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Well, this is disappointing. I’m reading Avengers: The Crossing Line epic collection (that’s from a 1990 Niciezia written story about working with Soviets, not the Crossing, where Iron Man turns out to have murdered a load of people) and there’s just been no remastering/restoration on the colouring (in the first six issues at least). It’s been printed “flat” (without ben-day dots or anything, I mean) but they’ve not tidied it up in any way, so there’s copious amounts of colouring that’s gone outside the lines, vague suggestions of the right shape on details, blank white space where they’ve not coloured the background all the way up to the speech balloons. It looks ropey as shit. I genuinely haven’t read a Marvel trade with colouring this bad since the 90s/very early 00s copy of Under Siege I had, which just reprinted the original files with no remastering at all. I shouldn’t be reading a professionally published comic and thinking “I genuinely could have done a better job of that”. It’s really surprising for an epic collection, as even the ones that are using material that hasn’t been reprinted before (like this) have really good remastering. They just seem to have not bothered with this one.

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Todd

Interesting that Mike Carey’s brought his “M.R. Carey” author branding back to comics with him.

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Uncle Retrospective

I got the first volume of Friday by Brubaker and Martin for Christmas, which I read today.

It’s very small. Not just in page count, but it’s got a weirdly diminished trim size as well, which I’m not wild about.

The book itself is a bit underwhelming, really. What if Encyclopedia Brown and Sally grew up a bit and also Lovecraftian horrors existed in their town. Which is not a dreadful concept, but not enough happens in this (only three issues, slightly over-sized ones, I think) to make me care. It feels very Brubaker by numbers and because the characters are so patently derivative of Encyclopaedia Brown, there’s no innate hook to them. It’s all very slight.

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Dave, Dan

Man, I didn’t think Hasbro Pulse could get more ridiculous but then I got this email this morning.

Hi Martin Smith,

We hope this message finds you well!

We’re emailing you for one of the two reasons below.

1. Your Item Will Ship Soon!

We wanted to give you a heads up that your order is getting ready to ship!

Please see below for details.

Order Number: REDACTED
Order Date: September 13, 2024

G.I. Joe Classified Series #146, Dreadnok Zandar x 1

…

2. A pre-order date has a new shipping date:

We’re writing to provide you with an update regarding the status of your recent order on HasbroPulse.com.

Regrettably, we must inform you there has been an unexpected delay in shipping the following item below:

G10655X00 – G.I. Joe Classified Series #146, Dreadnok Zandar

The new approximate ship date for this item is: February 18, 2025

We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding and continued patience!

If you have any questions, please contact us.

Thanks for being a fan!
Hasbro Pulse

The “we’re emailing for one of two reasons” bit is weird enough, but to tell me that my pre-order is, simultaneously, dispatching soon but has also been delayed, is remarkable. I went and checked my pre-order and it’s still showing with its original dispatch date, of 11th February.

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lorcan_nagle

From the Guardian’s live politics blog (which is a pain to link to)

Starmer will keep saying Truss crashed economy, even though she’s sent legal letter claiming it’s libellous, No 10 says

Downing Street has signalled that Keir Starmer plans to ignore Liz Truss’s legal letter saying he should stop saying she crashed the economy because that, she claims, is untrue and libellous. (See 11.58am.)

Asked about the letter at the morning lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said:

I am not sure I have seen the detail of the letter, but from what I can my gather, I don’t think the prime minister is the only person in the country who shares the view in relation to the previous government’s handling of the economy.

I guess the question is whether she will be writing to millions of people up and down the country as well, who felt her economic record which pushed their mortgage bills up.

UPDATE: The PM’s spokesperson also said:

You’ve got the prime minister’s language, which he absolutely stands by in relation to the previous government’s record.

And you don’t have to hear it from the prime minister. I think you could ask people up and down the country of the impact of previous economic management on mortgages, on inflation.

Asked whether Starmer had any plans to moderate his language about Truss, the spokesperson replied: “No.”

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lorcan_nagle

I haven’t painted any miniatures in ages – years at this point – but I was just hit with the urge to check out how the indy miniature companies I used to shop with are doing these days. I guess whoever it was that had the official Dr Who miniatures license (Warlord, I think – who put out awful 30mm pieces) has lost it/let it lapse, because all the Definitely Not Dr Who minis are back at Heresy and, better, Crooked Dice.

I was really annoyed when they went because I’d got all of Crooked Dice’s except Sarah Jane (I was leaving it for later, as I had loads to work on at the time) and then they all disappeared. But now it’s back, along with some new ones. And they’re selling STLs of the newer ones, which I might go for, as I have a resin printer now.

 

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Christian, Todd

It’s fine though – they supplement the fire service with prison slave labour. Who then aren’t allowed to join the fire service after they’ve finished their sentences, despite having training (and an almost literal baptism by fire).

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Uncle Retrospective, Al-x, lorcan_nagle, Todd

Dan wrote:

It looks like amazon has a kindle masterworks sale on – 5 quid/dollars a pop.

I’ve no idea if there’s anything I really want, I did wonder about chris Claremont’s side hustles in Spiderwoman or something like that.

Suggestions, and please don’t say Dazzler?

From the entirety of the Masterworks line? Hmm.. They’ve started on Tomb of Dracula, right? That’s fun. The second volume of Rawhide Kid, IIRC, has the few issues by Jack Davies. They’re worth $5. Is there a MW of Iron Fist? The Claremont/Byrne run on that is good.

I watched Calamity Jane last night, the 50s musical Western, which, frankly, I didn’t think was particularly good. Doris Day’s performance is dreadful, like something out of the Beano, though possibly she’s just doing what was written.

Weirder though is all the reviews on Letterboxd by people who watched it and then unfavourably compared it to Deadwood, which also had Calamity Jane in it. And yeah, they’re both (very loosely!) based on the same person, but who the hell goes into a 50s musical expecting a similar depiction of a character to a 00s HBO drama?

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Uncle Retrospective

I’ve not watched regularly in decades either. I’m tempted to pick a season or two at random and watch them on D+ and see how they stack up. But as I understand it, Al Jean’s been showrunner since after Mike Scully left, so there’s not even variation like the Golden Years had (which shook things up slightly every few seasons).

Yeah, some great animation for a serviceable story.

I get the feeling this is the last season only because Disney never lets anything go beyond three seasons unless it gets rebranded slightly (for contract chicanery reasons) and that that might happen here.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

Yeah, I know. I did not like that series.

I liked 7. Natasha Lyonne as the very 80s metal daughter of Howard and Darcy is a bizarre concoction but fun (I thought for a moment she was called Debbie as a nod to Debbie Duck from Starbrand). Surprised to hear the name Exiles used. Slightly bittersweet as I guess it means we’re no more than five months away from Marvel comics launching Captain Carter and the Exiles featuring no trace of Blink let alone Morph.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd, lorcan_nagle

Episode 5 “What If You Appreciated All The Eternals Actually Did For The World You Ungrateful so-and-sos”: pretty grim. I think the best element was Uatu’s narration which built nicely to his actions and thus the season’s bigger story.

Episode 6 “What If Westerns Y’all.”: kinda disappointing. Bit boring mainly. Weird that it debuted the Hood. I thought that was just going to a generic alias for a villain reveal but no it’s the actual Hood – well, his cloak anyway. Also a bit disappointing they didn’t fit in a cameo from Rawhide Kid or someone. Kid Colt is already canon (he was sort of in Agent Carter), he’d be perfect.

My heart sank a little bit when I saw the title for this one being Darcy and Howard the Duck, but it was fun. Nice excuse to see villains there isn’t much scope to use much otherwise. I was dreading seeing what was in that egg though. Could have been much more horrorific.

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Uncle Retrospective

I really liked it overall. It had the best of Moffat (sketching in a character you come to love very quickly – Anita not Joy, mind) and, well, far from the worst of Moffat, but some of his well-worn tics (“everybody lives”, sentient data ghost back-ups).

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Uncle Retrospective, Ben, lorcan_nagle

Episode 3 was nice dumb fun.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

The War Games in colour was interesting. Technically, it was very impressive and it’s easy to forget you’re watching something that was made in black and white. Less easy to forget it’s a 90 minute cut of a ten part story. While the War Games had a lot of padding that was easy to excise (a lot of stuff winning over the rebels, the futile escape attempt in episode ten) it’s still quite choppy in the editing and you can tell it’s been hacked down without necessarily recognising what has gone. Thankfully it’s not as deliriously edited as the Dalek one and while there are some smart abbreviation techniques that are much less obnoxious than the ones in Daleks. There’s also some nice new pseudo-model shots used for establishing shots to paper over some of the edits. Oh and there are some quite smart little bits, like the polygonal fridge magnets that are used for the SIDRAT control panels subtly going greyscale when the Doctor removes the main power control.

There’s also been some revisionist tinkering that I’m less in love with. I don’t think they’re terrible but I could have lived without embracing the stupid fan theory that the War Chief is the Master, which the show does by using Simm’s and briefly Delgado’s Master leitmotif themes in the score. There’s also the offered new faces for the Doctor being photos of modern era incarnations, which kinda works, I guess. Also a way to slyly edit out him calling one “too fat”..

And then there’s the new regeneration added to the end. As I suspected, it seems to use footage from that fan film Pertwee participated in back in the 90s, which had a 2.5 Doctor (bits of which were special features on a official DVD).  Yet despite seemingly having real footage of Pertwee, it looks pretty fake. Nice little Easter egg showing the meteorites from Spearhead moving towards Earth at the same time as the TARDIS though. And I did like all the colourised clips from other stories they squeezed into the trial and regeneration..

So yeah, an improvement over the Dalek one and I’d be interested in seeing another, though ideally one they don’t have to cut down. Mind Robber maybe?

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Dan

Episode 2 What If… There Were Some Decent Bits Of The Eternals We Salvaged To Put With A Character That’s Actually Popular was a lot of fun! Really gorgeous animation.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

Christian wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

Also, interesting to see it’s been review-bombed on Goodreads by India’s current crop of Hindu ultra-nationalists for daring to suggest that some of the Muslims covered in the book weren’t awful people.

India is getting to be a really unstable place. There’s a genocide waiting to happen there.

Yeah, definitely. I don’t know how the move to remove citizenship from muslims didn’t make bigger waves. Well, I do, Islamophobia, but still.

[Martin Smith]

Next blu-ray collection is season 7.

https://cultbox.co.uk/news/dvd-and-blu-ray/doctor-who-season-7-the-collection-blu-ray-coming-in-2025

Nothing explicit in there about any amazing new advances in restoration for the episodes that had to be recovered from NTSC copies. The new documentaries sound good though.

 

Oh, also, in case anyone didn’t know: there’s a colourised abridgement of The War Games airing before Christmas. Sounds like they’ve “enhanced” it with a proper regeneration into Pertwee. Hopefully it won’t be as ridiculously edited as the Daleks colourisation was, but I’m not holding my breath.

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 3 days ago by Martin Smith.

I read The Anarchy by William Dalrymple recently, which is a history of the East India Company and how it came to colonise India. It’s not a subject I know much of anything about – the history curriculum when I was at school skipped from Tudors to Victorians (both in primary and secondary school) and just kind of ignored the empire except very briefly in context of World War One. I don’t know if that’s due to shame at the acts of empire or that we’ve lost/give it up.

Anyway, the events here are really interesting. Although I (and Dalrymple) certainly don’t want to excuse the EIC/British for taking over India, a lot of it came out of the circumstances of the time, as the Mughal Empire imploded under poor leadership, fractured into warring regions of, well, anarchy, and the EIC offered the most stable alternative in progressive stages. Which is not to say that they didn’t completely take advantage of it all and certain people, especially Clive, don’t come out of it all well. But there’s more to it than just “the English turned up and conquered the place” as I’d assumed from ignorance.

It’s a tough read though. Not just from all the descriptions of abuse (from both sides) but just to follow. Partly that is just because I’m terrible at glossing Indian names and words, but also there’s just so much going on in the period of time the book covers that I struggled to keep track of all of it.

Not as compellingly written as something like Adam Hochschild’s Bury The Chains, which I also read this year, but worth a look.

Also, interesting to see it’s been review-bombed on Goodreads by India’s current crop of Hindu ultra-nationalists for daring to suggest that some of the Muslims covered in the book weren’t awful people.

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Christian

paul f wrote:

which won’t be on Disney Plus until the same time as it airs in the UK, at 5:10PM UK time on Christmas Day.

Well that’s a good improvement.

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Uncle Retrospective

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

There’s something disturbing that happens on twitter (and I guess bluesky would be the same) when you follow a lot of animal accounts, for the cute animal pictures: you start seeing lots of sad tweets about people’s pets and animals dying. I guess those tweets get a lot of engagement, so twitter algorhitm puts it on everybody’s timeline. It’s sad when you just want to see a cute bunny.

There’s no algorithmic feed on BlueSky so it wouldn’t happen there.

As I say, I don’t know how it was in the original French for All Fall Down or earlier volumes but in the English versions of the first few volumes, it’s all euphemistic about them being animals, stuff like “he’s a real cool cat” at most. And then in All Fall Down it’s explicitly “that man is a goat”.

Oh yeah, I forgot part 2 of All Fall Down had come out. I was a little cool on part 1 – I didn’t think the translation was as good as the previous volumes (or potentially the original text is more explicit about the characters being animals than the earlier volumes) but I should still really get part 2.

On the one hand, yikes. On the other hand, the Scots say that kind of thing about being lumped in with the English all the time.

The lunch thing is fucking nuts though. Being macho about not having lunch or eating sandwiches is so stupid.

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Ben, Todd

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Dave, Todd, lorcan_nagle, Sean Robinson

[Martin Smith]

As I’ve probably mentioned before, I have a tradition of replaying an old game in the run up to Christmas. As with all traditions, it’s about chasing the feeling of a Christmas gone by. Originally, one in my teens, when I stayed up late playing the Pokemon Trading Card Game on a Game Boy emulator, got really into it and never played it again, but increasingly one year in my twenties when I replayed Kingdom Hearts and managed to beat the finale boss on just two attempts with about 10 minutes to spare before I went out to the pub for the evening.

This year, my choice is Mario Kart Wii, which is, as far as I’m concerned, the worst in the series. Certainly the worst of the 3D ones. It’s so bad that I never actually won all the cups originally (which I’m good enough at Mario Kart to be able to do easily on all the other ones). I stalled out in 150cc, IIRC, possibly because I became convinced the motorbikes, which are hard to handle, were the best choice to use.

So I’ve dug out my Wii and hooked it up for the first time in about 11 years (I transferred all my data off it onto my WiiU when I got that, so it’s had no use since then), to my CRT rather than my main TV, which has helped the graphics immeasurably. I’ve done the four main cups (the ones with original tracks to the game) on 50cc so far and yes, I definitely still think this is the worst Mario Kart.

The big problem with it is the balance of items. It goes way too heavy on the distribution of big disruptive items. I’ve done races where I’ve been simultaneously hit by a blue shell and a POW block, then by a red shell before I’ve even recovered, losing 10 places in the off. And what MKW does that 8 scaled back on is that you lose your held items when you get hit by pretty much any of those. Maybe not the red shell, but definitely POW blocks, blue shells, lightnings and hitting any track obstacle (like the “real” cars on Moonlight Motorway) robs you of your gear, further disadvantaging you. It makes the “oh would you just fuck off” factor pretty high. It feels like they’ve tried to make the game more like Mario Party, in the way it just razes the playing field flat at the end of the game with bullshit bonus stars. There’s so many disruptive items in here that winning starts to feel more like luck than any semblance of driving skill.

(as an aside, this is why I also don’t like 8 Deluxe as much as 8, as I’m fairly sure they rejigged the item balance to have many more lightnings).

And yet, for the worst game in the series, it does have some absolutely great new tracks and it’s easy to see why they’ve returned in later games (and not just because they’d be easier to up-res than older ones).

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Martin Smith.

You’re right, I don’t know how I forgot to mention that. Stonking theme tune.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle, JRCarter

lorcan_nagle wrote:

The NYPD have a suspect for the CEO shooting and it seems he’s a reactionary nutbag.  So good job weaponising those guys, Republicans!

According to one report, he played a violent assassination video game called ::gasp::  “Among Us”.  Although venting would explain how he escaped New York so successfully. And actually, I would say there probably are transferable skills (or at least mindsets) in how to successfully be the Imposter in Among Us and how he killed the CEO. I guess he now just has to not look sus during the trial.

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Ben

I’ve been watching the 90s Iron Man cartoon lately. I picked it up on DVD for £3. It ran for two seasons, which are very different.

The first is the epitome of a Saturday morning cartoon. It feels very obviously based around selling toys of Iron Man, his various armours, allies and villains. To that end, Iron Man is working with Force Works (though I’m pretty sure they’re never called that in this season) – War Machine, Julia Carpenter Spider-Woman, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch (with a terrible mostly Russian accent) and Century. They’re pitted in every episode again Mandarin and his array of flunkies: MODOK (his 2IC), Justin Hammer, Blizzard, Whirlwind, Hypnotia, Grey Gargoyle, Dreadknight, Blacklash and Living Laser.

It’s a pretty dumbed down premise and not helped by just not being well made. The animation is crap (they constantly fail to properly do looping backgrounds for flying vehicles etc). Presumably most of the budget went on the CGI sequence of Iron Man putting his armour on, which I remember being wowed by as a kid, but has not aged well at all and doesn’t gel with anything else in the show (vs say the Battletech cartoon, where the CGI was used for the mech battles, so the difference worked ok).

The writing is dreadful too. The head writer is Ron Friedman, who wrote the first three GI Joe mini-series in the 80s, among other things. It’s all too rote and repetitive. About half the episodes focus on Mandarin and co sabotaging the test/demonstration/unveiling of a new Stark Enterprises vehicle or weapon. One episode literally ends with a trite “Tony was a robot decoy” reveal. The writing of Spider-Woman and Scarlet Witch is especially bad, as they’re just there to fawn over Tony and be catty with each other. Such a disservice to the characters.

Perhaps the most ridiculous part of how this season is put together is the opening titles. The music’s fine, but there’s a rollcall element to the animation, showing characters with graphics of their names. Except, it goes through all of Mandarin’s team (except Living Laser, who feels like a late addition) but only Iron Man and War Machine for Force Works, which seems like a really mixed up set of priorities. Why is Blacklash getting higher billing than Hawkeye?

The main redeeming factor of the season is the voice acting. Mostly. Robert Hayes (from Airplane) is Tony and he’s really good. I still think he’s the definitive “classic” Iron Man for me (as opposed to RDJ, who is a very distinct version of Iron Man). Dorian Harewood is good as War Machine too.. eventually. Rhodey is initially voiced by James Avery (Uncle Phil! Shredder!) who is fine, but clearly had scheduling issues, because not only does he disappear a few episodes in, there are moments where lines he couldn’t record are very poorly filled in for by Jim Cummings (who plays MODOK), doing a terrible impression.

Season 2 sees an entire overhaul of the show. New animation studio in the form of Koko (who would go on to do Spider-Man Unlimited), new producer and writing team, replacement voice actors for most of the cast (Hayes, Harewood, Cummings and Neil Ross as Fin Fang Foom survive) and just higher quality over all. Interestingly, it doesn’t just make a clean break and does actually go to the trouble of exploding the status quo of s1, by having Mandarin’s goons captured and jailed, Mandarin losing his rings and most of Force Works leaving after Tony faked his death. This leaves just Tony, Rhodey and Julia, which is a much more managable cast and there’s a nice sub-plot through the series for Rhodey about losing confidence in using the WM armour.

Oh and there’s also Homer, a dry, sardonic AI virtual assistant that works with Tony and talks to him in and out of the armour. It is the genesis of JARVIS, really and I think it’s original to this show.

Freed from the Force Works vs Mandarin set-up, the show wanders into other areas of Iron Man lore, like Madame Masque, Firebrand (voiced by Neal McDonough, later Dum Dum Dugan in the MCU), AIM and adaptation of Armor Wars. It works well, being much more varied than series 1 and, largely, being better stories.

Most interestingly, there’s a much different tone to the show. The new animation style is flatter but also darker, there’s lots of shadows, but also the writing feels far less pandering of kids. Dialogue is clipped and wry and doesn’t over-explain what’s going on. It suits Hayes really well.

Plus, Stingray is in the Armor Wars episode, so it’s a clear 5/5 for me.

It’s hard to think of any other show that’s been so radically and successfully retooled between its first and second season. Well, the 90s Fantastic Four cartoon of course, which was paired with Iron Man in the Marvel Action Hour and also went from being absolute dreck into an underrated gem. But beyond them, hard to think of much. Even TNG took longer to get better after its dreadful first season than this.

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Uncle Retrospective, JRCarter, lorcan_nagle, njerry, Todd

[Martin Smith]

Todd wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

Todd wrote:

lorcan_nagle wrote:

`The solution is not to vote for Trump.  the solution is for the Democrats to run on what their voters actually want.  This is a big part of why Harris lost, she tried appealing to the right, and she saw a collapse in left-wing support as a result. Then she got fewer right-wing votes than Biden did for her troubles.

And yiz are blaming the voters and not Harris for that.

As an American who saw everything firsthand, the irony is that Harris was portrayed as “too liberal” and part of the reason she lost is that it was perceived that she was more concerned about liberal idealism than actually doing something about the economy and other more pragmatic concerns, and that tanked her among moderate voters.

Some perceived Harris as too liberal, and others didn’t think she was liberal enough. Welcome to the Democratic Party’s version of the Kobayashi Maru.

If you’re going to be labelled “too liberal” by the usual suspects no matter what you do, it’s a great opportunity to actually go for it and offer some policies that might actually help or even appeal to people.  Instead they just meekly went “I’m not too liberal! Look, I hate trans people too uwu.” You’re never going to win at mud wrestling a pig.

EDIT: and they still don’t seem to have grasped that and think the problem is that they weren’t right wing enough. They’re never going to fuck you, my dudes.

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Martin Smith.
• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Martin Smith.
• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Martin Smith.

The problem is that many working-class voters feel the Democrats have abandoned them, including unions. Those people helped the Dems win a lot, but now they feel they are too focused on “high ideals” and not helping them economically. Trump promising cheaper eggs went a lot farther than trans rights for many voters.

It’s okay to go full left, as long as you are including everyone.

Well yeah, true left policies would appeal to working people and unions. That’s the other problem with the Democratic party really. Trans rights shouldn’t be the radical part of policy, it should be a given. There should be worker’s rights, protecting the right to unionise, minimum wages etc. They’re not mutually exclusive and it’s a right wing/transphobes’ tactic to make people think so.

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Martin Smith.

Dave wrote:

Don’t forget, it’s absolutely in the interests of the rightwing parties to stoke anger from the left at what the more progressive parties are doing. In the UK, the rightwing media (which is most of it) is attacking Starmer on every possible front, and lots of their criticisms are gaining traction with the left as well as the right, which is exactly what they’ll be hoping for. If it goes on like this for five years then they will have done their job well, and I’m sure Reform and the Tories will make significant gains in 2029. So I’m not sure parroting their attack lines is all that helpful.

Should the more progressive parties be exempt from criticism when their policies are lacking in certain areas? Of course not.

But you’ve just said that criticising Starmer can only feed the right wing. And any time Starmer’s Labour gets criticised for things the right wing do like, we’re told that they have to do that stuff because it’s essential to appeal to the right wing voters in order to stop the Tories/Reform getting in. So basically we’re not allowed to ever criticise Starmer from the left, because it’ll bring about a right wing government and we have to just put up with him acting like a right wing government anyway.

Ben wrote:

SciFier.

Oh cool, I used them a couple of times when they were Aphrohead. I’m not too fussed about when the DC trade turns up really, it’s the (non-SF novel) that’s the real issue. It only seems to be in stock with Amazon now, which is annoying – I try to minimise how much money I send their way. I find it ironic that the publishing house has on their website fluff about being proudly independent and stuff, but seem to have prioritised sending stock to the big global megacorp rather than smaller independent book-sellers. I get the economics of it, but not a great look.

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Ben

[Martin Smith]

Todd wrote:

lorcan_nagle wrote:

`The solution is not to vote for Trump.  the solution is for the Democrats to run on what their voters actually want.  This is a big part of why Harris lost, she tried appealing to the right, and she saw a collapse in left-wing support as a result. Then she got fewer right-wing votes than Biden did for her troubles.

And yiz are blaming the voters and not Harris for that.

As an American who saw everything firsthand, the irony is that Harris was portrayed as “too liberal” and part of the reason she lost is that it was perceived that she was more concerned about liberal idealism than actually doing something about the economy and other more pragmatic concerns, and that tanked her among moderate voters.

Some perceived Harris as too liberal, and others didn’t think she was liberal enough. Welcome to the Democratic Party’s version of the Kobayashi Maru.

If you’re going to be labelled “too liberal” by the usual suspects no matter what you do, it’s a great opportunity to actually go for it and offer some policies that might actually help or even appeal to people.  Instead they just meekly went “I’m not too liberal! Look, I hate trans people too uwu.” You’re never going to win at mud wrestling a pig.

EDIT: and they still don’t seem to have grasped that and think the problem is that they weren’t right wing enough. They’re never going to fuck you, my dudes.

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Martin Smith.
• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Martin Smith.
• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Martin Smith.

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lorcan_nagle

They got back to me again. The one for me is a DC trade and they can’t say when they’ll have it. The other book is “out of stock with the publisher” and they got in a small amount of stock to fulfil some pre-orders but they’re expecting it in 2-3 weeks. Which is a bit awkward for a Christmas present.

Has anyone had any issues pre-ordering with Speedy Hen lately? I had two pre-orders for books released on 3rd Dec (one’s for me and one’s a Christmas present). There’s no sign of them being dispatched. I contacted SH and they say they’re both out of stock with their supplier and will take 1-2 weeks to come in. Which seems kind of not the point of pre-orders.

It’s another mastermind bit of strategy from Starmer. Piss off all the people you’re going to be relying on over the next few years to achieve anything in order to… score points with the people who already hate them and won’t like Starmer as much as Badenoch/Farage no matter what he does?

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Ben, lorcan_nagle

Ben wrote:

Who do you think supplied him the info?

Marvel knows they get free marketing via him.

I know. Just thought it’d be quite funny if he went rogue and announced something they didn’t know about. And then they were stuck going “well damn, now we have to make it”.

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Ben

Ben wrote:

Omar has just announced for August 2025 a X-Men: Fall of the House of X / Rise of the Powers of X Omnibus.

Does Marvel know about this?

[Christian]

Christian wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

To be honest, I don’t think Biden pardoning Hunter is that big a problem.

There’s a number of problems with it really, but the most important one is: Biden demonstrated that he’s fine with some people – those in power – breaking the law and suffering no consequences whatsoever. In that, he is now no different than Trump. Which plays into the hands of those who already see the two big parties as interchangable and want someone like Trump to shake things up. And it also means that once again, people have been shown that “politicians are all the same” and they needn’t bother going out to vote at all.

Martin Smith wrote:

As he said, the plea deal Hunter agreed to was torpedoed

Ah well, when a plea deal doesn’t work out obviously all you can do is just not prosecute somebody further. I bet there’s a lot of convicted people in the US who wish they’d had that choice.

Martin Smith wrote:

I’d have pardoned him to avoid that too.

Right, because you’re fine with somebody stealing 1.4 million dollars from the people.

Well, like Tobias said, this is why separation of powers is a really good idea.

Interesting sidenote: The pardon doesn’t just cover the crimes he’s being accused of, but any and all he may have comitted in the year 2014. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 1 week ago by Christian.

I’m not saying it’s ideal by any means, but he had plea deal that a Trump appointed judge struck down. Given that they’ve spent over four years demonising Hunter Biden (and I have no strong opinion either way) I really wouldn’t put it past Trump, who is openly talking about persecuting his enemies with the full power of the federal government, to try and fuck him up even further on other charges, tenuous or otherwise. So yeah, lame duck President Biden at the absolutely end of his political career (and twilight years of his life, let’s be honest) pre-emptively protecting his fuck up of a son from the vindictiveness of the next President’s administration really doesn’t bother me that much. I just wish he’d been as keen to play in the margins of traditional acceptability on other stuff (stacking the supreme court for example) as the other side are. Because there’s only so far holding yourself to a higher standard gets you when you’re up against people like Trump.

I genuinely don’t believe this is going to change anyone’s pre-existing opinions about anyone, frankly. Who possibly has a problem with this but was ok with Trump pardoning all his mates? The people of a mind to think “both parties are as bad as each other” already didn’t particularly like Biden, who is now an irrelevancy anyway. I just think there are more pressing things to care about than a guy who was unlikely to go to jail anyway being pardoned.

To be honest, I don’t think Biden pardoning Hunter is that big a problem. As he said, the plea deal Hunter agreed to was torpedoed and it’s very clear that Trump and his cronies see Hunter as a big target. There’s no way they wouldn’t have gone for retaliatory “justice” against him. I’d have pardoned him to avoid that too.

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Sean Robinson, Todd

Al-x wrote:

I have been seeing Black Friday deals start since last week .  Stores aren’t waiting for the day after Thanksgiving to start. Depending on the year, since Thanksgiving is not a set date, the days between Black Friday and Xmas vary.

I already bought game consoles, smart TV etc. already. I don’t see the need to buy a new one every year. So maybe go easy on electronics stuff and get coats, jackets etc.

I genuinely thought Thanksgiving was last week, given all the Black Friday promotions I saw then.

I did some Christmas shopping yesterday and have come to the conclusion that nothing costs a tenner any more. There’s a few people I’d set a £10 budget for and everything I saw I thought might be ok for them was £11. Which obviously isn’t a huge monetary issue, but it’s odd. It breaks a psychological barrier.

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Todd

JRCarter wrote:

Trump election case is tossed after special counsel Jack Smith requests dismissal citing ‘categorical’ DOJ policy

Is it wrong to hope Trump dies before January 20?

Honestly, this is infuriatingly pathetic. “oh we have to delay these court cases because the defendant – who tried to overthrow the result of a legitimate election – is running for president and we don’t want to influence the election” becomes “well the guy who tried to fix an election won another election, guess we can’t prosecute him now!”. Just so fucking dumb.

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Ben, JRCarter, Todd, lorcan_nagle

Linda McMahon and Dr Oz? Jesus fucking christ.

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JRCarter, Todd

BBC daytime staple Doctors ended today after 24 years. I’ve been dipping in and out for the past month or so and watched the past week fully. It’s an odd show. It juggles ongoing storylines for the main cast and case of the day stories for patients. Some of that ongoing stuff is interesting – there’s been a storyline running up to the finale about a manipulative new GP in the practice trying to take over, scheming to get rid of people he doesn’t like etc (at the end, when he was ranting at being kicked out, it felt a bit like a strawman for criticisms of the show and BBC generally) – but the case of the week stuff is pretty limp. They never really seem to resolve, they just… stop.

Anyway, the show’s notable because it’s had a lot of actors at the start and twilight of their careers turn up in it. The show ending has prompted me to go and watch some of those, so I’m bouncing around season 1 episodes (all on YT), from 2000. So there’s the guy who played Ronnie in Renford Rejects and pre-Footballer’s Wives Zoe Lucker and Honor Blackman and a young Sheridan Smith. But you’d be hard pressed to tell at times because dear lord the camerawork is awful! Frenetic, wobbly, full of awkward close-ups while continually failing to show what’s happening, loads of dreadful “natural” lighting. And this is across all the episodes, not just one rogue director. It’s a shocking production choice and not something I remember being particularly common or en vogue at the time. I’m amazed it got recommissioned frankly.

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Uncle Retrospective

Is the original version of the site still up and running? If so, it’d be interesting to see if any of its regular readers noticed the change to the Onion running it as a parody.

I still haven’t read Secret Wars but I have read a handful of the Battleworld tie-ins and I thought some of them were pretty good. Thors, Supreme Power… another one. But not the Captain Marvel and Carol Corps one. Battleworld is an interesting concept, but I’m not interested in the story supporting it, frankly.

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lorcan_nagle

Christian wrote:

Isn’t that what you did, as well, though? Blaming only the Maccabi fans?

Well, I’m not trying to excuse antisemites – I’m sure some of the people retaliating were thrilled for the excuse and it always sucks when innocent fans get swept up in hooliganism – but the situation was created by the Maccabi fans. Retaliatory violence against football hooligans is hard to spin as being entirely down to antisemitism when it’s clearly provoked by the racist actions of the initial hooligans. If those prejudices were equal and comparable they’d have clashed directly straight off, but they didn’t. The Maccabi ultras fucked about unprovoked.

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Christian, lorcan_nagle

Right, but just because some of the people their actions provoked were antisemitic doesn’t mean the Israeli hooligans aren’t culpable. You’re using one side’s prejudice to excuse the other’s.

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lorcan_nagle, Todd

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

Also it is likely Maccabi fans also did things that are unacceptable.

Given Maccabi fans/hooligans are known to be fascistic even by the standards of football ultras, it seems pretty clear they fucked around (pulling down the Palestinian flags, smashing up taxis) and found out (hounded out of the city). That this is being spun as horrible antisemitism targeting poor innocent football fans is ridiculous.

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Ben, Dave, Todd

Todd wrote:

The Republicans took the Senate, and the House doesn’t seem settled yet. The Repubs may get the House.

If they get both, that pretty much means that Trump will be removed, and Vance will be POTUS.

Literally remove him from power or let Vance act as POTUS in all but name?

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Todd

Dave wrote:

Trump is hardly much better though, his rambling disjointed speeches aren’t exactly full of complex policy discussions.

But he does say tangible things, however abhorrent or delusional they may be. “Mass deportations” and “I’m going to fix inflation” are policies that supporters can grab onto. Harris had… I know more about what Walz did as governor than what Harris aimed to do as President.

You know, thinking about it, I’m not sure I’ve heard a single policy of Harris’ other than “I’m not Trump” and “let Israel keep doing what they’re doing” and while I’ve not been forensic about following the election, it’s not like I’ve totally avoided. So in hindsight, maybe a campaign based on vibes wasn’t the best idea?

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Arjan Dirkse

Andrew wrote:

only chasing characters that appeared in the 1986 movie.

So does that rule out Snarl or are you counting the three frames or so he appears in?

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

There’s Cassie as well. I suppose they might just have them be “Avengers”.

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Todd

They blew it upon Miami Vice? Not Jey Leno’s Garage, right?

I thought Agatha stuck the landing. I wasn’t expecting there to be two episodes this week and I actually thought the end to penultimate one would have been a bold place to leave it. I really liked that the road was a bit of folklore Agatha inadvertently created then completely seized upon for own benefits and that she’d been winging the whole thing. And hey now she’s got white hair again, after the comics made her look like young Kathryn Hahn. One day they’re going to stop chasing MCU synergy so desperately and pointlessly.

I’m still surprised there hasn’t been any kind of Young Avengers project announced, given that they’ve gone from seeding the characters to now actively setting them up finding each other.

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lorcan_nagle

Dave wrote:

(Tobey Maguire was in his late 20s when he shot the first Spider-Man movie)

Yeah and it shows tbh.

‘Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent’ Lands A (Rather Limited…) UK Release

Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent‘, the Canadian spin-off to the L&O franchise has landed a UK home, albeit a somewhat limited release, as it’s airing on “LG Channels” which are only available on LG TVs.

The drama is a gripping psychological thriller woven into a complex criminal investigation, centring on a team of detectives from the Specialized Criminal Investigations Unit, an elite squad in the fictional Toronto Police Department. Tasked with uncovering high-profile homicides and exposing corruption, these detectives navigate the dark underbelly of metropolitan Toronto.

Based on the classic series created by Dick Wolf for Universal Television, ‘Law and Order Toronto: Criminal Intent’ showcases original Canadian stories written and produced by, and starring Canadians. The series stars Aden Young (Rectify) as Detective Sergeant Henry Graff, Kathleen Munroe (FBI) as Detective Sergeant Frankie Bateman, K. C. Collins (Lost Girl, Saving Hope) as Deputy Crown Attorney Theo Forrester, and Karen Robinson (Schitt’s Creek, Star Trek: Discovery) as Inspector Vivienne Holness. The recurring cast includes Nicola Correia-Damude as Dr. Lucy Da Silva, Araya Mengesha as Mark Yohannes, and Tammy Isbell as Detective Alice Riley.

When the series premiered in its native Canada on Citytv earlier this year, it quickly became the number one prime-time drama of 2024, attracting 1.1 million views on the first episode. Citytv renewed the show for seasons two and three, both of which are set to air in Canada in 2025.

As I mentioned at the top of the article, the UK release is somewhat limited at the moment, as LG has brought the exclusive rights for its “LG Channels” which come bundled on all LG TVs running LG’s latest webOS software (that’s mainly 2019 LG Smart TV models onwards running webOS version 4.5 and up.) If you have a compatible TV, you can find this service by clicking HOME on the remote control, navigating to SETTINGS, and then selecting LG CHANNELS.

Weird.

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Sean Robinson, Todd

Couple of Classified Joes I’ve had in recently.

Raptor

Raptor is one of those wonderfully silly characters that Larry Hama somehow made work. He’s an accountant that works for Cobra but who dresses as a big bird of prey. This is to help train actual hawks and stuff he has and uses for… Cobra stuff. It works in context. The original figure is one I had from a load of second hand Joes as a kid and I always liked for how goofy it was. A bare-chested guy with a bird helmet.

The new version has kept that but also tried to make him cool. His eye mask now has a Robin/Nightwing vibe. He’s still got the bird hat, but it’s removeable and he’s got a cool hair cut underneath and he looks vaguely like Cillian Murphy. He’s still mostly bare-chested, with a high-cut waistcoat thing giving him feathers on the shoulders, but he’s now got tattoos that look a bit like henna braces going down his chest.

The big change is that instead of fake bird wings, he’s got a mechanical wing jetpack thing, like MCU Falcon. It’s really big, with a few points of articulation that mean it can fold around as a shield, Bat-Fink style. It’s kinda cool, but going to be a bit of a bitch to fit into the my main Joe shelf when he progresses there and it’s hard to get the backpack level.

He comes with a pistol and knife, which I think are standard for accountants, and a bird of prey that can plug into his wrist. Oh and some ninja style Wolverine claw things, which are a new idea for him and supposed to go with the wings for like a slicing divebomb attack concept. Overall, he’s a nice update of the character, showing that Classified can make even the ridiculous parts of the original Joe line work in its style without feeling out of place. But I do kinda miss him having just bird wings/feather cloak.

Retro Cobra Commander

Weird to think I’ve got so many Classifieds without a Cobra Commander until now. He was in wave 1, but it was a very fussy, updated “regal” design that I wasn’t wild about and wave 1 wasn’t easily available over here. So I’ve held out and now here he is accurate to his original 80s design. This is his classic slimline blue suit with minimal fuss. It’s very elegant and the colours are lovely (mostly). It’s the battle mask version (the hood is a no-go now, for some reason) but that’s fine, as I always preferred it. The faceplate is proper vacu-metal reflective chrome, which really pops. The only problem with his design is the colour of his shirt collar. It reminds me of when I was at secondary school and someone managed to get the wrong shade of blue for their school shirt. Instead of the same pale blue the rest of us had, theirs was much more saturated bright blue, which stood out by a mile. CC’s clearly gone to the same shop that guy had and got a really bright, almost fluoro blue for his shirt, which stands out too much.

Accessories are limited. He’s got a stand (still no idea why only retro releases have one, but I make my own now, so no bother), a backpack holster, a small pistol, a knife and then just six hand options. Feels a little miserly, but it does give a pointing hand and a maniacal laugh hand, so I guess they beat another gun or whatever.

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lorcan_nagle, Todd

I saw an interesting thread this morning (on Twitter, ironically) about the forces looking to use Trump as a puppet.

Suspiciously, Twitter is being shit about showing the whole thread, so here it is copied elsewhere.

https://mem.ai/p/rxEtqT5REEgAYVNzw5iy

1/ No Trump voter is saying that they are voting for Trump because they want J.D. Vance to be president. Or Elon Musk. Or Peter Thiel. MAGA voters believe they will be getting MAGA if they vote red.

They are absolutely not going to get that. They are going to get the *opposite*.

2/ Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison, which he’s entitled to do.

But he didn’t expect to win in 2016 and didn’t enjoy being president. He might not have run this time had he not felt embarrassed about 2020 and been worried about being imprisoned if he loses immunity.

3/ He’s hiding his medical records and looks and sounds unwell. He’s cancelling events due to—his own team says—“exhaustion.” He’s doing fewer events than ever. He’s rambling and mixing up dates and names more than ever before, to the point media is starting to write about it.

4/ He would be the oldest human to be sworn in as president. His wife and daughter have largely abandoned him. He just swayed and bopped silently to his own iPod playlist in front of a crowd for 40 minutes. There’s something wrong with him. Even if he wins, he won’t be president.

5/ All this was known to Musk, Thiel and Rupert Murdoch when they convened in California early this summer (feel free to Google it; it’s uncontested) to figure out who’d be Trump’s running mate. They and their ally Tucker Carlson knew the GOP VP candidate would be de facto POTUS.

6/ Canada just revealed it has evidence that Tucker Carlson is a Kremlin agent. So at least one of the men who chose the MAGA ticket is an agent of an enemy of America.

Obviously this is enough to avoid that ticket like the plague—forever—but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

7/ Peter Thiel is part of a creepy far-right techno-authoritarian cult headed by failed coder and utterly mid “intellectual” Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin has proposed that he and a group of other tech bros decide which humans worldwide are “productive” and turn all the others into goo.

8/ Oh, you think I’m kidding? https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas

9/ You’ll notice that the Yarvinist listed in the headline of the preceding article *isn’t* Thiel. No—it’s Thiel’s disciple, Vance, who Thiel *and Yarvin* have been grooming (yes, that is the right word) for years to become president so that Yarvin and Thiel can rule through him.

10/ When they saw that Trump was running not to be president but to avoid jail; when they saw how elderly and infirm Trump had become, and incapable of being POTUS even if elected; when Tucker Carlson convinced Trump that picking anyone but the Yarvinist Vance would cause him…

11/ …to get assassinated by the Deep State (again, Google it, it’s uncontested that this is how Kremlin agent Tucker Carlson got Trump to pick Vance); they realized this was the moment to make their techno-authoritarian dream come true.

continued

 

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Daniel R, lorcan_nagle, lorcan_nagle

A couple of surprisingly good movies based on 80s toys for me recently.

Transformers One, which I wasn’t going to bother with, but I kept hearing positive things from various corners, so caught it in the cinema. Really fun. Gorgeous graphics, though too much shaky cam. And Scarlett Johansson didn’t sound bored, which is astonishing.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which I’ve had on my Sky box for months. When the first trailers came out for this, I thought it was influenced by Spider-Verse. Seeing the full film, that’s both right and wrong. It’s aiming more to replicate something like Eastman and Laird’s art style (albeit with different Turtle designs) in 3D, but I do think they were only able to try that because of Spider-Verse’s success. The importance of the soundtrack felt very Spider-Verse inspired too. Overall, I liked it. Nice to see the “teenage” emphasised for once. I didn’t really like its take on Splinter (though him being inspired to teach them martial arts through media was quite fun) though. But it’s an generally a fresh, interesting new take on the concept and I can see why it’s done well.

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Andrew, Todd, lorcan_nagle

I don’t think there’s any new information in here (I saw pretty much all of this reported on Twitter during the Olympics) but here’s a nice summation of how the boxing nonsense during the Olympics was set up by Russia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/10/17/russia-paris-olympics-boxing-gender/

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Todd

Can’t be a Jedi Survivor without some Jedi Survivor’s Guilt.

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Christian, Al-x, Todd

Ben wrote:

Both things are true:

– Starmer’s stepped on several entirely avoidable rakes.

– The media are far more indulgent to the right-wing.

Oh there definitely is a factor of how these attacks are mostly coming from the right wing press, but while that makes them hypocrites too it doesn’t automatically make their concerns (however bad faith) irrelevant, as some Labour people keep trying to spin it.

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lorcan_nagle

There is an element of that, but I think it lets Labour, and Starmer, off the hook too much for their own failings and hypocrisy.

Take the freebies thing. Starmer made great hay of Boris Johnson’s cash-grabs and freebies – to the point of even going and doing a photo op in John Lewis looking at wallpaper when it came out that Johnson got ridiculously expensive gold stuff installed in no 10 – and yet here he is, in office less than three months, and he’s getting designer clothes and glasses, sports and concert tickets etc for free. And their only response seems to be “well the Tories were even worse,” as is that makes their sleaze acceptable, somehow.

Then there’s Starmer’s inability to stick to promises. He made a raft of pledges when he ran for party leadership: ditched them all when he became leader in the excuse of “country first, party second”. He made a load of vows in the general election: most of them are getting dropped or watered down because of “the financial black hole” they suddenly discovered when they came into office, even though they’d been told about it repeatedly during the campaign and refused to acknowledge it.

When he became LOTO, loads of centrists were frothing about, because he was a lawyer, he was going to be “forensic”. And yet so much of this in the past three months has been entirely avoidable and he’s walked right into it and in most cases made it worse. The free box at Arsenal thing (provided by the Premier League, who are the subject of a regulator the government is supposed to be setting up), for example. He claims it’s because it’s too much of a security risk being in the stands now. Which I don’t really believe (Sunak did that stunt in the stands at a match last year or so, John Major used to go to the cricket no problem) and doesn’t say much about other Arsenal season ticket holders if true, frankly (and he seemed to be fine going to that Taylor Swift concert without a private box). But his line of “it’s a choice between taking the free executive box or not getting to go to a game” just made the situation even worse. He sounds entitled. Lots of people have to choose between work and getting to go to the football. It’s not a god-given right to get to go to live games and heaven forfend that being Prime Minister comes with some kind of sacrifice.

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Ben, lorcan_nagle, Christian

[Martin Smith]

Slim hope of that. It seems abundantly clear already that Starmer is bought and paid for.

On a similar note:

Ah yes, because that’s been the big problem in the British housing and development market, regulations.

• This reply was modified 3 months ago by Martin Smith.
• This reply was modified 3 months ago by Martin Smith.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd, Ben, lorcan_nagle, Christian

I was going to say as well, I’m pretty sure my family had that exact stereo back in the day. Loved the three CD changer: felt so futuristic.

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Todd

Dave wrote:

It’s just so dumb to cancel these shows so early, because it actively disincentives people from watching them and stops shows from gradually building an audience through word of mouth. I was still halfway through the first season of Kaos and enjoying it, but now likely won’t bother finishing it in light of this news.

It’s incredible that they’ve gone from being the place that would recommission network shows to give them an ending to being a turbo-charged version of the US TV industry that instantly kills shows before most people have had chance to watch them.

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lorcan_nagle

Starmer era’s going well then.

Keir Starmer replaced his top aide and the Treasury acknowledged that key tax-raising plans were under review, as the Labour government tried to correct course from what even allies say has been a rocky three months in power.

…
Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves must now turn their attention to a budget on Oct. 30 that is already coming under strain, with the viability of more than half the extra revenue that Labour planned to raise to fix Britain’s public services now being questioned.
Plans to impose value-added tax on private school fees, announced in Labour’s election manifesto and due to come into force in January, may have to be delayed to prevent administrative problems, aides said, confirming a report in the Observer newspaper on Sunday.
Reeves is also reconsidering a planned overhaul of the UK’s tax regime for non-domiciled foreigners, looking at different policy options to maximize the tax take after suggestions it would spark a wealth exodus and end up losing money for the Treasury.
Private Equity
Further proposals to close a loophole on carried interest — private equity fund managers’ portion of profits on asset sales — are being looked at again after internal Treasury analysis showed they too could end up costing the exchequer money.

The private equity firm General Atlantic has warned the government that dozens of dealmakers in London could leave if plans for higher taxes on carried interest go ahead. The hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard is considering a move to Geneva from London. Jeremy Coller, a pioneer of Britain’s private equity sector, has already left for Switzerland.

::eyeroll::

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lorcan_nagle, Todd

[Martin Smith]

For reasons passing even my own understanding, I downloaded all of Saved By The Bell: The New Class recently. I’ve been playing a game on Switch that is very grindy, so something to have on TV and not have to pay full attention to while playing in handheld mode is nice.

I quite liked the original Saved By The Bell when I was a kid and I still have nostalgia for it (I’m not convinced how much it’d hold up to modern viewing, especially after seeing TNC). I think it helped that I was about 5 or 6 when I started watching it. If I’d been the same age as the characters, I don’t think I’d have been at all interested. But I was all in on those Peter Engel shows in my single digit years: SBTB, Hang Time, California Dreams especially and The New Class. But I only ever caught the latter sporadically, on both TCC and Channel 4, and it never seemed to have the same cast members between episodes. That’s a reason why I decided to go through it, starting with season 1 and… wow is it bad.

There’s two main problems. (Well, three if you want to include the scripts, but I can’t imagine they’re much, if any, worse than the ones original SBTB had). First is that the acting is broadly terrible. The cast are, admirably, all roughly the same age as the characters, there’s no 25-year olds as teens (well, maybe for some of the minor roles) but that means they’re not desperately well trained. They don’t gel well and they’re all delivering their lines awkwardly. Someone really needed to just spend some time with them, as a group, and get them to relax a bit.

The other problem is the set of characters. They’re mostly fine, with two exceptions. You have Vicky, a sort of generic 90s awkward headcase (she’s vegan! she’s a hypochondriac! she’s for animal rights probably!); Megan, the smartest girl in school (played by Beyonce’s half-sister); Lindsay, who… is just blandly nice; Tommy D, Lindsay’s biker-ish boyfriend; then Scott and Weasel, who are basically clones of Zack and Screech.

I can sort of see why they felt recreating that was a good idea, but it really isn’t. It makes the whole show feel like “here’s a bunch of knock offs” rather than just “here’s another group of kids”, especially as they initially have Scott break the fourth wall the way Zack did. The bigger issue is just that the actor playing Scott, Robert Sutherland Telfer, has negative charisma. The Zack/Scott archetype is a charming con man type, a loveable rogue. Mark Paul Gosselaar nailed that. Telfer just makes Scott seem like a sleazy dickhead. The stories don’t help: in the first episode he falls for Lindsay and starts trying to manipulate her into breaking up with Tommy D for him – in the second episode he’s resorted to dressing in drag and posing as his own cousin to attend a sleep-over to gaslight Lindsay into thinking she has nothing in common with Tommy – but Telfer just seems like a creep the entire time. He’s incapable of conveying sincerity, so when he inevitably has to apologise or show contrition, he still sounds exactly like he did when he was pulling the con or manipulating people. Weasel isn’t as bad, though Isaac Lidsky hams up his lines too much, but ultimately he just does feel like Screech 2.0.

The most interesting thing about this first season is actually what happened to the actors who played Scott and Weasel after SBTB. They were both dropped after season 1 (along with Bonnie Russavage, who played Vicky, who was arguably the best actress in the group). Telfer, allegedly, because of his bad behaviour on set, which extended to trying to pick fights with random extras. He doesn’t have any other acting credits on IMDB but now has a public Facebook page where he posts lots of angry right wing memes. Meanwhile, Isaac Lidsky, (who, like Dustin Diamond before him, was only 14 playing older as Weasel) was diagnosed with a degenerative disease in his eyes that led to him going blind. He went to college at 15, graduated Harvard at 20 with a computer science degree, founded an internet advertising start-up in 1999 that survived the dot-com burst and was sold for millions years later. But he’d left that to go back to Harvard to get a law degree, after which he became a clerk to Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and RBG and is now a famous lawyer and activist.

Very divergent paths from a Saved By The Bell sequel, of all things.

Anyway, I lasted about three and a half episodes into season 1 before just skipping around. I’m mainly just looking for episodes where future famous people show up, such as James Marsden as a popular sleaze in one episode (who out-acts everyone around him, although he was 20, so probably better trained) and Buffy’s Emma Caulfield in a season 2 episode, where she plays a school nurse who has a thing with Screech.

Ah yeah, Screech. So in retooling for season 2, some new kids were brought in. There’s Brian, who is still a bit like Zack and Scott, but it’s dialled back a bit, he doesn’t break the fourth wall and he’s Swiss, for some reason. Then there’s his best mate Bobby, who is more of a unlucky in love loser than a Screech (and played by a guy with the incredible name of Spankee Rodgers. He has no other credits on IMDB and I fear to google him) and rich girl Rachel, who had been in an episode in season 1. She’s played by Sarah Lancaster, who actually progressed to a decent career in things like Chuck (to be fair, Linsday and Megan’s actresses have subsequently done stuff as well, I’m just not familiar with any of it).

But the main addition is Screech, who returns to the school as an admin assistant to Mr Belding. It… doesn’t work. He’s incredibly annoying, which admittedly is Screech’s whole deal, but his dynamic with Mr Belding is just odd and it feels like a desperation move all round. Dustin Diamond is fresh off the just cancelled SBTB: The College Years and really this should have been the point in his career when he went off to reinvent himself, as the others did. Instead, he retreated to the security of Screech for six more seasons, which killed his career long-term, because he became indivisible from the character. But ultimately it just gets in the way of the actual kids taking centre stage fully.

The acting seems marginally better for season 2, but the weirdest bit is that all the episodes, in air date order, are out of order. First episode, everyone is going back to school (presumably for the start of a new years, but possibly just term). Second episode: school’s out for summer, Belding and Screech are working at a country club (huh?) and the kids are hired on as staff (huh?). There’s about six episodes set in that country club, along with two at Screech’s cousin’s dude ranch (of course) and they’re just sprinkled through out the series. The two part series finale (set at the school, just to make the timeline make less sense) didn’t air consecutively either. American TV, man.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by Martin Smith.

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lorcan_nagle

Well of course not. When has Biden (or anyone else in the US) saying anything a) deterred Israel or b) lead to any consequences affecting US support of Israel?

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njerry, Todd, lorcan_nagle

I think the bigger issue for me was the limited opening time. Four and a half hours just doesn’t seem enough (especially as it’s over lunch, so if you want to get food, you’ve got to burn some of that time) and I don’t get why it closes mid-afternoon. The crowd wasn’t too bad once we’d got out of the first aisle initially.

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lorcan_nagle

I went to the big toy fair at the NEC on Sunday. I was going to go solo, but decided to ask if my brother – who has been collecting MASK the past few years and getting TMNT for his son – if he wanted to come. Had to dissuade him from bringing the kids (they’re 4 and 6, a bit too young to cope with the size and business of the fair imo) and we ended up bringing along his friend (who is sort of my friend as well). They’re both early 40s, for reference, and before we went in Friend was asking if there was anything in particular we were looking for and I asked the same of him. He was non-committal, he’s been getting Thundercats recently and his son has been getting into Ghostbusters, but he was “fine with not getting anything, not looking to spend big but if I see a good deal I’ll go for it”.

Within about 15 minutes of getting in we were trying to convince him not to immediately buy the first MIB Millennium Falcon he saw. He was also nearly going for a MIB G1 Ultra Magnus for £100, I think (down from £180!) something I don’t remember him ever mentioning any interest in before. He ended up spending more than we did (on decent things, in the end). Made me realise that while I know a lot about various lines, I have no clue about going rates for most stuff. Is £100 good for a MIB Ultra Magnus?

I bought some stuff though. A stack of TFUKs was my biggest spend (22 for £35, which is pricier per issue than I’d have liked but ok), but I finally got a Beast Wars Terragator! one of the few BW figures I’ve never managed to find for some reason, right there, at one of the first tables I went to. So that was nice. Got some 90s Gladiators figures for my nephew (who is mad on both the new show and the 90s one). And then various junkers for use in designing resin stands: a Kenner Darth Vader (not a Star Wars guy at all, but having handled it for a bit, I can kinda see the appeal of it as a thing), a James Bond Jr scuba gear fig I had as a kid, a MotU Clawful, a Biker Mouse and, most surprisingly for me, Herc Armstrong from Inhumanoids. It was in a box of bagged, individually priced figures with no price. I asked the stallholder, expecting a high price (as I’ve seen precisely one in person before and it was expensive, though admittedly this is missing all pieces) and he just uncertainly said “£5?” and then, after I’d paid, asked if I knew what it was because he didn’t have a clue.

Most interesting thing I saw though was a stall which had all its loose figures in plastic blisters. One of their Visionaries had one of my resin printed stands in with it. Felt weirdly proud of that.

It’s an exhausting show though. Opens at half 10 (with early entry from 8). We got there about 11:15 and there was still a large queue filtering in, with a stream of people walking out with stuff (presumably bought from early entry) making the wait feel worse. We were still going round as the show closed at 3 (and, annoyingly, some people were already packing up at half 2). I think there was an entire aisle we didn’t get to check.

 

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lorcan_nagle, njerry, Todd

I got to have a go on a Virtual Boy yesterday. Not something I ever really considered a possibility outside of splurging several hundred quid myself on buying one (which I’m incredibly unlikely to do). But the owner of the retro games, toys and car dealership near me has got one in and had it set up for people to have a go on yesterday, so I went down (early, to beat the crowds I expected, but no-one else was there. For the Virtual Boy! Mad).

So it’s an interesting machine. By which I mean weird. First, the controller. It’s got two d-pads, for reasons passing understanding. The one on the right means that the main face buttons are shoved further inwards than is strictly comfortable. It has shoulders buttons, that came as a surprise, while the system’s power switch is on the controller too, for some reason. Not only is it weird in itself, it’s strange how close it feels to a PS1 controller in shape, yet the subsequent N64 one didn’t.

The system itself is no less odd. The shop had it set up on a tripod, to avoid strapping it to people’s face (which I think you can do) and he said you don’t need to push your face right down into it. I’m not sure if that’s true or if he just wanted to avoid having loads of people’s faces smushed into it. Looking into the viewer felt like being Spock on Star Trek, peering into his science device, just at a slightly different angle. I wasn’t sure if I’d need to take my glasses off to view it properly, but (as a short-sighted person) I really didn’t. The image of the screen feels surprisingly far away. There’s a serious feeling of depth. Not necessarily to the stereoscopic effect (though that does work) but just to how far away it all is. That didn’t mean the image felt small though and I’d say I had the opposite issue. In playing one of the games, a vector-based Starfox-alike, while concentrating on the ship, I couldn’t ever really see the HUD in the corners. I had to actively look around to find that and kept forgetting it was even there. As I said, the stereoscopic effect does work, to differing degrees. It’s not quite as good as on a 3DS but it does work. There’s a focus slider on the device, but I didn’t feel like that really did anything.

The shop had two games and that is the crux of the machine really. The first was that space shooter, called Red Alarm, published by T&E Soft and which plays worse than Starfox. The issue is really the controls, although I think I was meant to be using the second d-pad more than I was. There wasn’t much sense of speed (although that might have been due to me not knowing how to accelerate fully, if you can) and the manoeuvrability was poor. Another weird thing was that it kept flashing “Nintendo Virtual Boy” and “T&E Soft” on the screen while playing, which made it feel like a tech demo rather than a game. Not sure what that was about but apparently it’s intentional.

The other game was Mario Clash, which owes more to the Mario Bros arcade game than the proper Super Mario games. It’s about stomping on turtles that move across two platforms, the twist being they’re on front and rear planes, connected by pipes, rather than different heights. It’s a decent concept, I guess, and the depth of field really works. The game just isn’t fun. It’s immediately quite difficult, with spiked turtles you can’t stomp on the first level, while the platforming elements (there are some higher platformers) feel awkward and I just couldn’t make the jump.

Ultimately, that was the biggest issue I had with my short go on the Virtual Boy. I didn’t mind the red tone graphics and it didn’t seem to be inducing a migraine in me (as I feared, given VR does) I just wasn’t compelled to spend any time with the games, because they were kinda shit. And that’s ultimately what any console is going to live or die by.

Has New York never considered electing, or even nominating, someone who isn’t a POS? IIRC correctly, no-one seemed enthused about Adams or his opponent. No-one liked the mayor before that or the one before that etc.

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lorcan_nagle, Todd

Uncle Retrospective wrote:

the song in episode two might not have worked

I really dug the song. I’m definitely enjoying the show and I’m glad to see Debra Jo Rupp swept up into it.

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lorcan_nagle, Todd

So this is the panel scan I found, attributed to the French-Canadian reprints, that had me thinking that was the source of my art pages.

It’s got the same altered layout and extended panels. It’s from the story The Last Warrior, originally in Rawhide Kid 71.

So I dug into the French Canadian reprint title. There’s not a huge amount of info about it online, but by cross-referencing three sites, I managed to work out the contents of each issue in the run.

No sign of the story my pages are from. But the first ten issues or so had two stories in them, and from #5 onwards, they didn’t bother putting the titles of both on the cover. So maybe it was an unnamed back-up strip?

Cue lots of fruitless Googling. Eventually, I though to switch to Lycos, which gave me better results and I stumbled upon a site with scans of the entire French-Canadian run. Downloading was throttled though, so it took a while to grab the potential issues and…

No sign of the story my pages are from. And then the same page of the Last Warrior that I found that scan online from looks like this:

So I guess it’s definitely not from the French-Canadian series and I’m back looking in France.

I find this fascinating, Al. Is there a certain size at which an over-sized object becomes creepy to you? Or is it scale relative to the normal item? Do those over-sized scissors that are used at ribbon cutting ceremonies wig you out?

Cheers, Dave, I’ll look into that. I may have too quickly discounted the French Canadian possibility. The scans I’d seen of them were all from the first pages, but I’ve just found a scan of a random story page that seems to have been altered in the same way as the pages I’ve got, with lettering of a similar quality (much better than in the scans I’d previously seen, which were barely legible chickenscratch). Comics.org is a bit light on information beyond covers for the series and the original to cover to “my” issue was reused for that Masquerader story, so I’ve got little to go on.

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Dave

That’s the French-Canadian reprint I mentioned. It uses the cover from #73 but actually has the contents of a different issue. They used pages as were with new lettering squeezed into the existing bubbles.

The sheer gall of Labour trying to say it’s absolutely fine for private donors to be paying for/buying clothes for the Prime Minister and his wife because “they don’t get an allowance for clothing”. HE’S PAID A SALARY! They already don’t have to pay for most things in life, is clothing really too much to be covered by the £100 grand+ a year or whatever he makes?

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lorcan_nagle

I care only in that it might prompt DC to (finally) reprint the back end of Sandman Mystery Theatre in the second compendium edition. But given Gaiman’s fall from grace, they might not want to bother tying anything in with it.

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Ben

Has season 2 of Netflix’s Sandman already been shot?

As is the Treasury refusing to provide any details (some might say proof) of the supposed £22bn “black hole” in the finances. As if it doesn’t actually exist (to that degree) and they’ve picked a random number out of a hat to justify things they were going to do anyway.

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lorcan_nagle, Ben

Dave wrote:

But what I always think about that is, surely these guys would just buy a really high-end PC that outperforms a console either way?

I suspect a lot of them do too, but there’s still a difference between console and PC gaming. Not just exclusive releases, but comfort of playing in front of a TV rather than a desktop.

To be fair to Trump, I have heard lots about people eating dogs, even heating them up to do so. Disgraceful.

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Todd

Dave wrote:

I guess they’re mainly aiming this at people who haven’t bought into this console generation, yet rather than people upgrading mid-gen – but even as a newcomer to PS5 I’d sooner buy a standard model and five brand new games rather than a PS5 Pro.

Yeah, I’m not sure about that. The people who haven’t moved to the current gen (such as myself) are likely holding off for cost/desire reasons. So I’m not sure a slightly better model at such a high price is going to convince any of them. I think this is aimed at the type of people who read Digital Foundry and salivate over ray-tracing and frame rates, the kind that would have had a PS5 from launch. Or idiots with too much disposable income.

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Todd, Ben, Dave

Christian wrote:

Man, you really have to wonder. Gaiman, Whedon and Ellis were some of the most important influences to me in the nineties,

Ok Christian, you need to list your other important influences from the 90s so we can prepare ourselves for their scandals.

 

Wait, was Dave Grohl one? Damnit, Christian!

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Andrew, Christian, Uncle Retrospective, njerry, Todd

Asked about Tuesday’s vote on the changes to the fuel allowance, forced after the Conservatives submitted a motion to annul the government’s change to regulations, Starmer refused to say if Labour MPs who rebelled would be stripped of the whip – but made it clear he expected their support.

“That will be a matter for the chief whip,” he told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. “We’re going into a vote. I’m glad we’re having a vote, because I think it’s very important for parliament to speak on this. But every Labour MP was elected in on the same mandate as I was, which was to deliver the change that we need for the country.”

 

Well that’s a yes, isn’t it?

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lorcan_nagle

paul f wrote:

It’s a bit odd to see Kathryn Prescott still playing a high school student almost a decade after Skins, even if she was an actual teenager on that show.

I just went and checked to see if she was the twin that got really hench and into bodybuilding and that turns out to be her sister, Megan (who is now using OnlyFans to fund a Fringe show about how being a child actor is a bit like being a sex worker… :s) while Kathryn has had three years of major surgery and recovery after being run over by a cement truck. :|

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paul f

Remember when Labour kept criticising the Tories’ Rwanda policy but just for being inefficient and expensive and yet the media and their boosters kept spinning this as Labour not wanting to wholesale deport refugees, even though there was no direct evidence of this?

Yeah…

The government deported more than 200 people to Brazil this month, the largest single deportation on record. Since Labour came to power there have been at least nine deportation charter flights.

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lorcan_nagle

Ben wrote:

That happens quite a bit towards the end of a few Nintendo games.

Due to other things that it really nails, I’m sticking with Star Wars Outlaws. If it was from any other company, the stealth would make more sense, but as it is? They know how to do this, or most of their studios do. Still, got some new stuff to try out that might aid it for the better.

I watched Outside Xbox do a stream of Outlaws and Andy, who is a master of stealth in Hitman, spent the best part of an hour (it felt like, I wasn’t timing) stuck on one insta-fail stealth section in an Imperial hangar. It looked supremely frustrating.

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Ben

While my WiiU is set up, I decided to go back and finish off the single player campaign in Splatoon. The online services for the WiiU were turned off last year (there’s a fan-made alternative server system set up, but I’ve not gone into rigging that yet, if I bother at all) and that’s the core of Splatoon. The game’s main hub has other online player’s characters milling around and you can talk to them, so I was expecting a ghost town. But no, there were still people in there. I guess they’re just remnants of the last people I saw online. I was a little surprised that, with the servers off, you can’t even browse the shops for gear, but I suppose that makes sense given it’s only used online.

Anyway, single player is offline, so is unaffected. I couldn’t remember how far I’d got previously and it turned out to be most of the way – about 21 of the 27 levels done. But I redid all of them, for the experience and to get my head back into the game. I’ve always liked Splatoon, but I’m not particularly good at it, multiplayer-wise anyway. Single player, I did ok, but it’s not nearly as tough as MP can be, until you get to the final boss. Oooo boy that’s a challenge. It’s an octopus guy in a flying mech orb thing. It fires missiles at you and then its two fists. You basically have to shoot the fists so they swing back and punch him in the head.

Now, this being a video game boss, you’d probably expect to do that 3 or maybe 5 times. But nope, you have to do it about 12. It’s a huge sprawling fight. Every time you get a rebound fist hit in, he back his mech up deeper into the level and every third time, he starts firing a massive subwoofer thing at you, which you also have to ricochet back, but three times in succession. By the fourth cycle of this, you’re dodging two waves of four missiles, a sonic attack, bombs that spawn enemies plus then the fists and subwoofer, while also negotiating tricky terrain and patches of opposing ink (which slowly deals damage if you stand in it). It’s tricky as hell, and probably took me longer to do than most of the rest of the single player alone, but immensely rewarding to beat.

paul f wrote:

The least British thing about the season: due to a product placement deal, everyone uses Sprint, a company that never operated in the UK, as their mobile operator.

That’s up there with an episode of The Blacklist that has a short scene set in “Leeds”, where a guy and his young daughter are walking down a very American suburban street, see a kid with a lemonade stand and says “we always stop for lemonade stands”. And then get blown up.

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Ben

I decided to jump on the Blokees bandwagon. These are little blind-boxed model kits – a bit like Gunpla I think (I have no first hand experience of Gunpla) – of Transformers characters. They’re exclusive to Game in the UK and appeared with no fanfare on their website last month. They were repped at TF Nation though and went down a storm. I ordered two off AliExpress, because they’re about half the price on there compared to Game (£4 vs £8 each, which still isn’t expensive really). They’re really cool.

They’re a really fun little build. They use the same basic armature, with push together pieces (some of which are on sprues, but pop out and don’t require clipper) which allows for a lot of articulation and interchangeability. It’s incredibly satisfying to do, simple and yet the character feel really distinct (well, these two do – I imagine if I’d ended up with, say, Prowl and Bluestreak, that’d be less the case but that’s just Transformers for you). They’re so poseable. I’m really resisting the urge to order a load more immediately. I think they’d be great for kids too, obviously. Reminds me a little of building a Kinder Egg toy, except the end result isn’t shit.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

Kinda puts this in a new light:

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Todd, lorcan_nagle, njerry

A little while ago, I was listening to an episode of The Back Page podcast (which is hosted by Samuel Roberts, former PC Gamer editor, and Matthew Castle, former editor of Official Nintendo and Xbox Magazines) and there was a reasonable argument made about Metroid: Other M. Other M is easily the most reviled game in the series. It came out in 2010, which is when I’d stopped paying attention to the Wii and it forewent the FPS approach of the Prime games in favour of a 3D graphics on 2D plane(s) approach (ala Crash Bandicoot really) with first person stuff mixed in. What makes the game so immediately hated is that it absolutely slaughters the character of Samus. Where previously she’d been a silent protagonist, here she gives a running commentary that can best be described as “rambling daddy issues”, all performed pretty woodenly. But Matthew Castle’s argument was that the game deserved to be seen beyond the internet dunks on the story elements and that it’s gameplay is worth a look. So, convinced by this reasonable argument, I picked up a copy from CEX for £4 and I’ve been playing it this week.

It fucking sucks.

All the story stuff is as bad as I expected, but the game’s writing generally is terrible. The root issue is a poor localisation, I think. Even the plot summary reminders when you reload the game are badly written. But the gameplay’s shite too. The platforming is imprecise and woolly, the combat finnicky, with an auto-aim that occasionally fails and reliance on context sensitive moves (like jumping onto an enemy and doing a charged shot point blank in the head) that just don’t work most of the time. The map makes no sense – the mini-map that’s always on screen constantly rotates, meaning it’s really hard to compare it to the full map in the pause screen, which near the point at which I bailed on the game had just given up showing where I was. The biggest issue is the first person stuff. You’re constantly forced to use it to examine the environment in lame pixel-hunt moments (not a patch on Prime’s scanning visor stuff) and it’s the only way to fire missiles. But you can’t move while in it, meaning you’re a sitting duck any time you want to fire missiles. And the button to pan your view is the same as the one to lock onto things, which is annoying. But the worst bit is that you switch into by aiming the Wii remote at the screen and exit by returning it to the horizontal orientation, meaning you constantly have to change your grip on the controller while playing, which is just annoying.

So yeah, some times shit games thoroughly deserve their reputation.