Raithe

Eh, you have Mulder's "wait, its not a conspiracy working with Aliens, it's a conspiracy of Humans using Alien tech". But I guess what I mean is, they haven't really modernised any of it yet. Not in a sense of making what is being done or how it's being done. You'd expect more about the use of internet/social media and post 9/11 surveillance. Beyond that single change, its' still the same old conspiracy that was there in the 90's. The Men in Black rolling up in the last five minutes to hoover up evidence.

The X Files seems sadly lacking. It's watchable and competent. But... I mean, it's nice and all to see Anderson and Duchovny together again and slipping into their roles, but it's coming across as a very 90's show rather than post 2010. Where is the update of the conspiracy? Why is it the same tired old stuff that it was when it should be fresh and new and with post 9/11 twists? Why isn't Mulder bemoaning the smart phone and gps tracking? They throw a mention of Uber but nada about personal data and security breaches? There doesn't seem to be any depth to any of the throw away references and by now everybody is used to the 9/11 Truthers, so why isn't Mulder better than this?

It's hitting that point where you have the hype.. but that portion of your head is going "It looks interesting, but I'm not willing to spend that much money on it. I'll wait till it's on sale 5 months down the line". The constant hype of games and then not quite deserving it for one reason or another is definitely reaching a saturation point. I'm not sure if this is because the older you get the more critical you are of things you spend your budget on, or if it is that hype is just getting even sillier.

Its interesting how they've changed the actor playing the ex-husband from the original pre-air pilot. Seeing that slight editing done for each scene he was in. The guy playing Lucifer seems to nail the role quite well, and I get the feeling it might become one to watch more for his dialogue and interaction than anything going on with actual plot lines.

B5 won props from Nasa for the design of the Star Fury, both for the practical engineering in the thought of its design as well as how they portrayed the fighters working in space.

Seriously B5 is worth the long watch. The one thing that you should be aware of, is that it seriously is a multi season arc to the story. The unfortunate side is that when they got told that they wouldn't get the 5th year to wrap things up, the creators and writers struggled to compress two years of story into one season... and then after shooting it they got told they were actually getting a 5th year. So they had to stretch out a few things and do some "post story" consequences and what happens now. The final year had a lot of interesting concepts and a nice approach, but still didn't quite match up to the earlier stuff. The character evolution on so many of the characters are brilliantly done. (key note: G'kar and Londo. Plus, the ambassadorial aides Vir and Lenier). Ivanova and Garibaldi also get a lot of really well delivered lines, with that amusingly sarcastic bite. They do poke fun at themselves a few times, but try to do that serious issues with a foot in the slightly campy-sci-fi area. While the sfx and cgi can be a bit ropey by todays standards, they actually helped establish a lot of the techniques of how to achieve quality sci-fi sfx on a minimal budget that actually got translated later to how films achieved thing. - Random Film/TV production trivia.

The very important questions.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4o6ueieI_o

io9 - Take a peek inside Neil Gaiman's library

It's actually a really good series , with a lot of well done history behind it. You don't actually need to delve into all of it to quite that extreme either.

Heh, Eric Flint has just done a blog post on what he considers the best reading order to use when trying to get into the Ring of Fire series.. I guess that's the perils of creating a long running and multi-threaded series of stories... EricFlint.net : 1632 Series Reading Order

Recycling at it's finest?

And rather then pull back the Bowie thread.. Toby Froud, who was the baby in Labyrinth grew up into a puppeteer, and recently re-enacted the Dance Magic Dance scene he was in... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHO7scjC29Q

Also, for the general callback filmwise.. Elora Danan and Willow reunited..

Because there's always room for Deadpool stuff.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv05IIPRY6Y

When striving to achieve Cosplay accuracy...

Second Chance. I was mildly curious about this, and took the plunge. Watched the first two episodes and they've kind of caught me up. In many ways it seems to be riffing off the old show "Now and Again" in the general premise. Aging man gets killed and someone restores him to life in a body that's superior to normal, and shenanigans ensue. This time around it's an aging and forcibly retired Sherrif (who was corrupt, but never for himself, only to get the bad guys) gets killed because his FBI son is investigating the wrong thing. A private corporation run by a prodigy brother and his sister use Mad Science! to restore him to life in an attempt to develop a cancer cure for the sister. He then promptly gets involved in tracking down his murderers while dealing with the situation, and so on. Tim DeKay turns up as the FBI son (I guess he got used to playing the FBI in White Collar), and the rest of the cast seem fairly competent at what they're doing.