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

I was tagged by Jack on the grounds that I’ve “not done a meme for a while”.

Total Number of Books Owned

According to my LibrayThing profile, 858. I know I have at least one more to add to that list and I’d also need to subtract the 27 tagged as !borrowed or !sold. So 832. Minimum, as there may be more hiding somewhere that I haven’t added yet.

Last Book Bought

A couple of out of print role playing games from eBay. Last ‘real’ book would appear to be Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O’Brian which I found in a bookshop in Amsterdam and made Lettice buy because I’d only just bought something else there and the shop assistant was a bit on the scary side.

Last Book Read

I finished re-reading Human Nature this morning. I’ve been wanting to refresh my memory since the TV version came out. The book is bloodier and does a better job of creating the historical context. However it does have a number of elements that are really superfluous and which the TV version correctly ignored.

Five books that mean a lot to me

In reverse chronological order in my life:

1. Life by Richard Fortey

   I bought this whilst on holiday in Tennessee visiting gleet and littlebun so it reminds me of a great time as well as being a great book. Fortey takes a look at the history of life on Earth from the moment if started to the dawn of human history. Richard Dawkins did the same trip backwards in The Ancestor’s Tale but for me Fortey’s book is more engaging.

2. Ships of the Star Fleet, Volume One

   Very, very geeky. But as well as being one of the best Treknical fandom works ever it’s also the first book I bought online.

3. Thieves’ World

   I could have listed several works of fantasy or science fiction that I read during my adolesence - The Lord of the Rings, Dune, the Pern novels and The Colour of Magic prime amongst them, but this collection of low fantasy stories set in a seedy city at the arse end of an empire is the one that stuck in my mind the most.

4. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

   I was the pefect age for this when it was first published. And from this book sprung my interest in RPGs and wargames. It has a lot to answer for.

5. 

   Read About Me and the Yellow-Eyed Monster

   A childhood treat - a book with me and my family and my friends in it.

Four People You’re Tagging With This Meme

• Chris at The Virtual Stoa
• gleet
• pink_weasel
• Tony and his Random Thoughts

Got a short e-mail today about my StarDate Converter:

Have you considered making the current stardate available via RSS?

Hmm, interesting. First of all I’d have to translate the calculator to PHP or whatever to do the calculations on the server, but after that making the output available via RSS would be easy enough.

But would it be practical: the second decimal place represents a period of little over five minutes, so if someone wanted this to create a stardate ‘clock’ they’d be hitting my server at least that often. Not a disaster on its own but something that would need keeping an eye on if it proved popular.

Maybe I should test it out with the French Revolutionary Calendar first (I really need to convert that to PHP anyway so that the dates on this blog aren’t reliant on JavaScript). Hmmm, let’s see where this leads.

Very True Mood: curious

It’s one of those funny but not especially surprising things that fan activity for some well established shows is more creative when the show is off the air and loses momentum somewhat when new material is actually being produced.

Just as a new TV season starts in the US, the first second (bugger, things never sounds as good when the facts are right) without a new Star Trek series for nearly two decades, so two lang standing stalwarts (what I suppose we’d call BNFs in other circles) of treknical fandom produce new material. David Schmidt’s Strategic Design produces a new range of blueprints and Eric Kristiansen releases a new edition of Jackill’s Volume One.

Well, I’m excited even if you’re not.

I’m sure you’re all sick of the spoof motivational poster craze. But these four tickled my fancy… (all from RPG Motivational Posters)

Also, in case you haven’t had it pointed out to you by a dozen people already Star Trek Inspirational Posters.

Very True Mood: tired

Jim Stevenson’s Starship Schematic Database has finally been beaten by the bandwidth monster. Understandable, but still a great pity.

Very True Mood: sad

Discussion last night about the new Doctor Who with someone who is a sci-fi geek but not a long term DW fan. Now we all know that the Cybermen came first but are they better?

Opinions please.

So Enterprise has been cancelled. Not a huge surprise, though it does seem to have come at a time when the show was finally starting to produce some good episodes (or so I hear - I’ve only seen the first two seasons).

With the panning received by the last Star Trek film, Nemesis, it looks like this could be last on screen Trek for some while. Probably not a bad thing. It’s been eighteen years since TNG started and television and the world at large has changed a lot since 1987. In many respect Trek has failed to keep up with those changes.

If there is another Star Trek TV series a few years down the line it can start afresh and reflect the views and hopes for the future of those years in the same way that TOS reflected those of the cold war/space race era and that TNG reflected those of the glasnost era.

One positive thing that may happen in the meantime is a flowering of fan efforts. Some of the most imaginative fan works (and also, it has to be said, the works that originally gave us the term “slash”) came out of the 1970s when there was no new Trek being produced. Likewise the most fertile period for Doctor Who fandom has been the years since 1989.

There is, of course, a Save Enterprise campaign.

Bought one of the old LUG Star Trek RPG books on Saturday. Found it in a clearance sale in Guildford Waterstones going for £3.95, which brings the running total to £53.95.