I just feel like mentioning this, because recently I was talking to a couple of friends about it… 😉

Bones and Castle are both TV series that I like and I watch [whenever I get a chance, which usually means so many episodes at once…]. But seriously, how can anyone not see that Castle is totally a Bones rip off?

I’ve been a fan of Bones since it first showed up in 2005. I find the series to be a very interesting one, and generally not brainless entertainment. The story lines are complex and sophisticated. Also full of interesting scientific facts, and I can even see a touch of sci-fi in there rather often. I do consider myself a fan of the series and I try to catch all the episodes even if it means late night marathons.

Castle on the other hand… well… let me see how to put this. Castle seems to have borrowed much of Bones’ structural elements. The cop and the novelist, the touch of romance, the adventurer and the conservative, the single parent… and many more details of Bones can be seen in Castle. But of course all of that does not in any way mean that Castle’s story lines are EVER as interesting as Bones’. Castle is a very usual mystery/crime/cop TV series. It’s rather entertaining and often enjoyable to watch, but I watch it for smiles only, and I don’t find any thrill what-so-ever in it’s plots. So all in all I don’t think I’d really call myself a fan of the series, and I don’t mind missing episodes here and there.

So yes, that’s how I compare the 2. I sort of like Castle but I very much see it as a rather weak Bones rip-off.

Oh, and I must say that I’m so looking forwards to seeing Bones season 7. The way season 6 ended was pretty insane… 😉

And I just finished reading the last issue of Silver Surfer 2011, 5 issue comics. As it is often the case with Silver Surfer, it was poetic, painful, sad and pretty impressive. So yes, if you’re a Silver Surfer fan in general, chances are you’re going to enjoy this quite a bit. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the recent 4 issue “Annihilators”. That one’s also pretty cool.

Also on my current reading list: The 2011 “Mighty Thor” mini-series, as well as “The Thanos Imperative” which unfortunately I never got a chance to read before. And yes, you’re not imagining things, there is a pattern here. It’s all story arcs featuring the Silver Surfer. What can I say, I’m obviously a fan. =P

What happens on the world wide web in 60 seconds…

[Click to see the full size version]

Back when the Angel TV series got cancelled, the fans of the series [including myself] were pretty disappointed. But not long after that IDW publishing and Joss Whedon came together, and in 2007 the first episode of “Angel: After The Fall” comic series was released. Since then I’ve been following the comics quite eagerly. In some ways I found them even more entertaining the the TV series were… so yes, you could call me a big fan. The series also had a lot of very cool spin-offs and side stories, my favourite of which was probably the “Illyria: Haunted” series.

Now, after about 5 years of pure awesomeness, the series is over. Last night I read the very last episode of the After The Fall story line, and tonight [if I can somehow manage the time!] I’m going to read the end to “Spike”, which is the very last spin-off of the series. So yes, no more After The Fall. That doesn’t make me a very happy girl. =/

I should say that I’m certainly not disappointed. The After The Fall series had a great story line, and a pretty fitting end. Unlike the TV series ending, with the comic series you get that feeling of closure. Everything has been truly well explained and concluded. But still, I can’t help but wish that there was more! =P

Mind you, this isn’t the end of Angel comics altogether. The publishing rights are being passed on to [or more like back to] Dark Horse Comics, and they obviously have their own plans for it. In about a couple of months, Dark Horse is realising an “Angel Omnibus” containing whatever they published during the time the TV series was still running [before the fall era!]. After that, as far as I can see, they’re starting an “Angel and Faith” mini series, which apparently takes place after the events of the Buffy Season 8 comics [Dark Horse’s].

I haven’t read the Buffy Season 8 comics yet, but I’m hoping to manage that sooner or later. And I’m looking forwards to Dark Horse’s Angel series. On the cons side, Faith was never one of my favourite characters at all… so… meh. But oh well, I guess I can only wait and see how that’ll turn out. 

On a bit of a different direction… in the entire After The Fall series, I found only 1 serious inconsistency, which is pretty interesting seeing how the episodes were written by so many different people. I sort of have a problem with the whole James turned Myresto Mor scenario. Anybody else find that weird? The James character was supposedly an angel for so long in the series, long enough to come across other angels as well as various representatives of the Powers That Be. So how did he suddenly turn out to be some sort of an evil demi-god? I mean, wouldn’t other angels or even more importantly the big parents notice that he’s just not one of the family?

I think I read somewhere that perhaps in a try to smoothen the situation, it was said that the Cordelia that came to Angel’s help as he was dying, was not really Cordelia. But I think we all know that it was Cordelia. And heck, she wasn’t the only one who would technically have easily been able to recognize James as a non-angel. But anyway… I try to think of Myresto as a new character altogether… and the plot was great enough to pretty much hide that little inconsistency.

I just hope that in the new Dark Horse Angel appearances, there’s going to be room for Illyria and Spike, since they really are bloody fantastic characters and my favourites in the series. I also would really like to see what Connor may do with his new found powers, but I’m afraid we may never know, if the Dark Horse writers try to not make any references to the ATF series. That would be a huge disappointment, so I’m hoping they’re not going to completely ignore everything that happened in ATF. 

Anyway… enough comic talk… time to get back to studying… =P

Ok is this strange, unbelievable, unfortunate, disastrous and all in all extremely bad. I realize it’s old news which due to being extremely busy I found out about now, but anyhow I’m enraged.

Ever since the start of SGU, this is my 4th post about the series. Previously, I wrote this, this, and this one. If you’ve read those, you probably have an idea as to how I was feeling about the series up to about October of last year. To me, it was a bit of a fail. The first season and beginning of the 2nd season of SGU involved too much soap opera and too little sci-fi for my taste. I kept watching the show, hoping it would finally pick up at some point…

Well guess what, it DID pick up! From the middle of 2nd season, we started seeing much more action. The plot got a lot more interesting, character development started to finally happen, and we started seeing actual sci-fi in there. Improvements kept coming at a high speed, and finally a couple of weeks ago I found myself saying to my boyfriend “hey, SGU is actually getting extremely good now, I can’t wait for the next episode!”, to which he enthusiastically agreed.

Now, 2 weeks later, and I read that the moment the show got good, it also got cancelled. And if you start looking at the big picture, and the collection of things that made the path to the show getting cancelled… it really looks VERY ugly.

First, SyFy rescheduled the show from Friday nights to Tuesday nights, because apparently Friday nights had to be kept for the most sci-fi, the most brilliant, the most imaginative show out there. It’s called WWE Smackdown. Yeah, it’ BLOODY WRESTLEING! What the bloody hell does that have to do with science and fiction, I have no bleeding clue!  

On the other hand, lets be honest here, the sci-fi genre [specially what you may call hard-core sci-fi] has never really been the most popular genre with the main stream. Rescheduling of the shows like this together with lack of interest from masses, results in the show having low viewer stats at the time it’s first aired. Of course no one cares that many fans record the show to watch when they can due to busy schedules, or that many of us don’t even live in North America so we have to watch the show through other channels.

And now for mentioning the obvious… low viewer stats, low DVD sales and basically not enough money being made out of a TV series, means no love from money hungry networks like SyFy who ONLY cares about the profit. So, who cares that this is the successor spin off to one of the most successful, most loved, most amazing series in the history of sci-fi that we’re talking about right? And who cares that it still has a lot to offer? And who cares about all the people who have spent years creating all this? The main stream prefers to watch some guys smack each other to pieces [theatrically of course] or some girls chew each other’s necks over an ex, so the so called blighted SyFy channel decides to give them exactly that.

Sad fact is that the SyFy channel has no longer anything to do with science fiction. I saw that coming, when they changed the name from Sci-Fi to SyFy, supposedly to explore other possibilities. This is what they meant by it. Just look at the show list for the channel, and you’ll see that by killing off SGU, they just removed the last serious science fiction series that they had from the network’s list of programs. That’s it. SyFy, is officially no longer a science fiction channel.

To add to the disaster pile, it turns out that the untimely cancellation of SGU, also has put a permanent stop to the production of the Stargate Atlantis movie, and any other movies from the Stargate franchise that we may have been hoping for.

A quick look around the web, has made it clear to me how utterly upset, angry and frustrated the fans of the show [not a small number] are. And how hard they’re all trying to save the show. I honestly can’t say that I’m keeping any hopes up… but who knows, I’m going to join every campaign I come across and sign any petition I can. Maybe something will come out of it after all…

And here’s what you should be checking out:

An article from Joseph Mallozzi’s website, answering some questions about the show and it’s cancellation

A Facebook page called Save Stargate Universe

And since the list of information, support, campaign and petition pages is growing daily, I have created a Verse page where I [or anyone else interested] will be collecting relevant info and links. Check it out!

And of course here’s the new fabulous Satori demo, which totally made my week. I must say this was specially a breath of fresh air seeing that out of about a good 30 or so [recent] demos that I watched in the past week, this was one of the very few [about 3!] that I actually enjoyed.

As it is the usual case with Satori, this is demo is quite a mental trip. One unusual side effect was that the first time I saw it, after I finished watching the demo I noticed that my heart beat had risen quite a bit. Part of that might be due to the unusual and very effective soundtrack. Check it out! =) Of course it’s best if you download the real time from here and watch that. 😉

A friend of mine with an awesome taste in both music and visuals just shared this piece of perfection on my Facebook wall. =) The clip totally blew my mind, mainly due to the brilliant effect of the right combination of audio and visuals. The track is called “Fear” by µ-Ziq. I completely love it. This is the fist time I hear the name of this musician, and now I’m surely going to get my hands on his albums.

The video, seems to be a part of the process of building a robot that can simulate emotional responses among other things. I have a feeling that I’ve come across this team’s work before… I have to dig it out of my archives. It’s pretty fascinating work.

I have no idea how I didn’t already know about this. It’s horrible… bad bad bad bad news for the world of music. =((( No more E.S. Posthumus… that’s a real pain. Franz Vonlichten of E.S. Posthumus passed away last May. Today I was looking to see if there’s any new albums from them, and I landed on this note written by Helmut Vonlichten, announcing the passing of his brother. =””(( It does not mention what happened though…

Gosh… it’s not as if good music is easy [heck, or even possible!!] to come by nowadays. E.S. Posthumus was a real gem, and definitely one of my favourite bands of the current era. I really love their music so much… *sigh*… what a talent…  *siiiiigh*… this is a real tragedy… *snifff*….

Now I only hope that at some point we will hear something new from Helmut Vonlichten…. *sigh*….. 

As most of you probably already know, I read a lot of comic books. Specially at times that I’m mentally busier than usual, I have a tendency of taking comic breaks in between things that means reading even more comics… Anyway…. Recently I’ve been devouring loads of BuffyVerse comics, mainly related to Angel and the gang, and I’ve officially finished all the [so far published] Angel + spin offs issues.

So then I started looking into other BuffyVerse material and accidentally I came across this 8 issue set by the name “Fray“. Now, I just finished reading the last issue of Fray, and I wish to God there was more! =P

Created by Joss Whedon and set in the BuffyVerse, “Fray” is a mix of sci-fi and slayer stories. In a rather pessimistic view of a future world, when vampires and demons and slayers have long been forgotten, “Melaka Fray” is the fist slayer to be called after so many years. She has no knowledge of the past and no connection to her heritage, and she suddenly finds herself in the middle of a war that she knows nothing about….

It turns out that Fray is actually coming back in the rather recently published Buffy season 8 comics, which I have not read yet. So, I guess that’s where I’m going next! Oh, and if you’re into either comics, sci-fi, Joss Whedon stuff or vampire stories, you should totally check this out! =)

Oh my GOD! This is sooooooo true! Thanks a lot René for this… I can’t agree more with it! =P

[Also: Now imagine that in my case I often have 2 notebooks and a number of other electronic pieces that need to come out…. yeah… phuunn…]