The Secret’s In The Sauce
Secret Invasion: Fuck me, is it still going on? Haven’t they invaded by now? Isn’t this better characterised as Secret Occupation? Secret War Of Attrition?
Doctor Who at the Hugo Awards: Meant to write about this at the time, but forgot to, and now I can’t recall if I had anything interesting or longish to say about it, so I’ll keep it brief. Firstly, after watching all the Battlestar episodes to date, Moffat’s Who episodes beating Ron Moore’s show for three years running is a spectacular achievement, because Battlestar is some of the best television writing full stop, never mind in SF. The Pegasus episodes in particular, because that stuff is very, very good. And very, very harrowing. However, the Razor TV movie didn’t hold together quite as well as other episodes in Series 3 (regardless of apparent fan reaction to that series), so wasn’t that much of a challenge to Blink.
Secondly, the real challenge to Moffat’s episode was actually Paul Cornell’s Human Nature/Family Of Blood two-parter, and it really should’ve won. I mean, Blink was funny and brilliant, but Cornell’s just pips it, thanks in no small part to David Tennant and Jessica Hynes (Daisy in Spaced, of course), who were extraordinary.
And speaking of the Hugos, it must have been a poor year for film if Stardust was really the best long-form genre flick from ‘07. It was good, but Sunday afternoon family film good, not award-winning good. Other recent winners include Pan’s Labyrinth, Serenity and The Lord of the Rings (all of them), and it’s nowhere near as good as them. Hell, it isn’t even in the same league as recent nominees, like The Prestige and Spirited Away.
And to think Transformers wasn’t even nominated. Scandalous.
Knight Rider: And you can bet this show is never getting nominated either. I love that Mustang, but to be brutally honest the pilot was shit and the series looks worse. The thing is, this:
A big part of season one is going to be why Kitt is here with this group, why is he learning, and why is an artificial intelligence in this car. There is a bigger mythology to it and what I wanted to do was bring some from the original and update it. It’s been 25 years since Knight Industries was seen so what’s happened to them and where have they gone? [from an io9 spoiler post]
Sounds like a good idea in the right hands. But oh dear Lord are these hands the wrongest hands imaginable.
An observation of possible interest to the kind of nerd that even other nerds like to pick on: I’ve finally finished the big chunk of work I mentioned the other day, and it’s the first completed thing written entirely on my Linux-infused laptop.
Those who’ve been hanging round the Hall for a while may recall a few months ago I attempted to salvage my utterly out-of-date yet faithful and broadly functional old warhorse, a Thinkpad that got me through University. I didn’t really want to get rid of it and have to shovel out money for a new one, because it was only really going to be used as a word processor, and I wanted to see if Linux really was getting more user friendly.
The main problem with the plan was that the hardware’s a little too old to run Ubuntu, which I’ve been told is the dead simple Linux. Fluxbuntu and Xubuntu both ran on it, but the former wouldn’t recognise a USB memory stick and I didn’t really want to have to fudge around that much to get it working. Xubuntu ran really slowly at first, but I managed to set up some swap space on the hard disk that largely took care of the problem. It doesn’t really load any faster than XP did (old system, though, so not surprising) but it certainly hibernates and shuts down quickly, and there’s no sudden slow-downs or apparently random accessing of the hard drive, which is practically worth the bother on its own.
The USB stick works fine, which is the most important thing because printing duties will have to be done by transferring the files over to the Windows PC. I can’t be bothered faffing around with getting an internet or network connection on the laptop, and I think I’m better off without the distraction. Besides, I think the AbiWord writing package is just about all the creaky old system can handle.
To be honest, I wouldn’t call the Linux packages that will run on this relatively old system user friendly at all. I’ve just about got enough knowledge to do the minimum of what I need to do, but that’s it. Unless the more modern Linux packages are more user-friendly by a good distance (like, light-years distance) then I can’t see Linux ever being a realistic choice for most. But you never know, they might be.
