By Roy Mathur, on 2014-02-02, at 16:14:00--16:51:29 GMT, for Roy's Rocket Radio, Listen
Chaotic Plan 9 from Outer Space of the podcasting world is back on the right day!
Now I have to get the time right too (earlier).
Gatiss presents, and delivers with a slightly disturbing, glacial smoothness and a faint air of gleeful menace, a fun, chilling, yet deeply respectful exploration of European horror, from the silent era to modern day.
After watching this, I am now fully convinced of Gatiss's nerd credibility, as he seems to share many of my own predilections for the macabre.
If you like horror, I'm sure you'll love this...
It covers the whole spectrum of European horror, including the cinema of Germany's pre-war Weimar Republic and later Italian Giallo.
Some of the movies mentioned are:
Recommended and available for one more day on BBC iPlayer... and preceded by A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss (2010) mini-series.
Check out Mathew Sweet's excellent little chat about the David and Goliath rivalry between Milton Subotsky's Amicus the jugernaut of Hammer.
Hammer = Gothic/Victorian horror, vampires, Transylvania
Amicus = More modern day settings and portmanteau frame tales, but also some SciFi (not mentioned in programme).
Check it out on iPlayer in the next four days.
Personal favourite Amicus films (constantly repeated on TV): The Monster Club (1980); so camp it's brilliant and great rock theme and The House That Dripped Blood (1970) with Jon Pertwee.
As read by Tom Baker (excellent voice acting) has reached episode three on iPlayer, with one day left to listen.
A few weeks ago (Ep.22) I reviewed volume one of this series and was lucky enough to happen upon the second volume of Brian K. Vaughan's clever fantasy/scifi riff on Star Wars at my local library last Thursday.
Marko and Alana continue their escape from the forces of Landfall and Wreath who have, respectively dispatched, aristocrat Robot IV and human bounty-hunter, The Will, to kill them.
In this volume we also get to meet Marko's reactionary mum and easy-going and delightful dad.
My only criticism is that the modern colloquialisms, earthy and even coarse language, while not particularly offensive, is a little grating and detracts from the overall epic feel that I think this story is capable of producing. Though I'm sure people hearing this will just say that I'm being precious!
Google shut down iGoogle, then FeedReader and FeedBurner API, Facebook no API, Twitter and Skype shutdown API arghhh! Possible NSA backdoors + how much can we trust services to stay up?
But Jacob Cook's ArkOS startup was sucessfully funded on Kickstarter in November with the intention of creating a cloud platform you can run from home...
It is cheaper than existing solutions, because it is cheaper: custom linux running on Raspberry Pi hardware.
Initially it will support: Web Hosting, Email, Chat, Cloud Services, and Social Networking.
Great idea, though I'm not sure what ISPs will make of home hosting!
It's built for RPi, but what if you have obsolete hardware, like a netbook, just lying around? Well, apparently apart from plugins, that are being worked on, you can, with a bit of finagling, because it's mostly written in Python. I think that I'll wait and see for now though.
This might be the time to jump ship with MS to drop Windows XP support on April 8, 2014.
I really would love to get some reviews.