Mark

This is what I look like these days, more or less. I'm not always gazing winsomely into the middle distance, though, and my hair is sometimes quite a lot more purple.

Huh, what is going on with me? That's a good question. Quite a lot.

Malin and I own a flat now. That's quite nice. I have my own private room full of guitars and little toy soldiers and books and music and everything. It's great.

I've been working freelance as a translator fairly solidly for a few years, and while it's still not a reliable source of enough income to live on, it's getting there.

I got to hang out with Mike Carey for the first time in years last weekend. It was really good to see him.

Oh, and Malin and I have a child arriving at the start of February. That's fairly big news. I should probably have led with that, really.

Hello again, everyone. How are you all doing?

I think we lasted 15 mins & my other half (Who nerd) said "this is painful" & we've not spoken of it since.

 

Not even for the completists.

Yeah, that's about as much of it as I was able to manage. It's beyond awful.

Goldfinger

We Have All the Time in the World

Nobody Does It Better

Live & Let Die

You Only Live Twice

...

...

...

Other, lesser songs

Slimelight used to be awesome. I've been told that it's a shadow of its former self, but probably still worth dropping in if you happen to be in London on a club night.

Orphan Black is, indeed, very dumb (with occasional moments of effective cleverness, but generally pretty silly), but it's worth watching for Tatiana Maslany alone. The fact that she hasn't been scooping up every 'best actress' award in television is absurd.

Naah, you're hopefully going to be stuck with me for the foreseeable. I've missed this place.

I'm alright. Little of any real consequence has happened to me in the...what is it, about a year or so since I last posted here? Well, little that I'm willing to share in a public forum, anyway ;-)

Malin and I own a new flat now, which we're very happy with. Both of our former cats are now sadly deceased (unrelated natural-causes deaths within two months of each other last summer, which sort of sucked), but we've got two new ones called Max and Furiosa, who are equal parts adorable and infuriating.

This season was, while flawed, probably my favourite since 2005, and definitely my favourite since Moffat took over.

The Christmas special was ace - sufficiently so that I even enjoyed the return of River, a character who I was more than ready to never see again.

Hooray.

Capaldi is fabulous. I like the guitar. And the sunglasses have grown on me.

I'll go back and read what you lot have thought of the last however-much-Doctor-Who-there's-been-since-the-last-time-I-was-here later on. I'm curious.

Hello again.

So, what did I miss?

Hello again, all. I've been away for a while, but it feels good to be back. So, what's going on with you lot?

There's really very little more one could reasonably have asked for from that episode. It didn't feel like a finale, but as it wasn't meant to be one when it was originally written, I'm glad they didn't butcher the story in order to bring things to a forced climax just because the season was shortened. An extremely solid, surprisingly accurate adaptation of 'Waiting for the Man', with a few nice touches thrown in for us fans (4 Delano Street was a cute nod), and not undermined too badly by being interspersed with a load of other stuff developing the show's own story.

That final scene between John and Manny was pretty much exactly the way I'd want to see the character represented on screen. Whatever else happens in future, we can now say that we've seen a TV show in which John Constantine asks an angel to hold his cock for him while he has a piss under a bridge and then lights a cigarette and walks off into the rain, trench coat flapping in the wind. Which is nice.

Grandad!

Yeah, but not especially "superhero movie" cliched, which at least makes it moderately interesting.

I remain deeply sceptical, but not 100% so - it's not a bad teaser, all things considered. It's pretty obviously going to be a pretty loose adaptation of the FF, but the cast is generally strong and Chronicle really was very good indeed, so there's at least a slight chance that it could be a good movie in its own right. We'll see.

There are certainly some people making a somewhat unreasonable fuss about the issue, especially given that it's apparently already resolved to as great a degree as could ever reasonably be expected, but the degree of vitriol being directed at the people who were quite understandably a bit narked about the apparent straightwashing of John seems almost comically over the top. Bisexuality remains massively underrepresented in popular media, and even though it only very rarely played much of a role in the comics it is an established facet of the character, so as one of very few bi protagonists out there it's not surprising that he's become something of a mascot. Ironically enough, there's a reasonable chance that the TV show could do a better job of representing John as a bisexual character than the comic itself ever did, and I reckon that'd be something worth celebrating.

As to those supposedly attention-seeking bisexuals* making such a big noise about being bisexual...well, in my experience most sexually active bi folks *do* tend to be fairly vocally open about it, as long as they live in a place where it's safe to do so (and even if they don't, online is a pretty safe space for that). Firstly, the more visible they are as a group the more normalised and accepted bisexuality will hopefully become, and secondly...well, there aren't a great many of non-straight people out there, really. Being open about one's sexuality is a pretty important thing if one wants to maximise the chances of meeting someone of your preferred gender(s) in the first place...

Thirdly, of course, there's just the simple matter of wanting to lay a claim to one's own identity in the face of a culture that's generally ignorant of or hostile towards it. That's a lot more important than most people who aren't members of an oppressed/marginalised/underrepresented minority tend to appreciate.

*Full disclosure: I'm one of 'em, although not among those to whom this particular issue is especially important.

does it also complete 'the' with 'doctor'? or 'ex' with terminate?

Yes and no, respectively.

There's a sentence in the above post that should clearly read "whatever else can be said of the show...", but I'm leaving it as it is simply because of how much I enjoy the fact that my phone's auto-predict assumes that the phrase "...of the..." should obviously be completed with "...Daleks". My phone apparently knows me well.

That was really, really good.

Given Manny's reproachful glance at the end I strongly suspect that we actually have now seen the moment of demonic tainting that will be used to resolve the Zed/Mary story, and for probably the first time so far I thought it was an unequivocal improvement over the way it was done in the comics. It'd be a shame to lose that bond of personal connection between John and Nergal, but there's still room for something else to fill that role later on, so I haven't given up hope yet. In the meantime, having John willingly taint himself in a reckless, cocky attempt to save himself rather than being blackmailed into it as a fairly noble way of saving a hospital ward full of innocent babies strikes me as an eminently Constantine-esque notion, and further evidence that whatever else can be said of the daleks show it's clearly being made by people with a stronger grasp of who John Constantine - the real one - is than I'd ever dared to hope.

Like Red, I liked the way Manny was played this week. If this is how they're ultimately going to lead us towards John's more antagonistic relationship with the forces of Heaven, as seen under Ennis in particular, it'll retroactively make the "working with Manny in a bid to save his soul" stuff from the pilot a lot more palatable.

The first conversation between Tennant's Doctor and Simm's Master in 'Sound of Drums', that marvellously homoerotically charged phone call, is a real highlight. Season 29 (shutupshutupshutup) is a favourite of mine, too.

The first season of Supernatural is entertaining enough but thoroughly unremarkable monster-of-the-week fare. Second season starts to see some serious improvement, and seasons 3-5 are about as good as that sort of television has ever been done.

That was a very good episode of Doctor Who. I enjoyed it enormously.

There've been some ups and downs, some creative choices that didn't quite pay off, and I've had some nitpicks and gripes both reasonable and otherwise. But even allowing for that, I think this is the first year since 2005 in which there wasn't a single episode I'd rate below "pretty bloody good".

It's been a remarkably consistent season, all the more impressively so given how many risks it's taken along the way (in terms of complete reinvention the transition from Smith to Capaldi has been about as jarringly abrupt as anything the show's ever done - even knowing better it's hard to believe that Doctor Who is still being written and produced by almost exactly the same people who were in charge last year), and I can't wait to see where it's going to go next.

That is AWESOME.

Casting of Amanda Waller is pretty crucial for me - none of the other names cast so far give me real reason for either optimism or concern. None leap out at me as irrefutably perfect, but there are no obviously catastrophic choices either (the fact that Will Smith is a bigger star than any of the rest by several orders of magnitude does raise the worrying possibility that the whole thing will turn into a "Deadshot And His Amazing Chums" star vehicle rather than the ensemble piece it really needs to be, but in terms of pure acting ability and screen presence I don't see any reason he shouldn't be perfectly good in the role).

The fact that they're apparently looking for an Oprah Winfrey rather than, say, an Angela Bassett is encouraging.

Papa Midnite was good (and damn, he LOOKS good!), so was Matt's JC, but this episode was a step down from Feast of friends for me. A bit too generic in the way the plot resolved. Still, some good bits, especially the interplay between Midnite and John.

Agreed, but still a definite step up from the first three - if this is the sort of standard we can expect from a relatively straightforward case-of-the-week story, it's shaping up into a surprisingly decent show. Still not brilliant, but at least on a par with the first season of Supernatural.

Errm. Firstly, he's not actually saying what you think he's saying. Like, at all. And secondly, the bits that say what you think he's saying have nothing to do with the quality or worth of Morrison's art, but are part of a (largely fair, although less than wholly convincing) critique of how his self-avowed ideology compares with the actual reality of his career, something that really does paint Morrison in a less-than-entirely-flattering light. For someone so self-avowedly interested in the individual worth of humans within a faceless authoritarian system he's oddly eager to leap to the defence of the gigantic corporate entities he himself works for, largely because he's done very well out of them personally. The somewhat cowardly way he sidesteps the frankly appalling way a lot of key creative figures in the comics industry have been treated by Marvel and DC in Supergods is pretty glaring, as a lot of critics noted at the time).

None of which makes Morrison any less brilliant as a writer, though, and Sandifer never attempts to suggest otherwise. Because - thirdly - this essay is a tangential part of a much broader project, and you're (understandably enough, assuming you're not a regular reader of the blog) taking it massively out of context. Aside from the Doctor Who thing, he's also currently in the middle of a book-length project ('The Last War in Albion') dedicated pretty much solely to contextualising and deconstructing the parallel careers of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, and while he clearly ultimately sides firmly with Team Moore, he also clearly considers Morrison's work valuable and substantial enough to warrant that sort of in-depth analysis. As he puts it in the comments section:

As for whether there are things I like about Morrison, yes, but it requires, to borrow a phrase, treating the text as a hostile witness. There's stuff I like a lot, and I'll still buy anything he puts out guaranteed and site unseen. And, you know, if I didn't like him I wouldn't write about him - I'd just do an Alan Moore project. But it's... fraught.

Off the top of my head, I quite like The Filth - I think that's probably his strongest comic, actually. I thought bits of Doom Patrol were magnificent. Other than the bad mistake of moving key bits of plot into the Superman Beyond mini, I thought Final Crisis was great fun. I liked his Batman run up to about the start of Incorporated, but I've largely gotten bored with it. I'm terribly excited for his Wonder Woman project, though I expect that I'll be at loggerheads with the text several times. I thought New X-Men was mostly fantastic, and that it's infuriating how little influence it had on future X-Men comics.

And I actually quite like Pop Magic! even though I'm not wild about chaos magic as a pure practice. Jane's comment up-thread gets at a lot of it. I like the "do what works" ethos of chaos magic and the willingness to treat any symbolic system as a place to play, but I think the focus on power-over is terribly misguided.

Which, you know...well, I don't entirely agree, but he's certainly got a point. And it's a point that isn't even in the same ballpark as "LET'S RANK ART ACCORDING TO HOW REVOLUTIONARY IT IS". Hell, it isn't even playing the same game. Essentially, he's saying "I love Grant Morrison, but..." And for the purposes of this specific essay, the "but..." is what he's focusing on.

All of which said, I think this is a fairly weak bit of writing from a blogger who's capable of far, far better (I've been following his TARDIS Eruditorum project for years, and while he can be deeply frustrating on occasion, he can also be absolutely brilliant). But "worst thing I've ever read" and "Stalinist" might be something of an overreaction.

Someone waved a magic wand?

No, it's one of the Power Of Love ones.