1 pack of Star Wars Legacy of the Force collectible miniatures from Forbidden Planet, @ £9.99

I issue of Wargames Soldiers and Strategy, @ £3.95

1 issue of Miniature Wargames, @ £3.70

1 T.rex and 1 pack of Syntarsus from Jeff Valent Studios , @ $38.90 (£20.74)

Total: £38.38

Total for the quarter: £37.74 + £26.94 + £38.38 = £103.06 (a smidgen over the £100 budget).

Was that the most expensive piece of fanwank ever?

Very True Mood:  surprised

Via a few people but most immediately uninvitedcat.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE.
4. Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5. Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullmam
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I’ve read about a third, but a long time ago so I really should start again)
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I’m sure I’ve read some other than TLTWATW but I’m not sure how many)
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Why is this separate to 33?)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

ObHTML: I managed to resist the temptation to add <cite> tags to every title. If I had an editor open with better RegEx support…

Very True Mood:  thoughtful

1 pack of Star Wars Force Unleashed collectible miniatures from Forbidden Planet, @ £14.99

2 issues of Wargamesd Illustrated, @ £4.00 each

1 issue of Wargames Soldiers and Strategy, @ £3.95

Brontosaurus Rex RPG from eBay, @ £9.99 lost in post, money refunded by seller

Total: £26.94

Moffat to replace RTD in 2010.

Steven Moffat should be scared, very scared. If his Who is too much like RTD’s he’ll be damned, if it’s too different he’ll be damend, if every episiode isn’t up to the standard of ‘The Empty Child’ he’ll be damned. Some fans have built him as the solution to everything they dislike about the show that he can’t possibly meet their expectations.

I’m looking forward to the remaining stories that RTD has to tell and hope he continues to write scripts for Moffat; and I’m also looking forward to seeing what Moffat brings to the show when the time comes.

Oh, and the news story above mentions “four specials to be shown in 2009″. I think that’s just sloppiness and counting the 2008 Christmas special as well, unless anyone knows differently.

Via ffutures

The following is a list of Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning novels (not including retro-Hugos)
Bold the ones you’ve finished
Italicise the ones you’ve started but not finished
Underline the ones were you’ve seen the film/tv show

( Long list.... )

Very True Mood:  mellow

Via pesky33.

The Music Intelligence Quiz

Your final score was 132/180

Mix-Tape Master (109-144 points)

You are a music evangelist: the person in your network of friends who always has the coolest new song, the one whose iPod gets picked to DJ every party. You understand the art of the segue, how the key to the best mix-tape isn’t just the songs you pick, but how they interlock with each other. You also know who the up-and-coming acts are and are quick to recognise where their influences lie and whether they will make it big. You work hard at the pursuit of this knowledge, scouring music blogs, magazines and record stores. Most importantly, you are generous with your passion – and your friends should be very, very grateful. Still, it’s always good to get new inspiration for your latest mix

Or… I’m just good at trivia.

Very True Mood:  mellow

1 pack of Doctor Who micro-universe figures from Woolies, @ £9.99.

1 pack of Doctor Who micro-universe figures and 1 starship pack from the Doctor Who Exhibition, £18.98 total.

1 pack of Copplestone Castings Cavemen and 1 Walrus, @ £10.00

2 issues of Miniature Wargames, 1 @ £3.50 and 1 @ £3.70

Total: £46.17

Total for the quarter: £31.02 + £22.25 + £46.17 = £99.44 (Bang on budget - £100)

Went to see 10,000 BC this afternoon. Oh boy, history, biology, geography, astronomy - they all get a hammering in this film. I can’t be bothered to even start listing everything that was goofy here.

It was one of the most by-the-numbers renditions of (the easy to understand bits of) Joseph Campbell’s monomyth that I’d seen in a while. I smiled at the bemusement when hunter-gatherers first came across the evidence of agriculture, but of course in Campbell’s scheme there has to be a ‘boon’ to take back home at the end (sorry, that was a spoiler). There were also bits lifted from the Bible, Stargate, Conan and 300, just in case the mention of Campbell misled you into thinking there were highbrow sources being used.

The action and CGI were very good, the actors managed to keep straight face. It’s not a bad movie in the sense that it’s exciting and visual, but it’s certainly one to watch with the brain switched off.

Oh, by the way, the Doctor Who and Star Trek trailers look amazing on the big screen.

Very True Mood:  sleepy

This blog now has a theme tune courtesy of Brother Typewriter of the Burning Lodge.

Very True Things is a tribute to my friend Steve’s blog of the same name. The idea was to have a 16-note sequence running throughout the whole song and then play different stuff against that - which sort of worked, I think. Actually it was more to do with the fact that I couldn’t be bothered to write any more complex sequence in Moog Modular V. I am VLT - Very Lazy Thing.)

Thank you Howie, I think…