It honestly seems like Aardman Animation can do no wrong. Whether it’s the cheese-saturated domestic adventures of Wallace and Gromit or the hilarious mischievous of Shaun the Sheep, Aardman, known chiefly for their inspired stop-motion animation storytelling, have a gift, like Pixar, their spiritual narrative-shapers across the Atlantic, have a Continue Reading
Book review: Light Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell
One of the great appealing aspects of any science fiction worth it’s slave planet-mined salt is the imaginative audacity of the premise on which it sits. Time and again if you read or otherwise consume brilliant sci-fi, it’s hard not to sit back and gasp in wonder at the ideas Continue Reading
It’s beginning to look like a kids’ books Christmas: Jingle Bells, What Does Santa Do When It’s Not Christmas? + more
I love Christmas and in many ways, I am still a kid at heart (more looking at life with excitable eyes way, not so much the tantrums). So, it makes sense that among all the other things I love about the festive season that I really enjoy reading kids’ books Continue Reading
Where does destiny end and self-fulfilment begin? Thoughts on Foundation (E 8-10)
One of the prevailing themes of the masterful storytelling that is Foundations, adapted from Isaac Asimov’s saga of the same name, is how of what happens to people the result of blind, immutable destiny and how much resides in our often fallible hands? Musing on this great conundrum has kept Continue Reading
The festive short and the short of it: The accidental Christmas delights of Timber
SNAPSHOT“When Emily is nearly knocked off her bike by a careless driver, the passing car drops a Christmas tree in its wake. In the spirit of Christmas she takes it upon herself to find the owner, which leads her down an unexpected path.” The project started in Mid-November with a Continue Reading
Birthday book review: Trashlands by Alison Stine
Until the COVID pandemic came along and furiously and comprehensively disrupted life as we once knew it, most, if not all, people would have had trouble thinking in terms of a world ruinously different from our own. As a hypothetical concept, many of us accepted that without actual, substantive action Continue Reading
Christmas is a time to Love Hard … or is it? (movie review)
Christmas comes with a lot of expectations. A LOT. Many of them are delightfully festive and tinsel-draped, some are not but one thing is for sure – finding love at Christmas comes with a host of problems, not least the idea that in the midst of falling snow, twinkling lights Continue Reading
Already listening to Christmas music: Quick reviews of new albums by Josh Turner, Darren Criss and Kristin Chenoweth
It’s a question as old as time, or at least the festive season, anyway – when should you begin listening to Christmas music? There are some, of course, who will quite seriously question why you stopped at all, wholly convinced, and honestly after the hellscape of the last two years Continue Reading
Book review: The Mistletoe Pact by Jo Lovett
For many people, Christmas is an impossibly romantic time of the year. While this applies to the heat of a Southern Hemisphere festive season too, it is far more easily conjured in the Northern side of the globe where falling snow, twinkling lights in early dark nights and decorations placed Continue Reading
A terrific trio of TV trailers: As We See It, HALO and Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock
As we race to the end of 2021, exhausted, if even we have enjoyed them ( and we have) by the sheer volume of shows now available on streaming services, which are breeding like digital, high-resolution, it’s becoming excitingly clear that 2022 has a lot of great things to take Continue Reading