anotheruserwithnoname

[anotheruserwithnoname]

SUPERMAN MEETS THE QUIK BUNNY (DC, 1987)

Quicky the Nesquik Rabbit

Art: Carmine Infantino / Dick Giordano

[anotheruserwithnoname]

The biggest surprise of Wednesday Season 2

Don't worry, I'm not going to spoil anything plotwise but the first half of Wednesday Season 2 had an extremely pleasant surprise. I'll be giving my thoughts on the complete season after the second half drops in a few weeks (I hate this idea of splitting seasons, especially when you only have 8 episodes to begin with), but I'm loving it so far.

But the surprise for me was .... (spoiler break follows since it's still a cool surprise.)

Billie Piper sings again!

For those who may not know, the Actress Formerly Known as Rose Tyler started out as a pop singer. She had a number of hit records but in 2003 said she was giving up music in order to focus on acting, launching an acclaimed career in both TV and West End. Fans of her singing had no more to work with other than her early CDs.

That is until she took on the role of mysterious music teacher Isadora Capri in the dramedy Wednesday. Depicted as a former child prodigy, she is mostly seen playing piano. I'm assuming that isn't her actually playing, of course. But in one scene she performs Nevermore Academy's anthem, and it's definitely Billie singing. That was cool enough.

But then two episodes later we hear her singing a version of Creedence's Bad Moon Rising - in duet with Catherine Zeta Jones, who I don't think has done much singing on screen since Chicago. Billie still has a great voice and could probably do a new album today if she wanted to.

(In the next episode Billie sings again, this time doing a car-radio singalong to the 70s power ballad "All By Myself", but that was done for comedy. I won't spoil why.)

For season 1 they released a single of the cello solo Wednesday played. Fingers crossed a Bad Moon Rising single might get some love this time around! (Also hoping we hear Billie sing again in the back half of Season 2!)

[anotheruserwithnoname]

Terence Stamp (July 22, 1938-August 17, 2025). R.I.P.

Still the best General Zod ever.

[anotheruserwithnoname]

my place of work has just restricted and forbidden the use of AI tools and any use will treated as a security and policy breach

[anotheruserwithnoname]

A real cultural disconnect

I tell you, sometimes I feel totally disconnected with a lot of TV culture these days. For example, I only yesterday learned that the streaming series Severence is a science fiction show. I'd been ignoring it because I assumed it was a standard drama.

And yesterday I posted an item about a Stranger Things script book to tweak some out-of-touch comment made in the article, but then I realized I was out of touch myself: couldn't tell you a single thing about the show, what it's about, who stars in it, etc. beyond the fact that Kate Bush got a hit thanks to the show with a song I bought when it first came out in 1985. Oh and that they did a tie-in novel published in the format of a 1980s-era horror hardcover. And they put out a Little Golden Book for kids based on the show. I know that because I saw it in the store when I bought the LGB based on The Office (because guys in their mid-50s are so obviously the target market for Little Golden Books these days).

I used to be more on top of things. And while it's easy to blame streaming (I don't stream and only follow shows like Wednesday and Strange New Worlds thanks to knowing people who do), 12 hours ago I learned of the existence of Hyperdrive, a Nick Frost BBC comedy series from nearly 20 years ago that I'm told is Red Dwarf crossbred with Star Trek (and my brother, who is watching its 12 episodes on streaming, also says it's Britain's version of The Orville, though it predates Seth MacFarlane's show by more than a decade).

I've yet to watch it, so I don't know if I'd like it or not, but I am floored that I am only learning of its existence in 2025. It's not as if I didn't have access to the Internet in 2006, and even if the show didn't air in Canada (or maybe it did), I should have known about it. Especially since in those days I was really into Doctor Who, which had just come back to TV, and I had always been a fan of Red Dwarf since it appeared on Canadian TV in the early 90s. It sounded like the show I'd have eaten up like a bowl of Nutella and crackers.

Makes me wonder if there are other shows out there I'm unaware of. There is precedent to this. I honestly never heard of the film Napoleon Dynamite until it celebrated its 15th anniversary - puzzling everyone I knew who seemed to think that I should be as aware of it as, say, Back to the Future. And I swear that Harry Potter did not exist before the release of the Goblet of Fire book which had kids lining up all night to buy (this was before the first movie came out) and that I must have slipped into an alternate universe where Potter was a thing.

That's what I call it: slipping universes. I can only conclude that in the universe I hail from, Nick Frost never starred in a sci-fi comedy called Hyperdrive in the mid-noughties and Severence was a workplace drama along the lines of Mad Men. LOL

[anotheruserwithnoname]

"Summer's nearly over" is one of the most depressing things you can hear in mid-August. Mind you people have started saying that in mid-July, so what do they know.

[anotheruserwithnoname]

An unintentionally hilarious news item from Variety. It's not a joke that they're releasing a collection of the scripts from the first seasons of Stranger Things. That in itself is cool (as long as they followup with a book for Season 5). It also contains behind the scenes stuff, etc., as can be expected.

None of that is funny and is of course great news for fans.

This paragraph is the funny part:

The script release fits into a broader trend in publishing, where on-screen franchises are mined for print products that appeal to collectors — from action figures and tie-in novels to, most recently, these extensive script compilations.

Maybe variety missed the memo but script compilations have been published for many years and I personally own tie-in novels based on movies that are in some cases a century old. Ask Doctor Who fans if novels based on a show are a new innovation. And even the idea of complete season scripts is not new: the first season of nuWho was released as a script collection back in 2006, and several full seasons of Tom Baker's era were published not long after and I have the complete scripts for The Prisoner in a two volume set.

I'm not going to accuse Variety of using AI, but an out-of-touch paragraph of that nature is the type of thing that does raise an eyebrow, especially coming from the entertainment media of record.

PS: Here's my receipt on that statement about a century old book. This is a novelization in my collection of a silent film starring Clara Bow that was published in 1928 and included extra content about the film including a photo section and an intro by the actress herself:

[anotheruserwithnoname]

take a break while watching this little bunny cross your dash

[anotheruserwithnoname]

I only learned about this last week in a professional development session (I'm an editor by trade), and not only do I use em-dashes I'm instructed to use them as an alternative to make a text easier to read online. Like everything they can be overused (and few people know the difference between a hyphen, dash, en-dash and em-dash anyway), but they don't always mean AI. I'm waiting for someone to say this about the semi-colon.

Being told to stop using em dashes in my writing because ChatGPT uses them a lot and people might think it's written by AI...

[anotheruserwithnoname]

TALI'ZORAH NAR RAYYA MASS EFFECT 1 CHILDREN OF RANNOCH SQUID'S SQUAD OUTFITS

[anotheruserwithnoname]

candy before beer youre in the clear. beer before candy hurricane sandy

[anotheruserwithnoname]

Small businesses are hard to figure out sometimes

To anyone reading this who runs a small business, I hope you get where I'm coming from and maybe this might give food for thought.

I was at a small seafood business the other day and I was surprised to see a sign saying they were no longer accepting cash, only credit cards and debit. They gave no reason why but they did have a noticeably passive-aggressive sign claiming not accepting legal tender is allegedly legal in Canada because customers have the right not to spend money if they don't agree to the terms of service of a business. (In other words, "We can't force you to use cards. Don't like it, go elsewhere.")

The reasoning for it puzzles me.

But any business owner who has lost profit because of a customer using a card on a $2 item knows why going no-cash is a bad idea. Especially a small business. A place like Walmart can swallow the service charge of somebody doing the same (I saw someone pay for a 50 cent item on a card not long ago).

Fast forward one day and I'm at another small business, this one an artisan market, and they had a big sign up asking people not to use credit cards. They would accept them but they had a note about the service charges, etc. and asked people to consider cash if possible. They didn't mind debit cards that much, as for them the service charge wasn't that bad.

So that means this place probably did have people using cards on $3 items, robbing them of profit on the sale.

I mentioned the fish place to the shopkeeper and they scratched their heads and said it made no sense why a place would not take cash.

Certainly I'll never shop at that fish store again (there are 100 others to choose from around here).

One moral of the story is if you decide that you won't take cash, indicate why instead of going all "like it or lump it" on customers. Maybe that shop had a problem with robberies (unlikely in its location, but you never know). Maybe employees were pocketing the cash from the till. Maybe Canada Revenue is auditing and it is easier to track card payments. There was a short-lived phobia about handling money during the pandemic (debunked by scientists and authorities), but that isn't a thing anymore. I don't know, but a lot of uncomplimentary guesses are possible as you can see.

Contrast to the other shop that calmly explained why. Which also removes the concern that they're failing, which is often (but not always, I stress that) a reason why a shop might stop accepting plastic. Though in this case they still accepted cards, they just prefer cash.

This also raises the concern that people are increasingly being forced to have a) credit cards and b) smartphones in order to function. Screw people who don't want to deal with cards, or who don't have credit, or who might want to buy a $2 item with change. I had to cancel a planned visit to an attraction in Vancouver during my recent visit there because the parking lot required an app that would not work on my phone. And there are other places now that require apps for parking in their downtown cores. My answer to that is I don't spend money at the businesses in those cities. If they're going to make phones and cards mandatory then the government needs to start paying those bills for us.

[anotheruserwithnoname]

"The world will always need editors" - John Rhys-Davies said this to me at a sci-fi convention about 8 years ago. Truer words were never spoken.

Delicious. We love to see it.

[anotheruserwithnoname]

Just in case anyone thinks this music thing is new, Peter Capaldi recorded his first single with a group called The Dreamboys (whose membership later included Craig Ferguson) in 1980, 3 years before Local Hero.

[anotheruserwithnoname]

Full chaos, full charm, full POWER

Peter Capaldi at Belladrum Festival, Aug 2025

[anotheruserwithnoname]

Forgotten Intellectual Properties: Should They Come Back?

Jonni Thunder: Origin in a four-issue mini series in 1985. She was a private eye who came into possession of a gold statuette that let her become a being of pure energy, which was shown prominently on the covers, but was barely used at all in the mini-series. Appeared a few times in comics after that, but never made much of.

[anotheruserwithnoname]

Teenage me just pumped the air.