Darren

Rearly Small Windu

I don't think I'll bother with the blu-rays to be honest. Within minutes of it starting last night I'd forgotten we were only watching DVDs. It's just so good! Is it sad that I remembered exactly when disc 1 was going to stop? (As soon as Pippin said "where are we going?")

I've not read Brave New World since I was a teenager but I've been meaning to for ages. I will rectify this soon I think. My recommendation on Three Body is, don't wait to read the next two books. I left gaps between them (especially between the first two) and found I was quite confused at times about who was who and what they'd done in the previous books. So dive in in ASAP! They're all brilliant too, you're in for a treat.

I had no idea such a thing existed. (To be fair to me, I've never thought to look). Hmm, it may be time for a stupid splurge. To Amazon! Edit: how much?? Oh well, maybe not...

We enjoyed this reunion show so much, and it reminded us how much we loved the films (answer: a lot) that we've dug out our old extended edition DVDs and we're going to watch half a film per night* for the next six nights. We've not watched them for years. I'm really looking forward to it! *that's still about two hours a night. Although I'm calling it now, we'll get to the end of disc 1 and my wife will insist we put the second half on straight away...

20. Pet Sematary - Stephen King My Stephen King read-through continues with another cracker, and another one that was utterly new to me. This is one of those books that spends literally the first 90% setting up the last 10%, and as is often the case with King, the setup is brilliant, the ending much less so. But if I was going to let underwhelming endings put me off his books I'd have stopped reading them years ago, and as ever the real quality here is in all the non-supernatural stuff, especially the characters, their relationships, and their dialogue, which he always nails. It seems wrong to say I enjoyed reading a book with such a harrowing story (and the passage describing the terrible central incident is just devastating) so perhaps I should say I felt all the emotions the author intended and appreciated the skill with which he pushed those buttons in my brain.

I love Rog and his wonderful music, but he was an absolute arse to his bandmates and for a long time after he left them. I thought in recent years he’d finally mellowed a bit but maybe not. That chip has never quite left his shoulder.

I haven’t watched it but I will. They were never one of my favourite bands but I Don’t Like Mondays was the first single I ever bought so I have a soft spot for them.

That was definitely implied but I don't think it's set in stone. If they want to bring them back they will find a way, and I'm confident they'll do it in a way that doesn't retrospectively ruin the previous ending (unlike, say, Rose returning in Doctor Who).

They can make up whatever rules they like to bring people back. For all we know, all the incidental characters from the original series could have been "regulars" sent from "the pub" to help Gene in his quest to drum up more business for Nelson.

Mega-bump... We've just watched all of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes - for the first time - over the last few months, and finally watched the last two episodes last night. Coincidentally almost exactly ten years after the last episode was first shown (May 21 2010). Wow! I don't know why we didn't watch it at the time - possibly because we're not really into cop shows, and it sounded a bit hokey from the description. But I'm so glad we eventually corrected that enormous error. Amazingly, because we weren't interested in it the first time round, we had no idea about any spoilers or how it ended, which was of course almost impossibly perfect. I loved the idea of Gene helping all the lost souls to confront and overcome whatever it was from their real lives that was preventing them from resting at peace. Those who died instantly had no memory of their real lives, while those who clung on in comas like Sam and Alex remembered who they really were and so were perplexed by their apparent jump through time. In Alex's case, she then died in hospital and so forgot about her real life too. But Sam turned out to be the most tragic character of all (with the possible exception of Viv ). He actually recovered and came back to the real world, but then found it lacking and empty, and so deliberately returned to purgatory by killing himself. So the question is, what was Sam clinging to that Gene eventually helped him to let go of so he could go to the great pub in the sky? I think it might be his "life" in purgatory itself, with Annie - he was trying to have the life he'd lost in the real world, unlike everyone else he knew he was in purgatory but wanted to stay there, and presumably he was also trying to prevent Annie from reaching her own moment of realisation so she wouldn't be taken from him. But sure enough he lost her anyway - she "died" in the "late 70s" IIRC - which must mean she either went to the pub or down to the sub-basement () and that was the catalyst for Sam finally accepting he had to go too. Whether that's correct or not, I think it fits, and I love the fact that the ending was both perfectly satisfying and open enough to leave us thinking up theories like that. And now it seems like that wasn't the end after all... https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/03/life-on-mars-creator-third-final-series-in-works-bbc

Also the recovery time for each exercise, and the colour coding for extra damage, means you can't and shouldn't keep spamming the same move every turn, so even though it's impossible for them to be perfectly balanced (and the balance would be different for each player anyway - I have terrible balance so the yoga moves might not be strenuous but I find a lot of them almost impossible) you still have to use a few different ones each battle.

Pah, all you Astro Wars kids with your colour graphics and shapes that weren’t just red blobs... didn’t know you were born. Some of us had to make do with: I never ever worked out how to play it properly, and remain convinced it was just a random light and sound generator.

Super Paper Mario? I thought that was brilliant.