Battlestar Galactica may be coming to an end, but season 3 of Transformers Animated is just starting in the US this weekend with a three-parter titled TransWarped! (URL may contain spoilers!) It's rumoured that this season will be the last, but Hasbro refused to confirm or deny it in the recent Q&A. I'm hoping this means they haven't decided yet and are going to see how season 3 does....
Derrick Wyatt made a teaser post last week and supplied the Transformers Wiki with an image of one of the background characters, Mainframe. Continuing Animated's run of borrowing characters from all places in TF history, as well as the aforementioned Action Master, there's new versions of Strika (originally from Beast Machines) and Blackout (from the recent movie).
I'm holding out for an Animated version of Sky-Byte. What's more awesome than a Transformer who turns into a flying shark and writes haikus?
I want to see a movie for the first time since September on Friday night, and that movie was the long-awaited Watchmen. Having read the original book, I was keen to look out and see how much they'd changed it for the big screen. The answer was "quite a lot but not as much as I expected". The rest of the production was so perfect that I could accept the rest of the changes. The casting was particularly good, with the actors being, for the most part, a perfect match for their characters. Also, unexpected Garry Chalk. Cool!
Between seasons 2 and 3 of the original Transformers cartoon, the show lept some 20 years ahead and therefore took place in the futuristic year of 2006. Since 2006 was The Future, humans had spaceships and space stations. Most of the stories tended to be set on planets other than Earth, only a few depicted Future Earth, and fewer still showed vehicles.
Only two episodes, "Only Human" and "The Burden Hardest to Bear", made an attempt to depict what the makers thought cars might look like in 2006. Naturally their guesses were a bit far off...
In "The Burden Hardest to Bear", Marissa Faireborn drives this car, which more resembles some kind of dodgem.
This single-seater features gull-wing doors, a roof-mounted laser turret (presumably it's an Earth Defense Command staff car), what appears to be jet engine sized exhausts, and an indeterminate number of wheels. Mind your head getting out.
I've recently been format shifting my music collection, because it's easier to carry a USB drive full of ogg vorbis files to work to listen to than it is to carry a CD-wallet full of discs. I've been wondering how other people deal with albums where the artist's been a bit unorthodox in the way they've presented the music.
For instance, with albums where there are "hidden tracks" with a few minutes of silence before the music starts, such as Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill, I've been trimming off the dead air. Mike Oldfield's 1989 album Earth Moving inexplicibly has the last two songs as one track, so I carefully split them into two ogg files.
Should I feel guilty about interfering with the artistic vision of the composer? This is the sort of question which haunts me late at night.
Before you all say "We know", I'll clarify that it's broken on my PC. Although it will happy load web pages off my hard drive, give it a URL and it sits there forever saying "Connecting".
Running up "Diagnose Connection Problems" from IE's tools menu merely reports that "Windows didn't detect any problems with your internet connection". Turning off Windows firewall doesn't make any difference, and I even tried adding IE to the list of exceptions. The other firewall which might affect it is on the router, but other PCs on the network have no trouble with IE. It could be AVG, which has several components which sit between browser and internet such as LinkScanner, though disabling everything I can in that doesn't seem to have made a difference...
However rebooting fixes the problem, so apparently some program I'm starting in the normal course of things is causing problems with IE. A mystery!
You can see a higher-resolution version at Trailer Addict. It looks like it's going to be a lot of fun. What kind of a plot it'll have is still pretty much a mystery, of course, but people are going to be going along to see giant robots hitting each other anyway. One might hope that this time they keep the cameras a bit steadier, and perhaps not have any references to masturbation, thanks very much.
There's also a G.I. Joe trailer, which is notable for having Christopher Eccleston being quite prominent. I was never into G.I. Joe myself, but I might go and see that one anyway...
Is there a word for when you have so much music that you've lost track of what you actually own? I was looking through my CDs last night and discovered I had a copy of "Once More, With Feeling", the soundtrack to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode of the same name.
I'd completely forgotten I had it, and I still can't remember when or where I bought it. Being it came out in 2002, it could have been during one of my trips over to the states for the Gallifrey One convention, or I might have ordered it online.
I'm now wondering what other CDs I've bought, put away and forgotten about...
Scientists have found that space time may not, in fact, be continuous, but composed of pixels 10-35 metres in size, some hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton.
It occurs that if we can determine the exact size of the universe, we can then calculate its resolution.
As previously mentioned, I've been watching the Generation 1 Transformers cartoons which Japan produced after the American series wrapped. Lately I finally got around to watching Transformers: Victory, the last of these.
Representing the Autobots are Star Saber and his team of Brainmasters. There's an obligatory human kid named Jean whom Star Saber has legally adopted, and his annoying Wheelie-esque Autobot friend Holi.
On the Decepticon side are the improbably-named Deathsaurus and his Breastforce (they have chest plates which turn into animals). They're "aided" by the Dinoforce who are mostly around as comic relief.
It's... not really a deep series. The Decepticons turn up somewhere, cause trouble, and are fought off by the Autobots. It's only towards the end of the series that things begin to get interesting. It's perhaps telling that at least a dozen of the original episodes were clips episodes (The Madman release doesn't include them).
Something that is included on the DVD set is the one and only episode of Transformers: Zone, which barely has time to introduce a bunch of new characters, including new Autobot leader Dai Atlas, before there's an extended fight scene and it ends. I have to wonder why they bothered. Oh, yeah.
Also among the stuff I've watched recently: the 2002 series Transformers: Armada. TV2 either didn't play the whole series or I missed the end of it, as I hadn't previously seen the last nine episodes or so. Most of Armada is taken up with relatively self-contained episodes concerning the search for Mini-Cons, smaller Transformers which link with the larger ones to give them extra power. The last dozen or so are taken up with one long storyline, which sets the scene for the later series Transformers: Energon, which is more or less one epic 51 episode storyline.
Despite the obvious problems they seemed to have translating the show from Japanese (there are very few occasions where Mini-Cons are referred to by the correct names, for instance, and often the dialogue doesn't quite match the visuals) there are some pretty good character arcs and it was entertaining most of the time. It's interesting to see the difference in story telling that some 13 years made.
When I were a lad, we had this Soda Stream device, which you jammed a bottle into and pressed a button, and whatever was in the bottle would become carbonated. Then you'd stick some of the concentrated syrup into the bottle and get an instant soft drink. Two of the syrup flavours you could get were "monster" themed, and were blue and green, though I don't remember anything about them other than that. This story is almost completely irrelevant to this post but what the hey?
At almost $4 a can, I probably won't be trying Monster Energy again. OK, so it does come in a 473ml can, though the text on the side says "2 servings per can", I have to wonder how many people would buy a can and then only consume half of it. There isn't a precise figure printed on it for the amount of caffeine in it either - it just says "Energy blend" 2500mg (250ml cans usually have about 80mg of caffeine) and lists the caffeine along with a bunch of other ingredients included in said blend. It also says "Limit 3 cans per day", which is surprisingly high given the size of the can.
It has the usual vaguely-caramel energy drink taste, but is actually smoother as stated on the can. Not nearly as tangy as Red Bull, for instance. If they halved the can size (and price) I'd recommend it.
A while back I wrote about a fan-designed Police Box Transformer. I was unaware at the time that there was actually a canonical (in Transformers canon anyway) Doctor Who related Transformer. In a 1989 UK comic drawn by Lee Sullivan (who's not unknown in Doctor Who circles, having drawn Abslom Daak strips for DWM), one of the ruling Decepticon triumvirate, Octus, is quite clearly meant to transform into a Dalek.
Sadly Octus has never had a toy, but considering we've recently had the Transformers toyline cross-over with Marvel's Avengers, Star Wars, and Mickey Mouse of all things, I think it's time for Hasbro and the BBC to strike up a deal and bring us a toy version.
Although I'm not entirely sure how the transformation would work!
I remember there was a version of this cartoon which appeared in RTP around the same time, featuring that 'zine's Cyber-guy character.
I had two audio adventure reviews in TSV 61 (by then I'd stopped getting the books): The Spectre of Lanyon Moor, featuring the sixth Doctor and Evelyn, and The Fires of Vulcan, featuring the seventh Doctor and Mel. Both great stories!
Also very interesting: Jamas' article on Religion in Doctor Who, which is a somewhat more complete overview of the show's history of the treatment of religion than previously published in the 'zine.
Next time, interviews with Colin Baker and Gary Russell, Beyond the Sofa tackles The Tenth Planet and Attack of the Cybermen, the first of a series of articles by David Lawrence on the New Adventures, and reviews of the Pertwee era on Prime TV.
So anyway, back in 2000, when I had an ISP which actually supported Usenet, someone posted a question in rec.arts.drwho about a production of the 1974 stage play Seven Keys to Doomsday which was put on in Wellington some ten years later. The question sparked memories for me of both an old newspaper clipping I'd kept, and of seeing a news item about the play on the evening news. Unfortunately I hadn't gone to the play itself (in fact, I have a vague memory that I turned down an offer by my parents to take me, as at the time I didn't think it'd be as good as the TV show). Don't regret what you do, only what you don't do, as the saying goes.
Surprisingly, the 1984 performance of the play wasn't common knowledge, and Wellington fan Graham Howard tracked down director Brian Hudson for an interview which appears in TSV 61. As it happens TSV 61 is the issue I'm currently getting ready to put online, so watch out for that within the next week.
![[Monster]](/sh/monster.jpg)
When I were a lad, we had this Soda Stream device, which you jammed a bottle into and pressed a button, and whatever was in the bottle would become carbonated. Then you'd stick some of the concentrated syrup into the bottle and get an instant soft drink. Two of the syrup flavours you could get were "monster" themed, and were blue and green, though I don't remember anything about them other than that. This story is almost completely irrelevant to this post but what the hey?
TSV 61
