Tuesday 19 March 2013

March mags

Interzone #245 is just out, and this issue includes my latest 'Laser Fodder' column of DVD/ blu-ray reviews. Here's the line-up, with ratings:

     Neverlandscapes
Peter Pan (2000) - (4/10) 
Peter Pan (2003) - (5/10)
Neverland (2003) - (6/10)
Finding Neverland - (7/10)
Neverland (2011) - (6/10)

Crawlspace (2/10)
Looper (8/10)
Game Of Thrones - season 2 (7/10)
Alps (1/10)

    Best Bonds
Licence To Kill (8/10)
Skyfall (8/10)

Black Static #33 has also been published, containing my 'Blood Spectrum' column, and here's the list of new and recent DVD/ blu-ray releases that I've reviewed this time:

Fear Itself (6/10)
Holy Motors (8/10)
Resident Evil: Retribution (6/10)
Chained (3/10)
Antiviral (7/10)
Sinister (8/10)
Lost Girl - season 1 (6/10)
Rust And Bone (7/10)
Room 237 (6/10)
The Tall Man (7/10)
Silent Hill: Revelation (5/10)

    Retrothon: 4 Decades
Dracula (7/10)
Black Sunday (5/10)
Lisa And The Devil (5/10)
From Beyond (7/10) 

Tuesday 12 March 2013

Zoostorm


Got my new PC working fine, so far... but yesterday was an epic migraine by teatime.
New PC hardware

Windows 7 home premium (x64-bit system)
Bemused to note: a 32-bit system is called x86, but a 64-bit is x64. Such clever confusion! 

Intel i3 CPU @ 3.3GHz  
1 TB hard drive
8GB RAM
Blu-ray player + DVD RW

Everything runs through the HDMI cable from 1Gb NVIDIA graphics card to a new  Samsung 21.5 inch widescreen (1920 x 1080 p) monitor.

I'm still using M$ Office 2003 Pro.
All of my usual and old-favoutite software (like Paint Shop Pro 5) from previous desktop (Win XP) has installed without any problems.

The only thing I found was incompatible with x64 was a Casper 5 back-up maker, but I don't think it's necessary on this machine.

Anyway, this is very fast indeed, compared to the old XP desktop or my Vista laptop. If only my slow broadband connection had the speed to match this machine, I'd probably be doing the happy dance.

Wednesday 6 March 2013

Ironic chancellor



I woke up with all this rattling around in my headache, so it’s as much a satirical rant as political commentary.



Why this man is a fool -->
Shark-boy

Campaigners for the separation of church and state often miss the point. It’s not just the encumbrance of traditional religions, and lobbying by modern cults, that hinder social progress; it’s also the many and varied, but all misguided, attempts to manage economies on national or global scales. Economics is simply another belief system, not a practical science. Consequently, there is no good news on political fronts, and I doubt there will be, unless the people demand/ enforce some radical social changes.    

Ministers in government can trace their jobs back to positions in the imperial system.The current Chancellor of the Exchequer probably thinks his job can be traced back to a royal treasurer for kings and queens, but he’s actually a modern version of the court jester. In popular mythology, King Canute became his own ‘fool’ when he seemed to believe that his royal blood granted him some kind of magical authority over the waves. Since tides are prompted by the Moon, what ‘delusional’ Canute really needed was anti-gravity technology.

That famous misquote: ‘the business of America is business’ no longer holds true, in any sense, because America itself seems no longer to be a nation, it’s just a business. Now, it's just too late to be an optimist.

Meanwhile, some notes for a hopeless manifesto:


For the 21st century, government needs inspired leaders not jobsworth managers. Of the currently elected officials, none are capable to solving the problems of a corrupted economic system. The political tools might well already exist, but the will to use them is not there. We need a new political system, and a social contract with a global reach. Something based on secular principles of a ‘united world’, not just a United Nations. Is it any wonder the dream of utopia (as process not destination) is lost?