2009

03 November

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Comics Grant Morrison Project with BBC Scotland by Nick

Is the rumour being cast about by Bleeding Cool today.

More importantly, however is the revelation that the infamously snappily dressed Scottish comic writer wants to write for Doctor Who but hasn’t been asked yet.

A travesty, in my book. Even though I was a bit cranky about the end of New X-Men.

31 August

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Media Disney buys Marvel by Nick

And the crowd goes wild. And a little bewildered.

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01 June

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Comics Bleeding Cool by Nick

Bleeding Cool: A new comics blog/magazine from muck-raking comics journalist Rich Johnston. Looks impressive, and the roll-call of talent includes the prolific comic writer Warren Ellis.

I think we can finally forgive Johnston for getting the identity of the next Doctor Who so badly wrong (got our hopes up, he did!)

13 April

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Books Amazon goes anti-gay (now updated) by Nick

Update: maybe not anti-gay, but certainly anti-smart.

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29 March

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Culture Cursebird by Nick

Does swear-heavy Twitter aggregation mean a shark has been jumped?

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2008

17 December

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Music Freaky Trigger's Popular by Nick

A blog reviewing the history of UK number one singles (more)

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30 July

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Geek How would Annalee Newitz Reboot Farscape for a Modern Age? by Nick

By loading it up with dreadful clichés and just generally miss the point entirely:

Get rid of the silliness with this plot and make it dark as pitch, with some real gothic horror elements. Crichton is losing his mind and being enslaved by a chip that can’t be removed. Also, let’s give Scorpius a makeover — no more campy leatherboy zombie guy. Instead of making his wormhole technology into his “take over the universe” technology, make the killer app his mind-control chips. He should be a smooth, scary politician who wants to gain power by “changing people’s minds” — literally. That way the Peacekeepers really can keep people peaceful, by chipping them all. The crew of Moya is fighting not just to free Crichton’s mind, but to keep everyone’s minds free.

Also, she wants to make Zhaan a sexy assassin.

Farscape is almost unique (the less said about the miserable Lexx the better) in its delicate balance of horror, sex, aliens, and comedy, so why would it need to be remade into a more depressing version of Battlestar Galatica to “make it relevant” to modern audiences?

03 July

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Criticism More about that whole Boing Boing censorship thing by Nick

I’ve been following — with indecent interest — the Boing Boing OMG censorship! thing, so ably reported on by m’colleague a couple of days ago. (continued)

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31 May

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Comics Freakangels by Nick

I’m correcting a terrible oversight by finally linking to Freakangels, Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield’s new free weekly webcomic. Jump to the beginning with the prelude.

Freakangels is a grittier update of the cozy catastrophe genre of science fiction beloved of English writers such as John Wyndham. In fact, it’s basically a punk revision of The Midwich Cuckoos, exploring what happens after the creepy kids grow up and have destroyed the world. In this scenario, they’re not quite as bad as you’d think. But they have purple eyes instead of bright blue.

Ellis’s script has his usual quota of sex, violence, and swearing, but it’s Duffield’s art that is truly extraordinary in its depiction of a partially drowned future London.

22 May

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New Media Twitter wimps out on Harassment Problems of its users by Nick

Found this, ironically, from a comment on Twitter itself:

Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service

As I found out last month, the reality of Twitter is that they refuse to warn and/or ban people who use their service to “abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users” (to quote their forth line item on their TOS page). What does this mean? In short, anyone can use Twitter to consistently harass you and ruin search results for your identity and Twitter won’t execute any means of community management.

Ariel Waldman’s been experiencing persistent abuse from the same internet fucktard for at least a year, but Twitter is too scared of lawsuits to ban said fucktard.

I love Twitter but this ain’t right, guys. To put it mildy.

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