[Doctor Who’]

Private Eye on the latest Doctor Who leaks and mishaps

The news of Smith’s departure overshadowed another bit of news in the leaked email, which is that the next full series of Doctor Who will not be broadcast until August-October 2014, partly to give “Steven and the team more time to work on the scripts to ensure it's as good as ever and really secure the future of the title for many years to come.”

This will mean that between January 2012 and June 2014, when under Doctor Who’s previously-accustomed schedule 41 episodes would have been broadcast, the BBC will actually have put out a grand total of 16. That period includes the show’s 50th anniversary year, about which Moffat had announced: “I promise you, we’re going to take over television, trust me.”

Yes, 2012's half season, delivered with the promise that we'd get a season and a half of full cream Doctory goodness in 2013.

Janus backs away from the growing conflaguration in the passage way as best she can while maintaining her position by the door. "Hurry through lads," she calls out to Drin and Lars. "We don't want it coming back here to hide."

So, what gear beyond what we have on our character sheets are we walking into the new scene with?

And is there any chance of bottomless clip?

3 new seasons? I'm there.

I wonder how long it'll take for someone to hack the Xbone kinnect and install a camera loop

Splendid theme. All of them.

<evil mastermind> Strokes Win2000 style 'Classic' visual set up </evil mastermind>

In other news, Microsoft is unsurprisingly continuing their belief that you no longer own anything you purchase from them -- check your Windows or Office EULA sometime -- and that they can take their game back whenever they feel like it.




Like I said, this idea isn't new. I know with Mass Effect that if your Bioware Social board or other EA account received a ban, you were locked out of all online functionality of your game forever. And while some people were rightfully punished for being pricks -- though it's dodgey that being a forum jerk would have effects that extend to your purchased game --  a non trivial proportion got screwed by jerk arse admins and not realising that someone in their online lobby was cheating (yes, not reporting a cheat was considered to be itself cheating), but at least if you felt you'd been wrongly banned you could appeal.

Now it appears that bans are instead being linked to the account required to use Xbone, and bans can't be appealed. A  ban that locks your XBox Live account means that you will be locked out from all non-game functionality of the system, and by revoking your ‘licenses’ on all your games associated with your account, they can then disable each and every game you own for the system.

Okay, that last post has largely lost me. What's happening exactly?

Is Aero that fancy translucent overlay effect nonsense?

Aiko nods. "Tuku has the right of it: we need to plan. But first, we need to find our new... ally here something to wear. And I think for safety's sake you're going to have to put up with a bunch of women clothes shopping Tuku." (click to show/hide) Notice or Search: 1d20+14=29

The latest rumors surrounding the Xbone are that the demos that Microsoft allowed people to play on at E3 were not running on an Xbone, but instead running on high-end PCs with Titan graphics cards. Rumors apparently backed up by images that clearly show a high-end desktop under the displays of the stands at E3.

If this is the case, they were running the games on a system that is around 3x faster than the console.

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[Space Rangers]

Why can't she simply be an accomplished African women who just happens to have very short hair? Does Uhura have the monopoly on strong, black, human women on board the Enterprise? How about we celebrate the diversity of humanity instead of many everyone an alien.

No reason she can't be, and with a name like Darwin she most probably is.

But overwhelmingly, humanoid aliens on Trek in virtually every sci-fi property you can name are caucasian humans with occasional rubbery bits. The one noteable exception are klingons -- you know, the violent gang bangers barbarous tribal warriors of their setting -- and even then a lot of significant klingons have a tendency to be caucasians in not-quite-brownface. At least the short lived early 90s cheesefest that was Space Rangers mixed things up a little and cast their unspeakably brutal warrior race asian.

Besides which, humans are just so often immensely dull.

[Oblivion]

Saw Oblivion a couple of nights ago. Fun movie, great score, but my God did it telegraph its punches to anyone even mildly familiar with the genre.

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Admittedly I didn't see the whole army of 1 thing coming, but even if I hadn't seen the trailers which massively massively set it up, the fact that Jack mentions "mandatory memory wipe" within moments of a dream memory he couldn't possibly have directly experienced according to his voice over just screamed "he's a clone". Especially if you've seen something like Moon.

The interior of the Tet might well have been directly lifted from the mothership sequence of Independence Day. I felt like they'd started to run out of SFX budget by that point, so instead of giving us something interesting -- a call out to the City of Lead & Gold (aka the 2nd book of the Tripods trilogy, the TV adaption of which the Tet certainy evoked) would have been great, with all manner of alien tech processes for us to guess at, what we got was dull grey, foggy, bleh with a poor (and poorly defended) knock-off of HAL 9000 at the heart of it.

I wish we'd gotten into Victoria's head -- she seemed almost willingly complicit in the situation at times to the point she seemed expecting Jack49 to be killed and be issued with a new one who wouldn't remember the woman she clearly loathed. I think there's definitely a possibility for a direct to video animated prequel here. Also, the vastly expanded size of her pupils was disconcertingly abnormal.

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I'll second the comments about Victoria.  She seemed genuinely shocked that the drone had been turned on her.  You could tell she expected it to go after Jack.

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Something occured to me the other day -- why did the Tet intelligence let its Tech!Jack clones believe they were uniquely human? Presumably the army of Soldier!Jack clones were programmed in a manner that would walk out in the world shoulder-to-shoulder, employing advanced tactics and weapons to kill every other human they encountered. So, narrative reasons aside, why not extend that to the Tech-series clones rather than maintain the fiction that he and Victoria were down there alone while humanity was all safely tucked away on Titan?

I wish EA would for once put their PC DLC on sale the way they do for the counterpart console content.

Not really. The 360 tanked in Japan -- it just couldn't compete against both Nintendo and Sony. Not investing their first wave efforts there is about the only sensible thing Microsoft's done with the Xbone to date.