Today on Twitter there’s a tag-meme, #10yearsago. It’s not all that unexpected, given that we’re coming up on another round-number year, but it has special significance to many, because, of course, in 2000, there was a chance that we were facing the End of the World as we Knew It™.

We were wrong, of course, but not far wrong. The disaster we all expected never came to pass, but 21 months later, a different chain of events really did sort of change the shape of our world rather significantly.

But I digress.

On the off chance that someone reading this was living on a desert island that year, or was simply too young to remember, here’s a quick summary of what was generally called the Y2K problem:

Continue Reading »

The good news is that “The End of Time, Part 1″ is noticeably better than the first half of the Series 4 finale, “The Stolen Earth”. Of course, the problem is that “The Stolen Earth” was a steaming pile of cat feces, so improving on that standard is simply not very difficult.

The bad news is that, as fun as “The End of Time, Part 1″, it isn’t as good as it ought to be. Russel T. Davies has proven time and again (most recently, I’m told, with Torchwood: “Children of Earth”, which everybody seems to rave about), that he actually knows how to write in a non-clunky, non-fanwanky way. And yet, when it comes to Doctor Who finales, he continues to fall back on clunky, contrived, fanwanky writing.

That said, RTD does make good on something he was quoted as saying about this story. In an interview, RTD had said that this story was going to be “huge and epic, but also intimate.” When I first read that, I twitched, because it sounded like a salesman trying to convince us that his product is all things to all people, which never works out.

So I was pleased to discover that he actually succeeded at crafting a story that manages to be both things at the same time.

Continue Reading »

And so, it begins.

And what, exactly is it?

For a start, the name is a revival of an older, Slashdot-style weblog I ran for a short while focusing on fantasy and science fiction.

While that’s still the site’s focus, it will be more particularly focused, at least for the moment, on my own sometimes-informed opinions about the subject. This will largely take the form of reviews, but there will be other opinionated comment as well.

Continue Reading »