Unsurprisingly this bonk still attracts a sort of background noise of spam. Most of them are along the lines of "This blog is so great. I am totally subscribing naked casino chips party" but I got one in late May that was kinda blunt:
The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesn't disappoint me just as much as this particular one. I mean, Yes, it was my choice to read, however I truly thought you would have something helpful to talk about. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you could fix if you were not too busy looking for attention.
Wow! That's pretty harsh for someone trying to advertise doors. The spam link included on the comment suggested to me that the spammer in question might not speak English, so...
I admit to being outstandingly late with this review. I have nothing but my own laziness to blame.
Having watched it again when it screened on Prime, I'm better disposed towards The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe. It's still not as good as A Christmas Carol - I felt it wasn't quite as polished as the previous Christmas special, but it's at least a great watch, and what more do you need on Christmas? Yes, Steven Moffat apparently wrote this in the middle of the year, but it still manages to be appropriately Christmasy. The fact that it borrows heavily from the Narnia stories is so blatantly telegraphed by the title means I don't feel like I can really complain about it. I knew what I was getting into, after all.
Overall rating: 6 out of ten. More spoilery discussion (at this stage, who hasn't seen it yet?) after the cut.
All too quickly, Doctor Who series 6 comes to an end. With it being split in two, it actually felt like it was on for less time than it actually was. I wonder if Steve Moffat has been happy with the results. This time we have...
"Closing Time", which, well, if you enjoy watching the Doctor and Craig interact, this episode is for you. If not, skip to about ten minutes before the end and you've missed nothing.
I went into "The Wedding of River Song" not being quite sure what to expect, and I'm still not quite sure what I got. I'll go into more spoilery stuff under the cut, but I thought that it worked well in wrapping up some of the plot arcs of this season, and was even fun. Moffat did far better with last year's wrap-up though, and there was such a lot to cover I wish that it had been a two-parter, which might have helped it. The problem with that being that then it and "Let's Kill Hitler" would have meant a full half of the episodes in this half of the season would have been arc episodes.
I'm a little bit behind, since "Closing Time" screened here last Thursday, but NEVER MIND.
"The Girl Who Waited" is perhaps the best episode of the season. This half of the season certainly. Though not without one of two moments of fridge logic, it manages to do a lot with a few sets and some make up. Why is it often the simplest plots which come out the best. Karen Gillan as an older Amy was perfect.
Meanwhile "The God Complex" starts off brilliantly, is atmospheric, and a great concept, but then when the time for explanations come, it sort of falls apart and become silly. Potentially this could have been my favourite episode this year, but that ending... What the heck was that?
Back when I set up my current computer, I partitioned the 250GB hard drive with a 20GB partition for Windows XP and the rest as a separate partition for my data. At the time, I thought it was the best thing to do - since I was planning on installing software on the secondary partition and reserving the system drive for Windows, I didn't expect to need much space. Indeed, the amount of disk used on my system drive (which ended up as H:, because the installer for Windows is not very good at working out how to assign drive letters) has only grown by a little in these past four years or so.
Unfortunately these days software vendors are keener for you to install their software on your system drive. Google Chrome doesn't even seem to give you the option when you install it - it's the system drive or nothing! So the free space on my system drive has been dwindling for some time, and it was starting to impact on Windows' performance.
I've faced this problem before with my PC prior to this one. The system drive on that was likewise 20GB, and while doing some maintenance on it for its current owner, I used Partition Logic to make the system partition bigger. I figured I could just use the same software on this PC as well, so I burned a fresh copy to a CD.
Partition Logic is pretty awesome. Unfortunately it turns out that Partition Logic doesn't support the particular SATA drives which I have in my PC. Darn! So I went hunting on the web to see if I could find another similar tool which would support my drives. After trying one piece of software (In fact, I went through the whole process of installing it and setting it to adjust the partition sizes before it told me it wouldn't proceed unless I paid for it), I found Partition Wizard, which is free for non-commercial use. It was easy to install and use, and I was surprised that it was able to resize the partitions while Windows was still running. It was also very fast, though I had cleared most of the data off the secondary drive that I was shrinking to make room.
So that's my software recommendation! Adjusting partitions is not something you have to do that often, but Partition Wizard makes it fairly painless.
"Let's Kill Hitler" is an episode which seems to be aiming for light entertainment. As a follow up to "A Good Man Goes to War", it's a little unsatisfying. We get some explanation as far as River Song is concerned, and a concept ripped off from a movie which bombed magnificently at the box office.
"Night Terrors", on the other hand, is played dark. Luckily, unlike "Let's Kill Hitler", it's not bogged down by having to be part of a larger series arc, and is more of a standalone story. That said, I can see how it would fit better as part of the first half of the season (ISTR it was swapped with "The Curse of the Black Spot").
Because I was lazy last weekend, and because we're only getting half a season, because the BBC hates us, here's my coverage of the remaining episodes of this half season!
Following on from the season opener are two self-contained stories: The One with the Pirates and The One Written by Neil Gaiman.
"The Curse of the Black Spot", or "Doctor Who in a Bit of Running About on a Boat" lacks a bit of something in that the pirates don't really feel very piratey. It's possible we've been spoiled by Disney and Hollywood in general, but it seems like there should have been a lot more yo ho hoing. Henry Avery, played by Hugh Bonneville, is supposed to be a fearsome pirate captain, and we're told he's killed many men, but he just seems too nice. More about this story and "The Doctor's Wife" under the cut...
So, "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon" is the two-parter opening series 6, and they screened on Prime here in the last couple of weeks. Steven Moffat appears to have decided to do away with the Russell T. Davies series plan, and is now doing his own thing, which is good. However as a season opening, I thought the story lacked something. It seemed to spend half its time busily setting things up for later in the series, so the story had less time to develop its own plot. The first ten minutes of "The Impossible Astronaut" are taken up with a diversion which fails to be resolved by the rest of the story, and in the end we're left with far more questions than answers.
But I guess that's how we get hooked. Spoilers beyond the cut.
Recently John Key took some time off from flying around the country in helicopters so he could organise the NZ government to, well, basically bend over and take it from US copyright trolls. Starting in September, we'll have a law whereby the entertainment industry can accuse someone of copyright violation and have them cut off from the internet, guilty until proven innocent.
At least here in New Zealand it is. So what are the political polls saying at the moment as regards the political mood?
"Well, sure, under National our troops hand Afghan prisoners over to known torturers, our economy is on the verge of collapse, and John Key takes personal rides in Air Force helicopters at the taxpayers expense, but that Phil Goff fellow is a bit boring, so I'm voting National!"
I note that Labour have done little to capitalise on the situation, what with their own petty infighting and midnight antics. If NZ wasn't so set into the 2-party system and we had a third party which wasn't just a one-man party or one-issue party, we might have an alternative.
Back in the 80s, when Trace Hodgson was doing a weekly strip for The Listener, somehow it all went terribly strange and twisted, and we got "Shafts of Strife", a comic strip that felt more like a drug trip than anything. Like many things, it's now available to read on the Internets, courtesy Roger Langridge:
The Hub has just released another commerical for it, and it looks very good. If the writing's as good as it was on Transformers Animated, this should be a great series!
