I have the loveliest girlfriend in the history of girlfriends (sorry ladies, but you've ALL been outclassed), who has spent the last week giving me the space I wanted to indulge my inner Sci-Fi geek by watching an entire year of Stargate: Atlantis in one go.
But I wonder how she'd cope if I bought this...10 years worth of Atlantis' parent series, SG1 (and their first direct-to-DVD movie).
"Honeybunch? Sweetie-face? Snuggly-wuggly-buttocks? Can I have the next two and a half months to myself to watch some more TV?" Yeah, she'd love that.
Heh. I'd probably have to space them out much wider anyway, to avoid driving myself mad in front of the TV.
In a similar vein to the last post, I'm now taking my mum to see Wall-E at the cinema tomorrow! She phoned last night and pleaded with me to take her, so I've booked tickets just in my lunch there. She didn't have to plead, for two very good reasons. 1) The blatantly manipulative pitiful-female voice sounds disturbing coming from a 55 year old woman: I really must ask her to stop doing it. 2) I've been wracking my brains for a while now trying to think of a plausible way to see Pixar's latest opus without looking like I'm a sad single guy at the cinema possibly scouting for children to 'befriend'.
Sigh. The perils of being perpetually young at heart in a cynical world.
Mum never gets to see films these days unless I take her. Her friends are all rubbish, and Dad doesn't like cinemas what with being born in the age of chalk-boards and Churchill (The Prime Minister not the Insurance Sales-dog). So it's good that she has me; thankfully her taste in cinema is much the same as mine, our relationship has enough tension in it already, thank you very much Scorpio vs Gemini, without subjecting it to my point-blank refusal to even countenance watching Sex and the City.
In honour of the Coldstream Civic Week I’m not attending, next week - 4th to 10th August - shall be a special week devoted to feeding my inner Sci-Fi nut all the Sci-Fi it can handle. After a few weeks of markedly increased social activity, next week will see me disconnecting telephones, locking the front door and posting vicious, discouraging notices on my front gate and door along the lines of:
“F*** Off, World: My neglected soul and I are cheerfully pretending you don’t exist.” I won't be taking any time off work but I won't be meeting anyone afterwards either.
The other and possibly only legitimate reason for this celebration is the imminent arrival of two pieces of SF media, one of which has been several years in the making:
1) The Hidden Empire series – book 7: The Ashes of Worlds, by Kevin J Anderson.
The keener-eyed among you will have noticed the shiny numeral in that title and yes, just as with those dreadfully written but massively popular books about some spotty wizard and his chums, this number seven is also the last in the series.
Across the six previous novels, one per year, I’ve been through an epic space opera set on a variety of worlds, populated by a diverse cast of interesting characters all threatened by a slightly-clichéd-but-still-fairly-cool collection of aliens, monsters, evil politicians and killer robots. By the end of book six, we’d begun to see the forces of goodness finally standing tall and booting evil squarely in the rump. There are, however, a few loose ends running about - some large, some small - who’s rumps are, as yet, un-booted...
This is MY Harry Potter moment, so I intend to have the tear-eyed fun you all had last year before you found out that Snape kills Dumbledore. (Is it too late to ruin the plot for anyone? Oh, shame...). I won’t be queuing from midnight outside Waterstones – I’m doing what the smarter Potter-ites did and ordering through Amazon – but I will be giggling and squealing like a girl when I tear open the package.
Also en route from Amazon is
2) Stargate Atlantis: Complete Season 4
The second best sci-fi series that I currently collect (BSG = 1, Doctor Who is in 3rd) reaches Season 4 on DVD. I don’t watch it on TV for the simple reason I’m of the firm opinion TV is a dying medium and just isn’t worth shelling out whatever exorbitant price per month Sky are charging these days for another hundred or so channels of moronic garbage that I’ll flick through constantly until I throw the remote away in disgust before finding the few priceless twinkling programming gems I would actually watch. (SKY TV killed British telly, you know, leaving only the shambling corpse-like remnant to stagger along chewing people’s brains away with endless reality shows, shows about making money through whatever medium (houses, entrepeneurial enterprise) and a plethora of aggravating celebrity cooks)
*deepbreath/popsquicktablet*
Yes, so, season three ended - as most series do - on a bit of a cliffhanger, with the Ancient city of Atlantis lost in space having narrowly escaped a deadly energy beam death ray fired at them by a super-powerful colony of humaniform robotic intelligences known as Replicators, who the Atlantis team met and managed to royally irritate several episodes earlier. Proactively bombing their homeworld in the finale (in the name of protection) didn’t do much to help ease tensions either, he says wagging a stern finger at the US military, although that 90-second long shot of the cluster-nuke falling through the atmosphere was sheer CGI sex.
Season four has apparently suffered a little in terms of quality, what with all that Writer’s Strike business that happened in the US (something about them not getting paid for stuff they do on the internet which is identical to the stuff they do for telly but without the cheery wage packet at the end) but I’m looking forward to it anyway, although replacing Dr Weir – the lovely, very capable and very moral civilian leader of Atlantis since the show’s beginning - with Col. Samantha Carter, a refugee from the whoops-just-finished Stargate SG1 is bound to piss me off as much as it did when I first heard about it two years ago.
Her hair is apparently shit for the whole year, too (Ha! Take that, Amanda Tapping!). But I hear they got rid of her as well, now, in Season five for the crime of being dreadfully dull so at least I can take heart from her being a temporary fixture. Oh, but wait! Now that they've killed the Atlantis Doctor with the laughable scottish accent they're replacing him with actress Jewel Staite, known and revered among SF geeks for her portrayal of Kaylee in Joss Whedon's legendary and cruelly cancelled series, Firefly - hurrah!
Anyhoo, it should be great, and even bad SG:A can’t be any worse than the depths of fantastical willy-waving Doctor Who has been mining recently. (Don’t ask – I might tell you...)
Comment written on a news site article about last week's Doctor Who (Source: IO9):
I used to really like Rose [Billie Piper], now she's starting to get that muppet-mouth skeletor look that too many actresses get when they insist on losing too much weight.
Muppet-mouth Skeletor! What an image!
Ps: IO9 is a pretty good website for Sci-fi geeks, by the way. Lots of great, thought-provoking articles. Check it out here
If you aren't bang up to date with the latest episodes of Doctor Who and/or Battlestar Galactica - come back later. I don't want to spoil the fun for anybody else!
Run Rabbit Junk, an awesome piece of background music from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. This next piece is the sublime title theme from the show, entitled Inner Universe. I've rarely heard such beautiful choral female melodies...made even better, IMHO, by fact she's singing in Japanese and I can't understand a word! Enjoy!
As America is wont to do, most new films, cartoons or crazes come at you in pairs. So back in the early 80's when Hasbro unleashed the Transformers upon an unsuspecting world, Tonka in the US took a line of japanese toys (Made by Bandai) and with a little creative re-tooling launched their own story of warring, shape-altering robots, The Gobots.
This series, however, proved to be short lived. The official story is that Hasbro, due to the massive popularity of their toy-line (one that continues today) out-lasted their rivals and eventually bought the GoBots lock, stock and smoking hand-blasters. They then quietly buried the name and all memory of a cheesy-but-fun licensed property.
That's the Official story, anyway. But now, at long last, the true story of Gobotron's demise can be told! Enjoy!
I love this pic because it describes me perfectly. The bint with the weird eyes would fall into a distant second place to that fine series, no matter what she was apparently offering. "Ssssh. Daddy's watching his show."
Sorry folks, lazy post as I'm still not feeling 100% (although a bottle of Banana Bread Beer has helped a little). I also had a horrible day at work. One of those days where everything went wrong in spectacular fashion, stopping me from getting vital tasks done whose deadline was twofive days previous. I managed it, but not without some tears and a period spent gnawing on my keyboard. Thankfully a hasty early exit for another Opticians appointment came to my rescue (my eyes are in good shape but a bit mucus-y. Good to know).
*coughcough* Grrr. Getting fed up with this cold now. Hope your day was a better one!
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[UPDATE] Hmm. Banana Bread beer doesn't half make you fart...even I'M offended by the smell!
10 years worth of Atlantis' parent series, SG1 (and their first direct-to-DVD movie).
Muppet-mouth Skeletor! What an image!
Hope your day was a better one!
WIDGETIZE