SpursRiot2012

In what order do the Transmetropolitan books go? Thanks.

She looks like she should live under a bridge or something.

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I watched Invincible, starring that dude.

I was really fucking high while watching this, but I thought it was pretty good. What was with all the sex references though?

Not as far as I remember but to be fair theres lots I don't remember as everybody in the Archive below the age of 25 at that point was a huge stoner and we all spent a lot of time wasted. It was great for me as I did the 1-9pm shift like.

I also "met" Alistar Darling once. We were not introduced but I saw him down Oxford St. one early morning and accidently barged him, earning me angry looks from what I assume was his secret police guard.

Yeah, really. I mean, we worked in the Archive so we were basically the Oompa Loompa's of the company, and he used to look at us like we were something he trod on, and would actually order us around. No, "Could you please..." it's "find me *something* I need it immediatly."

Trev, who I only met on a couple of occasions and it's not like we hung out or anything, but he was a good guy. And also, he showed an interest in and subsequently borrowed my copy of Frantic Planet by Sickboy (I hear FP2 is imminent?) and never returned it as I left the company a short while after. Not that I think Mr. Draz believes me.

I somehow lucked into a job at ITN a few years back and since then have worked in that industry, at a production house in Soho after ITN and these days at al-jazeera but not for very long as it's shit.

Oh, and somebody else probably remembers more clearly, but Bradshaw took it off him and kept it and *may* have said something or given him a look of death or some such, I can't remember 100%.

I've met:

Trevor McDonald

Mark Austin

A whole bunch of ITV News newsreading women whose name's escape me right now.

Ben Scotchbrook

Alistar Stewart (the drunk that he is)

Felicity Barr

David Frost

Rageh Omah

Richard Gizbert (former ABC guy, now does The Listening Post for al-Jazeera and is a huge Spurs fan).

Jesse Jackson

There's loads "news people" I've met. Haven't listed them all. The only one who was an arsehole was Mark Austin who seems to think he's Jesus Christ or something.

Apart from that, I've obviously met a bunch of British wrestlers, but the only ones really worth mentioning as good people were Johnny Kidd, Anton Green (both seriously top, top guys), Jorge Castano, Rich n Famous (does he still wrestle? that guy was funny.)

Met Bradshaw and some Diva years ago at Hamleys when Kid Ka$h handed him the "Bradshaw + Brian Christopher + shower = whats the worst that could happen?" thing to be autographed...

Guys, any recommendations for books that have NYC as a backdrop? Sort of like 'A Guide To Recognising Your Saints'?

Watched one called Brooklyn Rules the other day and thought it was pretty entertaining. Freddy Prinze Jr., Alec Baldwin, Scott Caan and Jay Ferrara can't really go wrong.

 

 

Yeah man, stellar cast.

What's ya problem with Alec Baldwin?

Nice. I shall have to give Mr. Banks another go as I had Excession but I didn't think it was great. I think the next thing's I'm ordering will be Songs of Distant Earth, the Foundation Trilogy and Neruomancer was already in my sights also.

As well as books on Latin, Mein Kampf and Das Kapital! I need to get fired soon so I can get through all this stuff.

EDIT: Also, what's your opinion of Peter F. Hamilton's books?

Currently reading "Wizards and Glass" in The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. So far these books have just completely sucked me in. The world, mythology and characters are just amazing. My dream would be to one day see a HBO animated series based on it, it''ll never happen but it would be incredible.

 

I've got the first one of that series. Haven't got round to reading it yet, am currently reading the Illuminatus! trilogy. It's a sort of semi-parodical version of the Da Vinci Code, but was written in 1975. The style of writing is bizarre, but it reads surprisingly well. Definitely recommended for both conspiracy theorists and de-bunkers alike.

 

I have this, and started to read it before I started the book above but I just couldn't get past the strange writing style.

 

Stick with the Mars Trilogy first - it's very good indeed, although very heavy on technical detail. I will say this, though - if you can get through the Mars Trilogy, you can get through Illuminatus! relatively easily.

 

Oh, and if you decide you like Robinson, have a read of The Years Of Rice And Salt - it's a historical work of an alternative Earth where the East, not the West, became the dominant hemisphere, owing to the European nations being decimated and almost completely destroyed by the Plague. Well worth a read.

I lost Red Mars for a couple of days (I'd been reading in a bubble bath, yeah, a bubble bath and left it on the windowsill where somehow it wound up almost out the window and I couldn't find it) so I started reading Illuminatus! trilogy again and yes, I can see that I will get through it and probably enjoy it also.

What other SF would you recommend Carbomb? I'm just updating my Amazon wishlist for approaching pay day, and have been looking at Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, have you read this?

My wishlist, btw, in case anybody wants to buy me anything or critique my tastes! http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/registry/FLV8Z12DTIN1 it's mostly books.

I see.

So, where can you watch the HDNet shows in Blighty?

Currently reading "Wizards and Glass" in The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. So far these books have just completely sucked me in. The world, mythology and characters are just amazing. My dream would be to one day see a HBO animated series based on it, it''ll never happen but it would be incredible.

 

I've got the first one of that series. Haven't got round to reading it yet, am currently reading the Illuminatus! trilogy. It's a sort of semi-parodical version of the Da Vinci Code, but was written in 1975. The style of writing is bizarre, but it reads surprisingly well. Definitely recommended for both conspiracy theorists and de-bunkers alike.

I have this, and started to read it before I started the book above but I just couldn't get past the strange writing style.

'Red Mars is the ultimate in future history' Daily Mail 'One of the finest works of American sf' Times Literary Supplement 'Absorbing, impressive, fascinating... Utterly plausible' Financial Times 'Red Mars may simply be the best novel ever written about Mars' Interzone 'A staggering book. The best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written.' Arthur C Clarke

 

First of a projected trilogy about the near-future colonization of Mars, from the author of Pacific Edge, Escape from Kathmandu, etc. Robinson's Mars is realistically cold, arid, and lifeless; and even before they reach the planet, his first hundred scientist-colonists are hotly debating how Mars should be terraformed. Each phase of the latter process is told from a different character's point of view, and thus Robinson constructs an intricate and fascinating mosaic of science and politics, love and betrayal, survival and discovery, murder and revolution. Among further complications: practical immortality, discovered by Martian scientists; the building of a space elevator; ice asteroids to pound the Martian crust, bringing water and thickening the atmosphere; vast Moholes excavated to tap vital heat from the core; and the ingenious creation of life forms genetically engineered to survive the harsh conditions. Yet the constantly intensifying struggle between Mars's idealists and Earth's transnational corporate exploiters makes revolution inevitable; and a handful of First Hundred survivors flee into the Martian wilderness, where other idealists have secretly prepared hidden sanctuaries. Despite the imposing density of the narrative, a novel of splendid characters in a brilliantly realized and utterly convincing setting. A pity about the overfamiliar colonization-exploitation-revolution plot cycle; still, for power, scope, depth, and detail, no other Martian epic comes close. (Kirkus Reviews)

It's pretty good so far, it's a trilogy and so it's a commiment.

I'm currently playing Ninja Five-O for the GBA. Absolutly unreal game! Apparently very hard to find these days. They say a picture paints a thousand words, so have several thousand words:

 

 

 

 

I got this on eBay for

Hey guys where is the best place to go for console bundles? Specifically somewhere that would allow you to pick one of two games of your choice.

In Evolution, Stephen Baxter explores deep time to dramatise the story of Earth's evolving primates--from tiny shrew-like creatures dodging reptilian predators in the Cretaceous era, to humans of the 21st century and beyond.

 

The long drama starts with a bang: the Chicxlub meteor impact 65 million years ago--the dinosaur killer--bringing a holocaust of extinctions. Baxter describes that apocalyptic strike and aftermath in lurid, compelling detail.

 

By now the crater was a glowing bowl of shining, boiling impact melt, wide enough to have engulfed the Los Angeles area from Santa Barbara to Long Beach. And its depth was four times the height of Everest, its lip further above its floor than the tracks of supersonic planes above Earth's surface.

 

This book's hero is evolution itself, shaping surviving pre-humans into tree dwellers, remoulding a group that drifts from Africa to a (then closer) New World on a raft of debris, confronting others with a terrible dead end as ice clamps down on Antarctica. Elsewhere the river of DNA runs on, and ape-like creatures in North Africa are forced out of dwindling forests to stumble across grasslands where their distant descendants will joyously run.

 

Although the episodes resonate with one another, each is a separate triumph or tragedy whose early protagonists are uncomprehending animals ("He knew on a deep cellular level that..."). Darwin's imperatives force their successors to grapple with self-awareness, consciousness, memory, abstract thought. Tools emerge, and art, and language. One troubled genius of 60,000 years ago is seen inventing a theory of magic in hope of understanding and controlling the environment--and her contemporaries. Her reward is to become "the first person in all human history to have a name."

 

The story continues, and the apparent framing narrative--about a last-ditch global conference hoping to solve the ecological nightmares of 2031--is not the end. Baxter's final snapshot is 500 million years in our future....

 

Enormously ambitious in scope, Evolution shows the whole sweep and precariousness of pre-human and human development. We are so lucky to be here--although, as Baxter makes it clear, the luck may be running out.

I'm about half way through this almost 800 page book (started reading it yesterday morning) and though its not exactly what I was expecting, it's still very very good. It's extremely detail heavy, so if you don't like a lot of description I wouldn't recommend it.

1984 by George Orwell.

Firstly, in future if anybody tells me that this book is an "alarming paralell" to 21st Century Britain I'll smack them. It's nothing like that.

Secondly, I've found it readable if a little dry. I'm three quarters of the way through it now and am feeling a little bored.

A dark tale of racist violence and its aftermath, from British academic and critic Bigsby (Still Lives, 1996, etc.). In Tennessee, at an unspecified moment in the 20th century, various elemental characters are brought together in a heavy moral fable of humanity, racism, redneck violence and dogged lawmaking. False accusations of rape in a country store lead to the lynching of Johnson, an innocent black man whose 14-year-old son James is struck dumb after witnessing the murder. Poor local field hand Jake Benchley, who tried to defend Johnson, is punished, too: beaten, burned and branded on the chest with letters to signify that he's a "nigger lover." James helps Jake to recover, then defends him when two of the lynch-mob's inbred brothers threaten to shoot him, gunning them down instead. Now the mismatched pair goes on the run, with the rest of the brothers in hot pursuit as well as the sheriff, whose miraculous powers of deduction are on a par with the lynch-mob's tracking skills and instinctive logic. Bigsby's parable is melodramatic and breathless, generally more heavily focused on the bloody and busy, sometimes superhuman foreground action than the motivation behind events, although there are moments of introspection and lyrical, even sentimental reverie. All points of view are expressed, and all with some sympathy, although sometimes (especially in the dialogue) not all that authentically. The author's message lies partly in the bond that develops between James and Jake, partly in the mood of inescapable doom that plays itself out in the final scene in Indian territory. A brief, intense, self-conscious stab at an American tragedy. (Kirkus Reviews)

I wasn't expecting much from it, and picked it up last night just to have a quick flick through and it grabbed me. It's very engaging. I'm almost through it now, it's only 180 pages.

Congrats all.

I'm just happy to have been nominated enough times to make the vote, so thanks to everyone for that. Never thought for a moment I'd get joint third.

I know I said it before but I can't help but think the Secret Santa really helped with my chances of winning this so the actual nominations I received mean far more to me.

And shit, you have just reminded me that I haven't re-sent my gift. It's still wrapped up in my (vacated by myself, but all my stuff is still there) flat with the posters name on it. He knows it's me he got though, I hope he will be able to forgive the lateness.

But he's right.

Cant tell how gutted I am that last months "Kendo 'Lover of Tranny's' Nagasaki no shows LDN and creates half-a-dozen new accounts to put himself over" thread isn't nominated. I thought it was the funniest thing since the Shitarse thread and the whole Roger thing. Hilarious. Kendo's a mad old bastard isn't he?

Where is this?

That's bs man. How can Mab win this again? He's been tons better this year, and how he could win over the likes of hitman, crazyshady, pro ev, A&A is beyond me.