The Half-Pint Prince

Geek TV what I like:

IN VARIOUS STAGES OF WATCHING:

Chuck: (2 EPISODES)

I like Chuck. I like the fact that every animate object in the show is a spy. I like that every inanimate object in the show will eventually explode. I like that they occassionally mix the two. I like that it was made with same witty dialogue of the OC but with more over arching focus. I like the fact that Adam Baldwin is exactly the same character here as well on Firefly. I’ve only seen two episodes of this because TV3 appears to have cut it, which was little annoying when they didn’t mention that they had. On Fix it Friday, the Ray Darcy show crew managed to get a statement that Chuck might come back later this year. I’ll assume that its gone for good there, which is unfortunate, but it was nice to know its a good show, so I’ll keep an eye out for it elsewhere. If anything, I’d be more vaguely annoyed at the nbc site, which admirably gives out the episodes after release, but not to an outside the IP address outside the US. I see why people would use onion sites, but that seems fairly illegal just to see a tv show. Sarah Connor Chronicles was available from this IP, which is another show I hope TV3 brings back after the show gets up and running in the states.

Big Bang Theory:

I like Big Bang Theory. It has a premise that usually tweaked me a tad when it was used in the nineties: Hot girl – nerdy guys. Now that nerd culture has diversified, in-fought, reunited, in-fought again, flamed each other, then all ganged up to fight the Pot-heads, Ringers, Narutards and Gundumbasses, they are still caricatures, but they are fun caricatures. Also, the role of penny isn’t necessarily a straight man, given that she has this fashion obsessed / trailer park Mid-Western thing going on. I like that I got all the time machine jokes instantaneously. I like that I already knew all of Sheldon’s Supermarket Facts. I like that I see where the conflicts are going to come from. I like what I don’t know yet.

Others:

Pushing Daisies: Its like Dr. Seuss married Tim Burton and they had a child of unlimited budget and fabulous set design.

Dr. Who: Sometimes I watch it for the foreshadowing, sometimes I watch it in spite of it. I like the comedian-monster-villains.

Stuff I’d like to see eventually:

Dead Like Me: It was apparently good, apparently deep, apparently had Jewel Staite for an episode, and it apparently got cancelled before its time; a combination I can trust. I want to see ‘death by space station toilet seat’.

This Battle Star Galactica of which many speak, but of which I do not know. The BBC apparently paid for half of it, so maybe we’ll see it here, some day. Same with the Dresden Files.

Stuff I may get time to give another chance:

Heroes Season 2 was fairly annoying at times, with characters with Irish accents I’ve never heard in Ireland, breaking the stereotype by having them be thieves who paint paintings wistfully and run bars. Writer’s strike has broken my heart so much. Heroes season 3 looks impressive, which promos are supposed to – lets hope they can leave the Irish out of it.

By the gods.

 

Next week: anime.

Amazon Order of the Flight of the Phoenix

Book Review: Reviewing my options, I’ll flick through the Civil War again, and get it or, more probably, get another Hellboy. I want to see how many million crossover references it has that I’ll never get.

Gregg Taylor of Red Panda Adventures has released a novel called Tales of the Crime Cabal. Looks interesting, and he released a reading of the first few chapters online. Of course, he went and reminded me I’m not Canadian; as with many podcast promotions, the personalisation of popularity involves pre-order preparation. As standard, he’s offered the possibility of ordering early, getting your copy sent to him, he sending a signed copy to you, which is amiable in North America, but otherwise costs more than the reasonably priced book in shipping.

Webcomics: A lot of plot based stuff at the moment. Reallifecomics, even. Very strange. When originally starting reading Greg Dean’s stuff, I generally preferred the plot based stuff, and kinda enjoyed the singular stuff. Now, possibly because I’m getting more of the references in the once-off stuff, and because I prefer the stories referring to his actual reality, even vaguely, that this very palpably separate stories about space stations and lost universes. I like it all, of course, but I’m always conscious of these shifts in story. Generally its brief Tony-Dave story, then back to the regular stuff. Hard to say whether its just something he plays with for fans, or whether he hasn’t quite committed to but would like to do.

After all, he hasn’t only tried to vary the story. Dean has done a Canadian lang comic, a Forge comic spin-off and attempted to ‘fix’ all the old comics. He has a five-year old’s attention span, which is what I love about his writing. Thankfully, he knows to delegate his transcription (making the comic searchable) and the translation of the comic into german to teams of fervid volunteers.

Besides, Tony can’t be dead. He made a carbon nanotube cable (one of the few conceivable solutions to the space elevator mass vs. weight problem) for his Clarkesian space elevator. People like that don’t get shot with desert eagle….. A rail gun perhaps. Not a desert eagle. Though getting shot by your alternate self of opposing gender isn’t a bad way to go. Thats how I got rid of Flannelcratherine.

With Applegeeks, they seem to be tying up some loose ends and introducing a few new characters. More importantly, Hawk has drawn attention to the fact that the . . .

“The Mars Phoenix rover is the first recorded instance in history of a Space Pirate. I’m tipping my hat to you, NASA! We’re one step closer to the dream.”

Apparently NASA had the Phoenix rover impersonate a pirate on its twitter. Bob bless September 19th.

Ctrl Alt Del hasn’t done any game or chef brian based comics in a bit. Very relationshippy. Lotta anger, lotta scheming, lotta recurring characters. It’ll all end in tears you know. Quite. Rather.

Also, Zeke can’t be dead. Maybe he’ll get upgraded, but he can’t be dead. I miss penguin man.

And thats 500 words.

Giblets of Fire

Book Update: Got a 25 euro voucher for easons. I’m gonna get the recently released Pratchett’s Nation, but the other part may be:

1. Something later in one of the series mentioned in an earlier post

OR

2. Mark Millar’s Civil War. I haven’t read any Marvel so its like an Elseworld’s story for me.

Anybody whose read any Civil War, please tell me yea or nay.

I was worried about the Large Hadron Collider there for a bit, but I’m reliably informed (by someone who did a science in his first year arts) that it won’t fire up fully for four years.

Otherwise, it’ll be great. Finally a technology so fantastic that we can finally get a superhero origin story out of it out of it.

*the rest of this post was mysteriously erased by black hole related emissions, moments before the superhero Higgs and his sidekick-cum-nemesis Bosun were created in Geneva.*

Prisoner of Azerbaijan: Dog’s Body

Having never typed ‘dog lover’ into the search bar of a Google Image Search with the parental controls removed, I don’t know what I would see, merely that I’d regret it. However, apart from the bestial of beastiality, dog lover has connotations of late that are quite disturbing.

As previous posts have mentioned, I am a holder of many dogs, and I accept all their inbred dramas and instincts. I have much reason to wish they did differently than they do sometimes, but I bear with it, just as I hope I would bear with it if had an actual bear, in using it for good, not evil.

There are some dog lovers who are somewhat different. Take the Rhodesian Ridgeback. This breed is defined by its ridge; if it doesn’t have it, it isn’t a purebred, despite its stock and health.Apparently, one in twenty puppies of this breed are born without the ridge, and if they are born in the kennel of a top dog Crufts dog breeder, its likely that they’ll be put down. The vast majority of vets will not do this, so these dogs, for nothing more than a lack of a trait, will be taken to an ‘old’ vet to be put down.

The most reproachable part of this whole operation is the fact that the ‘ridge’ of the Ridgeback has been recognised as actually being a form of canine spine abifida for the past twenty years.

One breeder who did this claimed that it better than the dog ‘falling into the hands of the dog fighting people’.

Another term, ‘pug ugly’, is a fairly recent creation. The second part is obvious; the breed has a flatter face than a short-sighted car-chasing cat. But pictures from the 1700s reveal it originally to be a sleek, healthy creature. The modern pug is not only sufering a radical change in exterior, but it has been bred to look so. And, as a result, the breed at large is riddled with respitory, bone and organ problems. Individual dogs with these problems, many with neural pain, are not only allowed to breed, but encouraged to do so.

Dog breeders aren’t alone in this. As we all know from ‘Over the Hedge’, there are breeds of cats that can barely breathe, never mind smell.

One particular cat ‘breeder’ has managed to breed cats with incredibly weak forelegs, so they need to rest on their back legs making them look, according to the breeder, ‘like squirrels’.

The problem I have with things is partially people designing things to look good rather than work well. The other part is the concept of ‘good breeding’, a scale which I would no doubt rate owly, what with not looking good but having a robust constitution and power to move you.

Dog gonnit!

Webcomic Update:

The Big Difference Between Men and Women of Barkin’ Madde Studios & Mr. Mephisto Inc is going on a one-year (at least) hiatus, to be replaced by Sketchbook Autopsy.

A happy return is heralded to Conor Lynch’s Comics with the creation of The Chuffer and its current title comic, ‘Brian and his Bra (34 C, if you must know)’. Next issue: Brian and his bra On Safari.