Associate L Glenny asked me for some podcast recommendations, though I’m not sure he realised what he was asking for at the time. After it passed the 1000 word mark, I thought I probably ought to make it into a post. Has been slightly edited from its original form. If I say things like ‘you probably won’t be interested in this’, I’m talking about Lucian.

Back to Work

The podcast wherefrom derives ‘turns out’ and a few other classic refs. It’s two people talking about stuff – notionally productivity and workflow and other stuff, but just as often they will find themselves taken on tangents (usually about comic books).

Site: http://5by5.tv/b2w

Recommended starting point: http://www.one-tab.com/page/Os8EDLUZR6CGU-57TXDa8w – a selection of the best episodes as selected by the host Merlin Mann.

The Besties

Videogams podcast with some rather funny people. Almost certainly the best thing to come out of the rather expensive farce that is polygon.com. It’s less interesting than it used to be because they don’t really seem to understand what is/was good about the things that they do, but still a pleasant enough listen.

Site: http://www.polygon.com/the-besties-podcast

RSP: Topicality aside, their earlier material is much, much funnier. Just start listening from as far back as you can.

Decode DC

American politics podcast by a former NPR reporter who got sick of all the nonsense and decided to Kickstart her own show. Mind you, it still does that weird American journalism thing of sitting on the fence and refusing to acknowledge that most of the problem is the Republicans being dicks in a procedural way. But I Kickstartered it, so it must be good enough to listen to, I suppose.

Site: http://www.decodedc.com/

RSP: There are few enough episodes that you can listen to all of them and not have missed anything. The 99% invisible crossover is a particular highlight: http://www.muleradio.net/decodedc/3/

Couldn’t find any art for this one, so here’s a picture of Gillen’s face instead.

Decompressed

Kieron Gillen talking to people about comics. You probably won’t be that interested, but I feel I should include it on here anyway.

Site: http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/category/decompressed/

RSP: http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/4270/decompressed-004-matt-fractiondavid-aja-on-hawkeye-1/ – Fraction and Aja talking to Gillen about Hawkguy issue 1. Not technically the best episode, but Hawkguy, so.

Giant Bombcast

Excellent videogams talk from the Giant Bomb people, which is, as all the best podcasts seem to be, largely composed of tangents about The Fast and Furious series, or pro wrestling, or ham radios or whatever takes their fancy on any given week.

Feed:http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/

House to Astonish

Scottish lawyers talking about comics. Again, probably not of that much interest to you, but it’s pretty much all I’ve listened to for the last few days, so.

Site: http://www.housetoastonish.com/

In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg’s history of ideas podcast, which largely consists of his chivvying a series of academics into answering  questions about their areas of expertise. Best when he knows nothing about the subject and therefore doesn’t feel the need to try and contribute himself. Worst when, like in that one episode a few Christmases ago, he accuses one of the academics of being racist and they’re really bitchy to each other for the rest of the episode and it’s super-awkward to listen to.

Site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl

RSP: Depending on the sort of thing you want to listen to, there are archives on various sorts of topics (the topics vary A LOT. Looking at the page at the time of writing, the most recent episode was on Icelandic sagas, the next one is on cosmic rays, and the two others in the ‘next on’ section are Gnosticism and Montaigne. Plenty of variety, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Kermode and Mayo

The BBC’s flagship film review show. Mark Kermode talks about films very amusingly, and Simon Mayo is there. This is the podcast that I have listened to for the longest time. It’s amazing.

Site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lvdrj

RSP: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL12D53CDE8190825A – youtube playlist of some of Kermode’s best shouty rants. Very amusing.

The Memory Palace

One of a whole load of podcasts which owes a clear debt to This American Life. Short episodes, very nicely put-together. You could listen to the lot in a few hours, and you probably should, because they’re dope.

Site: http://thememorypalace.us/

More Or Less

BBC show about statistics in the news and their abuse. Sometimes a bit simplistic, but usually pretty good. Tim Harford, the FT’s undercover economist being jolly entertaining.

Site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd

MBMBaM

My Brother, My Brother and Me, a rather entertaining podcast from The McElroy Brothers, who are rather funny people. It’s their answering (alternately) questions sent in by their listeners, and bizarre or insane questions people dug up for them on Yahoo Answers.

Site:http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/my-brother-my-brother-and-me

RSP:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r5Q0zsO7IA — this is my favourite moment, but for a slightly broader view, they have a relatively short sampler here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjuBTXuYHhM

It’s All Politics

NPR politics podcast. Can get a bit (in the words of webcomicist John Allison) a bit Krulwich argle-bargle, but usually insightful and entertaining for the 20 minutes or so a week of it there is.

Site: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=5495231

Planet Money

NPR economics podcast, in some ways a spinoff of This American Life. Interesting little stories that highlight newsworthy or just interesting things in economics.

Site: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=94411890

RSP: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money – the first episode, which is actually an episode of This American Life, which is good, and gives you a good idea of the sort of direction this stuff is going in. 

Rum Doings

A gams jarnalism and the owner of a web hosting company talking nonsense for about an hour a week. I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to, but it’s fairly gentle listening.

Site: http://botherer.org/tag/rum-doings/

Thinking Allowed

BBC sociology podcast with the increasingly senile Dr Laurie Taylor. Still worth listening to, because his guests usually have interesting things to talk about.

Site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qy05

This American Life

Immensely popular and influential radio show which has only gained fame and influence as a podcast. You will probably listen to an awful lot of it and then burn out, if you’re anything like me, but it’s excellent. Meticulously constructed storytelling.

Site: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/podcast

RSP: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/favorites – some of their favourites.

Radiolab

Another podcast which owes a debt to TAL. this one is Like TAL but a bit more sciency. Jad Abumrad (does interesting things with sound) and Robert Krulwich (NPR guy who talks a bit funny) talking about all sorts of bits and pieces.

Site: http://www.radiolab.org/series/podcasts/

RSP: http://www.one-tab.com/page/tl4AH3Q6Q0uUU3a_anrXPA — three episodes that happen to occur to me. They’re all good really, though.

Valentin and The Widow

Andrew Wheeler, writer-about-comics, presents this serial audio adventure. It’s rather good. Aristocratic British lady Eleanora Rosewood and her valet, burly Russian sailor Sacha Valentin dash around the globe trying to foil the machinations of an evil secret society. Very good stuff.

Site: http://valentinandthewidow.tumblr.com/

RSP: It’s a serial, so you should probably start at the beginning.

Night Vale

If you like the Night Vale twitter, this is the podcast of that twitter, basically. It’s like Weird Twitter in audio form.

Site: http://www.commonplacebooks.com/p/blog-page.html

99% Invisible

YET ANOTHER TAL derivative, this one all about design and architecture and stuff. And shorter. I kickstarted this, and they sent me some very nice notebooks.

Site: http://99percentinvisible.org/

RSP: http://www.one-tab.com/page/93SkZymmQ7KQSwldO-Qu7A — three dope episodes, but they’re all good.

BONUS

The Ray Peacock Podcast

Finished several years ago, but in my opinion still probably the funniest podcast ever. Ray, Ed, and Little Raji James (Who Used To Be On Eastenders But Ruined It) are the best thing. I love this so much.

https://mega.co.nz/#F!nIRhDa6D!L_XiBBRZMmsWLVv5e3VgSw

I would start with series 2, because it’s a bit more accessible than series1, but if you like it, go back and listen to series 1 later.

Shockingly, that episode wasn’t particularly good or interesting.

I’ve written on here before* about how I find mediocrity more troubling than awfulness — I feel that the squandered potential represented by a tepid episode is problematic as a signifier of greater loss (or potential loss) — something that could have been excellent instead becomes merely ‘meh’. On a slightly more lazy-hack level, it’s much easier to write a very positive review (allowing me to deploy the extensive range of superlatives at my disposal) or a very negative one (which lets me break out the weapons-grade analogies) than trying to find a way of saying meh twenty different ways for 1000 words. Still, I suppose I have to now. Let’s spit this one out.

As last week, though, we’ll lead off with Positivity Corner. I quite liked all the rubber-masked aliens milling around in the market at the beginning, and the evil robots who were in it for a few seconds and then for another few seconds and had force powers and looked liked spooky sand-people. Also the Old God’s herald, and, despite myself, the Old God itself, even if it did look like Ego The Living Planet had caught fire. Oh, and the fact that it was set in an asteroid belt somewhere, rather than on Earth, again. Um. That’s about it.

I was watching Breaking Bad beforehand**, and then the Freeview box wasn’t working, so I only caught the pre-credits sequence after the show — thankfully, I only missed the Doctor being creepy (again) and a man teleporting into a road after being hit in the face by a leaf and then claiming for that reason that the leaf was the most important leaf ever***. Oh, and Clara’s mum died, but I really really don’t care.

The action then shifts to the Rings of Akhaten, which really does sound like the title of an episode from the ’70s (actually, you can add that to the list of positives), and some flashy CGI (the one-two punch of the last episode and this reminds me of the first two episodes of the Eccleston series (‘everyday things attack in modern day London’ followed by ‘expensive computer-generated spaaaaace’)) and then into a studio full of rubber-clad people choking down smoke-machine-generated smog, in which we’re introduced to a lazy attempt to engender audience sympathy in the form of a small girl who’s running away from something. Stuff happens and she’s got to sing a song to keep the Old God from waking up, or something. It’s a U-rated version of sacrificing a virgin to the dragon. But (of course) she messes up the song, and gets dragged to the temple on a different asteroid**** to the studio-market/open-air(space) coliseum one.

The Doctor then has to save her, obviously, which he proceeds to do for about half an hour. This involves (amongst other things) using the sonic screwdriver as a magic wand, copying Captain Jack’s act at the end of Torchwood Series 1 and delivering a pseudosermon which was half Carl Sagan’s ‘star stuff’ speech from Cosmos and half lines he ripped off from Blade Runner. Despite all these… things going on, the episode felt weirdly decompressed, a feeling which led to a perhaps incorrect impression on my part of brevity. The scenes seemed artificially enlongated, to the overall effect was that the story didn’t progress a great deal. Perhaps because everything was in eyeline. The kid got kidnapped, the Doctor et all followed, guards tried to start shit, herald woke up the planet/sun/god thing, it tried to eat the Doctor, then it didn’t (?) and then it tried to eat the leaf (of which more shortly) and then didn’t again. Then it imploded. No, it didn’t make much sense to me either, though I’ll confess to my attention running into deficit by that point.

Unlike other episodes, which have felt like plot devices haven’t been fully explained, this tried to introduce ideas, but none of them were ever fully explored. There was a nod to the idea that we might try and look at the culpability of a community for watching/participating in Bad Things (the aforementioned virgin sacrifice), but the little girl was really the only other actual character in this episode — everyone else was just ‘Motorbike Salesman’ or ‘Chorister [name I've forgotten, but he literally vanished shortly after appearing, so who cares really?]‘ so the idea was just sort of left hanging. There was an attempt to explore the nature of religion, but it was done in such a calamitously ham-fisted way, up to and including vampire analogies (which also provided a moment of false hope where I thought we were going to see the Great Vampires reintroduced. Bowships, yeah!). The idea of sentimentally valued items being currency was relatively interesting (and it sort of reminded me of the way that spells in Saga apparently run on secrets) and it seemed tied into the way that the god appeared to feed (or something), but then apparently, it didn’t. The worst of this, though, was the leaf, which caused Clara’s parents to meet, after it blew into her dad’s face. Apparently it represented a reality in which a whole bunch of other things had happened. The trouble is, that’s true for literally any object! The jumper she’s wearing represents the reality in which she didn’t choose that jumper, and she wore a different one. I’m not sure why that universe would be any less anathema to the god-thing. That whole thing made no damn sense at all.

This is further than I thought I’d get at this point, honestly. Over the course of the evening, a few people have asked me how the review’s going. Honestly, it’s been more difficult than usual. This episode was so insubstantial, but there weren’t even that many really objectionable bits for me to grab onto like last time (apart from the space motorbike. I mean, really). There was just a whole lot of stuff here that could have been interesting, if only they had used it better, taken it in a different direction, or even just made it make some sort of sense. As it was, a bit of a mess, much like the shonky direction. Better luck next time, The Guy Who Wrote Luther. Next time (though not his next time, which is some #2spooky4me nonsense called Hide) is set on a submarine, featuring the Ice Warriors and starring Davos off of out of Game of Thrones (and, *ahem* written by Mark Gatiss). That sounds a bit more like it.

A post-script here: The music. I like Murray Gold — really, I do — but there’s a point at which no amount of bombast will save you. Please, can we have someone else now? If you’re going to insist on writing plots which involve the bad guy falling afoul of the Magical Power Of Music, especially*****. And that ‘lullaby’ thing was just ridiculous. Sounds like ‘what Murray Gold thinks hymns sound like’.

*though please, for goodness’ sake don’t go looking for it

**I’ve just finished series 4, and it’s amazing. Go and watch Breaking Bad instead of reading this.

*** per Martyn, Snoop Lion would probably beg to differ.

****The Different Asteroid appears to have a pyramid on, which just made me want to watch Pyramids of Mars instead

*****or something. I’m not sure they really knew how the villain was defeated in this one, tbh.

Come with me.

First, let’s address the title.

We now turn to number two on your song sheets. Don’t strain your eyes trying to read them, though, because I shall be telling you exactly what comes next; in any case, these rather fanciful titles that we print on the programmes bear no relation to what we’re going to sing. It’s a dead waste of a shilling, is what I say.

- Michael Flanders

Now that’s out of the way…

Look at this!

Literally not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Or, as my friend Rachel said, ”sort of stunningly not much to go wow about”* But actually, that’s good. That’s better than what I was expecting. I’ve already covered (at some length) what I felt were the show’s biggest problems last year, and I’ll try my very hardest not just to retread that here, but I think so many of the issues are with Moffat as a writer that it’s difficult not to. Anyway, onward!

What’s that?

The problems are, obviously, numerous, but let’s start with the good stuff. Clara, annoying though she is (see previous writings), isn’t yet the harridan that Amy was by the end of her arc. It seems with Moffat, you die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become an awful individual through chronic mishandling. Amy didn’t start off as awful as she ended up. The new TARDIS interior is still good, the retro console splendid and the spinny thing above the time rotor is lovely (though the wardrobe can do one).

What’s that?

I rather liked the robbuts and (though it was a bit silly) the WiFi thing was akin to Old Who in a good way – like something Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler might have come up with on an off-day — not grade-A material, but perfectly acceptable. There were a fair few funny jokes, and even some rather clever bits. The TARDIS appearance-as-magic-trick thing is good, and in retrospect seems so obvious that I’m amazed it hasn’t been done elsewhere (unless Moffat bogarted it from a novel and I’ve forgotten). The bit with the plane was good – nice peril, and also the Doctor didn’t know how to fly it, which was good! Oh, and it infected the idents. I quite liked that — though I didn’t like the Youtube video stuff so much. I felt that he was another few seconds away from saying ‘Don’t click. Click and you’re dead’. It also felt like an idea in want of a home, not a natural fit for this episode. However, that may just be a consequence of the same problem that plagued the Christmas episode — the need to serve several meta-masters — introducing things and people, though it did at least seem to presume we knew who the Doctor was, which is a start.

What’s that?

The Enemy never felt very well defined, or that much of a threat – a bunch of middle managers in an office somewhere? How interesting. Oh, it’s the Shard! What a lot of difference to the plot that doesn’t make. In the end, it’s Richard E Grant from the Christmas Special eating the minds of the people? Fair enough, but (as with so many episodes recently) it still didn’t feel like anything more than window-dressing, perfunctory. The enemy had to exist so that they could threaten Clara, receive the Doctor’s wannabe badass message, respond and then get beaten by him. Furthermore, UNIT seemed ready to kick down the door almost instantly, so I presume if the Doctor hadn’t shown up, they would have dealt with it.

Seriously, what’s that?

I just read a Graun review** of the episode which was so off the mark and ill-written as to make me wonder whether the author was a recently a victim of massive cranial trauma. It described the episode with words like ‘splendid’ and ‘insanely complicated’. Seriously. I think he’s mistaking lack of explication for complexity — which I suppose, to an extent, is forgivable — there are a fair few things that go unexplained, though whether that’s because they were Chekov’s guns for future use, just stupid nonsense we were meant to go along with or (possible) explained quickly while I was distracted by Twitter will remain to be seen.

No, really, what’s that?

There were a few concepts that were introduced — the leaf thing and the numbers, for instance —  that were clearly Significant Things Being Set Up For A Future Reveal, but there were some things that were just there – the woman’s using the tablet to control four arbitrary characteristics in various people surrounding her, the fact that the Doctor started off in a monastery, which didn’t seem like much more than 1) a setpiece and episode title that Moffat came up with and wanted to fit in somewhere and 2) an excuse for this atrocity, which, had it been excised, would have made the episode 20% better.

Come on, it’s not funny anymore.

Speaking of things that the show could do without – Moffat needs to realise that playing to Tumblr is the internet equivalent of playing to the gallery, so he really ought to do away with the ‘Oswald for the win‘ twee bullshit (though frankly, and I only really fully realised the extent of this problem in this episode, Moffat has no idea how to write women at all (or rather, how to write women other than variations of Spunky-ish Female Sidekick who come in various flavours of annoying***)) and also never ever use the phrase ‘Doctor? Doctor who?’ ever ever ever again ever ever ever, REALLY, I MEAN IT.

Oh, it’s a leaf.

The episode also makes it abundantly clear that though he’s playing to Tumblr, it may be inadvertant, as he doesn’t appear to have ever used social networks, apart from Twitter**** (though he flounced off some time ago, if memory serves) – I mean, “Bebo, Myspace, Habbo“(?)(!) Has he been saving these hip references since 2005? He also appears to have contracted a bad case of LondonSkylineitis, a condition afflicting many of the country’s screenwriters where anything set in modern London has to tie back into a shot which takes in The Gherkin (or now (apparently) the Shard (hip architectural reference, yo)).

That was so boring I passed out.

Final thoughts:

• If that’s really The Great Intelligence, why the hell haven’t we got some yetis up in this piece?
• The Jammie Dodgers here were actually Jammie Dodgers, not Jam Rings like in Victory.
• Both the Doctor and Oswin did fast typing******. Please, no more fast typing.
• Friend of the show Lucian started the #doctorwhopositives hashtag which I very much hope will become A Thing. Best were this and this.

now there is random code on my face

Next week – The Rings Of Akhatan, which even sounds like a ’70s episode, and it’s not set on Earth! Oh boy, this might be good! I’m actually somewhat interested!

*apparently quoted, in her words, “from a book with a pastel pink cover and the title in shiny fuschia”

**actually it was an Observer review, but I’m not going to change it. Come and get me, Rusbridger!

***I’ve limited myself to one Lawrence Miles ref per review this time around, and this one’s even in the footnotes. How about that? From his Blink review

…Sally spends much of the episode delivering the kind of dialogue that ageing heterosexual authors would like to imagine dynamic twentysomething women delivering in the real world, at least as long as they can imagine her saying “oh, yes, you big, rugged man who works in the media, yes, yes, yes” afterwards.

**** A sidenote: the whole ‘you didn’t know anything about computers… and you just made a joke about Twitter’ rang spectacularly hollow, firstly because I don’t buy Clara’s being unable to connect to the WiFi – it’s really, really not that difficult —click the thing, enter the password, and secondly because even my mother makes jokes about Twitter, and she’s not a hip and happening youth, she’s an old lady who can barely work her email.*****

*****only joking. Love you, Mum.

******that link via friend of the show Martyn

At the moment, I’m trying to keep up with some of the titles being published by Marvel under the Marvel NOW! line. Marvel NOW! (and yes, that is the way it’s being capitalised and punctuated) is… well, I’m not quite sure what it is, and neither, from the looks of things, is Wikipedia. Near as can be told, it’s an attempt to draw in some new readers after yet another catastrophic world-shaking things-will-never-be-the-same summer event (this one called Avengers Vs X-Men*) by shaking up the creative teams and relaunching a bunch of books**. Sounds good to me. Here are lots of words about my favourite Marvel NOW! books so far.

[by the way, if you're reading this at or shortly after publication, Marvel are offering a load of issue #1s (including ALL the Marvel NOW! stuff) for free download, so if you're interested at all in the slightest, check it out]

Fantastic Four and FF (Matt Fraction/Mark Bagley and Matt Fraction/Mike Allred)

After the last few years with Jonathan Hickman at the wheel (which was perhaps the first time I’ve really been interested in the FF), Matt Fraction has taken over, and things are going in a different direction. The Four (plus kids) have gone off for a year’s voyaging around the cosmos, leaving them largely removed from the events of the rest of the universe, which is the thrust of the Fantastic Four book, while the running of the Future Foundation (Reed Richards’ school for genius kids) is taken over by Ant-Man, She-Hulk, Medusa (of the Inhumans) and Johnny Storm’s girlfriend Darla Deering, which is being chronicled in FF. The idea seems to be that the books exist in their own little bubble of oddball fun, which is, I must say, terrific. So far, both books have been great, with FF having the edge because of bits like this, and also Mike Allred’s art, which is absolutely lovely, not to mention tremendously well-suited to the book’s style. Even if you’re not usually interested in the Fantastic Four, this is worth your while.

Avengers/New Avengers (Jonathan Hickman/Jerome Opeña and Jonathan Hickman/Steve Epting)

I don’t find the Avengers that interesting, to tell you the truth. Of the core three characters, Thor, Captain America and Iron Man, the last is the only one whose character I find in any way diverting – the other two are tedious ‘noble’ duty-and-honour soldiers (though their respective films recently were both tolerable) – and the rest of the roll-call tends to be a who’s who of fan-favourites from other books. It’s to Jonathan Hickman’s credit, then, that I’m enjoying his current run on Avengers and New Avengers (which are closely related stylistically, if not quite so much in story terms at the moment). Both stories have an agreeably ‘epic’ feel – with Big Ominous Things happening, and all-new, all-exciting villain in each. They’re also both taking the team in different directions – Avengers has a ‘we need to get bigger’ thing going on (and an excellent Hickman diagram, to boot) and focusses on the team’s attempts to deal with new adversaries Ex Nihlo and Abyss, whereas New Avengers is focussing on the ‘Illuminati’ – the group who hold the Infinity Gems (super-powerful gems which come together to form a super-powerful glove called The Infinity Gauntlet, which they’ve got for reasons too long and boring to go into here) and their attempts to prevent other universes from collapsing into theirs. They’re big and epic, and both have Something Going On.

Iron Man/Young Avengers (Kieron Gillen/Greg Land and Kieron Gillen/Jamie McKelvie)

Obligatory Gillen recommendations here. While I don’t think I like either of them quite as much as I did Journey into Mystery (see ‘Supplementary’ below) they’re both still jolly good. Iron Man is solid, workmanlike, entertaining (though is about to get more interesting as he’s heading into spaaaace, to go and be part of the Guardians of the Galaxy, amongst other things) but more interesting is Young Avengers, which is a ‘sequel’ of sorts to the critically-praised first volume, which I’ve never read. It also features the return of Young Loki from Journey Into Mystery (sort of), but the reason I like it the most is that I think Gillen’s best writing is that involving young people. The second volume of his most well-known indie work, Phonogram, is by far the stronger, and I would say that’s at least in part because it focusses on teens, not adults, and he finds very strong, authentic voices for his young characters (see also his JiM run, of which more later). Two issues in, and we’re still setting the scene, bringing all the characters together (most haven’t even been properly introduced) but so far we’ve got a good mysterious villain, some nice interactions between the various characters (especially the very sweet couple Billy and Teddy, aka Wiccan and Hulkling) and some amazing Jamie McKelvie artwork, because who doesn’t love that?

Deadpool (Brian Posehn & Gerry Duggan/Tony Moore)

A funnybook that’s actually super-funny! Written by a comic book writer and an actual comedian, who the first issues’s back material describes “[together] they look like a Mythbusters episode about Orson Welles’ death”. The plot of the first arc is about Deadpool working for S.H.I.E.L.D. (with the aid of the ghost of Ben Franklin) to kill (or re-kill, I suppose) a bunch of zombified presidents. It’s got Arrested Development jokes, a ref to a story from the ’70s which involved Ben Franklin sleeping with a time-travelling Doctor Strange’s girlfriend, and at one point Zombie FDR uses the phrase “Here’s a new deal – DIE!”. It’s something else.

X-Men Legacy (Si Spurrier/Tan Eng Huat)

Si Spurrier writes some fantastic stuff. This is, for my money, the most interesting X-Men book currently running (though I haven’t had a chance to read the new Uncanny X-Men). It centers on David ‘Legion’ Haller, Professor X’s son who suffers from multiple personality disorder, but with the additional twist that he’s a super-powerful multi-powered mutant, and each of those personalities controls one of his powers, so he’s mentally constructed a jail to keep them all in check, inserting an additional layer to the story. It’s an unusual X-Men book, eschewing a large team and focussing on a character who (as far as I’m aware) hasn’t had much solo focus. It also has THE BEST covers (see above).

.

All-New X-Men (Brian Michael Bendis/David Marquez)
As my friend Zoe pointed out, this title is a massive lie, since they’re not all-new X-Men – if anything, they’re all old X-Men (the original 5, in fact), brought to the future by Beast because… well, I can’t actually remember – something to do with trying to convince young Cyclops not to do as Current Cyclops has been doing (to be as spoiler-free as possible). But it’s interesting and fun, seeing young-selves interact with old-selves (even if it’s not quite as good as when Calvin and Hobbes did it). In contrast with X-Men Legacy, this is about as traditional as the X-Men get, and it’s pretty good.

Superior Spider-Man (Dan Slott/Ryan Stegman)

You’ve probably heard (even if you’re not someone who keeps up with comics news) that Spider-Man isn’t Peter Parker at the moment – because Spider-Man is one of those heroes that the mainstream media actually cares about – he’s Doctor Octopus in Peter’s body, but with access to Peter’s memories, but in so doing has been turned to the path of good and right. He’s still an arrogant dick, though, so the idea is that he’s trying to do what Peter did, but better, hence ‘superior’. Usually, I’m not the world’s biggest Spider-Man fan (and I’m no big fan of impersonation plots either), but Slott’s writing, especially Octavius’ inner monologue, makes it work.

Hawkeye (Matt Fraction/David Aja)

Per the first issues’ credits page:

Clint Barton,

aka Hawkeye,

became the greatest sharp-shooter known to man.

Then he joined the Avengers.

This is what he does when he’s not being an Avenger.

That’s all you need to know.

Actually, it’s not. A useful bit of supplementary information is that it’s the best book Marvel is putting out at the moment, no competition. Much as I love the rest of the list, this book, which at times feels more like an indie comic in superhero’s clothing, is exceptional. It’s so good because it’s about Hawkeye just a guy – a guy who spends his time with the Norse thunder gods, super-soldiers and armoured billionaires, but is, in the end, just a normal guy who’s good at shooting arrows. The deceptively simple artwork is superb, and the writing is delightful. I could use other superlatives, but I don’t want to waste time you could be spending reading it.

Supplementary – Journey Into Mystery

Remember how effusive I was in my praise about Hawkeye just now? Journey into Mystery is better than Hawkeye. Better than almost any comic I can think of, actually. Also, written by Gillen (there’s a pattern here… if only I could see it). The story of Kid Loki, who came into being after Loki sacrificed himself to save Asgard or some similar nonsense. It was itself a resurrection – Journey Into Mystery being the title of the book that became Thor, and was resurrected when Marvel created Mighty Thor, one presumes to capitalise on interest generated by the film. While I usually find Marvel’s Asgardians rather dull, Gillen somehow manages to make them interesting, though I suspect it’s primarily down to the prism through which we’re viewing them – namely, Young Loki, who is an incredible character. He’s Loki without his spells and illusions, who has to rely on his wits, fast talking, and people’s expectations of him to kick the can of impending doom down the road just a little bit more to forestall today’s disaster by setting up tomorrow’s, when he’s do the same again, along the way tricking almost everyone, making literal deals with the devil, saving Asgard (and the world), and generally being tremendously entertaining. In 31 issues it manages to reach heights that few comics will, ever. And the ending…

…no spoilers, but the ending is excellent. Go read JiM and everything else.

* which is quite funny, to me, at least. For the uninitiated, characters in the Marvel universe can be divided into two broad groups – those affiliated with The Avengers, and those affiliated with the X-Men. The Avengers currently seem to have about a million books with ‘Avengers’ in the name, including (deep breath): Avengers, Avengers Assemble, New Avengers, Dark Avengers, Avengers Arena, Secret Avengers, Young Avengers and Uncanny Avengers (which sort of doesn’t count, because, like A+X, it’s half X-Men), and that’s not to mention the books of its individual members: Captain America, Invincible Iron Man, Thor: God of Thunder, etc blah blah blah. The X-Men are just as bad – Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine and the X-Men, All-New X-Men, X-Men (it’s just called X-Men), X-Men: Legacy, Cable and X-Force, Uncanny X-Force, X-Factor, again, half of Uncanny Avengers and A+X and again, individual characters (though the only examples that spring to mind are Wolverine and Savage Wolverine, and Wolverine is also an Avenger, but I digress). The only characters who seem largely to stay out of this stuff are the Fantastic Four (who arguably cleave more to the Avengers, but are off in their own little world at the moment anyway), Deadpool (arguably X-Men), the Thunderbolts (a collection of villains and antiheroes from all over the shop), whichever non-Thor Asgardian is starring in JiM at the moment, and possibly Daredevil, although frankly I don’t really care about Daredevil.

**in a similar spirit, I’m taking this opportunity to announce adam englebright dot com NOW! a new, exciting change of direction for the blog and a refresh for the creative teams on some major titles etc etc etc

Tap tap tap taaaaap tap taptaptaptaptaptap tap tap taaaaaaaaaaap taptaptaptaptaaaap tap tap taptapta-

Super Hexagon, from Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV fame, a successor to his slightly more rough-around-the-edges Hexagon (a flash game made for Pirate Kart, a game jam sort of thing) is a game that’s both very simple and very difficult. You control a small triangle, moving either clockwise or counter-clockwise around a central hexagon (or sometimes a pentagon or a square), and you have to avoid the line patterns moving from the outer edges of the screen toward the centre. It seems somewhat reductive to describe it in those terms, but watch the video, and you should get some idea of how it works, how difficult it can get, and how excellent the music (by Chipzel) is.

The gameplay itself might be simple, but the loop it forms – a loop very akin to the one found in VVVVVV – is a continuous thread of repetition and refinement – do it, fail, do it again, fail, do it once more, and again, until you get it right You will be failing a lot, mind, because the game doesn’t screw around – the first difficulty, ‘Hexagon’ is tricky enough for most people. You’ll be unlikely to get to ten seconds before you’ve failed 20 times. Above that difficulty, there are ‘Hexagoner’ and ‘Hexagonest’. Once you break 60 seconds in each mode (no easy feat, believe me – I’ve only managed it on the first two) you unlock the difficulty’s respective ‘Hyper’ mode, in which everything looks like this:

and things go bananas.

There are many games it reminds me of, but none that it’s truly similar to. Hotline Miami is probably the closest, for the lightning-quick bursts of gameplay-followed-by-reset, the slow descent into an unthinking, reactive, trancelike state while playing, and the dope tunes:

…sorry, #tunesbreak. I suppose you could also compare the weird, woozy movements of the camera as a game progresses to some of the weirder levels in Hotline Miami (and the menu, actually). At the same time, though, it’s nothing like Hotline Miami (which will get its own post at some point).

It’s rather a difficult game to write about, I’ll be honest. If this were Far Cry or CoD or something, I could waste some paragraphs talking about the graphicals and the multiplayer, but the only graphicals here are pulsing blocks of colour, and the only multiplayer is the Game Center leaderboard. There isn’t much to waffle about, because this is a game with no waffle, no fat, everything pared back as far as possible. I could talk about how it’s the embodiment of videogames, an experience of unusual purity and refinement, two inputs, any error leading to Robot Voice Lady saying “GAME OVER”. But that would be wanky, and I don’t want this to turn into the [redacted] review, so just go and play it. Play it now. If you don’t have an iThing, it’s on Steam as well, and is coming to Android soon.

More podcast talk! I have a feeling this is an expression of my sublimated guilt for not having edited the podcast I recorded with comrades S Wilson and J Lambert last week. Anyway, today’s podcast recommendation is different to yesterday’s – different to most – in fact, it’s not really a podcast at all, more of a serialised audiobook. Turns out.

Valentin and the Widow, by Andrew Wheeler is a period-set action-adventure series about Eleanora Rosewood, a recently widowed young aristo, and Sacha Valentin, a Russian sailor and former soldier. After her husband’s death in an aeroplane accident, Eleanora discovers he was part of an Evil Secret Society and had designed a machine which could cause earthquakes, which is going to be deployed in Shanghai, and in only a few days time, and only she, with the help of her doughty valet* Sacha Valentin, can stop them. It might sound a little cliched – and OK, it is a little cliched – but that’s not always a bad thing, and in this case, trust me, it works. It’s enjoyable and fun, the writing is good enough to keep it going, and manages to conjure up a splendid evocation of place – the grimy streets of Shanghai are brought to life

The effect is also enhanced immeasurably by its delivery. I note on the site that the whole adventure is soon going to be made available as an ebook on Amazon, and I’ve enjoyed the story so much I’ll probably buy it. However, I would say, having listened to the audio version first, that this would deprive the reader of one of the best parts of the experience. It’s read by the author, who not only has a nice voice, but gives each of the characters their own voices, and really sells the delivery. In the first episode, when Eleanora is assaulted by the thugs, her lines are delivered with a pitch-perfect note of terror. It’s professional-sounding stuff, seriously excellent.

An exciting, well-written, well-read audio adventure, then, and clearly worth your time. It’s also got a brilliant theme tune – Wild Cherries Rag** (big ups to Mr Wheeler himself for answering that question for me) which actually delayed my listening to the story as I spent quite a while listening to the opening over and over, and then once informed what the tune was, listening to the whole thing. I’m a sucker for ragtime.

The first story, The Mandrake Machine, is complete, and Wheeler has promised that the second, The Flowers of Mrs Moore, will be starting soon. Having followed the series for the last few weeks, I’ve become rather fond of Valentin and Eleanora, and I’m really rather looking forward to the next instalment. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it too.

*yes, his services are only retained in the first episode after he saves her from assassins. I KNOW.

**my friend Rachel said that the title ‘sounds like a period euphemism’. Thanks for that.

Tomorrow, I go back to work*, so I felt like I should talk about the podcast Back to Work, from the 5by5 network (at the rate they’ve been disappearing , it’ll soon be the only podcast on the 5by5 network) presented by The 5by5 Guy, Dan Benjamin, and well-known productivity person Merlin Mann,

It’s ostensibly about work and workflows and nonsense like that, but as the hosts freely acknowledge, it’s just as much about stupid in-jokes and sidetracks about X-Men and Florida. It’s a bizarre confection, and though I wouldn’t usually be interested in the theme (or in the pseudo-productivity-guru stylings of Merlin himself), it succeeds because it’s nice to listen to, in the way that some of the best radio and podcasts is/are. The two hosts are jolly nice people, and their conversations are genial and interesting.

It’s also worth noting that despite being someone who talks about productivity and shit for a living, Merlin isn’t a tedious ‘guru’ sort. He mostly just rambles in a moderately incoherent but still interesting fashion until he gets to some sort of point. These are almost always fairly common-sense, along the lines of ‘stop talking about stuff and do stuff’ but they get presented in a relatively useful way. Even the early stuff, dealing with ‘why haven’t you shipped…’ is worthwhile, as it prompts some instructive self-examination. Or it did for me, anyway.

Most importantly, though, the show has a whole host of riffs and catchphrases which I’ve taken to using in my day-to-day. My favourite, ‘turns out’ a phrase Merlin originally used to refer to the Malcom-Gladwell-slash-Freakonomics school of pop sociology, (good name) but has since just become A Thing, has become a regular (some of my friends would say too regular) part of my lexicon. Turns out.

I started listening over the summer, with the first episode now associated for me with wandering around Dorset’s very own Tank Museum. A few months into my listening, Merlin posted on Twitter what I think are a jolly good set of suggested episodes, divided into Golden, Silver, Bronze and Modern ages. I’d say you should probably listen to those first, to get a feel for the show at its best. Give them a go, they’re surprisingly entertaining. Turns out.

* ah, the return to the inexorable grind of lectures and stuff. Usually I’d be looking forward to it, tired of the stifling freedom of the holidays, but my ear’s still giving me trouble. I just want to lie down in the quiet until it feels better.

The game functions like an episode of Star Trek in which Something Is Happening, and Picard is barking orders at the bridge crew, except everyone is the captain and the orders are gibberish. Instructions appear near the top of your screen, just below the little graphic showing you how close your ship is to destruction, and you have to get your team to follow them before the countdown timer below runs down. However, each player has their own instructions, and they may apply to the player themselves or another member of the space team – or, when you’re accosted asteroids or black holes, the whole team. SHAKE! SHAKE! – which means that the game rather quickly descends into bellowing stupid phrases at each other – ‘Astrolathe to four!’ ‘Five!’ ‘Four!’ ‘Five!’ ‘Four then five!’. As the game goes on, though, the panel starts to break, or ooze slime obscuring the controls’ names, and this adds an extra level of mayhem to the proceedings. The game impresses by its ability to walk the line of humour and tension. Though we laughed an awful lot while playing, every hyperspace jump (indicating a stage ending) elicited a sigh of relief.

On the input end, the control panels the players are assigned consist of a random assortment dials, switches, buttons and levers. The randomness manifests not only in the arrangement of the controls, but in the names of the controls (a mixture of technobabble, weird non-sequiters (one was memorably labelled ‘hitchhiker’) and later in the game, symbols) and their functions (for instance, the instruction will be ‘greet the hitchhiker’ and the button below the label hitchhiker will say ‘hello’). There are many combinations, and they’re almost all hilarious.

The game is nominally about a spaceship trying to escape an supernova, but is really about a bunch of friends shouting at each other while stabbing their fingers violently at their ‘phones. The actual mechanics of the game are very simple indeed – flick switch, spin dial, etc. but the game is really played outside the confines of the interface – am I the one with the hitchhiker? Has someone wrapped the presents? OH NO ASTEROID SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE. It’s a refreshingly novel experience, and I had great fun playing it. It’s free on iOS, so give it a go.

One of the threads I was frantically tugging at in the draft of my Asylum review (which I appended to the last post) was something I referred to not-very-cleverly as ‘Who-by-catchphrase’. I must confess, I’ve found it very difficult to come up with a good term for this problem, as almost all of them end up encompassing things which aren’t inherently problematic. Catchphrases, for instance, (or at least dialogue tropes readily associable with characters or monsters) have been part of Who pretty much forever, but I had trouble identifying what about the ones Moffat’s been using made them appreciably different. To be sure, I think there is something qualifiably worse about ‘bow ties/fezzes/”‘quirky’ accoutrement x” are cool’, ‘wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey’ et al, but ultimately, I think the problem may be with me.

I’ve explained before how I’ve loved Doctor Who pretty much since I can remember, and I had suffered through the good and the bad that the classic series and the novels had to offer before the new series started in 2005*, so, happy though I was that the new series was such a massive hit, (and I was happy – so many new people, so many of my friends got to enjoy it with me, and I had new people I could talk to about it) there developed over several years a slight disdain of some of the bandwagoners. I would watch Totally Doctor Who (I was twelve) and tut at the contestants on their stupid reality show segments. Those kids I would think. They’re not proper fans. They don’t get it, not really. How much old Doctor Who have they watched? Not as much as me, I bet. Could they list every episode in order? (I don’t think I could do more than a close approximation, but it was enough to fool the inexpert) How long have they liked it? and so on in the sort of childish, petulant way that one acts when one is a petulant child, particularly a petulant child seeing idiots his own age unable to answer simple questions about Doctor Who. THE HORSE WAS CALLED ARTHUR, YOU IDIOT!

But as age and (relative) maturity stopped me from caring quite so much, I was able to rid myself of that sort of thing almost entirely. I may still have found it slightly odd that some people ‘only watched Doctor Who when it was on’ or ‘thought it was OK, I suppose’, but those people no longer drew my ire in quite the same way. Similarly, fellow-travellers whose weren’t quite as dedicated as I (especially those who hadn’t seen the classic series, or read the novels) were no longer pitied, but instead were novitiates ready to be inducted into the temple’s deeper mysteries.

However, there remains an element of the old childish petulance, one I can’t properly excise. It’s the scurrilous voice in the back of my mind whenever I see something like this (sent to me by my ever-hilarious friend Rachel), or someone wearing a ‘Keep Calm And Call The Doctor shirts’ (I have a friend who does this), or worse, if someone parrots one of the shittier catchphrases (although in those instances my inner voice is usually accompanied by my out-loud voice threatening violence against the speaker). It says ‘these people aren’t enjoying it properly’.

Now, clearly this is absurd, though it’s easy to see where it comes from. Having liked it before it was ‘popular’ gave me a sense of ownership (or at least part-ownership) of the show. Actually, I suppose even non-fans (Brits, anyway) have something similar, as Doctor Who is part of our Shared Cultural Heritage™, but it’s not quite the same thing. It’s the same reason I feel comfortable putting out strongly worded 3000-word blog posts calling for changes in the running of the show, and it’s not because I think any of the problems I raise will be addressed – at least, not as a consequence of my writing about it on a blog with a readership hovering around the population of Sealand. It’s because, at heart, I think I understand and appreciate Doctor Who in the ‘correct’ way**. I think I know not just how the show should be, but moreover how it should be enjoyed.

I have tried, but I don’t seem to be able to fully overcome this feeling. Consciously, I know it’s absurd – that the people who say ‘bow ties are cool’ (at least, the ones who aren’t just doing it to irritate me) (Sean) aren’t awful people, they just enjoy the show in a different way to me. People*** who post sepia-tinted screengrabs on Tumblr and write fanfiction about their Idris/Kovarian OTPs enjoy the show in a different way, and that’s fine. Really. That’s what my brain says, anyway. There’s still a dissenting element in there, somewhere, that I just can’t quite make believe it. Worst of all, I’m not even sure I want to be rid of it. Without it, I might not be able to write about Who in the same way, judge episodes with the same confidence. There’s got to be a dash of towering arrogance in the dish to give it some flavour, right? Gosh, I hope so.

I’d like to think my irritation comes from benevolence. I’ve tried to argue it this way before. All that ‘timey-wimey’ quirksome whimsical bullshit has become an end in itself, and it’s caused people to forget the true meaning of Christmas the far more worthy, interesting and thoughtful things Doctor Who is/can be/should be about****. This might actually be true, but it’s an argument made in bad faith, because that’s not the reason I object to people enjoying those things -the reason is that they annoy me, and worse, they’re a part of something I love that annoys me. If someone enjoys those stupid meerkat adverts, I really don’t care, because I have no interest in adverts. Doctor Who is my favourite TV show, so when I see people proclaiming their love for its worst parts, I get frustrated. Why are you praising the Brussels sprouts? Stop going on about them! Look at all this other, much nicer stuff! The breadsauce of curiosity! The pigs-in-blankets of adventure! But the grand irony is, of course, that the analogy sums up everything I’ve been half-arguing, half-avoiding all along – some people genuinely do like the Brussels sprouts. Some even like them best of all.

*I watched Meglos and read The Eight Doctors and I didn’t give up on it. That’s true dedication.
** if, by the way, you are interested in how to ‘correctly’ enjoy Doctor Who, just read a few reviews of mine and see what strikes you.
***I had to stop myself writing ‘the sort of people’, there.
****you can argue amongst yourselves about what they might actually be.