When you come to know someone later in their life, it is all too easy to assume, and we often do, that they have always been exactly like the person you see before you. We do it with parents and grandparents, teachers and authority figures of all kinds, even new Continue Reading
The madcap peril of Bob’s Broken Sleigh (review)
Christmas is, next to Earth and its unending attraction to alien invasion (I swear there’s a queue out by Saturn with armadas lined up one after the other to have a rack at subjugating us), the target of more villains than you can poke a gigantic red-and-white striped candy cane Continue Reading
Star Trek: Discovery – “Unification III” (S3, E7 review) / The Mandalorian – “Chapter 13: The Jedi” (S2, E5 review)
STAR TREK: DISCOVERY SPOILERS AHEAD … AND A SURPRISE PROMOTION AND RETURN OF THE VULCANS … SORT OF … Oh. how the future surprises us! Not only do they have matter that moulds and adapts itself to your unique physiology and transporters that beam you where you, and you alone, Continue Reading
Gravity defying stop-motion festiveness: Alien Xmas (review)
One of the most comforting parts of Christmas, a season dedicated to making us feel like everything is gloriously and perfectly right with the world, is settling down to watch the slew of new and old Christmas specials, TV shows and movies at our disposal. Most people will have favourites Continue Reading
Songs, songs and more songs #39: Akurei, Gus Dapperton, PLS&TY, Faithless, Hotel Garuda + Eurovision 2021 update
INTRO “HAIRDYE” by Akurei There is an ethereal beauty to “HAIRDYE” by Australian artist Akurei. In amongst all the sweetly charming music, however, are some fairly intensely reflective lyrics that the singer says makes “HAIRDYE” are a very personal statement for him. “‘HAIRDYE’, the focus track, came together on a Continue Reading
Fear the Walking Dead: “Damage From the Inside” (S6, E7 review) + The Walking Dead: World Beyond – “The Sky is a Graveyard” (S1, E8 review)
SPOILERS AHEAD … AND SURVIVOR WEIRDNESS ON A THOROUGHLY CREEPY SCALE … Getting stuck in the middle of the zombie apocalypse *and* losing everyone you love would go a long way to sending you way off the scales of workable sanity, right? Right. Just ask Ed (Raphael Sbarge) who has Continue Reading
Comics review: Star Trek Deep Space Nine – Too Long a Sacrifice by Tipton / Tipton / Scott / Sobriero
SNAPSHOTThe story is set during the Dominion War and is a noir-type story. David Tipton commented: “Set during the most difficult hours of the Dominion War, Too Long a Sacrifice shows the station during trying times: a series of mysterious and seemingly unsolvable terrorist attacks just as the war has Continue Reading
Movie review: A Christmas Gift From Bob
Christmas films are the comfort food of the season, a chance to pretend, if only for a couple of hours, that the world is as wonderful as we imagine it to be at this time of year. It’s usually not, of course, because sadly the world at large does not Continue Reading
Movie review: Summerland
If you’ve been paying attention, and really the business of being alive pretty demands it in one form or another, it won’t have escaped your attention that life is a big fan of unfinished moments. We, however, not so much; human beings are made for neat and tidy endings and Continue Reading
Book review: The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
A strange affliction affects a few people in an isolated college town in California before cases begin to mount and what started as a small outbreak soon becomes a major contagion, a virulent wave of disease that sweeps through the town, and thanks to the efforts of a few willful Continue Reading