www.richardhagen.org

… by sucking their soul out.

… by having luminescent tentacles writhe out of your mouth.

Tch. Men, eh?

The hard drive in my laptop failed on Friday night. I’ll be taking it to the laptop vet today, but this means that my ability to read and send mail is impaired.

Reading is screwed up because >95% of my email is spam. The junk mail filter on my laptop was well trained, but the junk mail filter on my fallback machine is a novice, so I have to gingerly pick through the emails to find ones from friends. I’ll probably miss worthwhile mail, so please don’t be offended if I don’t reply for a while.

Writing is screwed up because I don’t have a current version of my contact lists on the fallback machine.

Normal service, etc.

Update: This has taken out all of my RSS feeds, which is how I keep up with peoples’ blogs, Flickr photos, etc., so I won’t be active there for a while either. I will be following the 1462 project though.

Last night we had Earth Hour. It was heartwarming to know that thousands of Brisbane residents had turned off their lights… then driven to the Mount Coot-tha lookout to see the lights that had been turned off.

By the last episode of Midsomer Murders, the population of the county of Midsomer will be reduced to Barnaby, Mrs. Barnaby, the Barnabette, Scott (aka Troy Mk III) and a corpse, possibly played by Peter Wyngarde. The forensic pathologist will have been the culprit in the second last episode.

The BBC has recently produced a show called The Passion.

I dream that one day Michael Gambon or BRIAN BLESSED will be cast as Christ. Warren Clarke or Richard Griffiths at a pinch.

Today, one of the higher ups told me that the choice of name for the teddy bear on my desk — Teddy — was supremely unimaginative.

He then went on to tell me that his wife has something like forty bears, each with its own distinct name, all of which she can recite.

Techno Haiku:

Doof doof doof doof doof

Doof doof doof doof doof doof doof

Doof doof doof doof doof

The other day I was visited by a girl from Telstra. Telstra had noticed that I was renting a Telstra landline through my broadband provider and they had sent her to let me know about the rival broadband products that Telstra offered.

Around her neck she wore a very prominent crucifix, and I’m torn between thinking that she might have been quite devout or that crucifixes were issued as standard equipment by Telstra so attractive young female representatives weren’t victims of unwanted advances.

A third alternative: Maybe Telstra rents a lot of landlines to vampires?

It’s a matter of faith… on both sides.

Update: Spinning away from the Ultraviolet site, I notice that the supremely lovely Susanah Harker has hooked up with the once supremely lovely Paul McGann.

Ashes to Ashes.

A sort-of-sequel to Life on Mars. I’m really unhappy with this show. I won’t spend much time fleshing out why, but here’s a quick PowerPoint presentation:

• Lack of sustained story arc, beyond the vague goal of Drake being reunited with daughter. If there was a progressive solution to the puzzle of returning, the series would work much better. I’m surprised this wasn’t learned from LoM, where elements were introduced and dropped at whim, rather than assembled into a coherent pattern that could be unpicked by Sam Tyler.
• Hammered home trauma elements. If they turn out to be pointless gimmicks, I’ll be very cranky. This happened to a lesser extent in LoM.
• Drake is an unsympathetic character and there’s no chemistry between her and the other characters. There’s no chemistry in the show anywhere. Being told how attractive Drake is makes my skin crawl.
• Driving-fast-cars-and-running-around-in-tight-jeans was well parodied The Bullshitters. Maybe the producers missed this? The shallowness of the characterisations is a turn off.

LoM had a wonderful first episode and a last episode that had some wonderful elements, with a lot of variation in the middle episodes (none of which really live up to the promise of the first one). Ashes to Ashes hasn’t even managed that, and John Simm made a good call in not returning.