RIP Diana Wynne Jones

She will be missed.

You dance with the grace of a goat, my love,
And you sing soft like a cow on the mountains.

The Raven

Some bugger made this on a tiny budget, and now it's being made into a film with presumably a much bigger one.

Alone In The Dark

If you saw Uwe Boll's attempt to film Alone In The Dark, even if you didn't watch it all the way through like most people, you would likely be aware that it's among the poorer efforts to adapt a video game for the big screen. And there's some competition there.

It was particularly notable for being the grave of my long-standing (admittedly one-sided) love affair with the wonderful Christian Slater, and also for being a film that impressively managed to ignore the fact that to be called 'Alone In The Dark', you really need a character who is alone, or indeed in the dark.

Not mincing around a pack of unconvincingly CG'd devil doggies, or fondling a lady friend inexplicably to the sound of Neneh Cherry and Youssou N'Dour's Seven Seconds.

If you have seen it, or if you have been burned by Mr Boll before, then you may find this article explains a lot.

New Godzilla

You remember the American Godzilla? You remember how shit it was? Well they're having another go. Probably in 3D.

And you remember that Day of the Triffids adaption at Christmas? You remember how shit it was? Well they're having another go. In 3D.

Get the feeling these could go either way?

The Top Ten Hottest Homoerotic True Blood Moments

Ranker have posted their top ten man-on-man True Blood scenes.

And there's certainly plenty to choose from.

Smoking kills

It's true.

So it's come to this.

The Wicker Man sequel, The Wicker Tree, seems to actually be happening, and I am very excited, and in no way remembering various other misguided sequels which dented my respect for some of my favourite films...

Still, at least Christopher Lee's in it. This probably means I'll finally have to get round to reading Cowboys For Christ n'll.

And all we have to worry about is cancelled flights?

This volcano’s gone a bit Susan Cooper.

Lindisfarne – Clear White Light

Is an amazing song.

Firebird & Nightingale

Well on the way to cometing my second draft. Write up of a whole host of scribbled notes is now done, fucker is currently standind at about 93,000 words. Have now got a number of changes to go through, all involving very dull things like capitalisation, fonts, use of italics and multiple names.

Then one that’s complete, I get the joy of working on an agent pack.

Woo.

And, indeed, whoo.

Let’s celebrate with a Lego model of Geordi la Forge.

SFX’s Top 25 Scribbles

SFX have just published their top 25 Science Fiction and Fantasy books. You definitely won’t be surprised by the winner, but there are a few eyebrow raisers. Narnia didn’t do too well, and the absence of Gormenghast, The Dark Is Rising and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is oddness indeed. But it’s a solid list, the right Harry Potter book made it up there (Prisoner of Azkaban) and there’s grim satisfaction to be had noting that His Dark Materials trounced The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Take a look...

New Who.

Hot on the heals of David Tennant still managing to bring a tear to my eye, despite being forced to leave in an embarrassingly bad two parter, comes the BBC trailer for the next series of Dr Who. I'll definitely miss Tennant (and Russell T Davies too for that matter) and I'm a little concerned that Steven Moffat is the man taking over (because while his Who stuff has been ace, I was never a fan of Coupling) but what the hell, I'm officially excited.




And to add extra excitement is the continuing rumour than Neil Gaiman shall be giving us an episode. It may be false, but there's still hope. And this of course leads nicely in to Statuesque, which is rather good, and is now on the internet. I'd feel guilty about sticking this up, but he's already put it on his own blog, so I don't. Enjoy.

That's The Way To Do It.

Mad Men Yourself

Like so.




The charming fellows were even kind enough to provide a date.

Spirit Tracks.

Zelda seems to have popped her clogs.

Possible Roger Rabbit II.

Please, please, please, please, please, please, please...

X-Rated Disney.

Well, not quite, but a bit raunchy. And palpably not actually by Disney.

I don't mind admitting I had a couple of crushes on Disney guys when I was a kid, notably Prince's Philip (Sleeping Beauty) and Eric (The Little Mermaid) respectively. Filthy minded beast I was I still never pictured them quite like this...

Jam Talks About U2.

And his good friend Bongo.

The Thick Of It.

Looking good...

Well... I'm done!

My dissertation is finished, handed it in last week, can be seen here if anybody's actually interested.

Bit of a mixed time otherwise though, the past weeks have included Ian's funerals, and finding out I'm likely to loose my job next month (and then more recently finding out I may not be). On the other hand I did climb a mountain.

I climbed Helvellyn as part of Jamie's stag do, which was a bit of a surprise since as far as I was concerned we were going for a high altitude walk before the drinking commenced. Lovely surprise to find myself climbing a mountain, two hours in to a six hour hike. A perfect time to find I have a problem with heights.

Still, I've been able to catch up on all the other stuff in the past few days, happily the new Terry Pratchett and Bernard Cornwell books both came out pretty much on the day I handed the accursed thing in. Read Unseen Academicals in a weekend, The Burning Land shall soon follow.

Had my proper celebration the weekend just gone, been in London to see Andy's new play and now I'm desperately in need of sleep. because tomorrow all those fun things like learning driving theory, applying for jobs, and finding out where I've left my bloody glasses can begin. Though, and I'm looking forward to this a bit more, I'm also going to start work on the second draft of my book.