Aranfoolcaytar

So partway into Invasion of Time, there's these tiny green plastic chairs:

Why are they there? Can you see any self-respecting Time Lord actually sitting in one of those?

Can it be... actual physical evidence of Time Tots?

(Thanks go to Jeff for pointing those out...)

If there is one thing I hate more than breath and martial arts (all kinds...), its writing copy within a php array. So for a recent project that required text-heavy forms, and a bunch of emails, I created an element that mimics php template. The usage and theme function are rather simple: (and rather stolen from phptemplate_render().

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TSV 59 - the first issue of the new millennium to go up (unless you're pedantic and insist the millennium started with 2001). It has one of my favourite TSV covers - a Curse of Fatal Death piece inspired by the cover of the Five Doctors novelisation.

Peter Adamson puts in two great articles: the first on Cyber-conversion (in the new series it's just "Scoop, splat, off you go") and the second on the much maligned Greatest Show in the Galaxy, plus he and Alistair Hughes view Revenge of the Cybermen for Beyond the Sofa. There's also part one of a lengthy interview with Andrew Pixley, he who did the archives in Doctor Who Magazine, which also includes a postscript update to some of what was originally said.

On the reviews front, this is the first issue to have reviews of Big Finish audios, starting with Sirens of Time, Phantasmagoria, and Whispers of Terror. Amazing that those have been going for 8 years now - longer than the Virgin New Adventures did - although as Paul mentions in the editorial, it'd still be nice to have the TV series back anyway... Oh, wait, we do!

Also added on the site recently is an index of the comic strips we have up, in series chronological order. The latest addition, of course, being Alistair Hughes' Our Final Battlefield.

Previously: TSV 58
See also: Paul, Jamas.

You can order Time's Champion from here, although currently the first edition is sold out and they're contemplating a second...

Time's Champion, as previously mentioned is Craig Hinton's last Doctor Who book, completed by Chris McKeon and published with the proceeds going to charity. It's a direct sequel to Craig's previous sixth Doctor and Mel books, The Quantum Archangel and Millennial Rites and, as you'd expect from one of his books, is chock full of continuity references to many many television stories as well as Virgin and BBC novels. It's also a little over 400 pages, well deserving of the label 'epic', so I'm sure had it been published as part of the BBC books range, it would have been severely cut.

As a random piece of trivia - this is the first time Mel's appeared on the cover of a book (and it's one cracking cover!) since Millennial Rites and Head Games back in 1995...

Anyway, as the story starts, the Doctor and Mel are attending Benton's 70th birthday party in 2008, along with a couple of returning characters from The Quantum Archangel. In 1908, George McKenzie-Trench is attempting to work on his latest book, Time's Champion, while in 9908 another George McKenzie-Trench is working on a computer supervirus to defend his world against an impending attack by the Cybermen.

I'm going to try to avoid spoilers and keep things vague for the rest of this review, but just in case, I'm hiding it under a cut anyway.

Continue reading Time's Champion Review...

As it turns out the article linked to in my previous post was, in fact, a pack of lies and Digital Spy have removed it. People who were actually there report no such thing as happening, and likewise The Sun's article makes no mention of it (and if anyone would pounce on such a story, it's them...)

Of course, we're lied to all the time, so this shouldn't come as a surprise. :)

Catherine Tate, who appeared in the fourth season of Doctor Who, has been appearing in a play in the West End, however it seems like a bunch of fans have decided to make a nuisance of themselves:

'Who' fans 'disrupt Tate's West End play'

Tennant showed his support for his former co-star by turning up for a performance this week, but was reportedly horrified when Who obsessives began singing the show's theme and waving sonic screwdrivers.

"Fans had heard he was going to watch former Doctor Who star Catherine, so they turned up in force, complete with props," a source told the Daily Star. "He was very charming and friendly with them during the interval, but he was rightly disgusted when they disrupted her performance by singing the show's music and waving their sonic screwdrivers."

Greaaaat, thanks for that.

Update: it's all lies!

I won free tickets to go and see this from Mintshot, and I'm sorta glad it was free... X Files was a series I watched on and off and never really got into it enough to regard myself a fan.

Given it's the first X Files we've had in a few years, I was expecting big things, which I suspect was part of the problem. I Want To Believe is more like an extended episode of the show than a movie. In an earlier time it might have been a reunion TV movie.

It's a movie that's more likely to appeal to fans of the show than anyone else... It has some good points though, like Billy Connolly. Yo, someone get Billy for Doctor Who.

More questions from the search engine queries: this time they read like a Doctor Who pub quiz.

Who shot off Davros's hand?

Lee Harvey Oswald

How did the Master escape from the eye of harmony?

A really big stepladder.

Which story featured a transparent or glass Dalek?

Modern Art of the Daleks

Which superweapon was used to stop the Sontaran invasion of gallifrey?

The Collapsible Plastic Chair of Rassilon.

When is Jason Donovan taking the part of dr who?

Well, he- WHAT?!

Or the actual answers: Bostock in Revelation of the Daleks; the Time Lords resurrected him; Revelation and Resurrection of the Daleks (and the novelisation of The Daleks); the Demat Gun; and I'm not even going to ask where you heard that rumour.

At least judging by tetrap.com's top search term in Google Webmaster Tools:

Internet Explorer, why do you suck so much?

I'm working on a new site scheme for the NZDWFC web page and recently had a brainwave that I could make a special style sheet to render the pages in a format more suitable for printing. You can specify the media type of a style sheet so that the browser selects the appropriate one to use given the situation. I can therefore provide a style sheet which includes all the menus for display on the computer screen, and another one which hides those for printing.

Unfortunately I hadn't counted on Internet Explorer being a dick. Here's a review of the NZDWFC novelisation of Shada, rendered in IE using my print style sheet:

Here's the print preview of the same document, using the same style sheet:

So IE uses a different rendering process for displaying on the screen versus printing. It doesn't treat floats correctly (the text should flow around the image, as it does in the in-browser render) and it's ignoring the column widths I set, causing the content to be shifted to the right, and losing the right-hand side of the text.

And I thought it was bad when I had to deal with IE's in-browser differences. Grrrrr.

Edit: It wasn't that the column widths that was the problem - apparently setting page margins seems to upset the print renderer. Once I removed the margin definition, it laid out fine. The text still isn't flowing around the image though.

Doing a Google blog search for your competitors and leaving comments advertising your own drink: cunning, or a wee bit sleezy? Well, Ms Random Employee, I'd try 6 Hour Power, but unfortunately I was unable to determine whether it's available in New Zealand...

Apparently I should be boycotting Rockstar anyway, because according to The Truth about Rockstar Energy Drink, it was invented by a homophobe[1].

...

After drinking this, I was catapaulted into a world of rock stardom, touring the world, hanging out with groupies, and the associated slide into a mire of drugs and rehab clinics. And then the caffiene buzz wore off and I was a computer programmer again.

Rockstar (or Rockst*r) is a product of the US, comes in a can the same size as Demon and Relentless, and has the standard energy drink taste. I suspect we'll be seeing more energy drinks in cans this size...

Looks like the energy drink market's getting busy again.

I have this very strange -- apparently radical -- belief that the more money typical people have, the better the economy will function as whole. This has contrasted the United States' political leadership's view, which was "Give it all to Trevor McRichy -- he'll see it goes to good use, and he'll give you a great job later..." Frankly, that sounds more like a proposal from a con-artist, than sound government policy.

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Alien with Rifftrax Presents soundtrack: What better way to improve a classic movie but with a commentary full of jokes? Absolutely the best use of time.

Hancock: A fantastic comedy with only one flaw - it's too short. At only 90 minutes, I came away feeling like it was more like the pilot to a TV show than a movie. I'd still recommend it to comic book fans. Speaking of which:

The Dark Knight: Everyone is right. Go and see this movie.

OTOH, don't take your kids. Seriously, when I saw this last Friday, the cinema was full of parents taking small children to see it. There's a good reason why there was an article in today's Sunday Star Times saying not to take children to see it - It's a violent and disturbing movie.

Cola-flavoured energy drink! Thanks, Demon! (NSFW)

Added to the usual caffeine disclaimer is: "Also not for anyone who doesn't think Jordan has a nice set of... eyes :)" Is Jordan that well known in NZ?

Been working on the new drupal 6 design for this blog. Its taken longer than normal, because i'll be adding it to drupal's contributions. Haven't named it yet. Probably will go with something along the lines of "green nerd hippy", but am still not sure.

The theme aims to be a slick, two column layout, that is flexible enough to be used as a base theme.

The priorities in the theme are:

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Today's dodgy alien comes courtesy of another Irwin Allen series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The season three episode Doomsday Island:

Why, the chaps on Seaview have brought aboard a giant egg! Nothing bad could possibly come of this!

Ah, crap, an alien from the planet Scorpius!

Nice ears...

[Previously: Dark Star's Beach Ball, Lost in Space's Carrot Man]

Bit the bullet and upgraded this ol' blog to drupal 6.x. This is a painful update, since my blog was running on a weird hybrid 4.7/civicspace codebase, and had relics of early CCK, Views, etc. Am not planning on sticking with garland (not that there is anything wrong with garland).

My average rating for episodes this series was 7.153, which is down on Series 3. Though I thought this season was better overall - the finale really dragged it down. A handful of spoilers and misuse of the dl tag:

Continue reading Series 4 in Review...

Let me take you on a trip back in time to shortly before the millennium, which is a roundabout way of saying that TSV issue 58 went online yesterday. In the last pre-Y2K issue, there are many lovely shiny things.

Beyond the Sofa is one of my favourite TSV article series, wherein Peter Adamson and Alistair Hughes watch old Doctor Who (in this case Nightmare of Eden) in a similar vein to DWM's Time Team. Also Scott Gray gives us an article on the making of the DWM comic strip Happy Deathday!; there's A Locked Room Mystery, a comic strip featuring the first Doctor and Steven; and a look at the Sherlock Holmes continuity in the Virgin book All-Consuming Fire by Jamas.

There's nothing from me in 58, so instead I'll mention Neil Lambess' column in which he mentions having seen episodes of The Macra Terror and hearing rumours of The Highlanders, raising the possibility of more missing Doctor Who episodes existing in the hands of collectors. Since it's some nine years later and no more complete episodes have been found here, nothing came of it, but the recent discovery of a complete print of Metropolis, missing for the last 80 some years, does give me hope that more missing episodes exist out there.

Here's hoping, anyway.

Previously: TSV 57
See also: Jamas, Paul