Finally getting on top of things. I only have one more exam, Applications of Quantum mechanics and Electrons in Solids on Thursday morning, then I’m free, free like a bird! So far I think the exams have gone pretty well, but we’ll see how things stack up in the summer!

The Steven Moffat-penned Doctor Who two-parter was as good as his previous work would suggest i.e. excellent, so I’m really happy with the fact he’s going to be in charge of the show for series 5. Shame that won’t be until the year after next! I do wonder what he has lined up for River Song in future - the fact that she’s a character the Doctor will know in his own personal future suggests we’ll see her again down the line.

I recently picked up Buffy Season 8 #15, and it’s possibly one of the best issues yet! Mecha-Dawn vs. Giant Dawn on the streets of Tokyo; can you really ask for more?

I also picked up (at the same time, oddly enough) Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky, the latter of which has a sequel, Iron Sunrise, that I’ve already read, courtesy of my sister buying it for me as a birthday present. So far I’m really enjoying both of them - the best sci fi doesn’t just have character and plot, it has wonderful ideas around which those plots and characters can wind until you have a rich world that at once is both fantastic and believable.

Snow Crash follows the fantastically named Hiro Protagonist: hacker, sword-fighter, pizza delivery boy, in a wonderfully neo-corporate future where a computer technology called the Metaverse allows you to walk around in a virtual-reality version of the Internet. I can’t quite believe it was written in 1992, as some of the ideas contained within are actually starting to come true in parts. The technological vision in here seems like an inspired extrapolation in the Internet-saturated world of today; from 1992, it’s visionary. This is of course one of the other functions of science fiction - to serve as a technological prophet of things to come.

Singularity Sky is different again - set in a future where a hyper-intelligent AI, the Eschaton, has bootstrapped itself into sentience on the Internet, and then distributed humanity across 3000 light-years of space, sending them back in time one year for each light year out, so the civilisations at the edge are 3000 years older than those in the centre. One of the most brilliant things is that real physical ideas are found in abundance - faster than light travel exists, but it’s also a means of time-travel, as such a thing would also be in the real world. Relativity is a fact, not something ignored as too complex to include.

However time travel is not unrestricted; any attempts to violate causality (the principle that events must occur after whatever causes them) are thwarted by the intervention of the Eschaton, which preserves causality for its own ends. This is just the thin end of the idea-wedge in here! The others include mediations on a post-scarcity society, and further ideas on post-human intelligences. Great stuff.

In a public service announcement, you can hear the whole new Coldplay album here: http://www.myspace.com/387267497 Alas, you have to sign up for that insidious hive, MySpace. I’m not sure what I think right now - it’s certainly growing on me, and some songs on here are instant classics, like Lost, and Violet Hill.

Right now I’m also trying to work out what I’m going to do with my time over the summer. I have a handful of ideas, including giving this site the overhaul it’s needed for a while now, and possibly figuring out some way of skewing a satellite map of London so that it matches the distortion of the Tube map. And possibly a good way of managing music. I’m not sure yet…

I’ll leave you with one of the works of the excellent Team Roomba. Best keep your volume turned down…

TF2 Karaoke: Bohemian Rhapsody from FLOOR MASTER on Vimeo

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/news/080520_news_01

This is really just the best news ever. I guess the news I heard was true. 

Annoyingly, the full 5th series won’t actually be on until 2010. In 2009 all we get is 4 specials. Lame! Also lame is that the first of Moffat’s two-parter this series (The Silence in the Library) is delayed by a week due to Eurovision.

I’ll just quickly bash out what I’ve been thinking lately, which isn’t much, all in all.

Doctor Who was on again on Saturday, so if you haven’t watch it yet, spoilers abound in the next paragraph or so. Then I’m going to talk about the finale of Skins, so if you haven’t watched that either, you might as well give up now.

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So I’m just having a look at the stats for this site.

Top search terms for all time:

1. andy simpson
2. asuseee
3. weeping angel doctor who
4. sally sparrow
5. weeping angels dr who
6. weeping angel dr who
7. andy simpson music
8. revision sucks
9. weeping angel
10. office 2007 student deal

I think this rather clarifies that my core audience seems to be people interested in me, followed by Asus EEE users, then Whovians.

So people interested in me, you’re in the right place. Congratulations.

Asus EEE folks, you’ll want to check out eeeuser.com because it’s a fantastic resource, the wiki is well worth having a look at. Also, if your institution has some sort of VPN-over-insecure-network as a way of connecting to their network, it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to hack in WPA Enterprise.

We all love Sally Sparrow. This seems to be a universal truth. The fact that we’re instead getting Catherine Tate, a re-run of Martha (she was OK, I guess…) and Rose (again? They don’t make barriers between parallel worlds like they used to) for the next series of Dr Doctor Who is just brain-numbingly painful to me. I sometimes wonder if Russell T. Davies actually has some kinda soft mulch inside his cranium, instead of the finely-tuned ninja-writer-brain possessed by pretty much everyone else writing on that show. Is the head writer supposed to be the worst of the lot?

I mean, I think the biggest achievement of the Sound Of Drums / Last of the Time Lords two-parter was to make you not notice the huge plot holes. I mean, why exactly did the Master go to all the trouble of becoming Prime Minister? One would think that controlling an army of 6 billion armoured robotic spheres would do the job well enough.

Never mind that the Doctor said he permanently fused the controls on the Tardis, only to then fix them again at the end of the episode. Maybe he just locked the controls out with private key encryption or something, but it seems ridiculous that the Master could turn the Tardis into a Paradox machine, but couldn’t fix the controls.

Awesome tangent. Anyways, I think my favourite term not in that list is “insipid boom-fest” for which I’m randomly the top search result on Google. Weird.

Thanks to Dickie for inspiring me to look at search terms, mine are all much duller than “ugly fatties”.

Update: I forgot to mention, I saw a League of Gentlement / Doctor Who actor/writer Mark Gatiss, as well as another Doctor Who writer I recognised but couldn’t name in Forbidden Planet in London. It was cool, and made my sister angry, which is always fun. Felt too lame to ask for an autograph, so I didn’t.

So according to here Steven Moffat is going to be the next Doctor Who showrunner. Given that he wrote last series’ fan-fucking-tastic “Blink”, I really hope it’s true.

And a guy sitting behind me has an Asus eee. Is it wrong I want to murder him and take it?

So I bought and enjoyed Crackdown on my 360, it’s a big ol’ barrel of fun. You’re a genetically engineered super-man, let loose to bring “justice” to a city full of gangs by a futuristic law enforcement Agency.

You have 5 major skills: agility, driving, explosives, strength, and firearms. Agility makes you faster and lets you jump higher, driving lets you drive faster and with better control and causes some vehicles to get upgrades, explosives make explody things more potent, strength lets you beat people up with greater effectiveness, pick up and throw heavier objects, and have more health, and firearms enables you to shoot more accurately.

Rather worryingly, you level up most of these skills my killing gang members. For some inexplicable reason, running people over makes you a better driver. I don’t even pretend to understand. I mean, I can understand blowing people up or shooting them makes you better at exploding or shooting… Agility makes far more sense, because you level that up by collecting green Agility orbs which tend to be found on the roofs of buildings and the like.

Anyways, it comes with access to the Halo 3 Multiplayer beta, and I was going to play some tomorrow. Except the beta ends today. Oh well.

In other news, I watched the new episode of Doctor Who that I managed to miss by going to Sarah & Sarah’s party. It’s called “Blink” and it’s astonishingly good. For a series about a time traveler Doctor Who has surprisingly few stories in which time travel is a critical element; this episode has a healthily non-linear storyline and monsters which were terrifying not because they were revolting or exploited cheap shots like being alien or murderers or the like, but by playing on a very primal fear of malign entities moving out of sight. I can see this being horribly frightening for children, this could make a lot of them afraid of the dark. Along with the last two-parter the quality of the writing has been phenomenal.

And the actress who played the lead part isn’t half bad looking neither, which helps.