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Discworld Readthrough Part 1: Early Days.

30/7/2011

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It's now been nearly 30 years since The Colour of Magic was published back in 1983. What started as a fairly simple fantasy spoof has now produced 38 books that have become increasingly complex, thoughtful and serious, with several different sequences covering the adventures of an insanely large number of characters and locations. From cowardly wizzard (sic) Rincewind through to world weary copper Sam Vimes via DEATH himself, Terry Pratchett's world has become one of the richest and well characterized in all fiction.

I first encountered the Discworld in the early 90's, sometime around the period between Men At Arms and Soul Music, thanks to the wonders of Kidderminster library. The series was coming up to it's tenth anniversary at this point and the most recent books on the shelves showed an author pretty much at his peak (it's staggering to think that for most of the late 80's and a large chunk of the 90's he was doing two books a year with no decline in quality) and I very quickly became hooked. The comics and audio tapes helped expose me to the early books as well, and by the time I left school in 1998 I was pretty much on top of having my own copies of all the books up till that point. From The Last Continent that same year I even started buying them in hardback as they came out rather than waiting for the paperbacks, which was a fairly steep increase in what I was paying for an unemployed school kid.


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Close Encounters of the Comic-Con Kind- Paul Review.

16/7/2011

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Ever since I saw Mac and Me, I've dreamed about meeting you!

Sometimes a bad trailer can really put you off a movie. When Paul came out earlier this year the promo spots didn't make it look all that funny, the best gag in the whole thing being the dead bird one. When you factor in that only two thirds of the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy team (Pegg and Frost) were involved it looked like director Edgar Wright was going to be badly missed. Indeed, most of Pegg's work without Wright, barring Star Trek, hasn't been especially good. Has anyone watched Run Fatboy Run yet?

Luckily trailers can be deceptive. The film is a lot more juvenile and sillier than either Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz (and remember those were hardly gritty realistic dramas to start with), and in particular has characters going around swearing for cheap laughs as if the writers (also Pegg and Frost) were teenagers who're still excited by naughty words. However, silly and juvenile can be entertaining if you're in the right mood, and this is still an extremely funny film.



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Doctor Who: 148 Rat Trap [Big Finish Review: Spoilers]

9/7/2011

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Rat Trap closes the second main range trilogy of Doctor Who audios for 2011 by bringing a very primal, visceral fear many of us share right into our ears, rats. In this case, super intelligent rats out to destroy humanity and take over the world. Not something Rent-A-Kill are set up to deal with, so it's lucky the 5th Doctor and chums are on hand to save us from this fiendish result of science gone wrong.


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Dark Moon Rising: Transformers 3 Review. [SPOILERS!]

6/7/2011

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Ah Michael Bay, loud, rude, not afraid of speaking his mind and clearly having the time of his life and not giving a toss what people think of him. A person very easy to dislike, and who has made what may well be the ultimate review proof film series of all time with his three Transformers films. Critics have pretty much slammed and hated all three, but the paying public clearly don't care, flocking to see them in droves.

I've never been a particular fan of Bay, Armageddon annoyed me so much the internet doesn't have enough Picard facepalm pictures, and the least said about Pearl Harbor the better. However, for a director who excels at action scenes and explosions whatever his other flaws he was pretty much born to direct a film based around a principle which boils down to giant robots beating merry hell out of each other as things explode.






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Banner-Tastic.

4/7/2011

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Many thanks to the mighty Cliffjumper for helping me out by providing the Solar Pool with its amazing new banner...

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Carte Blanche: James Bond Arrives, But Will It Be Worth His Returning? [No Major Spoilers]

2/7/2011

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Since the James Bond books were relaunched as a regular ongoing series with Licence Renewed by John Gardner back in 1981 they've suffered mixed fortunes. Initially hugely successful best sellers, by the time Gardner moved on in 1996 after fourteen books and two novelizations sales had fallen badly (though they perhaps oddly remained higher in America) and even his biggest supporters tended to be of the opinion that doing one a year for that long had taken its toll, and the quality had reached pretty much rock bottom. Though personally I'd say there's only two outrageously bad Gardner books, Win Lose or Die and the Goldeneye adaptation.


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