A pretty-much-complete portion of the Doctor Who video mashup project I’m working on can be seen here. Fun stuff!
What’s even more awesome than that is this… too bad I can’t afford one, but man, that’s awesome. Just a wee bit more detail than the last one of these that we had…… Read more
If you’re not a Doctor Who fan, you may as well skip this entry – it’ll only make you crazy. Or it might make you a fan. Which may or may not be the same thing. … Read more
Sometime back I threw together a fun little video mash-up celebrating the entire history of a certain long-lived, apparently-indestructible sci-fi series in the space of 35 minutes. I briefly posted it to the web and a few folks seemed to really enjoy it. Now I just happen to be working on a new version, completely from scratch. … Read more
Gentlemen (and by gentlemen, I mean “unidentified label who has just released the downloadable edition of the soundtracks to a couple of movie spinoffs of a certain favorite British sci-fi show of mine”), I’ve called you here today to discuss your download service. … Read more
It’s safe to say that if you don’t feel like getting your geek on just a little bit, this is not the post for you. … Read more
Okay, let’s just get right down to it: the figures of the first and second Doctors. I was beginning to think, with Character Options reporting major losses and planned cutbacks in new product, that we’d never see these.
Don’t ask for them in your grocer’s freezer aisle: That’s right. There are Daleks in my freezer. (There’s a real and logical reason for this…which you’ll have to wait until the end of the post to see. In the meantime, my wife’s going to be pissed, looking in the freezer for some manner of foodstuff and finding evil armored mutants and stuff.)
They really like the moon: check out this link for a really cool project – a small NASA team has set up shop in, of all places, a disused McDonald’s, and they’re restoring and reprocessing raw data and pictures from NASA’s 1960s unmanned lunar missions with jaw-droppingly spectacular results. Apparently the data gathered by such probes as the Lunar Orbiters circa 1966 could be beneficial to the next generation of lunar mission planners, but hey, I’m okay with it if all we get out of it is more of these great pictures. That’s a perfectly good thing for my tax money to be going to. Be sure to check out their series of pictures showing where these open-reel data tapes have been for the past four decades or so, too! That information makes the restored data and pictures all the more remarkable, and makes me feel a little better about my own housekeeping practices. (Not that I couldn’t use some improvement…)
MobileProWoes: fifteen bucks later, I have a new wi-fi card to replace my horrendously abused one for my handheld PC…and it turns out that the wi-fi card may not, in fact, be the problem at all. It’s the port inside the machine. I’ve had all sorts of advice about what to replace the MobilePro with, but in the end I’m fond enough of the machine that I’m going to be happy to replace it with an only slightly newer MobilePro. There are fully capable laptops out there, but I’m on too tight a budget to even get into the $300 range. I don’t need this to play movies or MP3s – I just need something extremely portable for writing purposes that isn’t a Crackberry or anything of that nature. I’ll let you know how the hunt goes. In the meantime, the fact that the MobilePro won’t fire up a perfectly good new card raises the interesting possibility that I might just have two working wi-fi cards – one slightly battered and one backup.
Electric cattle pod: still working on the year’s-end best-of podcast thing, which is now looking like…ready for it?…five hours, split pretty evenly between soundtrack and non-soundtrack stuff. The frightening thing is, every time I think I’m ready to finish writing my material and start recording, some other really cool release pops up and I’m all “ooh, got to work that in somewhere!” So by the time Christmas actually rolls around and I unleash this puppy, it’ll probably be two days long. And yeah, I’m writing a script for myself; it’s bad enough that I’m going to have to listen to my own voice while putting this thing together, so I’d like to at least have the benefit of the illusion of sounding like I know what the hell I’m talking about.
Okay, okay, here’s why: I just got the Doctor Who Stolen Earth figure set, which has two Daleks, Davros and yet another Doctor (if anyone needs the spare tenth Doctor I wound up with here, give me a shout – if you can cover shipping and maybe lunch, he and his sonic screwdriver are all yours). Apparently, many of the Daleks manufactured this year by Character Options had some issues with the plastic of the ball joints behind both the “sucker arm” and “gun” swelling up; freezing them for a few hours gets things back to normal. It also works wonders for Davros’ head/neck joint, apparently. You learn something new every day, huh? Look for them wherever your grocer carries frozen genetically engineered mutants in bonded polycarbide armor. (If I was less tired, I’d totally geek out on you and regale you with the fact that freezing both the Daleks and Davros have actually been major plot points, but…….naaaahhhh.) I picked up this and the classic series Dalek 3-pack, along with the new wi-fi card, in a recent round of eBaying which is pretty much my early Christmas for this year. I picked up one other fun thing, but I got it for Evan…and you’ll see a photo of it soon enough. 😉… Read more
David Tennant + Peter Davison? Sign me the heck up. Already got a DVD cover on hot standby:
Grab your own copy of the cover here if you’re so inclined (or just want to gawk at my insomnia-and-E.S.-Posthumus-fueled Paint Shop Pro dabblings). I literally used the only still photo the BBC has provided so far (and then that one from the Sun too), so design greatness it ain’t, but it’s just a tad more epic than the original “two guys standing there” publicity shot. 😆 I’m really looking forward to this. If they’d managed to shoehorn Sylvester McCoy into the same little special, I’d be happy beyond belief. But this’ll do nicely. Davison and McCoy were my favorites among the original Doctors, and I don’t care if he has put on a bit of weight, Davison looks great. (I wish that when people looked at me and said “you’ve put on a bit of weight,” I was looking like that guy instead of the fella in the mirror.)
It’s official: despite the glut of CDs I’ve played for him, from Scott Joplin to Vangelis to Moody Blues, Evan’s officially approved darn-near-guaranteed-to-work sleepytime CD is a “baby mix” I assembled for him, whose playlist goes thusly:
(The Raymond Scott tracks are basically the entirety of Soothing Sounds For Baby Volume 1, the Hot Butter tracks are all from Popcorn, and the Radiophonic Workshop stuff is all from BBC Radiophonic Music. The Neil Finn track is from the Rain soundtrack.)
So…in other words…Evan’s got a thing for kinda trippy experimental electronic music from the 1960s and ’70s. But man, does that mix knock him out like a tranquilizer dart. Now, I know that he’s not gonna remember any of this stuff, and that these early “preferences” of his will wind up in my memory only, but that music is now inextricably linked with my son in my mind. I also donated the little light apparatus to his room that once powered my glowin’ Dalek; it simply projects its patterns straight onto the ceiling above his crib now. And he seems to dig it – until the colors shifting and the music lull him to sleep.
If he was older than, say, a month, I’d say it’s time to break out some Floyd.… Read more
As noted in the site’s news section today, a new CD of music from the third season of Doctor Who is due in about a month. Now, as much as I’m looking forward to that, I had to fess up that the music was yet another aspect of season 3 that just underwhelmed me a bit. It seemed to me like about 3 pieces of action music were written, and a few variations on Martha’s theme, and some other bits…and then all of the above were recycled relentlessly throughout the season. I’ll still be happy to pick up the CD, because at least all of this stuff was decent music, but on the tenth reiteration, it loses a little something. At this point, it’s almost like the more recognizable music from the original Star Trek – it’s kinda like “cue the Corbomite Maneuver cube music, there’s something sinister out there!” I love that they’ve got a whole orchestra on this show, but I am starting to wonder if perhaps Murray Gold shouldn’t rotate with someone else to do the writing. Even Dudley Simpson took a break once in a blue moon.
Speaking of TV composers who did a Ton Of Stuff, just got these the other day from the fine folks at Dennismccarthy.com:
Nifty stuff on each one. I’m still hoping that maybe we’ll actually see some real live Trek TV music sneak out the door this way, but I’m not holding my breath. Speaking of Trek music, I’ve finally reposted the Dennis McCarthy interview in the news archives here, and as a treat – well, I don’t know if you’ll think it’s much of a treat – I’ve included the original telephone recording of the interview from 1993. Some things to keep in mind about that interview include: (A) the fact that I was 20, and (B) I was at the height of my Trek geekdom. If I had the chance to redo that interview – and don’t think that I haven’t approached him about doing a new one – I’d be a little more even-handed about it. There are some somewhat insinuating questions in there on my part – oh, so the producers tell you when to wipe your butt, do they? – that come across as someone who’d read a few Film Score Monthly editorials too many. And, call it perverse, I know so much more about the other, non-soundtrack music he’s done that I would broaden the line of questioning, though I still chuckle at catching him off guard with that Tommy Flander thing and still getting a pretty in-depth response about it. (I think that’s actually my favorite part of the whole thing, actually!) And of course, these days, there’d be questions to ask like his feelings on only getting to do one of the Trek movies (which I think was, musically, one of the best ones of the whole series, though I’m not sure anyone else will ever give it that due), the Enterprise budget cuts that forced him to “go synth” for much of the final season, and stuff like Sliders and Stargate SG-1, among others. When I first got a CD burner – the stereo component kind, mind you, not the computer drive – that interview, which I’d kept on cassette for about 6 years at the time, was one of the very first things I burned to CD-R, and that CD-R turned up during housecleaning not so long ago. So there it is, an interesting little time capsule from my past. (At the time, the interview originally appeared in a text file called “the LogBook Master Index of Soundtracks” which was bundled up with a distribution ZIP file and sent across the pre-internet BBS file-forwarding networks.)
I really wish I had the chance to do more interviews for the site. Maybe someday – for right now, the only podcasts you’re likely to get out of me anytime real soon will probably be diaper changes, which technically should really be poocasts. 😆… Read more
Okay, Doctor Who fans, here’s somethin’ you don’t see every day.
… Read more
