flash-forward scenes to a post-invasion apocalyptic world that utterly ruins the whole thing. It's been fucked about in the editing stage by people who had no faith in the source material. I'm actually quite angry about spending a chunk of my life watching this thing.

The maddening part is that there was probably a perfectly decent adaptation buried in this thing somewhere. Early on, the book stuff is well-realised although the editing seems to be off — some scenes don't seem to be coming in the right order. Nothing I can point to as outrageously out of sequence, just a general sense of "Wait... what...?"

It really feels like they made a straight adaptation and someone decided it wouldn't gel with a modern audience, so they went back and messed about with it.

As the thing continues, they go all in on the flash-forward stuff which sucks all the life out of what's left of the book material.

You were hoping to see tripod vs HMS Thunder Child? Don't hold your breath. There's a bit on Skegness beach ("We're heading for safety in Dunkirk!" Ooh! The fucking irony!) but it never develops into the scene we all wanted.

My previous point about not trusting the source material...? There's a point late on where a character ACTUALLY SAYS "This is all white people's fault, isn't it...? This is like what we did to those poor chaps in the jungle..."

It's FUCKING AWFUL.[/spoiler]

Herbie Goes To Zombie Carlo...? :-)

Good grief, the barrage of unsolicited graphic spoilers from every possible  online source

I'd like to apologise for the spoiler upthread. I initially thought that spoilers were fair game (having seen the show being implicit in the thread subject) but quickly decided that that's was the sort of dick move that annoyed the piss out of me over GoT, but I'd missed the edit window to fix it. I've petitioned the mods to whack some spoiler tags on it, but it's a Sunday and I'm sure they have better things to do.

FWIW, though, I'm very sorry and I'll liberally apply spoiler blocks from now on.

I absolutely haven't seen Episode 2, but if I had then I would have thought its neat swerve from Star Wars spaghetti western into Star Wars [spoiler]Lone Wolf and Cub[/spoiler] worked splendidly and I imagine that if I had seen it, I would now be positively champing at the bit to see Episode 3. I would probably have thought [spoiler]baby Not-Yoda[/spoiler] was the best thing ever.

beware though, if you have any kind of severe aversion to heights, you might be holding onto your seat cushions at times!

TBH, there were a couple of bits in the trailer that made me feel quite queasy. Possibly not one for me!

the claim that Clinton and the democrats were running a paedoophile ring from a pizza restaurant - patent nonsense, but it diodn't stop some Trumper firebombing the place.

From the basement of a business that didn't even have a basement, if I recall correctly...

Another good Thought Bubble - luckily, my trains weren't affected by the floodwaters, and I reached my hotel* in good time to meet Bolt-01 (plus minibolt), Jim Campbell, Conor & Lizzie Boyle and Si Spurrier for a few pints.

Great to meet you again after a few years! Have you got the preceding two Porcelain books...? I may be able to help out if not...

Pet-hate alert - Half the speech bubbles (in the sample, at least) are missing punctuation.

Also, an ellipsis ... is three periods, no more, no less. Most lettering fonts have a typesetting character for the ellipsis — on a Mac you get it by hitting ALT-semicolon. On Windows, not so sure — last time I used a Windows machine, accessing typesetting characters like this was either a quick round trip to Character Map to copy and paste, or typing ALT+some not very easy to remember four-digit Unicode number.

It's worth using the ellipsis character over just typing three periods because the periods are spaced for precisely this use case, and in many fonts, they're actually designed to give a slight variation between each period and look less mechanical than just typing them out.

"It's David Bishop's fault that Slaine was shit" is certainly an... interesting take on the matter.

Jim! Jim! They are playing Sisters Of Mercy.

Bah! I'm really ill and have spent the evening in my room, alternately rushing to the toilet and drinking huge quantities of water to try and stay hydrated as my body attempts to expel every sodding drop of liquid it's ever contained.

They may just find a small pile of dust where I used to be when they come to clean this room after I should have checked out.

Only if one believes in it.

No. There are studies showing that you can give patients placebo tablets and actually tell them that it's just sugar and there's still a statistically measurable improvement in their outcomes.

It's true that the comic does have some very heavy homophobic, and racist content to it, but I'd say that it isn't done out of spite, or to be mean spirited or edgy in any way.

Can't speak to the comics, because I haven't read them, but how many episodes of the TV series have a plot point revolving around either gay sex being something that people are ashamed of and/or someone getting something inserted up their arse with disastrous/hilarious consequences? Answer: most of them. That's not a character having a reprehensible attitude of which we are supposed to disapprove, that's systemic and inherent.