End of year Review 3 All the rest of the tat.

 You know the drill now, a round up of all the stuff that doesn't make the original first 2 posts and anything that we've forgotten from the past two posts.

Britney Spears and Elton John Tiny Cancer.

I know it should be tiny Dancer but this is the worst. Britney coming back from insanity hell with a rework of this old pile of nonsense. Possibly the only thing you'll probably enjoy from this is she's now posting nearly nude tat on Instaspam (you won't though).

Keith John Stack cartoons. 

Les + Brianne, two cartoon lesbians with a slight Beavis and Butthead overtone. It's pretty geeky TBH, but this is exactly what floats my boat. Whether its eating a load of pumpkins for halloween or just admiring the general filth of their New York flat, there is always something to admire. You can find him on twitter. but mostly on newgrounds and Masterdong the two bit commie social network. 

 Film  The Amazing Maurice and his educated Rodents.

Or just the amazing Maurice. Its a German made 3d animation of a Terry Pratchett Discworld book I've not read, which is a rarity in itself. I'm guessing set somewhere in Uberwald a sort of proto black forest / Transylvania, it stars a cat, a bunch of sentient rats and a plan to get rid of every rat from a small town somewhere out in Uberwald. I'll definitely look into reading the original.

Also it clears the nasty low budget version of the Watch made by the BBC out of my memory. You want representation, check Cheery Littlebottom isn't in Guards Guards nor is Angua, neither do they have much of a role in The Nightwatch which its both based on. Vetinari a woman, check, run a stick through my own wheels Dibbler disablist version, check. Weird non binary Cheery (original was a beardless female dwarf.) Worst sin of all omitting Nobby Nobbs and Fred Colon although that would require them to own up to all the other sins committed in this trash fire of a series. 

Gaming.

Neverwinton Nights,

Finally playing Neverwinter via an old PC, its pretty good you don't get visuals in cut scenes on Win 7 but everything else is, chef's kiss. The Switch version could do with them adding in touch screen controls as the interface is far too convoluted to work via buttons alone. 

Dragon Quest builders 2

Nice tribute to Minecraft, which I've never played, and only have the soundtrack to. Can see how building shit can be a massive time sink. Also gotta love the actual English localisation done on this, a Yorkshire worm, eeh, ah'll go to the foot of ah stairs.

Yoku's Island Express.

A nifty little platformer built with pinball mechanics and a lot of charm. Team 17 of course, and reminds me of old PS2 oddity Flipnic. Which is no bad thing.

End of year round up. Television.

Hello, its boxing day already and although Monday, I'm convinced that it's still Sunday. Thanks to Twitter I've found that there was a lo fi version of Last Christmas used in Sega UFO Catchers. Oh and that changing the lyrics to Gay penis is making me hard, totally fits. 

Today though is all about Television, the good and the bad. So with no further ceremony we'll get on with our year review.

Good

Green Planet.

David Attenborough documentary on plants. With a focus on specific areas, this includes the short lived Balsa wood tree, a look at Lithops in South Africa, and the usual this planet is fucked, heavy climate change guilt trip these programmes always have.

Martin Clunes Pacific

Doc Martin goes to the south seas. Looking at various island cultures, whether its Fiji, Tonga or Vanuatu, its a joy to watch him island hop and encounter different races. Oh and the Xmas special of Doc Martin reunites him with Caroline Quentin, which is basically half of Men Behaving Badly.

CSI Vegas.

I know its a multi culti cast, and that Gil and Sara don't come back for season 2 (Wed 28th 9pm Alibi). But Pauline Newlove is boss as the new CSI Lead. Season 1 was just to get Hodges off a rap of sabotaging the CSI cases he worked on. 

Arirang TV Korean TV trad music special.

This should have been on the music round up, but I got so bored one time I watched this whole traditional Korean music concert, a sort of shamanic music with guitar and traditional instruments. About as far away from KPop as you can get. They had three bands, which I didn't get the name of,

but were cool.

Bad

 

Craig Charles UFO Conspiracies.

Mr Lister from Red Dwarf, with a half baked Aliens show. Of course it has Nick Pope in it, it has to have Nick Pope in it. Its fuck awful.

Alexander Armstrong South Korea.

For some reason this rubbed me up the wrong way. Weird make over to make him look like a corpse, then an actual stay in a coffin where a Korean priest conducts his own funeral. A focus on KPop  and a focus on Mukbang, aka stuff your fat face with enough food to choke a horse. 

We also had the misfortune to see actual Korean TV on holiday and it seems to be dull drama and the kind of half witted prank / KSI shit from the Youtube home page, you get when you accept Google cookies. No one needs to see Mr Beast's leering grin 50 times over or SS Sniper wolf.

 

Review of the year 2022 Music

 This is going to be a really short effort this year. Waking up to learn that you lost both Maxi Jazz from Faithless and  veteran coder Archer Maclean both on Xmas day has been a blow for you. 

The worst of it all is not that there has been a lot that stands out or that is objectively worse, but just so much stuff that falls into filler category. Neither objectively bad but not good either.

Good.

Ben Hemsley Love, Peace and Happiness.

The sort of piano overdriven happy hardcore / old rave that will put a smile on your face. A joy.

Bum a boy, Burna Boy Last Last.

My tolerance for Afrobeats is pretty low, but this is catchy enough to get me through, its not Ye which with the right house track can be devastating, but will do in a pinch.

Drake. That mixtape album thing where he does house, sort of. (Honestly, Nevermind)

Its good you are making this sort of thing, but shouldn't your vocal actually enhance a track rather than detract?

Beyonce. Break My Soul

You can break break my soul. Part old Stonebridge edit of Robin S Show me luv and part shitty rap, Terry Hunter's remix is probably the best of this.

BAD

Stormzy. Hide and Seek

He's done slow ass songs before (Blinded by your grace) but this is such a slog to get through.

Aitch and Ed Sheerness coach. My G

Or Margie, a song dedicated to his disabled sister. Sung by the retarded, for the retarded.

Firebird Rockets.

 So the final normal post of the year before its Miranda awards and best of annual round ups.

The Firebird Rocket is one of the canon books that make up the original corpus of works. The first 57 books. Its not a bad little tale this. The Hardys go to Australia to look into who is sabotaging a rocket launch and find a missing senators son.

You get Sydney, Port Augusta, Adelaide and Alice Springs, as places and an incongruous recruitment at a "soccer" match, given the Aussies track record in the "beautiful game" surely they could have edited this to be a cricket match or rugby game, but no our missing senators son is picked up at the footy. 

Chet Morton has one of his temporary hobbies, this time launching rockets, which is enough to win the science fair and get him to Oz with our boys. 

It starts off with a lab mishap and a call from Fenton Hardy for the boys to go to Princeton, where the Firebird Rocket is being developed, before leads lead them to Australia.

The UK version has some amendments to the text, with it expanded in places and cut in others. Also all references to Abo's are altered to aborigines, here, as I guess it was deemed beyond the pale here in 90's Britain. Also there are a lot of US slang dropped from this. No gumshoes here, nor are the boys called punk kids.  

All in all it is not a bad read, not terrible, but not going to set the world on fire.

If you want to read it, you can read it here.

Kitsune

 Ever had one of those days? I don't  mean one of those days where everything goes wrong or such. I mean

one of those days where it has an over arching theme. This basically happened on Wednesday just gone. We was clearing snow and ice from a road on the estate and noticed a group of preschool kids and their Child minders / teachers. We have a square of grass out in front of the road and at this time we had a fox show up. 

The little guy stayed for a good ten minutes and started capering about, sitting in the snow, scratching (he was a fleabag fox.) Before wandering off. Some of the kids tried to approach him but he kept his distance.

The last we saw was on the estate road further down. This is not the end btw, going back home and saying about watching the fox, my mum says that there was a dead fox out in the garden down at the bottom. It's not the same guy of cause but I thought it was strange enough to warrant an entry. 

One final  thing, the last thing I noticed before going to bed was that there is an ad for Old Speckled Hen Ale on TV, which of course stars an urbane cartoon fox trying new things. Anyone else had such a strange themed day. 

This is the guy.

Finally I'll leave you with a shot of Foxy himself. Next time It'll be review of the year.

Homeless.

 No I'm not homeless, but this week I've had to deal with someone who was. 

We have a couple of people sleeping rough in the blocks, one Romanian guy who's been moved on a few times and a woman, about my age, who we've taken on to get a place. If you don't know its been cold as hell these past few days and as a collective we decided to intervene.  I got to wake her up with the good news that we somehow found her a place to stay. Don't know how she got on as its not my doing, but my boss. But I hope she gets back on her feet soon.

Edit. She came back on Tuesday as the current place fell through, due to her threatening people. Jesus fuck man, I'm not helping anyone ever again. 

The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew meet Dracula

 Not sure if this one is going to be made into a PDF yet, but its not half bad.

The premise is that Fenton Hardy has gone to Transylvania  to catch some museum crooks but instead gets whacked when looking through Dracula's Castle. The Hardy's turn up in France along with Nancy Drew, who's looking for Fenton also. 

There is a band called Circus which the boys join, to travel to a gig in Transylvania. Nancy and Bess go along with them. 

Oh and did I say it's based on a TV show of the same name from the 70's. I should really watch it as Nancy posed for Playboy, back when it was at it's heights. For the ladies there is Shaun Cassidy and in this Elton John's producer, Bernie Taupin, which means there's going to be a terrible English accent. They've already tried to convince me that Eau De Cologne is rhyming slang for Phone. So will have to see if any more crimes against the English language are committed here.

Edit: Yes it did get made into a PDF. But time for some more elaboration.

There are two other stories here. The Hardy's going to an Amityville house of horrors repurposed as a diner and disco to track down a kid, whilst Fenton Hardy visits a graveyard.  And the last story has the boys help a rockstar Tony Bird, to find his missing sound recordist. 

They're not bad stories, and for once we actually know who wrote them. A few out of character arcs here. I never knew Joe had the appetite of Chet Morton here in the haunted house story but there you go. Also Callie Shaw seems to be the P.A. to Fenton Hardy in this rather than Frank's sometime girlfriend. I wonder if the old man is knocking her off as well as Frank, just  a thought. 

Anyway for reading averse people the Dracula story is here on Youtube. The other stories are probably there also, if I can be arsed to look.