Posts tagged ‘Doctor Who’

I’m up to 1,300 words of my ‘The End of Time, Part Two’ review. Clearly what I lack in speed I make up for in size.

… Ladies.

There’s also an atypicalreview redesign coming. If I had any sense of timing at all, it’d be ready on April 4, a date to which I’m not counting the days to at all, no sir, not me. But I almost certainly don’t, q.v. paragraph one.

Finally, and because there’s no way in hell I’ll get around to reviewing it, I’ll briefly mention The Surgeon of Crowthorne, a book about murders, schizophrenics and the English Dictionary. It’s a peculiar read — constantly interesting but not particularly engrossing, if that’s possible. You get a good perspective of the almost insanely daunting task of making a comprehensive dictionary, which would be pretty tricky today, but even more ridiculous without computers. But just as interestingly, you get a good idea of how horrible it’d be to be a bit mental¹ 150 years ago.

Linking to books is trickier than linking to movies, where IMDb is king. I’ve gone with amazon.com above, but in future perhaps Shelfari will be a better bet. It’s kind of like a social networking site for reading. Is anyone else using it? I started importing my library from Delicious Library and got rather bored rather quickly.

In any case, the title didn’t match the cover for Crowthorne — which has clearly gone through some name changes in its time — but this may be fixed by the time you visit, as Shelfari allows you to suggest changes to its information a la Wikipedia, which is pretty neat. If anyone is inspired to sign up, I’m here.

1. Not the technical term, as I understand it. ↩

The 2010 Doctor Who logo has been announced.

The answers to my questions turn out to be “Above”, “No”, “Serif”, “Neither” and “the coloured lights are inside it”. It hearkens back strongly to the older, simpler logos, which is nice. I see everyone at the BBC still gets excited by lens flares. I’m reasonably keen, though I’m curious to find out when they use the initials and when they use the full word. It’s certainly a nicer logo for putting on DVD spines which is obviously my main concern.

Hrmmm.

There’s not actually very much to say about a new logo. I should have covered the Apple event instead. They’re much more contentious. I went onto a Who forum to try to find crazy fans whinging that the new logo doesn’t do target disk mode, but no such luck.

2009 has been a quiet year for Doctor Who news, so the BBC are stretching things out as much as possible. The latest in a slow and meticulously planned trickle of announcements is the new logo, to be announced this Tuesday. This throws up all sorts of intriguing questions. Will the “Doctor” be above the “Who”, or to the side? Will any parts of the word be set in a rakishly cheesy angle? Will it be serif, or sans serif? Arial or Helvetica? Or will it just be the old logo bent a little bit with coloured lights behind it?

The excitement never stops around here. I hope you’ll join me for the unveiling tomorrow.¹

1. No, seriously. I will actually post something tomorrow, or my name isn’t Jackson Kearney. Hang on, sorry. I mean, because my name isn’t Jackson Kearney. ↩

When the dog bites, when the bee stings, I simply remember my favourite things. And recently, many of them have been joining together, presumably for extra “not feeling so bad” goodness. BioWare are making an iPhone Mass Effect game. Gillian Anderson might be appearing in Doctor Who.¹ There’s a Tom Baker style costume available in Rock Band. The Cosmic Machine have made EventBox, which combines Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and a few other things.

Also, the combination of me and a lack of swine flu is particularly gratifying.

1. Although, she’s rumoured to be the Rani; perhaps the most sucky returning villain in Doctor Who history. ↩

Things are quiet around atypicalreview, and it’s my fault. I’m a bad person. I can’t blame it all on my broken chair. It’s not like I’m not watching TV that I could be writing about. Dollhouse is steadily improving, and is supposed to get awesome next week, or so they tell me. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles continues to engage me, and I’ve scientifically proven that it’s not just because Summer Glau is in it. I like the general idea of John Connor and Skynet both reaching back through time, trying desperately to create themselves and destroy the other. Battlestar is one episode from ending and has staged a most unexpected comeback.

I should have reviewed Doctor Who‘s 2008 Christmas special as well, but ultimately it was just a little unremarkable, and so I’m having trouble remarking on it. There was a giant frickin’ robot stomping over Victorian London, and I can’t think of anything to say. That’s disappointing.

I still love those dots. I could change the subject to anything at this point and no one could argue. Unluckily for you, I’m changing it to the size of text.

I’m in the middle of a disagreement at work about what size text is ideal for a website, and what size is ‘standard’. A quick survey revealed that most of the more famous sites these days don’t drop below 13px. The Age hits 15px, as does The New York Times. Some have said the standard is 12px, but I don’t see the evidence, except in old timey 90s sites. Somewhere along the way I think everyone realised that there was no point in squinting. Or, more likely, we got bigger screens and so weren’t that fussed any more about squeezing everything in. Or, perhaps we actually decided to try to come close to vaguely respecting the default font size specified by the user.¹

1. Which is a bit of a joke, of course, because your average user probably never even thought about specifying the font size. And, if they did, they’d have to specify it at 20px just to get 16px on most sites. ↩