Another post about stuff I did during the day

Things that tell you you ought to keep you're desk tidier number 1013:

Moving an old copy of Retro Gamer to discover several pieces of unopened mail marked January.


In addition to the aforementioned tidying, I also managed to get some revision done today. It wasn't much, just going through a Computing prelim that I don't think I even have the answers for, but it was a start. I expect to get more done tomorrow, now that I've finished watching Life on Mars. Well, after I've watched the first episode of the sequel series. And the Torchwood episode they showed on BBC 3 tonight.

Speaking of Torchwood, it was pretty good tonight. They toned down the melodrama a bit, which made the characters a whole lot more likeable than usual. There were a few similarities to a certain Star Trek episode (and I'm sure it's been done in other media as well... come to think of it, I remember a plot synopsis for a Torchwood novel that had a similar basis) and an episode of Red Dwarf, of all things.

Still, it was pretty good overall, if you're willing to pave over a rather large plot hole involving the character of Rhys. Which I am, since I rather like the character of Rhys. He was a jerk in the first season (then again, so was everyone else) but now he's been rounded out a bit, it's become clear that he's the only person in Torchwood who doesn't have some kind of glaring mental defect.


What else have I got to talk about...

I said yesterday that I was going to talk more about Assassin's Creed but I ended up not playing it any more so that'll have to wait for now.

I didn't play any more of Mass Effect either, though I did play some more of Link's Crossbow Training and a couple more Advance Wars missions. Crossbow Training is actually a lot of fun, if fairly easy. It certainly fulfils its simple purpose of showing off (and justifying the price of) the Wii Zapper.

Oh, and I've done a bit more writing on the background of The Grey Line. It's funny how just sitting and bashing out ideas on the keyboard can help me solidify them. Maybe it's because I have them all there in one place, rather than drifting separately into my mind from time to time. I've been able to combine a few plotlines so that it hangs together better as a whole and I've sorted out a few problems with the physics.

I'm not going for hard science fiction or anything, but I do want it to be internally consistent. The problem came up because, while I don't want time travel to be a regular or easy thing, I did have one story (from the earlier, more carefree days) that I didn't want to give up but which required a form of time travel.

Also, trying to do more writing about them has made me realise that about half the cast don't actually have names, or at least not full names. That's probably something I should work on.


That's everything I think. Now, if you'll excuse me, my neck has been killing me all day and I deeply desire to rest it upon a pillow. Although that may just make it worse.

We shall see.

On budget laptops, new games and the joy of decades-old television serials

I just came in from school (after a fairly hefty delay due to one of the main roads being closed) to find my Eee PC waiting for me. I'm just going to get something to eat and then set it up. More later.


It all seems very impressive so far but I've been running into some trouble while trying to connect to the wireless network. I've double-checked the password and the settings but it just doesn't do anything. Curious.


Well, after a bit more tinkering, I still haven't got the Wi-Fi to work. It came with one week of free tech support though, so I guess I can try that either tomorrow or at the weekend. Or during the week after that, in fact, since we go on holiday after this Friday. That would be a good thing, if it hadn't just reminded me that immediately after the holidays, my prelims begin.


I haven't got round to playing Mass Effect tonight, even though I said I would. I've been too busy fiddling with the Eee, in addition to my usual routine. I did manage to play Link's Crossbow Training for a while. I'm not entirely convinced that the Wii Zapper is such a brilliant peripheral but it works well with this game, simple as it may be. I haven't done anything beyond the first set of levels yet – the urge to chase high scores is just too great.

The only minor complaint I have is that the sensitivity and alignment settings aren't unique to each Mii profile. An odd design but I can live with it. It'll probably only be Erin and I using it and she seems to like the same settings as I do.

Hold on a sec, I've gotta watch Torchwood. Will I like it this week?


It was all right. A bit melodramatic in places but, well, it's Torchwood so melodrama's pretty much par for the course. Watching a bit of classic Who now, The Time Warrior, the serial which introduced Sarah Jane Smith and the Sontarans. It was one of the ones I got for my birthday, along with Carnival of Monsters (which has fast become one of my favourites) and The Hand of Fear (featuring the last regular appearance of Sarah Jane).

I still have a few more DVDs that I want to get out of the shortlist I made before my birthday. I got some Amazon vouchers for Christmas and that ought to cover a few. I'm planning on buying Life on Mars at some point, probably soon so that I can catch up and watch the sequel series as it happens. Someone said that it starts tomorrow so I'm going to miss the first episode at least but I'll try to record it.

Shows like Life on Mars that have a planned backstory and arc always make Doctor Who seem all the more strange to me. Every modern show almost has to have some kind of extended story between episodes and will usually have characters and plot arcs fleshed out years in advance. Shows like Heroes, Lost and Prison Break are the clearest examples of this (though the amount of long-term planning in some of them is... debatable) but even largely episodic shows have some connection between episodes. Such as the new Who series, for instance.

But getting back to old Who. The Time Warrior was broadcast just over ten years after the start of Doctor Who, from December 1973 to January 1974 and it was the very first serial to name the Doctor's home planet as Gallifrey. It had taken two years for another Time Lord to appear in the show (not counting Susan), five years for the now iconic sonic screwdriver to show up and it was six before the Time Lords were named as such and appeared as a proper civilisation.

In the scale of Doctor Who, it's not very much. But those ten years would be like the entirety of the first two Star Trek series going by without Starfleet being mentioned. It would be more than halfway through the original series before another Vulcan appeared and we wouldn't even know they were called that until Commander Riker grew a beard and told us so*.

I'm not sure why I find that all so fascinating but I do. There's such a history associated with it and a complicated weave of plots and characters far greater than any single series could come up with today, even, or perhaps especially, if it was meticulously planned out.


A couple more things before I go. I'm not sure what the problem is yet but it seems that a couple of other computers, namely the family desktop and my mum's laptop are having difficulty connecting to the wireless network as well as my Eee. It could be related but they're both a wee bit temperamental anyway so I'll probably still put in that call to tech support, assuming it doesn't all fix itself.

Also, I've got the last part of that Maths test tomorrow. It was technically only meant to be for two days but no one's got it finished and it doesn't really count as anything other than practice anyway. I think that with a bit more time I should be able to get through it but it's got me a bit more worried about the prelims now.

Physics might also be a problem. I'll really need to do some revision on that front. Computing, I'm not so bothered about. It should be fairly easy but doing the practice papers is proving to be annoying. The commercially produced ones, as opposed to the actual exams from previous years, are always quite low quality, often having questions that don't make sense or which give far too many or too few marks for a particular answer.

Anyway, I'll deal with them later. By which I mean tomorrow, since the first one is due in on Friday morning. Bah, I'll figure something out.


I keep having problems concluding these posts. It's worst in the ones where I keep darting from topic to topic, such as... well, most of them. Including today's. I'll just have to fall back on my normal, poorly-planned escape route.

So, loathe as I am to admit to being unable to come up with anything more creative, have a nice day.






*If you don't get the reference, find the geekiest person you know and have them explain it, even though you probably won't like the answer. It's nothing bad, just boring.**

**If you think my timing is a little off with these references, then you're probably the kind of person that people will go to if they need it explained.

On Torchwood, Life and the Gaming Community

So I was talking to my dad and my brother about Torchwood, which they each caught some of last night as well. We all agreed that the concept was pretty good but that the execution was flawed. There was some discussion about the quality of the actors, though I happen to think they're all okay, given a decent script. See, for example, any episode of Doctor Who, the show where Jack isn't regularly treated like a emotionally distant nymphomaniac.

The overall consensus was that it was all a bit rubbish but I think I'm going to stick with it – partly because I know it's going to impact on Doctor Who again at some point and partly because, as I said before, I like the concept and want to see if they can actually take it somewhere. If next week's episode is back up to the standard set by last week's (this week's being a bit too violent and melodramatic for my tastes) then I'll know the show stands a good chance.


Anyway, more of that some other time. I would normally just run through my day at this point in the post... so that's what I'll do. Got in more or less on time. Went over the Physics test I did a couple of days ago – managed to get an A but my marks were still a bit lower than I would've liked. It was apparently a hard test though, so I guess that's okay.

Computing proved to be a bit of a problem since I still haven't made much progress with my project, despite reassuring my teacher that I was doing exactly that every time he asked. Technically, it's not working right now, but I'm confident I can fix it fairly easily now that I've figured out the problem. If needs be, I can just remove the feature that's causing the problem. Seems like a bit of a waste but it might just be necessary for the sake of simplicity and speed.

Last three lessons were all taken up with Maths of some sort. I picked up some revision sheets that I had rather foolishly left behind yesterday and spent a while going through them until I was fairly confident. I then sat the test and I reckon I did well enough. I'll probably find out tomorrow.


Okay, that's that little record of my life updated for today. On to something more important and interesting.

You may recall that, a few days ago, I provided a link to a Fox News piece about Mass Effect which not only managed to completely misrepresent the game but also to prove just how incredibly stupid all the people on it were, except for the one reasonable guy who got cut off in the middle of his rebuttal.

Well, EA, parent company of Mass Effect's developer BioWare, has written a letter to Fox specifically addressing all the points raised in the segment and systematically shooting down each repetitive and equally incorrect one. In my opinion, Jeff Brown, the man who wrote it, has taken exactly the right tone – he comes across as calm, as opposed to the sensationalist piece itself, and he doesn't make any demands or accusations.

He basically tells them that they were wrong and that they should know better before politely asking for an apology and some clarification. He makes his point eloquently and presents a far more intelligent and dignified image than the supposed journalists and experts responsible. I rarely find myself in agreement with the yearly-incrementing sports franchise factory that is EA but in this case I have to say that I'm delighted to see them taking a stand.

Yes, they are defending their own product, but they have every right to do that and in doing so they send a clear message that the video games industry and gamers themselves are not the depraved fools that the media often suggest them to be and that, if attacked, they can and will defend themselves on the public stage.

On another note, even ordinary, non-corporate giant gamers are making a stand. Just take a look at the reviews of the so-called expert's book on Amazon.com. She was the one who laughed when asked if she had even played the game she was on national television attacking – I very much doubt that she's laughing now, or that she'll be so eager to make similarly unfounded claims any time soon.

The whole thing makes me proud to call myself a gamer.

Torchwood and Timetabling

Well, I watched the first episode of the new series of Torchwood tonight.

I'm impressed.

The first series went a bit overboard when trying to be “darker and edgier” than Doctor Who and often ended up with unlikable heroes and unsympathetic villains shooting at and having sex with each other for no particular reason, usually to the detriment of the character development and plot.

Right from the start, the new series establishes a lighter tone with the now sans Jack Torchwood team chasing a sports car-driving alien through the streets of Cardiff in their trademark SUV. This isn't played for laughs however as we quickly learn that, despite its humorous appearance and introduction, this alien is armed, dangerous and knowledgeable about the team. This whole section also serves to reintroduce all the characters and give Captain Jack a suitably dramatic entrance.

While some witty banter helped a lot, the thing that really made the Torchwood characters more appealing was that they were actually competent at their jobs. Remember in the first series how they didn't notice a half-converted Cyberman in their own basement for months? None of that here, much to my relief.

The team manage to work together and actually save some lives for once rather than just whining and letting a combination of Jack and random chance fix everything. This makes the characters and their role as defenders of the planet so much more believable than it was before.

You could try to chalk it up to character development – everyone had to grow up while Jack was away or else the world wound have imploded – but really this is how it should have been in the first place. There's been a subtle but hugely important shift in the tone of the show and it's all the better for it.


Nothing much going on today. Spent a lot of time watching Firefly in between lessons, to my great delight. Room changes are still going on so we got put in one of the science labs for Maths today. It was the lab where I had Higher Chemistry and it reminded me that, more or less one year ago, I would've been studying like mad for my Chemisty prelim. And now I barely remember any of it. Strange.

I also currently have a problem facing me – I have no idea where my Physics class is going to be tomorrow morning. I know we've been shunted out of our usual room but I think the room we're going to has changed several times, meaning that the schedules posted around the school are probably wrong.

Normally, I'd just go for safety in numbers and hang around with my classmates until we either found the room or collectively gave up, hoping that any blame would be spread thin. Since I'll be coming in late, presumably after everyone else finds the room, I'm more or less screwed.

I was about to ask Sam to leave me a note of some kind when, for the first time I can ever recall, he decides to go to bed early and logs off. Hopefully, someone in my class or, more likely, my teacher will have the common sense to get me the information somehow if the room has indeed changed.

The Good, the Bad and the Bloody Painful

It's been a long day so I'm going to keep this short.

First of all, my wound seems to be healing up a bit. The pain seems to be a bit milder, which means I've been able to cut back on painkillers, which is good in itself because I generally dislike taking painkillers, as much as they help in this particular situation. Also, one of the side-effects of these painkillers is constipation, which also makes cutting back a nice prospect.

Today was another largely mediocre day at school – there's still the occasional joke (in good taste from my friends and bad from the assholes in the school, also known as “nearly everybody else”) about my joggers and my surgery and trekking around my classes has proven to be a bit of a hassle. Still, I got my Computing project more or less working, simply by overcoming a silly mistake that I should have noticed days ago.

In other news, Billie Piper and her character of Rose Tyler are apparently making a comeback (more here) in the next series of Doctor Who. This should be quite good because, unlike a lot of other characters, Rose and her family had plenty of time and effort put in to develop them and I quite like each of them. And, of course, if the Doctor can finally get some closure then maybe he can quit whining about everything that isn't Rose and start saving the universe in his inimitable happy-go-lucky style again.

It'll be tricky to do, since there was so much emotional investment put into her final scenes and the whole arc was wrapped up so well and tidily that I have a hard time believing that they can pull it off again. Not to mention that with three female companions, at least two of whom are explicitly in love with the Doctor, in the TARDIS at once, there are going to be a lot of ridiculously emotional scenes going on and I don't much like them. I'm not against them as such, it's just that they often seem to jar with the rest of the show.

Still, all I can do is keep an eye out for new information and hope that they manage to pull it off properly.

But this “short” post has, thanks to various angry interruptions, taken almost half an hour, so I reckon that I probably ought to end it now. My final point for today, and one that rather cheered me up, is that I have had an unconditional offer to study Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh next year, not more than a couple of weeks after sending my application away.

Of course, I also got an email telling me that UCAS had just set up a new web tool that let you compare information and ratings for different establishments to help you before you apply. Thanks a load, guys...

My mouse isn't scrolling properly. Again.

Another day passing by far too quickly. I'm fairly sure that I stuffed up at least part of a Maths test but I did manage to get my Computing homework done as well as getting a significant (not exactly large, but significant) chunk of my Computing project completed.

Now all I need to worry about is my Physics project. I'm meant to be doing something on wavelengths and dipole antennas but I really have no idea how or where to go from the basic notes I've got so far. I guess I'll just have to figure it out as I go along.


I really have nothing to say. I just deleted two big paragraphs that I wasn't happy with and I can't be bothered reattempting them. All they said was that, due to a chance that I may be in hospital overnight on Friday, I'll need to write two posts tomorrow and have Skippy upload the second if it looks like I won't be getting out. Also, I'm annoyed that I have to miss school, especially non-uniform day, for the surgery. Just my luck, I guess.


I'll leave with one final thought. Depending on how eloquent and interesting I find it after I've written it, I'll call this either a crappy post or a mini-post.

I've been watching a few crime mystery shows lately, Numb3rs and CSI: New York in particular and, while I like both of these shows, they do sometimes have rather formulaic plots*. Roger Ebert once said (referenced here) that you can often tell who a murderer is in a mystery fiction simply because they have no other reason to be there.

For example, in an early episode of Numb3rs that I watched tonight, I could tell instantly that a character was significant, probably behind it all, because all they did was drop in once or twice to tell their boss, who was being interviewed by the FBI, that they were late for a meeting or needed to sign something.

That may seem fairly insignificant but consider that this role could simply have been ignored. The viewer doesn't need to know what documents need signed. If the boss were late for his meeting, he could simply have looked at his watch before excusing himself. But the writers created this character and the production team hired and paid an actor instead, implying that they had a solid reason to do so.

Sure enough, she was paying for hired hits and had committed some rather nasty (and potentially dangerous) fraud.


Anyway, I'll end this here. And I think it's actually long enough to count as a proper post. Hurray. Now, I could go and watch another episode of Numb3rs or I could go to bed... where's that Rapidshare link?






*Come to think of it, you could say that the whole concept of Numb3rs relies on formulas, if you were really into puns.

Speed Blogging

Okay, bad news, then good news. Bad news is that I still have to do at least some of my Computing homework before I go to bed. Also, I need to do some more Maths revision, including several practice questions. And my toe is infected again. I don't think I've mentioned this here before, but I often fall prone to infection in either of my big toes. It's not a big deal and it mostly goes away if I leave it open to the air and have a few salt foot baths, but it stings like hell when I walk and it's pretty damned inconvenient.

Now, the good news. I've started writing something. I just started thinking about this scene I've had in my head for a good while now and then, all of a sudden, plot elements started clicking into place. I can't promise much, but I do hope to have something to show for it eventually, probably put up on here.

Of course, all that means that I have to get back to work soon so I can only spend about five more minutes on this post. I wonder what I can achieve in five minutes of solid typing.

First up, the new Firefox beta. Keeping up Firefox's well-deserved reputation of being faster and better than Internet Explorer in ever way, the first version 3 beta is out just 13 months after the official launch version 2. Microsoft managed the same feat with Internet Explorer after four years.

There's a whole host of new features being added (as seen here) but you probably won't get to play with any of them. As I said before, this is just the first beta and it's being recommended that no one but experienced testers and web developers play around with it, though there's really nothing stopping you. I just wouldn't recommend it as your primary browser.

Skippy more or less qualifies as a web developer, so I might get him to try running it to see how it works with some of his sites and projects. Personally, I'll wait till something a bit more stable and then try out some of those new features, like the ability to resume downloads, sort my bookmarks in a jillion different ways and... use parental controls. Okay, that last one's not much of a big deal but it should still be awesome.

That's coming up on five minutes now... is their anything else?

I'll take a moment to recommend that you start watching Numb3rs. This show completely passed me by until recently, meaning I now have three seasons worth of episodes to catch up on. And by the time I'm done with that, probably most of the fourth as well. Solving crimes using complex maths may not seem very interesting (it may even sound educational) but, from what I've seen so far, it manages to keep the maths and science believable, unlike certain other shows.

Well, that's my time up. Maybe I'll try some “speed blogging” some other time, since it's been a rather interesting experience. I've got to go do this Computing homework or else my teacher will kill me about, oh, three times. He's already up to twice because I'll be handing it in late and, due to trips (I might talk about that tomorrow but I might not, since it was today and I'll have lost interest in the memories of it by tomorrow) and my surgery, I'll only be having two of my intended five Computing lessons this week.

Don't be surprised if you hear me complaining about my crappy Windows laptop and how I have to do loads of Visual BASIC on it over the next few days.

I had no idea how geeky this entire post was until I re-read it

So, I'm sitting here watching Children in Need while Super Mario Galaxy is sitting downstairs. Why? Simple. A short sketch that may be on sometime in the next hour or two involving both Peter Davison and David Tennant in their roles as their respective Doctors.

Since I don't give a toss about the rest of the Children in Need* and they've just started a segment featuring the Spice Girls, I figure I'll talk a little about my brief experience with Galaxy. So far, I've played it for maybe an hour and a half, tops. And I'm hooked.

It's the first game I've played in a long while when I decide that I'm going to stop, glance at the clock and then do everything in my power to rationalise my decision to grab just one more star. I love this game. It puts a wonderful twist on every trope and formula you've come to expect from the platforming genre, in much the same way as Super Mario 64 did 10 years before it.

I don't know if it'll leave quite as large a stamp on the genre as SM64 did, though. It's not quite that big of a leap from what came before it as that famous wall-jump from 2D to 3D was. It's still an incredible game though and I'd recommend it to anyone who can get their hands on a Wii.

I expect I'll have more to say on the game as a whole once I've played it more. And when I don't have B-list Celebrity Pillock No. 12 crooning away in the background. I don't care about singing or celebrity chefs or dancing news-readers! I want Doctor Who!!!


Okay, just watched Time Crash. Not entirely serious and a few flaws that means that it might be tricky to fit into canon but, hey, timey wimey balls in action.


It's now a few hours later. You know, one of the first things I did after watching Time Crash was discuss it with Sam, one of the few people I know with a knowledge of Doctor Who that's as good as mine, possibly even better.... All right, the only person. Anyway, we were discussing fascinating things, such as how shorting out the time differential between the two incarnations also helps explain Patrick Troughton's aged appearance in The Two Doctors, assuming you don't want to accept the Season 6B theory.

And all the other multi-Doctor specials involved direct intervention by Time Lords, implying that they have a way of circumventing this little anomlay.

Every day, something happens to me to reaffirm my geekiness. It's actually Sam's birthday tomorrow, so I picked up an “I void warranties” t-shirt and some Zelda: Twilight Princess figurines from ThinkGeek and presented them to him at school, where Jimerson also provided him with a Twilight Princess wall-scroll. He seemed to greatly enjoy both and had much fun putting together the figures while he was meant to be doing... well, probably something more school-related.

Every day, something happens to me to reaffirm my friends' geekiness. There are some fairly distinct divides in my year group at school and the lines are drawn roughly along the walls of the common room. The “other” room contains an Xbox and a whole load of people playing FIFA. “My” room contains four consoles from a variety of different decades along with two TVs fitting the same criteria and a whole load of people alternating between Mario Kart, Donkey Kong 64 and co-op Probotector.

There's no real point to any of this ranting. I just find it mildly amusing.

Anyway, my throat's starting to hurt again, as is my head, so that's probably time for me to go to bed. Tomorrow, I'll... wait, I still haven't done last week's woodle, have I? Oh, well. No big deal. It just means I can use the same little Post-It note to remind me.





*Just to clarify, I care about needy children. I just don't like watching celebrities butcher perfectly good songs.

SWAT Kats

So, it's half past 10 at night, I haven't written any of The Grey Line all day, I'm bored out of my skull, I really ought to be doing something interesting for tonight's blog post and my thumbs hurt again. And what am I doing? That's right, downloading old episodes of SWAT Kats.

Damn, I vaguely recall maybe having liked that show as a SWAT Kid (a term I just coined and will likely never use again). It's one of those shows that you don't ever really think of when considering your childhood but as soon as something reminds you of it (or you see it referenced on TV Tropes), little memories and images start coming back. You can't recall the plot but you remember the big cat and the little cat and that they had a jet. When you watch the intro, you recognise the logo and the theme tune rings a bell.

But, though I haven't watched the first episode yet, I doubt anything else will come back to me and sooner or later, I'll forget what's a childhood memory and what I read about on Wikipedia. The first episode is fully downloaded now, so I'm going to go watch that for a little while. I be right back.


Okay. On the one hand, the plot makes no sense whatsoever. On the other hand, they're fighting a dinosaur in a jet plane, in the middle of a city. And that dinosaur is called a Megasaurus Rex. And all this occurs before they get sent back in time, their plane runs out of fuel and they have to eject in order to avoid getting eaten. They then get attacked by flying dinosaurs, while up in the air, in their seats. Fortunately, the chairs are also jet planes and they can simply put on their gas masks and skim over the surface of an active volcano in order to get rid of them. Of course, that's just a last resort. For when the chairs run out of missiles.

By the gods, I love this show.

And, just so you know, they escape from the past by refuelling their jet with gas from the volcano. When this initially doesn't work, T-Bone utters a line that, by all rights, should go down in television history.

“Maybe we should have tried the unleaded volcano.”

I'd write more but... I have to go and watch the next episode. I just have to. I don't care about doing a woodle. And neither should you. Go download the episodes.

Too Much Mystery

I've just finished watching the whole of the first season (volume?) of Heroes. Which, incidentally, is the reason that several of my posts this week have been late and rushed. That show is very, very good.

I'm not going to talk about it at length, since it hasn't finished showing on TV in Britain yet and I don't want to mention any spoilers. And I want to encourage anyone who hasn't seen it to watch it, so no spoilers for them either.

But I do want to talk about that particular genre. A type of show with an ensemble cast, each with their own plot lines which inevitably tie into a complex arc. There are a few minors examples, often cancelled early, but the most prominent ones are Lost, Prison Break and Heroes itself. I'm obviously a fan of Heroes and I watched some of Prison Break on DVD and keep meaning to catch up with it. I watched some of Lost but I really lost track of it and don't much feel like catching up.

You see, in my opinion, Lost fell into the trap of over-complicating things. There were too many questions and not enough answers, to the point where you felt that no conclusion could properly resolve all the mysteries. If you don't quite see what I'm getting at, think of it in terms of some other genre.

Take a whodunit. The author takes you along with the detective as he discovers clues to solve the main mystery, a murder for example. Along the way, smaller mysteries will crop up. Why is character y in the house? What was character x doing on the night of the murder? What was in the hidden safe that the murderer had crowbarred open?

These smaller puzzles are solved simply as a means of getting to the final conclusion. If it turns out that y is here because she is in love with x and that they were together on the night of the murder, then that eliminates them as suspects. Perhaps the open safe was a red herring, installed years before and never used. But that false clue must have been planted by someone who knew about the safe, which means it could only have been the long serving butler.

Now, to put a Lost-style twist on it. Character y is at the house because she is in love with x and x is the father of her child, z. Unfortunately, z has gone missing, y thinks x has him and now y has come to confront x, who has completely forgotten about her due to receiving head injuries in a car accident. This accident was caused by a drunken v (an alcoholic, traumatised by an event in her youth, probably involving her millionaire father), the butler's old sparring partner from a fencing club he frequented as a child living in village A. Incidentally, y's mother comes from village A.

Before reaching the denouement, the detective must unravel all of this, probably meeting at least three minor characters for each main character, each of whom have their own stories that will only be told in the spin-off graphic novels. Eventually, you, the reader, are informed that the butler did it.

You think to yourself “Ah-ha! The butler did it! What an excellent ending!”. Then you start wondering “Wait. What did the butler do?”. It just gets worse from there on in as you realise that the author has put themselves in a position where not even they know what's going on. Even if they do know, they seem to have completely failed to convey the facts to the reader.

Then the novel gets unexpectedly renewed for a second series and it turns out that the butler was a polar bear.

And that is the ultimate pitfall for these kinds of shows. Maintaining the balance between questions and answers, particularly when trying to craft a long-running TV show with many characters and tight continuity, is a delicate and difficult task. Heroes, it seems, has managed it.

And that's all I have to say.

Time Travelling Transformers

(Note: this post contains no time travelling Cybertronians. It contains references to time and Transformers only in separate places. The word "travelling" was added purely because of the belief of the author that alliteration is awesome.)


Ever had a cut that you didn't notice until you saw it and then it started hurting like hell? Well, I've got one on the knuckle of my finger. Still, it could be worse. When I was much younger I once split my head open and, if I remember rightly, didn't start screaming until I put my hand on my head and felt the blood. Of course, once I started...


In my continuing quest to reorder the crap that passes for my possessions (lit: tidying), I came across my Dilbert desk calender. I've got one of these each year for the past few years but for some reason this year, after January, I didn't really bother to take the pages off. Whenever I noticed it lying wherever I had shoved it last, I just didn't have the time to pull off all the pages and I didn't like to just pull out as much as I needed and chuck what I'd missed in the bin, in case I was missing a second's amusement.

Today, I did have the time and I yanked out all the sheets of paper that last from June 29 to today. It's weird how calenders can make you realise that time is passing. If you mark off days on a calender, as so many TV characters love to do, you feel that each one lasts an age. If, like me, you just live from day to day, waiting for nothing special, and you suddenly find yourself holding the summer months in your hands, you begin to wonder where all the time went.

We're two thirds of the way through 2007. I can't quite believe that and I don't exactly know what to make of it.

Which, in retrospect, makes it a bad thing to write about.


I guess I'm in kind of a deep thinking, melancholy mood. It seems that watching too many episodes of Scrapped Princess in one day can do that to you. Still, I suppose I'll just watch some Transformers to cancel it out. No matter how much you start to think, 80s Saturday morning cartoons are sure to beat it out of you.

In unrelated news, I got to play around with a jigsaw today. Well, that's not strictly true. My job was to keep the wood from moving too much as my brother played about with the jigsaw to cut holes in the back of my cabinet, but it was still kind of cool. And now I can stick all my consoles under my TV. Hurray.

But the jigsaw has had to be put away, far out of reach, as my little cousins are coming to stay with us for a few nights. It might be fun but I can't imagine that I'll have much time or energy to write anything substantial. Not that that's ever stopped me, I just feel it's fair to warn you.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go watch some discarded royalty and robots in disguise in the hope that they'll have some sort of crossover in my dreams. No reason why, I just think it'd be funny.


[Later: Just watching episode 2 of Transformers. Silly Autobots, infrared doesn't work that way.]

Too tired, can't spell check...

Busy day. Spent a fair chunk of time travelling to and from Edinburgh and in between I was chasing around two ever-so-slightly-hyperactive small children. Still, when my little cousin asks me for help on Jak and Daxter because I'm "the best gamer I know", it makes the whole thing worth it.


Other than Edinburgh, I've spent much of he day watching TV. It's weird. We left for Edinburgh at around 9 o'clock, got back at half past 4. By the time I'd got everything settled in and had something to eat and drink, checked my webcomics and done my usual computer rigmarole, it was almost time for tea. Then, by the time that was over, Top Gear had started and then it was two episodes of Heroes after that. I've spent more time watching TV than I normally do.

And it's TV that I want to talk about tonight. First, the aforementioned Top Gear special. I'm a big Top Gear fan, as is most of the rest of my family, and while I don't get some of the car stuff, at least not as much as my car-nut brother, I find it both informative and entertaining, a rare combination.

Today's episode featured one of the races of the "car vs. some other vehicle" style that they tend to do once a season. Clarkson and May, in a specialised Toyota Hilux pickup, raced against Hammond and a specialist on a dog sled to the magnetic north pole. It was very odd to watch as the normally light-hearted team, who made jokes even when Hammond had been in the fastest car crash ever while filming, started to feel the pressure of racing to such an important goal and of trying to dwell in such an incredibly harsh environment.

If you didn't catch it, I suggest you try to find a repeat somewhere.


As the frequent visitor to the TV Tropes Wiki and reader of geek culture webcomics that I am, I've been reading about references to Heroes for months. I've glanced at a few things but tried to avoid reading too many theories and facts so that I wouldn't have it wrecked for me when it finally came out over here.

As luck would have it, the show was picked up by the BBC meaning that a) I can watch it in my room and b) there are no adverts. After seeing just the first two episodes, it's fairly safe to say that I'm hooked. I've seen it noted that, in the whole "loads of people in a mystery"/Lost clone genre, there is often the problem that viewers will get bored if you reveal too little but will lose interest if plot points are resolved and that Heroes seems to have acquired just the right balance. I'd have to say I agree.

Anyway, more on that as I see more episodes. I think it really exemplifies why I like Doctor Who: as long as I watch each episode, I can freely browse the internet without having everything spoiled by someone who saw it months ago. It doesn't always work out like that though; I think we got the end of SG-1 before the States did due to a mid-season hiatus or something.

Like I said, busy day, lack of time, etc., so that's all I can be bothered typing. I'm going to bed.