The Whore of Mensa gets her P45

Wow!

surliminal — Sat, 23 Nov 2013 23:17:30 GMT

as in, wow, LJ really IS dead! - wot, no Day of the Doctor reaction posts! or has there been a DDOS attack???

Well I just wanted to say that YES we never still did see 8.5 regenerating into 9 so maybe, incredibly, doubtingmichael was right and the Doctor's personal history has been rewritten, the 9th Doctor is Capaldi, we will see this in the Xmas ep and 9,10 and 11 never existed??! and would that mean they didn't get to be in the official canon any more and not on lunchboxes either?! I suppose they'd be an alternate timeline, though, right (so still ok for the novels?)? Would that mean there never was Donna, Amy, River , Rose too, and all the people they saved were unsaved??

As a DT fangirl I kind of hope not (and one imagines it would seriously piss quite a lot of others off including Mr Davies) but it WOULD certainly be interesting! though it would, notice, only put off the 13 regenerations question for 4 more actors, not fix it.. (thats enough sighs Moff!)

In other stuff, glad to see Gallifrey back, loved seeing Tom Baker, could have done with slightly less Blackadder pastiche but it was good clean fun, sad 10didn't get to see BadWolfRose (I suppose that was a difficult call to make given Rose-lovers and haters, but..!) and really liked the portrayal of 10 and 11 as deliberately childish to avoid the horrors 8.5 had lived through of facing up to being an adult. I actually genuinely didn't know if a choice would be made to change history or not (though I could have done without SuperClara saving the world, again). Obviously most Hurt's lines were originally written for Eccleston and you can imagine it might have been a lot more angsty if 9 had been there - I was surprisingly dry eyed - but it was a damn good sub choice.

Adored HurtDoctor's exasperation at timey wimey, sonic weapon screwdrivers , snogging, etc and thought it was a remarkably acute self criticism by Moffat of the modern infantilisation of Who as it has paradoxically played more and more to an adult audience. Altogether wonderfully meta in places. Moffat largely played to his strengths - straight comedy, time paradox and po-moishness and it worked. 10 and 11 was just to die for. Bravo!

GikII by the seaside

surliminal — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 13:27:19 GMT

Would normally have done this earlier but with the slow death of LJ.. :(

GikII VIII Conference - call for papers

Sun, Sand and GikII VIII

When robots, drones, autonomous agents, Facebook stalking, teleportation, 3D printing, MMORPGS, science fiction, computer games and superhero justice are discussed within the realms of the law and LOL cats, you know the time for the annual GikII workshop has arrived! Yes, it’s time for GikII VIII - and a time to immerse ourselves in debates about cutting-edge technology, popular culture and the law.

Date: Monday 16 & Tuesday 17 September 2013
Venue: Bournemouth University, Executive Business Centre, BH8 8EB

Submission of Abstracts and Deadline

Please send an abstract not exceeding 500 words to Professor Lilian Edwards and Dr Dinusha Mendis. The deadline for submissions is 2 August 2013. We will be in touch shortly after the deadline regarding acceptance of papers.

Registration

GikII is being hosted with the kind assistance of the Law Department and the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University. In keeping with tradition, there is no registration fee to attend GikII and priority is always given to speakers, but there are some limited spaces available for students and non-speakers. To guarantee your place, please make sure you submit your paper early and register for the event. Registration will be announced when acceptance of abstracts has been confirmed.

Please visit our event webpage for more information.

We look forward to welcoming you to Bournemouth.

NOTE: I know AAA has already submitted abstract -majorclanger?cairmen ? feel free to pass on.

Dr who

surliminal — Sun, 19 May 2013 19:05:22 GMT

Finally got a chance to see it.
Omg. That was ALL RIGHT. In fact it was more than all right. I went OMG, OMG ! At the end. When did I last do that re Dr Who? I was actually gripped.

Poor River. I'm glad she got a proper ending. I almost had actual tears in my eyes. I,ll miss her. (So it looks like we,ll never see the night before the Library? Probably just as well.

but - ahem - do we still not know why the Tardis exploded? Will we ever?

And if all the Doctors were there in his corpse (and how Lawrence Miles was THAT? He really will deserve to be pissed off now..) then why didn't we see FUTURE incarnations? Well we know why. But I hope we get an explanation..)

ps Having now read about a million comments since seeing the finale,I get that the majority view is that HurtDr is between 8 and 9 - but I really hope not as I think it destroys the moral point of the entire 9 and 10 eras, that sometimes very awful things have to be done by good men to save more than is lost - and at tremendous personal price(compete loneliness). Just labelling that "so bad that he can't be called the Dr" would be simplistic and cowardly,disrespectful to the entire RTD period, which I doubt Moff wants to do, and even , in someways, not a great role model for kids series...

id much rather he was Pre Hartnell, and, as someone suggested on Grauniad blog, what in fact impelled One to take off to fight for Good as against the general insularity of the Time Lords?

also everyone seeminly hates the DRAMATIC BILLING of John Hurt. I thought it was a deliberately Tarantino-esque flourish and laughed out loud; perfect for a b movie cliffhanger that's going to hang over us for 6 mos!

and finally, others seem to think we,ll see River-of-the-library again. I thought this was absolutely and definitely her curtain call. Anyone else?

Filums

surliminal — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:39:03 GMT

Watching the BAFTAS and though I have seen neither (yet), rather pleased to see little-David Argo beat all time Goliath Lincoln for most the big awards. Has no one else noticed how much those Lincoln trailers resemble the The Comic Strip Presents version of Hollywood in Strike!? I suppose not. Sigh. (and now I see Brave won Best Animated too. yay!) I wish we'd seen more of the little awards tho, all of which seem to have gone to aliens beamed down to earth as part of the Les Miserables stage crew.. (deely bobbers??!) (and where was Daniel Craig eh? no wonder they didn't give him a best actor nomination!)

Hohum. Watched Looper last night and was rather underwhelmed. As a long time lover of headfuck time travel I'd expected to adore it, but really, it was a bit derivative even for me and started from an even sillier high concept than In Time.
I mean, really, there are scarey-ass gangsters out there in the future and the best thing they can use pinpoint-accurate time travel for is getting rid of bodies? even if you accept this (and I'm willing to accept one daft pretext as the basis of a good movie) it didn't really make sense. Why send back a loop to be killed by themself, clearly a tough job? Why not send back loop A to be killed by looper B and vice versa? Or why not just kill the Looper in the past after a few years, where there seems to be no danger of law enforcement intervention whatsoever (judging by the fact the Loopers aka multiple murderers, seem to be well known and have their own whorehouses, union and TV channel apparently?) And if the future law enforcers are so damn efficient it isn't safe to dump a body, why don't they er clamp down on this big time machine thing the baddies have? You'd think that's something it wouldn't be too hard to locate.. (And actually a ,much more fun movie, the one I was expecting really, was what an escaped loop might have made of their life in the past, with their physical existence affexted by whatever trauma the "original" goes through.. the best bit of the film's concept.)

Add in the silly guns the Loopers have which seem limited to a 15 yard range purely to expedite the plot and I really began to get annoyed. The heartrending end if you unpack it otherwise doesn't work at all. Logically, Joe's best choice is to shoot Bruce Willis: thus ending the threat to Rainmaker's Mom and giving himself the best chace of helping her bring up Rainmaker Kid to be good not evil. But no, that wouldn't show he'd Learned on his Journey so he has to shoot himself instead. I spent about 10 hours agonising about this till someone on Twitter just told me it was cos of the range on the gun. And when you get told that you realise just how artificial that plot-point was (I mean for godssake - we're less keen on mass murder right now on modern US of A and they still don't hobble all their guns to 15 yards..)

I did like stuff. I liked the random TK plot element, which I hadn't expected, I liked the cinematography (yet another influence on Utopia methinks) and I always like Bruce Willis playing the seasoned but strungout and world weary streetfighter. It's just we've seen it so often before and in so many vaguely timey wimey movies (Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, Sin City..) all of them better than Looper (weell ok, not Sin City). The film staggered under the weight of its reference points : not just the above 3 but the entire Terminator oevre, Primer, Eternal Sunshine etc etc.. in the end I was waiting for the sequel where Rainmaker-Mom's unborn child by Joe (what was the point of the unconvincing shag otherwise?) is sent back in time to kill his mum thus preventing the Rainmaker ever being born (but also of course himself..).. watch this space!

Oh this is lovely!

surliminal — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 22:02:41 GMT

Dr who - spohttp://sarah531.livejournal.com/386618.html#cutid1ilers!

Holiday reading..

surliminal — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:38:41 GMT

.. has anyone yet noted that David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is almost certainly a parallel world counter-history novel? Not to mention having at root a common sf trope I first read in Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron..

Anyway is stunningly good - review to follow..

ps OMG Wachowski brothers filming Cloud Atlas!