Who is that Artemis Four pin-up by? I can’t make out the signature.
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Karolina looks like she’s standing against her will.
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Pakistan are apparently negotiating a ceasefire between the US and Iran at the moment (no mention of Israel in the reports I’ve seen, which seems like a big omission). And, honestly, the Iranians would be mad to agree to anything. There is practically no chance the Americans will stick to anything they say. Trump has already shown the worth of his word on all those “trade deals”, like the one with the UK, which suddenly became irrelevant the next time he had a tantrum and wanted to change tariff rates.
I’m no fan of the Iranian regime, but it’s hard to see how they’re really at fault for much of anything in this conflict. The Americans have achieved the impossible in making the Iranian government seem if not sympathetic then at least in the right. I kinda think the Iranians should just stick it out and wait for the Americans to crumble. Trump’s negotiating position is highly dubious.
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I’m interested in this IQ drop issue, so I’ve had Perplexity give me a quick overview
::sideways look at camera::
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£100k cap on political donations and Reform be squealing foul.
It’s as if Megatron went into politics, he who cares not for rights now pleads for them.
Another potentially really good bit of (lower case) reform is a public interest test for all contracts over £1m for public services, to see whether they’d be better served kept in-house rather than out-sourced. Which admittedly still might not do much if people just hand-wave through the test, but if applied properly, it could really cut down on the out-sourcing empires of the likes of Capita etc.
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Originally developed by Chinese alchemists in the 9th century who were trying to create an elixir of immortality, it was later discovered to be explosive.
The one thing they didn’t want it to cause!
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Huh.
You missed a few letters from your huzzah there, Lorcan.
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Wonder Man is getting a second season! Huzzah!
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It also feels like they haven’t really reworked the style of comedy for a British audience either,
Maybe it should be half an hour a week
So it should just be every other British sketch show ever made?
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Oh, I thought it was a screen cap of Andrea Martin from Great News at first glance.
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SNL UK launched last night and I thought it was pretty good actually. My main concern had been Weekend Update feeling a bit pointless given all the other topical comedy around in the UK, but by keeping it relatively short and also going quite dark and borderline bad taste, it actually felt valid.
The rest of the show was solid. A few wobbles, the usual SNL thing of not always knowing how to end a sketch, but it certainly wasn’t an embarrassment to the format or any kind of demonstration that the format won’t work over here. The fake ad was an all-timer, the cold open was pretty good political satire, Boovies Goes To The Films was good.
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Curious as to how bad this must have been to not ever air.
Zhao seems a terrible choice for it though. Admittedly I’ve not seen her other work, but Eternals was dire and the MCU has, broadly, a very similar tone to Buffy, so if she couldn’t manage to work in that, I don’t see how she could have done Buffy successfully.
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Great news!
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I’m actually getting somewhat optimistic about SNL UK. There’s some great people involved. Grainne Maguire and Humphrey Ker on the writing team, for instance.
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The UK version of the Floor ended last night and it was a final episode that rather highlighted the flaws in the premise.
The actual gameplay – two people naming things in pictures on a chess clock – is fine. Fun to play along with at home. And one duel last night, on US states, showed how good it can be when competitive. The winner only had two seconds left and I genuinely wondered if they were going to run out of states.
But that was one duel and a lot of the others showed the opposite end of the scale and how the show can struggle: when one or both people don’t know anything about a certain topic and have to muddle through. A key rule of game and quiz shows is that they’re not very fun to watch if the person playing is completely useless at them. (There are exceptions to that, of course: Taskmaster, House of Games.) That really is true of the Floor, especially when it’s a subject you’ve been looking forward to for the whole series. Formula One was on the board and finally came up last night, but played not by the person who brought it, but instead one guy who happened to know a lot about it and one guy who really did not. It’s not that fun watching a guy say “Damon Hill? Oh pass.” half a dozen times in a row having clearly given up the will to live. Even worse was a woman, who had dominated the last two episodes, defending on countries and not being able to recognise Canada and Brazil on a map.
This really came to a head in the end game. That is structured as best two out of three, on each of the subjects the contestants are holding and then a “neutral” third as a tie-break. Both contestants last night had inherited categories – cricketers and James Bond – and it became immediately clear that they’d given up on those and just wanted to go for the tie break. The guy with cricketers just didn’t even try on James Bond and passed his way through (and he really could have named some of them if he’d actually thought about it), while the woman struggled on cricketers for a bit, saying some random surnames a few times, before just giving up and doing the same.
So the whole series just came down to UK Tourist Attractions (which weirdly included 10 Downing Street, which I would argue is really not a tourist attraction, but heigh-ho), with the guy winning. “You’ve earned £50,000”, Rob Brydon told him, to which my reaction was, well, had he? Because he’d taken part in the second duel of the first episode and then fuck all til midway through the final episode. I mean he did a lot of great standing around! But ultimately he won largely from random chance rather than skill, which doesn’t really feel right. He gets £50k for winning three rounds, whereas other people did five times that and got, in some cases, nothing (or £5k an episode for having the most floor space). There were people who got to the final episode having literally done nothing. It made the whole thing feel somewhat arbitrary and chaotic, in a bad way. Less than the sum of its parts. The Risk-esque domination format is interesting, but flawed, given it repeatedly just ended up with the biggest area changing hands on a single round. The “name-the-picture” gameplay is fun, but doesn’t feel… weighty enough, I guess, to be what the tactical stuff turns on. Contestants bringing their own categories is a cool idea, but the way it’s structured means you’re too likely to end up with people who don’t know anything on one floundering entirely.
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I picked up some stuff last month that I keep forgetting to talk about.
So Mattel has been going cross-over mad lately. There’s Transformers Hot Wheels and Hot Wheels Transformers (that is Hot Wheels cars of Transformers alt modes and Transformers figures of, erm, “famous” Hot Wheels cars), Turtles of Grayskull, which asked the pressing question “what if a lot of He-Man characters had random mutations and some Turtles characters lightly cosplayed as He-Man characters” and MotU x Transformers, where some He-Man characters are cosplaying as Transformers (which look fucking awful but props for doing Scareglow as Starscream, I guess).
But there’s also MotU x Thundercats. Which initially I dismissed out of hand as being the same as Turtles of Grayskull – entirely inessential and rubbish. The only figure that caught my attention initially was Battle Cat Man, which is Battle Cat as a Thundercat, a brilliant idea. Not Mattel’s own, it must be said, as someone’s been making customs of that concept for years now.
I thought I’d missed out on BCM though, as I could only see it available from import dealers at an eye-watering £30~, but then it popped up on Amazon and a couple of other places (I ended up ordering it from Rarewaves). And in looking into that, I gave a closer look to the rest of the line and realised it’s actually better than I thought. Because while there is a He-Man with a cat chestplate and slightly leonine hair, most of the figures are Thundercats characters. But they’re not really cosplaying as specific MotU characters, they just have Eternian styled accessories, which you can just entirely disregard, leaving you with MotU Origins style Thundercats figures. Which it turns out I am into.
Cheetara is the perfect example of this. Here she is with all the Eternian bits.
And they look pretty rubbish, frankly. But throw those in the bin and you get:
A classic Cheetara. And it’s really good. Mattel have totally got the articulation pattern down well for this line (it helps that they reuse so many parts, I guess). The ankle jointss are a little weak and I think I stressed the feet swapping out the lower leg parts (will definitely heat treat to loosen them next time), but otherwise it’s great. And having it in scale with the MotU Origins figures is nice, even if I only have He-Man and Skeletor (and who else do you really need? Well, She-Ra and Hordak, obvs).
Skel-Ra is slightly more involved. He’s a bigger figure and the concept is Skeletor getting the powers of the Ancient Evils that Mumm-Ra uses or whatever.
Which is fine, I guess. You have to pull the figure apart at the waist to swap out his loin cloth, which is a bit daunting, but again, a nice thing about Origins figures is that they’re designed for exactly that, for some reason. Pop off the nice Skele-head, reverse the bat wings and add in some other accessories and you get:
A pretty fucking rad Mumm-Ra. That’s a great head sculpt. He’s bigger than the other figures, which is a good feature (no idea if Origins has been doing figures this size much – I assume not). Just a really solid figure.
I got both of those off Amazon Italy (worked out cheapest – Skel-Ra was in a damaged box) and they arrived before the main event: Battle Cat Man.
He’s a simpler figure in that there’s no real “transformation” element. You can remove his armour, but frankly, there’s not much point, as he just looks naked (maybe if they’d added a Cringer head it would have more appeal). Still, the concept alone, and the solid execution is all you need. I maybe would have liked another weapon, as the claws – which are based on Battle Cat’ armour of course – are a tad underwhelming and connect only in a fairly vague way. But that’s nitpicking.
There’s three waves of the series so far, with the aforementioned naff He-Man, Tygra, two versions each of Lion-O and Panthro (cartoon and toy deco versions) and a redeco of Battle Cat Man as Panthor making up the rest of the line. I’m definitely looking to get the rest of the T-Cats. Hopefully they’ll go on and do Wilykit, Wilykat, Pumyra and others (that guy who is a blue redeco of Tygra seems an obvious choice at least) but there was no news of the line at Toy Fair, so I fear it may be done, which is a shame. Would have been interesting to see what they’d done with Snarf. Maybe dress him up as Orko?
These figures have renewed my interest in MotU Origins somewhat. I bailed after that first He-Man and Skeletor as I was a bit pissed off with the way all the promo images showed He-Man with a proper sword, but then he only came with half a sword that combined with Skeletor’s (which looks naff) which was then switched to a proper sword in a running change. But I might dip back in and get some of the cartoon classics, especially the 200X ones they’re doing at the moment.
I’m also a little interested in some of the first He-Man Origins cross-over figures they did: Masters of the WWE Universe, which is classic WWE wrestlers with He-Man gimmicks (so the New Day as Man-E-Faces, which is genius). They’re all OOP and expensive though. Turns out they’ve done another WWE line in the Origins style though (called, unhelpfully, WWE Superstars, which is impossible to search for online successfully), which are just straight gimmick-less figures. They also seem to have ended and are also stupidly expensive online (about £30+ per figure) but I happened upon Tatanka, of all people, for £10 in a small chain toy shop in Worcester recently. He’ll do for designing resin stands for those figures at least.
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Hasbro teased a Studio Series 86 Prowl but haven’t delivered. A weird omission given how far into the weeds they’ve gone on characters from it now.
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I’m watching that Chevy Chase documentary. Incredible really that, in a documentary that he’s fully involved in, he comes across as such an asshole. Not even in a warts-and-all historical sense, even in the bits of him interacting with the (off-camera) director/interviewer.
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Prison abolition lefties when there’s a school shooting: we have to jail his family!
I’ve never seen a “prison abolitionist leftie” say that after a school shooting.
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<arrested development open marriage meme>
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Nothing like a pointless war in the middle east to show everyone how well your Presidency is going!
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There’s going to a new Neon Genesis Evangelion series!
Argon Genesis Evangelion?
Neon Exodus Evangelion?
Neon Genesis Evangetiger?
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the biggest thing it did was light a fire under me to check out Strikeforce Morituri, which I’d been meaning to do for the longest time…
I read the first tpb of that a year or two back and was really surprised by how great it is. There was an omnibus released last year, which – despite really not being an omni guy – I’m tempted by.
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I finally watched Sinners, which I enjoyed. But pick a fucking aspect ratio, my dude.
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The Day The Earth Blew Up finally got a UK release this weekend and I saw it today.
It’s a mixed bag. Animation-wise it’s a tour de force. There’s a whole musical section in a Soviet workers propaganda style (I’m blanking on the name of the movement) which is great.
The story though is a little underwhelming. Not bad, but it wasn’t nearly as laugh out loud funny as I’d hoped.
Worth seeing if you get chance though.
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Yeah, same. I’ve seen them as “set dressing”, essentially, in a barcade and well… beats Pop Vinyls, I suppose.
Pre-order listings have gone up for these on Entertainment Earth. They’re ReAction+ figures of Leoric and Darkstorm. From what I can tell, ReAction+ are basically just o-ring figures like 80s Joes and indeed Visionaries (although Visionaries were 4″ and these are 3.75″) and is what they do for their Joes now, as well as TMNT and Back to the Future. And they don’t look too bad?
That’s from some idiot’s YT video, comparing them to the original ReActions (and complaining that they’re “very smooth” seemingly missing the fact they’re meant to look like the cartoon versions). Seem to have all the poseability of “proper” O-ring figures. Faces are a bit bland, but not awful. Oh damn, am I getting mildly optimistic about these?
I’ll be interested to see what they do about accessories and holograms. I imagine they’ll just do shiny stickers like the Revolutionaries Leoric – which I’m fine with but I know some chuds will complain about – but the power staffs will probably have to be scaled down to stay within the budget for these (as most figures don’t have any accessories).
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Yeah, Super7 figures generally suck. They’re either the ReAction ones, which are basically “hey, what if this thing you liked was a shitty 5 poa figure from the 70s” or the 7” Ultimates, which pale in comparison to figures in that kind of scale by Hasbro, Mattel or others, but are stupidly expensive.
Oh, on a related note, Super7 also have the Visionaries license now. Pray for me.
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I’ve been reading DC Finest: Hawkman – Wings Across Time recently. Still got a little bit to go, but I thought I’d talk about it and how weird it is.
So, Silver Age DC super-hero reinventions were all about science fiction. The Flash went from a guy who might as well have been magic to a scientist with pseudo-science powers. Green Lantern went from having a literal magic ring to a space guy with a super-science ring that might as well have been magic. Atom went from being an angry short man to a guy who used pseudo-science to change size and density.
The key thing about all those reinventions was that the original creators weren’t involved. New creative teams had free reign to completely rethink the characters. That isn’t the case for Hawkman (and Hawkgirl) though. The GA Hawkman was co-created by Gardner Fox while the SA Hawkman is created by Gardner Fox, along with Joe Kubert, who drew the Golden Age strip near the end. I think it’s fair to say Fox doesn’t achieve any distance from his creation in the update process.
The GA Hawkman is Carter Hall, an archaeologist who finds Ninth Metal, which allows him to create a pair of wings, which he uses to fight crime, along with
priceless archaeological treasures“weapons from the past”. He’s assisted by his wife Shiera, who becomes Hawkgirl.The SA Hawkman is Thanagarian police officer Katar Hol, who along with his wife/partner Shayera, comes to Earth chasing a criminal. Their police uniforms coincidentally include a big pair of wings powered by Nth Metal, which lets them fly and looks otherwise identical to the GA Hawkman and Hawkgirl costumes. Arriving on Earth, they meet the police commissioner of Midway City, who suggests they take human identities and jobs in order to learn Earth policing methods. His brother has just retired as curator of the Midway City Museum, so he sets Katar up with that job (immediately get a sense for how Midway City is run) and Americanises their names as Carter Hall and Shiera. They fight crime under the names Hawkman and Hawkgirl and, arbitrarily, decide to use “weapons from the past” (ie any old shit lying around the museum) to aid them.
It’s a bit of a mess really. The sci-fi elements are constant – their Thanagarian ship hanging around in orbit gets a lot of use, as does their Absorbascon, which summarised and implanted all knowledge from Earth in their heads when they arrived – but they don’t really add that much. It really feels like Fox just wanted to seamlessly carry on/revive the original Hawkman in the new era – as the characters that hadn’t gone away like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman etc had – but had to bolt on a few contrivances to appease an editorial mandate. As a SF focused reinvention of the character and concept, it’s weak as hell.
But it is late 50s/early 60s DC, so my expectations weren’t high, especially for a Gardner Fox comic. He had a special talent for writing the most scientifically illiterate nonsense possible and then presenting it as if it’s the biggest, galaxy-brained thinking imaginable rather than just a contrived twist. If you wrote a summary of the plot of one of these issues and had someone read it, they would have you sectioned. And yet, Fox is drawing on real science at times. There’s one story where he utilises thermal wake from submarines. Another where the plot hinges on “cold light”, which is silly in how it’s presented, but is really the concept of low-energy lightbulbs decades before it became mainstream. It’s an odd mix of arrant nonsense and the occasional smart idea.
Even having read some Silver Age Gardner Fox comics before though, nothing could prepare me for the fact that Hawkman and Hawkgirl can talk to birds. I had no idea this was part of their power-set! How on Earth do they get a free ride for this while Aquaman is constantly ridiculed for telepathically commanding whales? At least Aquaman’s not dressed as a giant fish.
As I often do with mediocre old comics, I find myself thinking about how this could have better. And I think there is the bones of a decent concept in here. There’s too much that’s just hand-waved away or given a ridiculous explanation. For instance, the Thanagarian police uniforms being giant wings and hawk helmets is explained in a story where it’s revealed the wings were invented by Katar’s father to help fend off a race of space-faring giant birds wearing human face masks that were looting the planet. The police service was set up in the aftermath of this, using the wings and wearing hawk helmets to… remind them of their origin? It’s just silly. I think they’d have been better off breaking the fourth wall a little (as Flash had already done) by having Katar and Shayera get to Earth, use the Absorbascon thing – with possibly it not working correctly – and they chose to emulate the costume and wings of the GA Hawkman and Hawkgirl that they learned of from comics. They’re essentially play-acting their lives anyway in the Carter and Shiera identities, why not go the whole hog? Or the weapons from the past conceit could be the result of them only having remote, out-dated information about Earth so they’ve only previously researched/trained with ancient weapons, not guns or whatever.
Which isn’t to say what is here is terrible. I’ve ragged on it, but the stories are largely enjoyable in a hokey way, it’s nice seeing Hawkgirl be almost Hawkman’s equal and the art by Joe Kubert and Murphy Anderson is pleasant. But neither of the leads have any real personality, it’s all very low stakes, there’s next to no continuity. There’s so much potential for something more interesting here.
One hypothetical that often crops up in comics communities is the old “if you could swap two characters between Marvel and DC” thing. Usually that’s taken as happening now, but I’ve always thought it would be more interesting if looked at a hypothetical for when the characters were created. And in that context, I think Hawkman would be a prime candidate. This would have been great if done by Lee and Kirby. Ok, Hawkgirl probably wouldn’t have come out of that as well as she does here, but it would have rocked.
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He’s making the categorical mistake of reducing the writing to the dialogue and captions, though. The writing is the art of telling the story, and if you don’t do that, a portfolio is indeed what you are left with.
This is what annoys me when artists say they’re the most important part of a comics creative team (not necessarily untrue) and that they don’t need a writer. If you’re making sequential pictures that form a story, guess what? You’re the writer. They haven’t eliminated the need for one, they’ve just taken it on themselves.
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The one thing they didn’t want to happen…
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I probably go with dee-kal, because it’s only a term I hear Americans use for the most part.
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The ones in there I’ve heard of, I like. Of course, for true SNL, they should mostly be unknowns (though that’s never been entirely true through SNL history and increasingly isn’t, with new hires having online careers). I’m not confident in the show working, but I’m willing to give it a go.
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the companies insist that the beer is not only safe to drink, but actually tastes good.
Always a great footing to start your campaign off from.
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Sooo… Trump shat himself in an Oval Office presser the other day. You can hear it happen in the video.
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I finished Wonder Man this evening. I was a bit concerned by them burning it off in one drop rather than weekly (which is what they did to Echo, which was also part of the vague Marvel Spotlight branding IIRC), but I loved it.
Abdul-Mateen is great and Trevor worked surprisingly well long form (though Kingsley’s bad Scouse accent got grating at times). I thought they did really well taking the essence of the character and applying it to a reinterpretation of his actor status quo from the 80s. I’m curious and excited to see what they do with him next.
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Wait…did Martin just post part of the redacted Epstein Files?
Far more explosive and ill-tempered.
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Walz has been increasingly disappointing over the past month or so.
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Thoughts on a few things I’ve bought recently.
Transformers Legacy Metalhawk
I’ve been on the fence for this for ages. I like the character, but never felt compelled to pick this up. Then it got recoloured with nicer greys and I still didn’t pick it up. Both versions have been hanging around on mild clearance for a while and I needed to suggest something I’d want for my birthday.
And I picked the “wrong” one. I’ve got the one with the lighter greys rather than the charcoal ones and… look, it’s fine. I’m not sure that darker grey would actually be better, but there’s something about this lighter shade of grey that just makes it feel like it’s unpainted. Maybe it’s all the resin I’m printing in the exact same colour.
That colour scheme is mainly a problem in alt mode. I don’t think the colour design for that works at all really, as you get a blue jet with red highlights and then just random grey panels. It’s far less of an issue in robot mode and Metalhawk is a cool figure. I’d forgotten that he’s a retool of Kingdom Cyclonus and that’s a good base to work from.
So yeah, it’s nice, it just feels a like some metallic paint/plastic would have boosted it.
Transformers Age of Primes Quickstrike
Another one I was on the fence about because from pictures it doesn’t look that different from the original Beast Wars one. Which obviously not everyone is going to have, but I do, so did I really need the upgrade?
Well I went for and I’m glad I did because it’s awesome. It’s bigger than the BW original (which was a basic class figure), about twice the size and with that a lot sturdier. It is the same basic transformation pattern, just with ~30 years of improvements in design. It’s replaced the translucent plastic of the original with a nice shade of goldy-yellow that gives the impression of being metallic without actually being metallic (except when paint on the chest).
It looks absolutely look the character did on the show and there’s a variety of blast effect and 5mm ports (not that I have much of any to put in them), replacing the water squirting element from the original. A really great figure.
TMNT 88 Remastered 6 Pack
Last year, possibly 2024, Playmates released four “remastered” 88 Turtles, a bit like Transformers Missing Link. These were recreations of the original Turtles figures, but with better articulation. They also gave them nice stands and, for some reason, horrible textured skin. I passed (easy to do given, as with so much of Playmates stuff, it wasn’t available in the UK).
Late last year they revealed this 6 pack. It’s the four Turtles figures again but with smooth skin and joined by Splinter and Shredder. I found a place importing the set (a Target exclusive in the US, I think) for £50, so went for it. And then waited several months while it kept getting delayed, only to turn up almost out of the blue.
The Turtles themselves are pretty great. They really look the part as the original 88 figures (which I’ve bought most of in the last year or so – just missing a Raphael) but with nicer articulation. The originals had swivel joints at the neck, shoulder, elbow and then a more flexible one at the hip. These have ball joints or rotating hinge joints at the neck, shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee and ankle. They’ve all got the same body with different heads, which is fair enough. The belts have been redesigned a bit, so that they’re not connecting on the buckle. Their signature weapons are all included, now in accurate colours (with colour coded handles) rather than uniform orange-brown. No stands, but given they’ve all got flat feet now (rather than a mix of flat feet and tip-toes) and more articulation, they’re not too hard to get to stand (although weirdly I’m finding it harder to get Don nicely posed on the legs than the others, which is weird given they’ve got the same bodies).
I did have to get a heat gun out to reform most of the hands (softer plastic than the originals) so they’d hold their weapons properly, mind.
And then there’s Splinter and Shredder, who are… weird.
Splinter is really cool. Vinyl kimono rather than the original cloth. Has his stick sword and bow and arrow (no paint apps on the bow and arrow, but it’s a really nice sculpt with a surprising amount of flexibility). Really great head sculpt too. What it isn’t though, is anything to do with the original figure. Completely different mould entirely. And as I said, it’s not a bad mould, but it’s not really a “remastered 88” one. It’s just a completely new figure in the style of the early card art, maybe the cartoon.
It’s the same with Shredder, just with worse results. The new Shredder figure fixes some of the problems with the originals – brim of the helmet painted correctly and not as his forehead? Check! Able to stand upright rather than in a persistent back-breaking hunch? Check! But it’s not great. It just feels really weedy. The paint apps on the face are weak and bland (just eyebrows and black dot eyes on white, but there’s no expression there). As with Splinter, the original cloth cape is replaced with a big heavy, wide vinyl one, which mainly serves to highlight how thin the body feels. Oh but they did keep the weirdly posed left hand that looks like it should be for holding a shuriken but doesn’t really hold them well.
It’s just an odd choice. 88 Shredder is, I think, the one figure that would most benefit from a Missing Link style remaster. Proper paint apps on the helmet, a hinge joint in the chest and some knee joints, so he stand up straight for once. But instead, there’s just this entirely new, bland stand-in. Maybe it was a scale thing? I imagine straightened out 88 Shredder would tower over everyone else, even later human figures from the original line, but still. Just feels an odd choice.
Shredder comes with a couple of swords (and I had to heat his hands too). The set also has one each of that weird pizza looking stabby thing in the above picture (which I always thought was a bit of pizza, as a kid), one of the bigger punch daggers (which I always thought was some kind of pie slice for pizzas), a five pointed shuriken and a four pointed shuriken. And that’s it. Feels slightly miserly for six figures, but honestly, who is ever going to display a Turt holding those if they’ve got the signature weapons? It feels like a required formality. The proper punch dagger is much smaller than the original though.
Overall, £50 for four really good Turtles, a nice “imposter” Splinter and a so-so “imposter” Shredder isn’t bad. I’d be interested in more of these (Rocksteady and Bebop, April, Usagi – basically the ones I’ve bought originals of recently) but I guess that won’t be happening given Playmates have (despite literally everyone else on the planet having one) lost their Turtles license from 2027 on.
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Kash Patel is coming to the UK for a meet-up of Five Eyes (the joint intelligence sharing association of the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). But instead of going to offices (in secure buildings) for his meetings, he wants to do them while off having jollies. He’s demanding that he (and his girlfriend/secretary) be taken out jetskiing and to Premier League matches for these meetings. Yes, this genius wants to have classified intelligence sharing meetings in football stadiums and on open water. I despair.
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Finally, a good riff on the pagliacci joke!
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That show of support, that clapping for the nurses, was always bullshit. Well, no, that’s maybe too harsh.
It absolutely was bullshit, as underlined by the many of the same people being against pay rises for healthcare workers not long later. As my mate who worked for the NHS said at the time, “I can’t pay for food with claps”.
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I went through a big John Hughes phase when I was at uni. I wouldn’t say he’s my favourite film-maker but I do think he’s incredibly interesting.
Since then though, I’ve not rewatched many of those films – just Breakfast Club and Home Alone really – and I’ve had some sitting on my DVR for a while that I’ve been hesitant to go back to for varying reasons.
Weird Science, which I actually watched a year or so back, I had mixed memories of. I mainly just remembered the talking shit monster bit, which was good. But that I actually found really enjoyable, and I think it uses Lisa in a way that isn’t objectifying (or at least not solely). She always has agency and power.
Sixteen Candles, which I watched the other day, I couldn’t really remember much of at all, but had heard loads in the interim of it being racist and rapey. And, well, it is. Though I’d say that beyond the name, Long Duck Dong isn’t too bad. Ultimately, it has to be looked at as the transition point for Hughes between doing sub-Animal House bawdy Lampoon comedies and his teen comedy-dramas. It’s got both of those shoved in there together and it works better than it really should.
And then lastly Pretty In Pink, which I watched tonight. The reason I’d been hesitant about this is because I remember thinking it wasn’t really all that. But I think I’ve been mixing it up to a degree with another film Ringwald and McCarthy did called Slow Horses or Fresh Horses or something. So, gave it another go.
Boy it sucks. McCarthy’s character Blaine is just a big ol’ streak of fuck all. There’s nothing to him at all. It’s hard to see what Andie’s meant to be attracted to initially (beyond looks I guess) but it’s even more baffling that she’s then thrilled to be asked to the prom by him given their one date is a disaster that she clearly didn’t enjoy. And then on the other hand you’ve got Duckie, the pining best friend who is a stalkery bellend. I absolutely don’t understand anyone who thinks Andie should have ended up with him. Apparently that was the original plan and somehow that would worse than the dreadful ending the film has where Blaine gives an awful apology, Duckie suddenly gives his blessing and Andie goes off with him.
The only redeeming bits of the film are Ringwald generally, especially her scenes with Stanton (more should have been made of that), James Spader looming and lurking around as an entitled prick and Annie Potts as Andie’s boss, bit even the she gets the same “conformity brings happiness” treatment Allison got in The Breakfast Club.
There’s a much better film waiting to have been found in the bones of this.3 users thanked author for this post.
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A modern Blake’s 7 could be excellent with the right team. But I’m sure this story gets repeated every 7 years or so. I’m not holding my breath for this to appear.
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I love bonus frog!
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Two episodes into ITV’s new quiz show import THE FLOOR and it’s strangely compelling.
The format is that 81 contestants have a square on a big digital floor (interestingly, this and all other adaptations are shot in the studio of the original production in the Netherlands, so it must be an expensive floor. More expensive than at least 82 return flights on EasyJet) and have brought their own specialist subject. THE FLOOR randomly selects a starting contestant, who has to challenge one of their director neighbours (horizontally or vertically, not diagonally) on the opponent’s special subject.
Those challenges are, on paper, trivially easy. It is literally just a case of naming things in pictures, on a chess clock system of 45 seconds each. You’re not penalised for giving a wrong answer, you can keep going on the same picture, but you lose three seconds for passing. And yet, there have been some complete implosions. One woman confidently challenged another on “moguls” and clearly didn’t understand what the word meant, because she spent 10 seconds not being able to name Richard Branson. One guy defended his own category of fashion icons and got absolutely demolished, not knowing who most of them were. It definitely feels like it’s been cast for personality rather than quizzing skill. Still, that “I can’t believe they’re that bad on their category” element is sort of compelling, possibly not long term.
Winning a duel eliminates the opponent and merges your square with theirs. If you’re the defender, your category is gone and you inherit the specialist subject of the losing attacker. You then get to decide if you want to attack further, or pass to another randomly selected contestant. At the end of each episode, the contestant with the biggest area gets £5k (split if it’s a tie). The same contestants are on for the full series (I get the feeling it was filmed in one day, two at stretch – they didn’t even do an outfit change between eps 1 and 2, despite having them all come back out to THE FLOOR again at the start of ep 2). So the tactical element lifts it a bit as well, even though I would say the best tactic is quite obvious: if you’re lucky enough to attack without having defended first, take out all your opponents whose categories you like, then back off and wait to defend on your (theoretically) strongest subject when someone comes for you. Seems the best way to get the five grand early on at least. Despite this, a lot of people have been backing off immediately, stuck with an inherited subject they don’t like, which I don’t see panning out for them.
The show’s hosted by Rob Brydon, who is a safe pair of hands. Very personable, hamming it up like mad and able to do a good reaction shot when someone passes on something they really should know. Ultimately, it’s an enjoyable bit of fluff for a Sunday evening. The way the format’s set up, you have a tease for categories that are coming to come up at some point and seeing some of those (and how badly they get screwed up, potentially) is enough to keep me coming back, for now at least.
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That’s a pretty cool topic! And it does make a lot of sense that most traditions would’ve been invented later than their supposed origin.
(And I say that as someone living in a city whose famous “gothic” cathedral was actually mostly built in the late 19th century.)
Yeah, a lot of it is perfectly reasonable, like the Welsh eisteddfod. Do they bear any relation to what the old bards actually did? Probably not. But they’re as much about promoting what the country wants itself to be now as anything and that’s perfectly reasonable.
The clan tartan thing is much funnier though, because it is all pure bollocks made up by a combination of royal-wannabes and clothing manufacturers.
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I’m currently reading The Invention Of Tradition, which is a collection of essays from the 80s (I think – possibly the 60s). After an incredibly dry and academic introduction that had me doubting I was going to manage the whole book (various uses of “inculcate” and “promulgate”) it livens up a bit. The first chapter basically tore down the Scots (deconstructing the myths of highland culture, kilts, tartan), the second went for the Welsh (the fabrication of Druidic culture in the 18th century or so, mostly) and I’m just at the third, which is going for the royal family and their pageantry. It’s like an academic version of an insult comedian or roast.
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I’m a few hours into Metroid Prime 4. I’ve got two of the five macguffins, but I don’t think I’m 20% of the way through. (Hope not anyway). I like that they give Samus someone to talk to early on. It’s not that different from having ADAM in Fusion and Dread really, just telling you where to go. Plus, that fact that Samus doesn’t actually talk to him makes her silence a choice rather than just coincidence because she has no-one to talk to. That said, I think having her completely mute (so far) is a little awkward. There are a few moments where it would have flowed better if they’d just had here say the odd word (for example, “here”, when she’s giving a USB type thing to the guy to plug into the computer, because he essentially just divines that she’s trying to pass something to him without looking, as it is) and played up her physical acting a bit. A few heavy sighs or rolls of the eyes felt even with an obscured visor, that kind of thing.
On the other hand, I like that they’ve turned up the immersion of the first person view a bit. In the earlier games, you’d occasionally get a glimpse of Samus’ face reflected back at you in her visor. Here, it happens every time you go into the map screen (suggesting it’s an in-visor screen she’s looking at) which you could argue is overegging a subtle little touch, but it’s nice to see.
My only real problem with the game is that it hasn’t struck a decent balance on tutorials. If you have the tutorialising on, it keeps not just explaining how to do new techniques, but prompting you to do those in battles or when you’re faced with certain puzzles, which I really don’t want. I’d like to be able to work it out for myself. But when I turned tutorials off, the game just straight up didn’t tell me anything, such as how to do anything on the Vi-O-La bike when I was in the blimmin’ tutorial section for it.
Beyond all that though, it’s fun and feels like a valid continuation of the series after a long interval.
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I did like his line in that rant of, paraphrasing, “oh so I’m the guy at which you suddenly decide it’s not ok for people to get fit to play a superhero?” Because that must have really stung for him, but also he kinda is that straw that broke the camel’s back, really. That even a beloved everyman comedian felt he had to fashion himself into some unattainable Adonis shape to be a character in an ensemble superhero movie.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/23/epstein-unredacted-files-social-media
People examining documents released by the Department of Justice in the Jeffrey Epstein case discovered that some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.
It seems they essentially redacted sections by just highlighting them in black, which doesn’t destroy the text.
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Stargirl: The Lost Children
This is such a weird comic.
I’m not the greatest fan of Geoff Johns generally, but I do love Todd Nauck’s art and seeing that Secret from Young Justice was in this was enough to get me to bite.
And in one regard it’s great. Nauck’s art is possibly the best it’s ever been. He absolutely kills it here, with loads of crowd scenes that would break a lesser artist. Plus, there’s loads of new character designs in here, most of which are great (I especially like The Boom, although I’m not sold on her name).
Unfortunately, the reason behind all those new characters is less compelling. Part of the problem I’ve always had with Johns is that he’s a very regressive writer. His work is always about looking back to some halcyon past and rewinding comics to it, from bringing back Hal Jordan and Barry Allen, to reviving the JSA and ditching all the cool 90s reinventions like the android Hourman with facsimiles of the Golden Age originals.
His big idea for this mini-series is similar but of a slightly different approach. He seems to have decided that every Golden Age superhero should have had a kid sidekick (you know, that trope that went out in the 60s) and so retcons loads more into existence, even for heroes that no-one particularly cares about. Did anyone really think Dr Fate was missing a sidekick? Or the Dan Garrett version of Blue Beetle? Or the Red Bee?!
Quite what the point of all this is, I don’t really know. Apparently this is part of a wider thematic event – The New Golden Age – though there’s no mention of this anywhere on this collection (which is maybe for the best, as it probably would have deterred me from it). Is anyone going to make any further use of Cherry Bomb or Sparky outside of a crowd scene? It seems unlikely and most of these characters don’t get to do much here (Secret seems present entirely as fan service for Nauck and/or his existing fans, but at least it’s the same version of her from Young Justice, for whatever continuity matters these days). The entire premise of this series seems utterly self-indulgent and pointless.
It’s not a terribly satisfying story really. Although Stargirl gets to keep centre stage, Red Arrow gets increasingly marginalised through out, drowning in a sea of sidekicks. The plot doesn’t really make much of any sense (not helped by taking half an issue to have someone wang on about Flashpoint) there’s an island, whose beach is made of ground up Miraclo, on which loads of forgotten sidekicks have somehow ended up. Stargirl and Red Arrow, after being involved in a time-bending event, think Wing is still alive and follow in the footsteps of Dan The Dyna-Mite to said island, where a Baba Yaga called the Childminder is holding some of the kids and trying to capture the others, to deliver them to her buyer, who is the android Hourman from the 90s, except he’s working for Corky the Junior Time Master (who turns up to help the kids)’s evil adult self, who needs Wing to still die in the temporal event that killed him original, but not let any of the other kids back into continuity, for reasons. But he has his own time machines, cos he’s a Time Master, so I don’t get why he’s using Hourman nor Childminder, why they need Jay Garrick’s retcon daughter The Boom running on a treadmill to power something or other, nor why/how most of the kids ended up there beyond just “Flashpoint did it”.. And while I can buy Stargirl caring about the fate of Wing (the Crimson Avenger’s sidekick apparently), I’m not totally sure why most readers would. The attempts to build a theme around being forgotten and unloved doesn’t really work because, despite throwing in something about her biological dad, it’s not really relevant to Stargirl. It is to Red Arrow, but as I said, she gets increasingly displaced from focus.
Still, looks gorgeous.
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Yeah, it’s a little weird he did this chunk of the season. There were rumours he was leaving over the summer (though there was for everyone, frankly). Also, can’t believe it’s his eighth season (well, seventh on screen) already.
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Twitter automatically goes to the “for you” tab now, when you reload it. And the for you tab is giving me 50 % of Ruski propaganda and 50 % AI slop of cats driving cars.
Maybe stop using it then?
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I think RTD should be embarrassed by this series. Because it’s written by someone else and it’s head and shoulders above what he’s been doing with the main Doctor Who show for the past couple of years.
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About 6-7 months ago, I posted about a random European-Japanese co-production anime I’d stumbled upon and the terrible Malaysian English dub it had. Well, Reporter Blues got its claws in me and I ended up getting hold of the entirety of it in French (along with the German DVD release of s1) and doing an English fan-sub of it all.
I was just going to put it all up on a torrent site like Nyaa, but it turns out that’s almost impossible to do (if only media piracy was as simple as the people who demonise it claim) so I’ve resorted to putting it up on my YouTube channel (soft-subs using YT’s built in caption feature because I really couldn’t be arsed to re-convert all 52 episodes yet again to have hard subs).
It’s all uploaded and scheduled to go 4 episodes a week for the next 13 weeks. Episode 1 went live this morning.
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Sandman Mystery Theatre Compendium Two
It still feels like a minor miracle that this books even exists after so many false starts on collecting the series. It’s almost surreal to get to read the comic’s conclusion. A little bittersweet. Somewhat naively, given how long the series ran and with such a stable creative team, I had assumed that it ended on its own terms. But nope, sudden cancellation that forced a two-part finale. Despite that, Seagle mostly sticks the landing. I think his end-note after explaining what happened and his reasoning for how the story went makes me appreciate what it does more, admittedly.
End aside, there are lots of good stories in here, though a couple that are less compelling. Slightly over complicated in places. Dian seems to ricochet between charity work, working for her dad at the DA’s office then not and doing charity work again on the whims of what would be more convenient for each story. And it’s weirdly heavy on JSA elements at the start of the this volume (and tail end of the previous), which has diminishing returns. Jim Corrigan being introduced and then doing nothing, as far as I could tell (maybe I missed some subtle Spectre related shenanigans?) was a pretty pointless. But I guess that was to try and drive sales.
But when the book is left to be itself, it’s great. What other superhero comic from a mainstream publisher would have an extended, sensitively handled plot thread about one of the main characters getting an abortion? Even before that, it’s nice that Dian and Wes, well, fuck, frankly. Superhero relationships are usually so chaste or juvenile, but by the time they’re properly together here it’s clear they really enjoy each other’s company and get to express that as real humans do (and then have consequences for it).
Unfortunately, it seems that there’s a side one-shot (Sandman Midnight Theatre) that sits between Compendium 1 and this volume that’s been omitted, because DC are always going to DC.
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Worth noting that the X-Men got a ton of hate mail about Colossus and Storm especially in the early years. And Marvel printed and responded to a lot of it in the letters page.
Yeah, I think people think toxic fandom started with the internet, but it’s wild some of the crap that people would send to comics companies to have printed in their letter cols. I read a lot of them in the Western comics I read through recently and you’d get people sending in entire plans telling Marvel how to restructure the Western books, creative teams and all, with the same tone you’d see someone use on a message board. And people complimenting Gunhawks #1 for being brave enough to say that slavery wasn’t bad.
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I watched the Blue Beetle movie tonight, which I’ve been meaning to do for, ooo, about a year.
It’s… fine? The cast is all good, the story’s alright, though my attention started to wander 2/3 in. I could have maybe lived without the emphasis on family after Shazam did that, but it does work. The effects are a mixed bag. I’m far from a snob about CGI, but it did look pretty weightless at times here. And then on the other hand, you’ve got practical fight scenes that feel a bit Sentai-ish (ie a tad cheap) but I don’t know, that worked for me. I liked the casual bounce of the extra legs looming over the shoulders when Jamie’s in costume but just talking. I wish all the weapons didn’t just magic out of nowhere (I’d have preferred an organic effect, where the suit grows them out of itself). I think the bigger problem visually is that the film half-heartedly goes for this 80s retro neon Miami cool blue and purple colour palette which doesn’t entirely work and it always looks better in the scenes where it doesn’t bother with that.
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The Kickstarter model has been a god-send for shady comics companies all round, frankly. You get publishers that can absolutely afford to produce the product anyway (several Image studios, Dark Horse etc) using it as an elaborate pre-order service built on FOMO, in which tenuous stretch goals are used to obscure high margins (see that aforementioned Transformers one from Skybound) and you get fly-by-night indies ripping people off, as Doran’s explained there. Yet only the projects that don’t deliver anything on time or as advertised (Goldtiger, Sullivan’s Sluggers, that covid lockdown short story anthology) ever seem to be “acceptable” for criticism from most parts.
The only comics Kickstarters that make any sense are actual small press publishers, like formerly of this parish Russell’s Freaktown, where it is literally raising the money to get it printed.
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“I really liked Stargate, but I need a Babylon 5, or a Battlestar Galactica reboot”
There was a part of me that saw this news and, as well as being stoked, thought “ok but Dark Matter s4-5, maybe?”
I’m interested to see how this turns out. Will they be able to recapture the magic? Stargate being very much being a network show with 20 episode seasons to work with was part of the formula that made it work and streamers don’t tend to go for that.
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arguing it’s not “pedophilia” but “hebephilia” or whatever is stupid.
Yeah, whenever anyone makes that argument in any situation, it’s a massive red flag, because… why would you be trying to make that distinction, my dude? They’re both pretty awful. Guilty conscience? And not to play into stereotypes, but they often have some kind of anime waifu avatar too.
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I went and saw Mischief’s latest production today: A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. “Wait,” I hear you say, “that’s their latest? But that was on TV 8 years ago!” And yes, it was. But that was a created for TV sequel to Peter Pan Goes Wrong and, imo, the weakest thing Mischief’s done (of the Goes Wrong series, anyway). Unlike The Play That Goes Wrong, Peter Pan Goes Wrong and the Goes Wrong Show, which all had the eponymous production that goes wrong be a play, CCGW had the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society hijack a BBC production of a Christmas Carol that was being filmed as a standard TV show (albeit one being filmed in order, conveniently) with all the bits Going Wrong being elements of TV production. It didn’t really work and they course-corrected nicely for the Goes Wrong show by doing those as essentially filmed plays, like the BBC did in the 60s or so.
Anyway, when they announced a stage version of Christmas Carol Goes Wrong I was a) surprised b) curious and c) hungry (that’s incidental but nonetheless true). I really wondered how it would be possible to move that story – which is set in a BBC studio, goes for a wander around London and into a Tesco and relies on appearances from Derek Jacobi and Diana Rigg – to the stage.
The answer is that, well, they kinda didn’t. This is essentially a different take on the same concept. There are a few similar threads – Robert trying to replace Chris as Scrooge throughout the play as it goes, for instance – but it’s mostly a fresh story. Rather than it being about the Cornley troupe trying to prove themselves to the BBC, it’s main plot thread, beyond the play being a disaster, is about Chris, the director and star, being like Scrooge. Which is fine. It’s a tad under-cooked, but it works well. Interestingly, the play isn’t just the Cornley production presented as is, there’s framing material of them auditioning and planning beforehand and then regrouping afterwards. This means that the core set for the production is the bare Cornley Theatre, with the Christmas Carol sets brought on in front of that. It really adds another layer to the play within a play element, and speaks to the craft (and budget) that’s gone into it.
The set design overall is as impressive as ever. Mischief plays always require not only precisely made and positioned stage scenery, for the physical comedy, but elements that are moved about frequently, including by the cast. I noticed that they’d come up with hydraulic systems for some of the pieces here, so that they could raise up onto castors to be moved about easily (some are required to be spun as part of the story) and then settle securely onto the stage after. Really impressive stuff and you can feel a bit of the Penn and Teller stage magic craft in that. Oh and there’s also the most impressive and disturbing Tiny Tim you’re likely to ever see.
The real draw is of course the comedy. There’s fresh takes on familiar beats here, like Dennis’s workarounds to not knowing his lines, but nothing feels tired. It’s really great seeing these characters again, especially with half of them played by the “proper” cast (it felt like there was a collective repression of the desire to cheer from the entire audience when Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer came on stage). The “replacement” cast are a mix bag. The guy playing Max – a character that I’m convinced only Dave Hearn can pull off – felt like a Lee Evans tribute act and the actress playing Annie wasn’t amazing. But overall they were solid.
So Christmas Carol Goes Wrong is pretty great. An improvement over the TV version, definitely. It’s currently touring before going to the West End over Christmas and into the New Year. If you can get a ticket, I definitely recommend it.
