Raithe

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.

More of an annoying, smug, self-satisfied personality. Ran a couple of tabloid newspapers. Muckracker. Took the place of Simon Cowell as the "scathing english-guy" on a couple of those talent shows in the States.

I believe the mention of Piers Morgan marks this as more wishful thinking then sarcasm...

Well hey, it was the origin of the term Laconic. Laconia, the area surrounding the city state of Sparta.. (just for the pedantic trivia and unenlightened)/ Also, in 300 when the Persians say "We have enough archers to blot out the sky with our arrows." and the Spartas snappy reply "Good. Then we will fight in the shade.", That's a reputed quote mentioned by Herodotus in his histories. While there might be many historical....inaccuracies in that movie, it was nice to see some nod given... And for those who thought the movie was camp, it could have been worse. A lot of people forget that besides the 300 Spartans, there were a group of Thespians at Thermopylae. Could you imagine how badly campy the movie could have been then ducky?

Amusing, and historical.. At the start of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians sent a message to the Spartans (to roughly paraphrase) "If we win, we will destroy your culture, we will kill the men, we will kill the women, we will kill the children. We will wipe you from the face of the land." The Spartans replied with a single word. In fact, the very first word of the Athenian message. "If."

One thing I stumbled on that I'm not sure how many people are unaware of.. The "AskJJB" youtube clips where JJB answers various questions from the DeusEx boards.. Whether the questions and answer be that interesting or not...

The one thats always made me slightly shocked is walking through the village when school finishes, and all the girls who have "designer" bags or jackets with the playboy bunny on. I know there's expanding your market.. but turning it into designer labels for kids clothes and such seems a bit of a strange thing.

Had a fairly stinking headache land feet first on my forebrain as the afternoon wore on. Went with the steak and kidney pie, took an aspirin, and sprawled back with a couple of episodes of Life on in the background.

But it did mention that the "delay" is really only into April rather then any significant time.. Although a job that pays you to spend 12 months playing Deus Ex, Deus Ex Invisible War, and Project Snowblind? That might push it a touch too far..

Woke from some bizarre Dumas-inspired dream sequences to find the cat making insane amounts of noise while chasing/dragging plastic carrier bags around the hall.. Kind of got started on the day, and most of the christmas decorations are now down and half packed away. Although have to go through the christmas tree lights to trace some faults before it all gets shuffled back up into the attic.. The day is grim, grey, heavy, oppresively overcast and was thrashing down some really heavy rain...although it seems to have paused just for the moment.

Preview: Deus Ex Human Revolution I hadn't realised the extent they went to create a "bible" to work from.. something a tad interesting.

On that note of old films, one of the small "arty" cinemas near here did a Kurosawa festival awhile back... I have to say, watching Yojimbo and the Seven Samurai on the big screen was an experience.

Well I wasn't meaning science fiction only..but there seemed to be a lot of sci-fi examples. Series that the execs thought had enough promise to go beyond a simple pilot .. that were written with long multi-season story-arcs.. and then get cancelled leaving all sorts of hanging questions. If they haven't got enough merit to give more then 13 episodes to.. why bother saying yes to series that have those long arcs?

For the slightly random, but sounding kind of funny : Doctor Who is Marrying Doctor Who's Daughter. Or to be more exact, David Tenant (the tenth Doctor Who) is marrying the daughter of Peter Davison (who was the 5th Doctor Who). And that daughter actually played the "daughter" of Tenant's Doctor Who in the series..

Trying to pace myself through the morning. Really hoping that at some point in this new year my sleep smooths out. For some reason the last few nights I keep finding myself awake, tossing and turning and not getting back to sleep around that 3am to a bit past 4am zone of time. Which is starting to have a cumulative effect on my body clock.

Heh, I tried installing Privateer 2 and Wing Commander 4 on my machine a few months back. Which was.. a kind of silly fun because I didn't set anything up to reduce cpu speed for it. The interactive scenes worked fine..but the moment you were out in space.. everything was a blur of ludicrous speed. Kind of made them unplayable without putting in a chunk of effort to find that workaround.

Not playing directly now, but should in a day or so when it arrives.. but I snagged a copy of Borderlands Game of the Year for

Ah, if you want a sort of wrap up to Dark Angel, they released a couple of books. One of which covers the finale episode and then runs along a bit further. Then there was a 2nd that continued the story to explain a whole lot more and provide some sense of completion.

For the truly random subject... We've moved into a new decade and tv has changed a fair bit in the last one.. but think how many damned good television series there were that networks cancelled by the end of the first series. Usually due to network jitters, or the belief that the series appealed to only a small bracket of the population. I mean, right off the top of my head a bunch jump out at me. The most obvious being Firefly. Cowboys & Hookers in SPAACE! What was not to love? Although when it was first put on the network screwed up its time slotting, so the pilot which introduced the characters and universe was shown as episode 10 or so.... Actually, there was a fair bit of sci-fi related shows that got killed like that.. Threshold - a crisis analyst designing worst case scenarios finds out her "Encounter with Aliens" has come true and gets called in to run the plan and keep it all a secret while dealing with what amounts to alien signals changing human dna... Oddysey 5 - a group of astronauts watch the world destroyed while they're in orbit, encounter a strange alien device and have their minds sent back a few years into their earlier bodies. Leaving them with trying to find out what the hell happened... John Doe - A man wakes up on an island off of Seattle with total amnesia...but then realises he basically has the sum of all human knowledge. Just not who he actually is. While trying to find out who he is and how he knows so much he helps the police and struggles with some secret society. Journeyman - Came across in some ways as a modern version of quantum leap almost. Reporter keeps jumping back in time, and finding out that each jump follows a person whose destiny he needs to change. Thrown in an ex-fiancee believed dead, who is also jumping in time.... On the not-so-sci-fi scale.. Kings - now this was a rather impressive one, a reworking of the story of David into a fictional modern setting. Had some beutiful dialogue. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - funny, witty, and smart. Set around a pseudo SNL style comedy show. And then it was cancelled what seemed like 6 months before 30 Rock came out... Apparently the network decided Studio 60 whilst appealing to the university educated, higher income bracket wasn't a wide enough audience to keep making it. The Unusuals - came across as "MASH in a police station". The police precinct where all the oddball cops and strange screwups got posted. Eleventh Hour - scientific crime procedural .... sort of. American remake of an English mini-series. But the thing that got me, was that the majority of those shows also had an arcing storyline... Which left cliffhangers unanswered right when the series ended.. Dang networks.

Went through a fairly pleasant and uneventful bank holiday to start the week off and now suddenly having a major down in mood for no real reason that I can figure out. Pondering on whether to do some major retail therapy and blow some savings on some random goodies for my birthday later in the month before vat jumps to 20%.

Got caught with a random tv film of the season "Santa Suit". What caught me by surprise is that Kevin Sorbo, when he isn't having fun hamming it up in space-opera/mythic fantasy style roles, is actually quite a damned good actor. I mean, he's normally entertaining in those sorts of roles, but seeing him play something totally straight, fairly restrained and with the wide emotional range... I don't know why but I never really expected that.

Had a nice little New Years Eve celebration.. round a friends who was holding a small party. Since his gf is from Mexico and over here at working on her post-doc , her mother was visiting as well.. they made up a pinata for the party. So slightly drunk English people.. using a japanese bokken..to hit a mexican pinata while blindfolded... And I was rather surprised to see just how many chinese lanterns were being sent up... Although the whole gathering around the firepit with blazing fire going.. and the assorted cuban/mexican/dominican cigars he keeps picking up cheap while he's visiting over there being passed around while everyone enjoys slow drinks of port was quite nice. Then ending the evening with a few tequilla shots. Still, took yesterday at a slow and steady pace. I was surprised to wake up none the worse for wear apart from a generally dry mouth. Still poking around looking at replacement tvs... It's kind of surprising to see simple things like a tv with 100Hz setting jump up the price by

Wandering around in Bully Scholarship Edition... I'll admit some of the controls for pc are a bit gimpy to get to grips with at first but not too bad. Some of the classroom mini-games are a bit irritating, but the writing and dialogue for the different cliques is spot-on.

That's what Deus Ex gives you.. But Shadowrun can have some very funky atmospheres and moods.. and really highlighted the phrase "Never deal with a Dragon."