Andy's Blog

"Yeah, boys!" This is not so much weird as momentarily odd, and as a pop culture reference it falls short of being recognizable or even particularly unique by a long way. It is a weird thing I say, however, and it has its origins in a particular passage from Dave Stone's Sky Pirates! , a passage summarising the events of the previous book in the series, introducing the two new companions for readers who may be less than completists:   And when the time-travelling alien, the Doctor, had offered to take them along with him in his ship - for want of a better word - Cwej's instant and automatic reaction had been: 'What, travel the whole vast panoply of space and time, righting what once went wrong and confronting hideous beings of slithering, inutterable and unmitigated evil on their home turf? Yeah, boys!' While Detective Adjudicator Roslyn Forrester stood somewhere in the background with a hand over her eyes. It may itself be a pop culture reference, possi...

"Everything is NORMAL. You will not SUSPECT me." There was a period when I got reasonably into reading  ReBoot  fan fiction. I was much more interested, though, in the critiques presented by a fan named Hanako. This introduced me to the concepts like the Self-Insert, the God Mode Sue, and many other fanfiction tropes, both specific to the ReBoot mythos, and common to any fandom. I'm reasonably sure it gave me some early direction on how not to write. It also introduced me to the notion of MSTing. I was unaware of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 at the time, but nonetheless I was thoroughly engaged by the mechanic of fictional entities commentating on and responding to the occasionally-coherent ramblings of amateur authors. There was an ongoing Mystery Reboot Theater 4000  series, which had Bob transplanted directly to the Satellite of Love and Megabyte joining the Mads, but the above quote comes from one published by Hanako and sidekick Claire, featuring themselves. Th...

It's fairly obvious that "Pick" - formerly PickTV - is the Sky-run freeview channel; Wikipedia confirms my suspicion that it is simply a rebranded Sky 3. I wonder why they changed the name? I guess either "Sky 3" tested poorly - people thought it was third-class or third-rate or just generally offcuts - or they wanted to trick people into watching what they thought was an independent channel so they could bombard them with adverts for other fine Sky products at a discount rate. And wow, what does it say about the broadcasting industry that it is cheaper to buy your own channel than it is to buy advertising space on somebody else's? Anyway, I only mention this because they've recently been pushing this thing called "Moonfleet". I don't know anything else about the show. I believe it involves boats. An advert in my news feed suggests it contains Ray Winstone. Whatever. The important thing is it's called Moonfleet. Moooooonfleeet. ...