Raithe

I miss you, Kings. Ian Mcshane, Eamonn Walker, and a complex, realistic storyline. Great show, unfortunately too expensive and cerebral for mainstream. Plus the advertisements basically avoided the biblical connection that would have drawn in viewers. I never saw the advertisments.. I'm kind of amazed at that though... how can you advertise the story of David..and miss all biblical allusion?? Although, I guess if you look at it... how much of the old testament is basically sex, death, politics, murder, warfare and things that were the soap opera stories of the BC world?

Being quite a grey day weatherwise, but pushing on and trying to keep the mojo running. The new tv arrived this morning so got that unpacked and set up..including hooking it into the router so it can access things like youtube and bbc iplayer... also apparently easy access for computer media filesharing. Of course, the trouble is that someone put on an episode of Planet Earth to see what it's like on that screen... So as I'm trying to work at the pc and actually produce something intelligent in the way of work.... I keep getting flashes of gorgeous views and impressive photography from across the room.

And Olivia Wilde is set to appear in a buncha films this year... Apparently she got a lot of work in during that sabattical from "House"... And on general film news ; With MGM emerging from bankruptcy, they've announced there's going to be a new Bond film coming in 2012... With the potential of doing something special with it being 50 years since Dr No was released.

I've always tried to be wary of judging a series too harshly the first season (as long as the actual premise is interesting). Ever since Highlander the tv series, the first season of which was really quite ropey, but once they all figured out what they were doing, they started doing some quite good episodes. So if I like the key ideas of a series I'm willing to overlook certain elements for a few episodes and see how things settle down.

What's kind of scary is it's already gotten a sequel in the works. Of course, the original Clash of the Titans had an amazing cast playing the gods.. and they were terrible. It was amazingly bad. I guess the remake decided to follow in that tradition... Although I missed the Harryhausen stop-motion animation.... On the upscale, Gemma Arterton was fairly decent. And always nice to look at. Edit: And for the trivia - Worthington's sandals are Nike trainers with toes painted on them; he didn't wear sandals because he needed shoes to perform the stunts well.

If you "died" in the dream, you ended up in limbo.. which was basically the subconscious area of coma-ville. The area that's really deep, deep down. So the time difference was vastly greater. Which meant that because the japanese guy had been "killed" on the one dream layer, his mind got cast into limbo.. and in the time it took for Leo's character to get there to show him the way back.. the japanese guy 'lived' another 50 years or so in limbo.. hence, being a really old japanese guy. Depending on how you look at it, the dead wife was just the subconscious reflection of Leo's guilt over how things happened. Or an "echo" of his wife left from their time in limbo together.

Well the pilot basically put Summer Glau in that role of mystery hacker/information specialist. Combining DC's Oracle and the old Dark Angel "Eyes Only" together... Plus the obvious "money" angle. From what I saw I'm getting a feeling she's going to have a serious connection to the civilian identity of Chess. Young enough to be a daughter of his perhaps? Something to add that sense of cliched twist to it all. The circus folk look to make an interesting area for potential background stories/hooks. And there was no explanation for why Chess' eyes go reptile style vertical slits... When he was in super-villain costume you could imagine flashy contact lenses for the effect, but when they briefly showed when he was in CEO clothing...

Most of the fantasy settings where nigh immortal elves linger with childhoods of 40-90 years.. generally have them read the 10-15 year old stage similar to normal "mortals" and then get stuck as teenagers for many decades.. Which is a bit different from spending years and years as the equivalent of a 5 year old. Throw in the low rate of birth, and they generally establish a sense of the whole community adores/looks out for any children within it. Thus adding a certain sense of protectiveness to looking after the young. Besides, look how we treat our young. Even if they're physically capable, we generally don't act as if they're likely to be emotionally capable for years... For a race that is able to live millenia, I'd expect that attitude to be really compounded.

Of course, thinking about some of these old shows that I really enjoyed right up until they got cancelled caused me to poke around.. Now I've picked up both the Threshold and Odyssey 5 dvd sets at fairly inexpensive prices. Just have to figure out the right time/mood to watch a few episodes in. Both of which have several episodes included in the dvd sets that were never shown on network tv because of cancellation. Although John Doe has yet to make an appearance in dvd country..

Well the guy who tried holding up a gun store in texas was stopped because the majority of customers were carrying...

I initially liked GTA IV once I got over the irritation of installing it, the rockstar social club and the games for windows live crud.....but within a few hours it took a downturn. It just didn't seem to have the snappy fun of earlier GTA games. All in all, I had a helluva lot more fun with Saints Row 2 then I had with GTA IV.

Just installing Bordlands Game of the Year Edition.. Of course, I have no idea when I'll be able to actually sit down and play some of it...

Gamespots Latest 'exclusive' Dev Diary "She fills her day making poisons. And cake. Tell me you didn't try the cake."

The correct spelling is p****. She is married to another soldier.....

To totally change the topic (hopefully for the better), after this mornings rather rough start, I've managed a rather pleasant evening. A friend wanted to do a movie night.. So watched the film "Red" in the conservatory, smoking some cuban cigars he brought back from his last trip to south america and enjoying some croft port. An entertaining film and pleasantly buzzed from the booze. Edit: What's kind of annoying is that I'm buzzed enough to consider changing the order for the family tv to the 46 inch even though its a couple of hundred quid more... but not buzzed enough to not recognise that I'm considering it mostly due to the alcohol rather then any practical reason.

One of those random wanders.. Comic Relief version of "I'm Gonna Be (500 miles)". I'd never noticed Osama Bin Laden was included on the list of celebrities in the audience...

Just finished the first draft of the first professional / academic type of short paper I've written in many a year. Realising I need to tighten up my standards a bit... and my warped humour is pondering just how many "buzz" words I could try fitting in it if I really made the effort.. How many excuses do you get to throw around terms like "visualisation" "transformative processes" and such... For the random news type of thing.. Combat Barbie to return to Afghanistan Last year's "Miss England" is back in the army and all set for a return to duty... Now I've known a few squaddies, and while she's been decorated for bravery, how much schtick is she going to deal with for being Miss England?

I keep sitting down and doing an hour of Fear 2 here and there. Can't seem to really get into a long block of time on it. Not sure if it's because I encountered all those atmosphere building tricks in the original, but they don't seem to be working on this one.. rather then building a moody/scary atmosphere I'm finding the "hallucination" sequences more annoying then anything else..

Kept waking up throughout the night in sweats..very little sleep had. So morning arrived and I crawled out of bed feeling shattered and generally icky. Still, a cup of tea always helps. But guh, kicking my brain into order is taking some effort.

My apologies.. I dropped an n without thinking...

Some of the family have been having brushes with flu the past week..and today it seems it's decided to land on me. Drinking a hot cup of hot tea and trying to ignore it for the moment, hoping it doesn't go full-blown. Hm, and for the random trivia for the day.. "jerky" (as in the food type) is the single word in the English language..that originally comes from Quechuan spoken in South America. Hm, and for the other slightly random, but kind of humerous.. The Fins invented the "molotov ****tail". Named after the petrol bombs they used against the Russians. Named after the Russian minister who kept assuring the world that the cluster bombs they were dropping on the fins were in fact "food parcels". So the Fins turned it into a joke with "here's a ****tail to go with your breadbasket"...

I could swear I'd seen something mention that for the release of Mass Effect 2 on the ps3 they'd actually used the engine tweaked for ME3... But now it escapes me. Of course it could be a false memory but there's something niggling away about it...

Tis been an exceptionally monochrome morning here. Oppressive cloud cover, dark, grey, generally coating everything in that sort of colour scheme. Still, going with a nice cup of tea to keep the spirits up. Just finished watching a quirky National Geographic program about the world's largest cave discovered in Vietnam. The scale of the thing was quite impressive..especially when the camera was focused on one scientist..then starts pulling back..and back..and back.. until he's just this dot about 4 pixels high and you can still only just make out a cave wall to one side. A single cave that runs about 5 km long.. has a couple of fractures in the roof where its letting light in from the surface..and at 400 m below the ground, rainforest is growing inside the cave... that looked a little freaky. Interesting, but a little freaky. Hm, and having the temptation of a 1TB usb powered external harddrive for just over

Ultramarines - computer animated film, based on a rookie squad of Ultramarines on their first actual combat drop when an Imperial Shrine World sends out a distress call. Throw in the usual Warhammer 40k gothic horror, a host of Imperial Iron Fists protecting a sacred relic on a dustbowl planet, Black Legion Chaos Marines, and a Demon... Oh, and a batch of UK names doing the voices.. Terence Stamp, Sean Pertwee, John Hurt... All in all, the 40K world details, the lore..that's in there, the voice acting is as expected from such generally superb, the story isn't exactly original.. and the animation around the battle sequences is a touch sucky. And yeah, it doesn't feel like genetically engineered supersoldiers. They come across as pretty much religious indoctrinated "normals" wearing armour with big shoulderpads.... But if you like 40k, it's probably worth the 70-80 minutes to watch it.