So I think this is the series my brother worked on. Maybe only for episode 10 though.
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It’s a shame Benedict died first. Having a spare Pope hanging around would have been handy in just this situation.
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The fan section went on way too long and got way too sentimental, but other than that I enjoyed it. Amusingly Lux was defeated the same way as Badgey in Lower Decks.
And the werewolf in that season 2 episode the name of which escapes me. Doctor even repeated the same line about drowning. Assuming that was intentional.
The bit with the “real world” didn’t work for me. I think it either needed to be the actual real world or not be in there. Turning out to be a fake as a trap just didn’t really make sense with the rest of Lux’s deal and it all just felt self-indulgent (though I did like the jokes about Blink).
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I think the only concern with using Kate would be showing her around the levels of gore they’re going for with DD and Punisher.
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Given they’re increasingly not that young, they might end up being just the Avengers at the end of the next set of Avengers movies.
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She’s presumably on a back burner until a Young Avengers project happens. Can’t be too long, they’ve got most of them set up now. I was a bit surprised Eli wasn’t in Brave New World at all, actually.
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Nintendo are being both greedy and stupid here:
Please understand, download codes are expensive and labour intensive to manufacture. They couldn’t possibly keep producing them indefinitely.
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I bought Million Dollar Baby on DVD from a charity shop about 13 years ago-ish, thinking “I’ll want to watch that again some time” and some time finally came about yesterday. First time I’ve seen it since I guess 2005.
The film opens and there’s a guy boxing and I thought “is that Mike Colter?”. Then “well, I’m just saying that because it’s a bald black guy, that’s probably a bit racist on my part.” Anyway, turns out it’s Mike Colter. Also Michael Pena and Anthony Mackie are in it. Who know? I’d say I’d forgotten that, but I didn’t know who they were back then. I did somehow entirely forget Morgan Freeman is in it though, which is impressive given he’s the narrator and third main character.
That narration is properly awful though. I don’t go in for those rules of screenwriting (as brought up in the film Adaptation) saying that VO narration is cheap and hacky and shouldn’t be used, but man, it is used as an absolute crutch in this movie. So much of the plot is just told through the narration rather than shown. And the reveal at the end that it’s a letter to Eastwood’s estranged daughter makes no sense. I’m sure she was hooked reading about the sub-plot with the intellectually challenged guy getting beaten up while her dad was in Vegas for Maggie’s final fight.
I expected better from the creator of Due South, really.
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Who is this for anyway?
Anecdotally, from dating app profiles, Millennial women. There’s a significant percentage of them that are still mad for Harry Potter, regardless or in spite of Rowling being an ever growing PR nightmare.
Have to wonder if all the people being cast in this are also getting signed to agreements about what they can say publicly about trans rights etc in contradiction to Rowling or if they just don’t give a shit and are happy selling out to glorify the work of a bigot.
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Yeah, that Homer picture is horrific as well as being AI. Can we get rid of that?
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I finished the Pitt off this weekend and it’s really great TV. I won’t go too into depth on it, because I want others to see it unspoilt, but one thing I thought it did excellently was build up a believable world of characters in that hospital that we’re only getting a glimpse of. As people from other shifts come in later in the season/day, they all feel like as natural, established and important parts of the staff as the ones we’ve been following til now and the show treats them as such. It’s not like a typical “oh and there’s SG-2, who are a load of glorified extras” or “here’s a super famous person that sticks out like a sore thumb doing a cameo for two minutes”. It’s “here’s Dr Shen, he’s at work now and if this show had happened to be set a few hours later, he’d be a main character and you wouldn’t question it”. Very well done.
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Also, nice that they didn’t do the Disney double drop this time.
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I was going to hold out til this evening, but ended up watching it this morning. I really enjoyed it. I liked the retro 50s sci-fi aesthetic especially, as the social commentary buried into it. Quite a fate for the villain, really.
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I couldn’t read your link as the article is behind a paywall
Yeah, it won’t let me read now either. I think it had a gift thing attached, must have run out.
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Sky in talks to bring hit US series ‘Saturday Night Live’ to the UK
A British version of US comedy show Saturday Night Live is set to be made in the UK for the first time under plans being worked on between broadcaster Sky and US media group NBC. Executives at Sky UK are hoping to bring in a British cast for the popular series, said several people close to the talks, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary in the US. They added that talks to launch Saturday Night Live in the UK were at an advanced stage but a deal was not finalised. Sky declined to comment. Sky is looking for more in-house hits for the UK to help offset the impact from the end of its exclusive deal to show HBO programming, the Warner Bros Discovery-owned network, which finishes next year.
I think there is actually a gap in the market this could fill now. With so many panel shows having been binned off and the almost complete lack of sketch shows around (there’s Mitchell and Webb coming back at some point and… Horrible Histories?) there’s a real lack of opportunity for new comedy talent to get on TV now. I think there’s even a possibility Weekend Update could work, given the Mash Report is gone.
The trouble is, SNL is hugely expensive to make and I don’t think even Sky will have the money to throw at this to make it seem anything other than a cheap imitation of the original.
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The Losers – I’ve not seen this in a while. If you’d asked, I’d have said it was made in 2007, but it’s actually 2010. It feels older than that both stylistically and in the way that it uses comic book aesthetics to show off that it’s based on a comic. I don’t think it really needed that, frankly, and it just feels a bit try hard in that regard now. The story’s decent – though it’s very weird that the nonsense sci-fi sonic disintegrator doomsday weapons are called “snukes” when that’s blatantly a suitcase nuke – and the characters good, though elevated by the cast. Chris Evans especially shines as Jensen and it reminds me of why I was so amped to see him as Captain America the next year. The direction isn’t great though, just full of lots of annoying gimmicks. I can see why Sylvain White hasn’t been trusted with another feature film since and is doing TV shows of a similar ilk.
The Kid Detective – Like Brubaker and Martin’s Friday, this is based on Encyclopaedia Brown, asking the bold question of “what if he became a burnt out adult”. I’m sort of reaching my limit on that kind of concept, but this does do it mostly well. Abe Applebaum was a kid detective who solved various cases in his school and across his small town – to the point that the town clubbed together to buy him an office – but burnt out when his best friend and assistant disappeared when they were about 14. Now 32 and struggling for meaningful detective work, he’s hired by a high school girl to investigate the murder of her boyfriend. For an indie comedy, it is actually funny in places, which is nice. It’s also quite dark but it balances those well, I think. It’s not spectacular, but it is entertaining.
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I watched the first episode of The Pitt last night, which was really good. The real time aspect makes for a nice pace that doesn’t feel too artificially amped up – though I imagine that will change through the day/series – and I like the prospect of minor characters weaving in and out through that span (the guy with chest pains complaining that he’s not yet been seen, for instance, is presumably going to be a running thing).
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Why the Ultrarich Are Unplugging From “Smart Homes”
“They could not find a single light switch in the entire home,” says Beverly Hills-based interior designer Carrie Livingston about a sprawling penthouse she was hired to renovate. Her clients had inherited the previous owner’s Crestron automation system, which controlled all overhead, wall and table lighting in response to movement within rooms. “The wife complained that every time she got up at night, her husband would see her path illuminated as she made her way from bed to bathroom,” says Livingston, who has worked with clients including Ralph Lauren, Gwyneth Paltrow and Dasha Zhukova. “Other times, she’d enter a darkened room where the lights wouldn’t go on no matter how much she flapped her arms.” Result: Livingston took out the entire system and installed manual switches throughout, an intricate overhaul that cost more than $100,000. Similarly, Bush recounts a recent renovation involving “a kitchen with a built-in dining table that rises and lowers from counter to dining height with hydraulics. But to do so, you need a passcode. Otherwise, the table will not move.”
Also, criminal that the article mentions this
She designed a media room loaded with books, board games and a vintage Corvette that she converted into a pool table.
without showing pictures. Because that pool table is either amazing or a glorious abomination.
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It’s going to be quite funny seeing the reaction of the Americans currently explaining away the already high price of the Switch 2 (and moreso its games) as due to the tariffs when the tariffs actually affect the price. There were quite a few doing that in the chat of the Treehouse livestream yesterday (which was predominantly people telling Nintendo to drop the price), with a certain amount of “you shouldn’t have voted for Trump” gloating mixed in.
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So Switch 2 then. Out in June and costs £395. £75 for a physical copy of Mario Kart World, £67 for Donkey Kong Bananza. Both of which look great, but man, that’s a steep price, especially given first party Nintendo games rarely drop in price.
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So Booker’s 25 not-a-filibuster-filibuster: what was the point? I mean don’t get me wrong, impressive he did it for 25 hours or whatever, but it wasn’t actually filibustering anything and as soon as he was done the Senate went right back to business (unanimous consent for a Trump nominee).
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I wouldn’t be surprised if the villain was Mr Negative, in recent years he’s been built up in Spidey stories in other media too.
Yeah, that would be pretty good. I think Screwball would be good as bit part villain too. The live-streaming social media element is even more relevant now than it was back then.
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Marie Le Conte on the Le Pen conviction (paywalled). https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/marie-le-conte-stop-worrying-about-a-le-pen-backlash/
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Alright! Freak, Paper Doll, Screwball, Nora Winters, Dexter Bennet here we come!
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I really enjoyed the bank heist episode. Just a nice bit of stand-alone superheroing and fun to see Yusuf in a different context.
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Coyote Vs Acme is saved!
At this rate, Ketchup is going to end up getting the entire Looney Tunes brand off WB.
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To Al’s post (i’m not going to quote it because it’s long) that’s a tad unfair to Ditko, though not totally. I will say, I was amazed when I saw scans of the original pencils to some of his late era Spider-Man. Gwen looked very cute in the raw pencils. It’s just that Ditko’s own harsh inking turned her into the Grinch.
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Makes more sense though, Waterstones are actually very good book stores, whereas WH Smith are mainly places where you get books and toys cheaply.
Waterstones are good shops, though I think their reputation as the last bastion of high street book-selling and bigging up the importance of booksellers as individuals who their own ability to make recommendations and foster a community etc is a bit unfortunate because they treat their staff really shittily. I interviewed there for a part time job a few years back. Instead of just being employed by the one branch, you’re associated to a “cell” of stores and expected to work across all of them at any time, on a zero hours contract with no advance notice of when you’d need to travel. For someone like me who doesn’t drive, with the stores across a 40 mile or so area, that was less than convenient.
WH Smith is weird because it’s always done a lot of things, but never been the best at most of them. They’re ok for stationery, I guess, and the magazine section is probably the best around, but the decline of the magazine industry makes that increasingly moot, imo. But for most other things you’re better off going to a specialist shop. I think they’d have done well to stick with video games, DVD/Blu-ray and music given the death of specialist shops for those, they’d have had a niche as the half-decent omnipresent option.
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If it merges with the American branch of TK Maxx and an angling shop, maybe it can eventually end up as TJ Hooker?
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DC Finest trades for the rest of the year have shown up on Penguin-Random House’s site. Includes:
Superman – seemingly the second Golden Age volume
Hawkman – first Silver Age volume
Spectre – Silver Age
Static – first volume
Superfriends(!)
Wonder Woman – first Golden Age volume
Batman – last pre-Crisis volume
War – Kubert stuff
Horror – a mix of House of Mystery, House of Secrets etc
Green Lantern – debut of Guy Gardner
Supergirl – first volume of PaD’s 90s version
Blue Beetle – Dan Garret version, so 60s?
and some others I’ve forgottenI worry they’re going slightly too far for breadth rather than depth. The Epic Collections started with only seven series in the first year (Thor, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Avengers, then FF, Captain America and Daredevil) then slowly expanded. DC Finest, in its first year, will have about 30 different series covered. But I’m also quite interested in a wide spread of them, so I guess I can’t complain.
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Trump’s Aggression Sours Europe on US Cloud Giants
There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.
“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former, decade-long member of the European Parliament.So there’s a limit to how much I can openly say about this, but I know people involved with UK government infrastructure and even before all this with Trump 2, I asked why we kept renting American cloud services rather than building/using our own, and that surely it’s a security risk. Not even from the stuff posited here, of the Trump administration strong-arming access to US tech firms’ data, but just from N.E. Megacorp suddenly deciding that they can get away with vastly hiking up the cost of cloud storage for vital systems etc because they’ve got the government over a barrel. The answer, to the degree I got one, was that it essentially comes down to cost and convenience. But I wonder if that’s being reassessed lately.
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Funny, cos I read this this morning.
I and seven colleagues from the U.K., Canada, and Switzerland have just published as a pre-print — Gollish et al. 2025 — the first such study. We compare in-competition performances of nine women who fall under the 2024 World Athletics DSD Regulations (and who have publicly stated so) against the performances of hundreds of other women who participated in the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
…
The career bests of these nine athletes with natural variations fall entirely within the distribution of women’s performances at Paris 2024, for the 100m, 200m, and 400m, and that all but two athletes fall within the distribution for the 800m. This analysis would likely look different if the results compared the personal best of each of the athletes who competed in Paris, rather than on their performance during the games. Of particular note, is the 800m, which is often run tactically at a championship event compared to the 100m, 200m, and 400m run at full effort. Consequently, this analysis is very conservative in that it captures the career best of these 9 women compared to the results of a single Olympic Games. None of the identified women have a women’s world record or threatened a world record. Similarly, none of these nine athletes have performances anywhere close to the distribution of men’s performances at Paris 2024. In the 200m, 400m, and 800m there are an equal number of regulated women in the top and bottom half of each distribution of Paris 2024 performances.
Does evidence in performance of the women currently banned by World Athletics indicate an “insuperable advantage” or “exactly the same” advantage that men have over women?
The answer to this question is perfectly clear:
No, these women do not have an “insuperable advantage” over other women nor do they perform like men.
And of course there was this the other day:
A gender row involving two boxers at the Paris 2024 Olympics was the result of a Russian fake news campaign and had little to do with reality, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) president, Thomas Bach, said on Saturday.
Bach, who is stepping down in June after 12 years in charge of the biggest job in world sports, said the IOC had had to fight off many similar campaigns before and after the Paris Games.
The boxing competition in Paris was run by the IOC after it stripped the International Boxing Association (IBA) of recognition last year over its failure to implement reforms on governance and finance. But the IBA, run by Umar Kremlev, a Russian businessman with close links to the Kremlin, criticised the IOC during the Games for allowing Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Chinese Taipei, who had been banned by the IBA as a result of a chromosome test a year earlier, to compete.
A bitter war of words ensued between the two organisations and dominated the headlines. “I would not consider this a real crisis because all this discussion is based on a fake news campaign coming from Russia,” said Bach, speaking in Pylos, the southern Greek seaside resort where his successor will be elected on Thursday. “This was part of the many, many fake news campaigns we had to face from Russia before Paris and after Paris.”
This feels like a little tantrum from Coe after flunking the IOC election.
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The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
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I recently managed to get a copy of the third OHC of Morrison’s New X-Men after a mere 20 years of looking (well, to be fair, for a lot of that I wasn’t actively looking. It was about nine months of having a saved search on eBay that finally sorted it). And I read them all this past week or so.
It has been an absolute age since I’ve read any of these – 15 years at least. I’m not sure if I’ve read the contents of the third OHC in other formats before. Some of it was familiar, some of it I might just know from osmosis. Anyway, upshot was a lot of it was unfamiliar. Overall, I quite liked it, but it does have significant flaws, which come to a head in the third volume.
First is Fantomex. I just don’t like the character or any of the Weapon Plus stuff. Retconning Wolverine into being Weapon Roman Numeral X? eh, fine, whatever. Tying that into Captain America and Nuke? Sure, I guess. But then having The World with an artificially sped up time-field and forced evolution yadda yadda yadda. Just bollocks, frankly. And it doesn’t entire make sense. If the Weapon Plus program is about creating “super-sentinels” (which, as a retcon, make no sense for Wolverine) why are they speed-evolving people? That’s just making mutants. Bleh. And Fantomex is just annoying in his “oh this is so cool,” element. Like all that stuff in his first appearance where he’s “hello, I Fantomex, the most famous thief in ze world!” and then he takes Jean and Xavier to his cool hideout that has his blind mother in a recreation of his old house inside a cliffside lair – which is surface level kinda cool – but then it all turns out to be nonsense because he’s only been out of The World for about 12 hours? It doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t get away with that on just vibes, imo.
The other big problem I have with it, on a similar note of not making sense, is Xorn being Magneto. Now, the actual Magneto story that it ends up with is pretty cool. I like that he’s completely unable to lead a movement, disconnected from the people he seeks to lead/rule and better off a slogan than a person. That’s all great (though I can see why Marvel almost instantly undid it, because there’s not much room for the character to go from there, frankly). But even reading the series with the fore-knowledge that Xorn is Magneto doesn’t make that make sense. There’s not really any clues to pick up on (apart from maybe the micro-sentinels being used to fix Xavier’s spine). The history and life of Xorn is too well fashioned to hand-wave it away as just “a fiction created with the help of my followers in China”. For that to work, Magneto would need to a) see the Sentinels baring down on Genosha b) record all the dying thoughts of Genoshans as they died while c) not dying himself having d) decided to not do anything to stop the attack nor make any very public attempt at retribution then e) secretly flee the levelled city without being spotted and hotfoot it to China where f) he set up, seemingly from scratch, an old prison with a mutant guard and several mutant prisoners where he could g) hide out as Xorn so that h) Sublime’s U-Men (who he had no real way of knowing about) could turn up and vivisect the other mutants in the fake prison and try to do the same to Xorn but i) be stopped just in the nick of time by the X-Men who then j) offer him a job so that k) he can manipulate students into an uprising.
That’s a more convoluted plan that the Joker has in the Dark Knight and apparently it was all concocted in the moment he saw a load of Sentinels about to destroy his entire city. It just doesn’t hang together. Xorn is too well crafted as a typical Morrison-esque character to then feel like a facade (to say nothing of the question of skin tone, given Magneto is white and Xorn would presumably have been Asian). It’s especially galling in the reveal when he taunts Xavier (and the reader) with something like “an iron prison? A man with a star for a brain? I can’t believe you didn’t work it out, Charles!” as though a guy with a star for a brain is too silly to have been real, but oh sure, Fantomex is on the level and a ancient sentient bacteria colony is fine. It’s really playing with fire for a writer like Morrison to throw out “I can’t believe you fell for that silly lie!”.
The other thing that struck me reading it is the similarities to Millar’s Ultimate X-Men in various ways (and not just that they both settle on Magneto’s big doomsday plan being flipping the Earth’s magnetic poles). It’s understandable given they worked together/had a mentor-mentee relationship, but there is a similar tone to the dialogue between them, although it’s very much a case of Millar being the poor imitation of Morrison. One thing I always hated about Millar’s writing, even when I was into his work, was the clunky way he’d name-drop things; “Xbox” like an 80s America parent using “Atari” or “Nintendo” to mean all video games, is one that always sticks out. Morrison kinda does that as well at times, but without sounding so utterly artificial. They have similar takes, broadly, on Xavier as well, though Morrison’s feels more well-rounded than Millar’s.
The other notable thing about New X-Men is art, which is all over the place, frankly. Quitely is nominally the main artist. I love his uniform designs (I still think it’s Jean’s best outfit in particular) though I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of his art generally (which is not to say it’s bad, it’s just not for me). I find it more palatable in the Riot story, where I think he’s being inked by someone else. The other artists used to fill in for Quitely are a mixed bag. I remember there was a lot of negativity around Igor Kordey’s work at the time. I can kinda see, as it’s stylistically very different to Quitely’s so doesn’t really mesh well. It’s rushed AF in places too (which is because Kordey was given barely any time to do it). A better fit is, unfortunately, Ethan Van Sciver. Say what you will about the right wing fuck but he can draw well. He disappears after a while though and his place in the “rotation” is taken by Phil Jiminez, who is the best artist of the bunch, I think. The refined style of EVS but with better artist chops (EVS’s background characters can often look janky). Things take a turn for the worse in the third volume, again, though. The Weapon Plus arc, which I was already pre-disposed to dislike is drawn by Chris Bachalo, who I just find so hard to read for little reward. Then the final arc (a tiresome apocalyptic future thing) is drawn, or rather etched, by Marc Silvestri, who is kind of the opposite of Bachalo in terms of line weights and general style, but also just as unpleasant to read.
The final thought I have of this is how long a shadow it’s cast over the X-Men books. It’s weird because as soon as it was done, Marvel went about undermining and contradicting it – Austen did a couple of issues where he somehow didn’t seem to get that Ernst was Cassandra Nova IIRC. There was a series about Xavier rebuilding Genosha with a not-dead Magneto (who I think even tried to claim it wasn’t him in New York). The “real” Xorn showed up a little while later. And yet, thematically, the X-Books have been doing a lot of the same stuff since. I can see the roots of pretty much all of Gillen’s work in here, let alone much of Hickman’s.
And yet no-one will bring back the outfits!
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I loved that stuff. And Fisk being bound in red tape about the docks thing. D’Onofrio really added to that, I think a lot of other actors would have just growled through it.
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Was Nixon “lawful” evil? Part of the problem was he very blatantly broke the law!
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I just finished playing Stray Gods, which I got as a Prime Gaming freebie a while back. It bills itself as a roleplaying musical, but it’s not an RPG really. It’s pretty much a visual novel or Telltale Walking Dead style light-adventure at best, though it does offer branching choices, often tied to three different personality traits (empath, quick-wit, headstrong), so I guess they’re calling themselves an RPG based on the similarities to how Mass Effect kinda sorta does that.
Anyway, the game’s about Grace, a 20something musician who meets a woman named Calliope, who sings a song with her and then, a couple of hours later, turns up at her door, dying. Calliope turns out to literally be Calliope, the Greek goddess/muse and passes on a glowy orb spirit thing that is her godly essence to Grace. This gives her the power to push people into musical numbers that reveal their true emotions/feelings etc which she has to use to prove her innocence of Calliope’s murder to the other Greek gods (called Idols).
It’s a cool game. Nice mostly low-fi art style with awesome character designs and takes on Greek gods. The voice acting is top notch (though Troy Baker cannot sing) and the songs are mostly good. They all branch into three different versions (tied to those personality traits) and those changes can be somewhat jarring at times, plus there’s a little too much musical theatre “performers singing against each other to show disharmony” but generally they’re a good time.
Not a very long game – took me a few evenings – and not really much there in terms of gameplay, but worth a go if you see it cheap.
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I saw Walz in the news today, essentially taking blame for the election loss, which is good of him but also a shame because I think he was the least to blame. He was making traction with that “they’re weird” stuff until no-nothing Democratic bigwigs decided it wasn’t the right tact. Walz seems like a genuinely good guy.
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As soon as they mentioned Hector’s niece, I knew his time was limited. I’m enjoying it, I thought episode 3 was really good, but it feels like it’s as much as Punisher story (and he’s not even shown up) as a Daredevil one.
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I finally read Game Change this past week or so, the book about the 2008 US Presidential election. It’s interesting how incredibly unflattering it is about most of the people in it. Palin comes off the worst though and I was still somehow shocked by how awful she was as a VP candidate and some of the stories about her.
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Oh, and speaking of Trump destroying the US economy, the Tesla Takedown thing is also interesting. Tesla shares have gone down to being almost back to where they were pre-election and will probably continue downward sloping. X has very little hope of ever making enough profit to pay the huge debt Musk loaded it with in order to be able to pay for it. I think Musk may be self-destructing, as a businessman.
They’ll probably figure it out, of course, because this is a kleptocracy now and they’ll manage to somehow spend all of the government’s money on Musk’s and Trump’s businesses. But it would be very funny if they fucked up in doing so and just managed to ruin themselves because they’re such incredible fucking idiots.
Well Musk’s group of frat boys got access to the child support payment system, so he’s probably saving himself a bit of money by removing any record of him needing to pay child support to his literal dozen of children.
Didn’t the Supreme Court ruling last year essentially mean a sitting President can’t be charged or convicted of crimes? So I don’t think even that offers a venue to remove one from power now.
There is always an alternative of course…
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It’s not as good as season 1 of the Netflix show, but I enjoyed it. Interested to see them tackle this idea of Punisher fanboy cops.
It did feel like a bit of a waste to bring Foggy back just to kill him off (for no apparent reason) right at the start of the first episode though. Karen can sod right off though, that’s fine.
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So, Amazon.co.uk dicked me around on two of last year’s three exclusives, cancelling the Breakdown/windsweeper and Chop Shop/Barrage two-packs like a day or two before they were due to be released, which was months after their US releases. Luckily I was able to get them from the US, but then I have to pay shipping and taxes and argh. So I noticed the Carnivac/Fisitron 2-pack is up on Hasbro Pulse, and shipping is only €6.
It’s utterly ridiculous the way Amazon is doing pre-orders on TFs now. They’re consistently just cancelling them last minute and leaving people with nothing. After the hassle I had with Tasmanian Kid, I won’t be bothering with them for a TF pre-order again.
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I also saw that McFarlane is now doing classic Mortal Kombat figures. I might be tempted to grab a couple of those.
MacFarlane’s lost the DC license too. Back to Mattel from second half of 2026.
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New York Toy Fair this weekend and the first big thing to come out of it is The Loyal Subjects showing off the (first) four in their line of MASK. They were a bit vague when they first announced it and it turns out they’re slightly tweaked reissues of original vehicles with new figures. These have ball joints at the shoulders and neck, possibly at the hips, better sculpts and paint apps, especially on the Masks. They all come with blast effects too.
The first wave is Thunderhawk, Condor, Switchblade (as Hi Tech Helicopter for legal reasons) and Rhino (as Mobile Defence Unit). Looks like Rhino will have an SDCC exclusive version that includes Scott and T-Bob, according to a German retailer. Prices set there range from €38 for Condor to €116 or so for Rhino, which is kinda high, I think. Thunderhawk is the one I’d be most tempted to get and it’s €60 apparently, which puts it outside my curiosity range, I think.
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Lately I’ve been watching a Canadian series called The Collector. It’s about Morgan, a former monk from the 14th century who sold his soul to save his girlfriend from the plague and ended up becoming the devil’s immortal agent on Earth, collecting the souls of other people who made deals when their ten years is up. Now (or 2004, when this was made) in Vancouver, he’s decided that these people should have a change at redemption, so has convinced the devil (who finds it amusing) to let him spend their last 48 hours trying to redeem them by rebalancing the good luck they got from their deal against the bad luck that went elsewhere.
It took a couple of episodes to get into the swing of things, but it’s pretty good and there are a couple of episodes that are straight up excellent (The Ice Skater and The Roboticist in season 1). And being a show from Canada, where there are only ever about 50 working actors at any one time, it’s great for spotting familiar faces. So far the highlights have been the admiral from Strange New Worlds as a rapper, the voice of Tigatron from Beast Wars as one of the devil’s guises and Five from Dark Matter, when only about six years old, as another guise of the devil (a different actor plays them each episode). It’s not perfect, there are some questionable elements: there’s a running plot thread about the non-verbal autistic son of Jeri, the journalist investigating Morgan being able to see the Devil and having visions of things relating to Morgan’s cases etc, which is a bit borderline “autism is really divine something or other”. One of the main supporting cast is Maya, a drug addict prostitute Morgan finds near death in episode 1 and tries to save, who then falls for him but he can’t tell her what it is he does (apparently if anyone learns of someone’s deal with the devil, they also immediately go to hell) and the devil keeps messing with her to taunt Morgan. Potentially a bit sad power fantasy, but it works well enough.
I’ve just started season 2 and the show has to recast Maya, as original actress Carly Pope became busy with something else. So it does something interesting with this by having her relapse and OD. Dead, the devil finds her and decides to take her soul and put it in a different body, one that might distract Morgan more (“blonde with bigger tits” I think the Devil says, as he picks it out from a line-up of replacement Mayas). So Maya comes back to life, thinking she’s just had a bad trip and near death experience and no-one notices that she’s now physically different. A picture of her as a kid changes to match. But she starts having hallucinations of her original appearance and nightmares of her original childhood self rather than the revised version. It’s a clever way to deal with losing an actor.
On the other hand, the show decides to make a supporting character out of Jeri’s sister, who helps look after her son. She first appears in the last episode of season 1, is called Rachel (who Jeri had spoken to on the phone a couple of times previously) and is played by Erica Durance, who then became a main cast member on Smallville. So in season 2, rather than recast Rachel, Jeri suddenly has a hitherto unmentioned second sister, Taylor, who acts exactly the same as Rachel did and Rachel is explained away as having just got a new job that prevents her from helping out with the kid. It’s really a strange choice – I don’t think anyone would have begrudged them recasting a guest character who had appeared once when making them a main character.
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I saw it yesterday and thought it was fine. Given all the reshoots, I was expecting a mess, but it holds together fairly well. I liked Sidewinder quite a lot and thought they did well presenting him as a threat (the bass on his gunfire helped a lot). The big problem is that it has no surprises. Partly that’s on me for having checking what the cast of Incredible Hulk were up when I rewatched that a few months ago and saw that Sterns was in this, so maybe that would have hit differently if I hadn’t expected it (though Sterns’ great plan isn’t especially devious or complicated, frankly). The finale is a fight against the Red Hulk, who is in all the posters (and there can’t be that many people who don’t know the identity of) and the film has zero new ideas about a fight against a Hulk, so it just eventually gives up. There’s some decent spectacle in that, but it doesn’t really go anywhere and it wraps up far too neatly.
I thought Mackie did well as a lead though and I like the new Falcon, so that’s good. Weird there was no establishing shot (I think) of their HQ given there seems, from the inside, to be a big Captain America symbol on the outside and across the windows. Presumably its some big public facing base of operations, but there’s no context for it.
So yeah, I agree with Todd. It’s far from the worst MCU movie (Love and Thunder, Eternals) but I don’t think I’ll be in a rush to rewatch it.
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I’ve skipped all of the recent Marvel animated shows except X-Men ’97, and had little interest in the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man show, but I am intrigued by the promo image from the Disney+ carosel that shows that the Slingers are in it:
I have a soft spot for that era of Spidey comics (though I’ve never actually read the Slingers series).
I haven’t watched it yet but as I understand it they’re just costume designs Peter comes up with, rather than used as characters/.
If it gets us a Slingers complete collection, I’m all for it though.
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That’s good to see. And between that and Cruel Summer, there’s enough to fill a fourth deluxe hardcover somewhere down the line now.
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By chance, I happened upon Drew Goddard’s latest project (which Rob Thomas is also part of – I assume the Veronica Mars one, not the Matchbox 20 one) on D+ this week: High Potential. It’s another entry in the venerable genre of “people other than the police solving crimes”, adapted from a French series. In this instance it’s Dee from Always Sunny, here an unspecified probably autistic savant who works as a cleaner at the police department until she “corrects” a murder investigation board and ends up getting hired as a consultant. A potentially very tiresome premise, it’s saved by sharp scripts and some fun direction. There are lots of cut-aways to hypotheses – half soviet montage, half Family Guy cutaway gags – which are a lot of fun.
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Oh no, he’s going to threaten tariffs against everyone now all the time, because (he thinks) it gets him what he wants.
The joke is on Trump. What he asked Mexico and Canada to do, they had already been doing.
The incompetency of this administration is astounding.
Yeah, sure, we know that. But he thinks it’s a resounding success, so of course he’s going to keep trying it. And eventually it’s actually going to get him something more than things that were already in place. I kinda wish Canada had just stood up to him and got into retaliatory tariffs. Sure, it would have been painful for people in both countries, but it would have possibly helped put an end to this instead of indulging him.
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Oh no, he’s going to threaten tariffs against everyone now all the time, because (he thinks) it gets him what he wants.
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Couple of films I watched last week.
Lisa Frankenstein. Directorial debut of Zelda Williams with a script by Diablo Cody. It’s about a teenage girl who is depressed after the death of her mother (killed by a slasher movie type guy in their house) and subsequent remarriage of her easy going father to a horrible woman (who has a mostly very nice daughter). The occupant of her favourite grave at the bachelor’s cemetery she hangs out in is struck by lightning and revived and she ends up bonding with him and procuring parts to fix him up. Absolutely does not work. Lovely colour palette and set design (it’s set in 1989 and manages to avoid a lot of the easy cliches while still feeling authentic) and seeing Kathryn Newton in increasingly stylish goth outfits is a treat, but the story is all over the place and it’s not particularly funny. I bailed after 25 minutes, reconsidered so went back and finished it and I’m not sure that I didn’t make the right choice the first time.
Bad Times At The El Royale. Four people arrive at a motel that straddles the Nevada-California border at the same time, all harbouring secrets. They end up intruding on each other and everything goes to shit, as the name suggests. Really good. Maybe a tad too long, but it’s got a great cast (even Dakota Johnson is passable in it) and the non-linear structure works really well. I’ve seen people compare it to 90s Tarantino and I can kind of see that, but it’s better than that comparison might have you suspecting. It’s written and directed by Drew Goddard, which I didn’t know til the end credits hit and I immediately went “oh yeah, I can definitely see that”.
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I went by Smyths this morning hoping to get the Wolfpack guy in the new Lego CMF wave. They put all the packs on peg racks now (the foil packs used to be strung on plastic hangers down the ends of aisles, which was annoying) so very easy to just go through and scan them all with the barcode scanner app to find it. Which I guess is exactly what other people had done before me, because despite there being 2-3 case worth of minifigs hanging, there were no Wolfpack guys. About 12 Steampunk guys, weirdly, but not a single Wolfpack guy. A double edged sword, the scanning apps.
As a bit of a consolation (though not really, I was thinking of getting it anyway), I picked up the g1 toy style Legacy United Optimus Prime. Only just taken him out of the pack, but man, it really speaks to me. I would be up for more in this style, definitely. Well, pending how well it transforms.
They had a Magmatron on their clearance table too. I somewhat want him, but not for £90 nor their “clearance” price of £80. I was hoping he’d turn up in GAME at silly prices, but that seems to be happening less now.
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Why did prisons do gender transition services? (With taxpayer money?)
Because trans rights are human rights and you can’t deny medical aid to someone just because they’ve committed a crime.
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Yeah, I can totally see why he’s done it. It does possibly set a dangerous precedent, but given the corruption Trump is prone to, I don’t think that’s really a consideration worth giving weight to – he doesn’t need precedent to abuse Presidential power. This comment at the end is interesting though.
“The pardons are actually great news. No one who was just pardoned will be able to refuse to testify in a civil, criminal, or congressional proceeding based upon the 5th Amendment,” Binnall wrote.
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ShowZStore.com might be better than AliExpress.
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I’d never heard of the film Polite Society before I got it off Sky the other month. Watched it tonight and it is fucking rad.
It’s about Ria a teenage martial artist whose older sister Lena, an art school drop out, starts dating a seemingly perfect doctor. Ria doesn’t trust him, so she decides to break up the engagement. It’s funny, got a great cast, is stylish as hell and has excellent fight scenes.
edit: oh and I’ve just seen it’s by Nida Manzoor, creator of We Are Lady Parts, which makes total sense.
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He’s going very Woody Allen.
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