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If that's not a Staz Johnson cover, I'll eat someone else's hat.*


*My hat was very expensive and probably doesn't taste very nice.

[Medivac 318]

I think most if not all of those are involved in rights issues, not just Metalzoic, but putting that aside

Medivac 318

Medivac definitely is. In fact, if memory serves, Hilary Robinson got the rights back to this (and I think, Chronos Carnival).

[Thor: Love and Thunder]

Thor: Love and Thunder

I've seen some pretty sniffy reviews of this, but I really enjoyed it and at bang on two hours, it doesn't outstay its welcome.

It opens surprisingly dark in tone (introducing Christian Bale's character, who proceeds to steal pretty much every scene he's in) before veering off into a good-humoured romp with Hemsworth and Portman both likeable and funny, and a decent amount screen-time for Tessa Thompson's Valkyrie. Oh, and a hilarious turn by Russell Crowe.

There's review (spoilery, so I won't link it) over on Ars Technica that nails one of the genuinely great things about the film — there's a gleeful inventiveness in the visuals that calls to mind Jim Henson... particularly in the early battle alongside the Guardians of the Galaxy.

If you didn't like Ragnarok, I don't imagine you'll like this, and if you don't like Marvel movies in general, I doubt this film will change your mind but, if you're not in either of those groups, there's a lot to like.

TBH, it's almost worth it for the goats alone — which (I've only just discovered) it turns out are canonical.

I have been offering my opinion on this news to my neighbours via the medium of Julian Cope.

(Note: link is appropriate, but somewhat NSFW.)

cant see why the subs are so much worse now than during the pandemic?

Well, the Tories have more-or-less privatised the Post Office, so I can't imagine that's helping. Also, the pandemic isn't over. We're smack in the middle of another wave, it's just the government and their stooges in the media aren't talking about it.

12 year old me thought the ladies of fort neuro were amazing.

Fourteen-year-old me really, really didn't. Disco Rogue? Really? Even early-to-mid-teen me thought that the art was generally amazing on RT, but the stories were often, well... not.

[Vault]

Not going to vote, because I work for several of those, but if Aftershock is on the list, can I respectfully suggest that so should Vault (for a great spread of non-cape books) and also Titan, who probably deserve to be on the list for their excellent Blade Runner titles alone...?

We're up to ten resignations of ministers, party officials and PPSs (possibly more in the half an hour since I last checked), plus Lord Frost, chief Brexit 'negotiator' sticking the knife in on Twitter (and saying he'll have more to say in a Telegraph column tomorrow). Plus MP Andrew Bridgen saying he'll be talking to the 1922 committee about changing the rules on no confidence votes.

Given that Johnson has already announced replacements for most of the resignees, it's clear that they'll have to drag him out of No 10 kicking and screaming.

Which is fine with me.

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.

It was my favourite movie of that year. Serkis should have won an Oscar for that role.

It's a really good movie. I recall actually gasping at both the audacity and the cleverness of the way in which they [spoiler]replayed the original movie's (second?) most famous line.[/spoiler]

[Nina Petrova and the Angels of Death]

Entirely nit-picking here, but the only thing that flagged up as odd was perhaps a font problem between computers, as the logo for Nina Petrova and the Angels of Death seems to have gone a bit wrong

Yeah... some fonts refuse to be embedded in PDFs and need to be converted to outlines to display correctly, There are various effects on the main part of the logo that would require the text to be outlined anyway, but the sub-header, being plain text, was probably (unintentionally) left as a 'live' font* — the upper/lower you're seeing is what's necessary to utilise variant characters in the intended font ('Soviet Bold', I believe).

I've been caught out by this little wrinkle more than once... :-(

*It'll likely have been outlined in the first example you show because rotating text like this can sometimes produce unexpected results if you don't outline it.

Hence me not seeing it, Jim?  Not saying it wasnt there, just I responded to Corinthian without reading all the responses that followed it.  Am I missing something (other than IPs message)?

Not sure how you responded to the message in question without seeing IP's request, given the timestamps. Whatever.

I confess I didnt see IPs sensible appeal to move the debate elsewhere Funt

Before you posted right under it, several hours later?

so saying the purpose of alcohol is to damage one's health seems incorrect.

No, sorry. What do you think intoxication is? It's poisoning. The aim of consuming alcohol (for the most part) is to achieve some degree of intoxication, whether it be gentle buzz, a little loosening of social anxieties, mild stress relief, not-so-mild stress relief, right through to getting throwing-up-blacking-out-and-waking-up-in-a-ditch drunk. All of those scenarios involve poisoning yourself, because that's what alcohol intoxication is, the difference is degree.

As someone who is almost certainly fonder of a drink than they should be, I say this not as some kind of prohibitionist puritan, simply as someone who's tried to make an informed choice about how much of a trade-off I want to make between inevitably shortening my life, and having a few vices that help to make life worth living.

hence the examples I suggested.

*SIGH*. Drinking serves no actual purpose other than to damage your health. As long as you only moderately poison yourself, the effect is a generally-pleasant intoxication without organ failure and death.

Transportation, for example, serves any number of societally important functions and deaths and injury arising are a byproduct of that, rather than the actual point of it.

(Once we hit reliable, fully autonomous vehicles the entire landscape of transport will change. I strongly suspect people will no longer want to drive — you'll just subscribe to a couple of on-demand services and just schedule a ride, or ping one of the services from your phone or watch for impromptu journeys. Hold-outs who want to drive themselves, I imagine, will rapidly be priced out of this habit by insurance premiums.)

And here comes Shark with more ludicrous false equivalence.