Alden Bates' Weblog

So, back when I watched Lost in Space on NZ TV, they would only ever seem to play season 2. This meant that I missed out on one of the more famous moments - the season 3 episode "The Great Vegetable Rebellion", which features the infamous carrot man. Legend has it Guy Williams and June Lockhart were unable to keep a straight face while filming this episode.

After watching the first two seasons on DVD, I was fair anticipating this event and...

Yeah.

They did what they could with what they had, I guess. :)

[Previously: WOTW Potato, General Vishishnou, Turdy, Thing, and, of course, another great Lost in Space moment...]

Continue reading "Dodgy Alien #6"

I was watching the latest episode of Doctor Who (3.08 Human Nature) last night and suddenly had a sense of deja vu...

Continue reading "Shooting Stars"

I wasn't planning to do another Unreal Tournament review so soon after the last one, but this level was just so darn pretty. Thus, screencap review:

Assault: Utopia
Author: Rob Hartley

Utopia is the story of the attack and destruction of a scenic village and its sacred historic landmarks. The drawback, you see, of making an Unreal Tournament level this beautiful, is that the purpose of the game is to blow things up. There's no tour at the start of the match to instruct you on what to do, so the tour (with explosions) is as follows:

Continue reading "UT Review: Utopia"

I was trying to find out why Googlebot and Slurp kept hitting a URL on here which was incomplete (they were trying to load http://www.aldenbates.com/ archives/.../09/spam_and_movable_type_comments.html) and stumbled on this page:

http://www.wealthdoctors.net/prosubmitter/log1.html

No link love for them. It's a log of attempts to post comment spam to various blogs. It looks like they tried to hit a couple of my entries (and were stopped by some rules in my .htaccess file), but successfully posted to a bunch of other blogs. I checked a few of the blog links they had there, and none of them had the spam comment that the log says they posted, so evidently they picked poorly when looking for blogs to spam. If they're using that page as an example of their leet spamming skills, it's not very impressive.

Their spambot appears to operate off their web site, so blocking hits 66.98.218.84 in your .htaccess file should stop them.

I haven't reviewed any Unreal Tournament maps for a while now, mostly due to being too busy. To make up for it I'm going to look at five maps in this post, the contents of the first Kranial Map Pack.

As a side note, I notice now that I have a faster computer, all the weapon and blood effects have appeared in the intro sequence which plays when you start a new single player game. I guess UT was jacking back the effects automatically.

Anyway, the five maps are:

• ONS-KG-LunarSurvey (Lunar Survey)
• DM-KG-Vega (Vega)
• CTF-KG-Chill (A deathly chill)
• CTF-KG-Decrepit (The Decrepit Sector)
• CTF-KG-RGB (RGB)

Continue reading "UT Review: Kranial Map Pack #1"

Around about a year ago, I wrote about Google trends, and posted a graph showing the trend for the search term "Doctor Who", and mapping it to the screenings of the show. I thought it might be interesting to revisit that now that the data for 2006 is in. Here's 2005 again for comparison:

The positions of the episode screenings are approximate, since Google only marks down as far as the months. You might also notice that the end-of-series spike seems to be a lot bigger than on the graph I posted last year. What's up with that, Google?

Here's 2006:

Interestingly there's a huge peak right when "Army of Ghosts" was screening, though if you compare the two graphs, it looks like there were less searches for series 2. However this is entirely due to the fact that Google doesn't label their Y axis. If you look at the combined graph for 2005/2006, you can see the line's a lot higher for most of series 2 than it was for series 1, with the "Army of Ghosts" peak almost twice as high as series 1 got.

Unfortunately Google Trends only has search data up to February this year, so no series 3 indicators yet...

I was watching Superman: The Animated Series again recently and remembered something that always bothered me about one of the characters: Captain Maggie Sawyer of the Metropolis PD appears to be going pants-less. Witness:

Continue reading "Maggie Sawyer Has No Pants"

The Free Paris Hilton petition currently has 24,981 signatures.

The Jail Paris Hilton petition currently has... 58,500 signatures.

No further commentary needed. :)

Adam (current editor of TSV) reported on the message boards that Tardis Tales is returning to the fanzine as of the next issue. Tardis Tales is a comic strip which ran in TSV for just about all of its first ten years - most of its run is now online in the archive. It's good to see the strip making a return. I'm sure the new series of Doctor Who has given Graham a lot of new ideas.

With that and the return of Doctor's Dilemma last issue, what's next? More Exegesis? :)

Coincidentally I was actually considering writing a Tardis Tales drabble for the challenge Jamas issued in TSV 74 but it seems kinda academic now...

And a month to the day since TSV 45 went online the next issue (appropriately titled TSV 46) has gone up on the web site.

Issue 46 was the first to feature a flash new version of the TSV logo, not to mention a return to the colour covers. Inside, there's the second half of the Andrew Cartmel interview (which reminds me to go add a link from the first half), another comic strip titled Monkey House, another Tardis Tales featuring the usual mayhem, and boatloads of reviews.

Of course, what I really like about this issue is there's not only pictures of Tetraps, but also a rare piece of artwork of my favourite companion, Mel Bush. Due to the fact they were reprinted from an earlier issue, the review of Time and the Rani aren't actually reproduced here, but they're already in the index as part of TSV 6.

This issue also contains the news that Paul McGann had been cast as the Doctor for a TV movie being filmed in Vancouver. Somehow it's strange to remember that this issue came out more than ten years ago now... I feel old. :)

Previously: Revelation of the Daleks

Cannon Point walkway has a sign at the bottom of it which is misspelled - leading to one of the few times you can say "It's not canon!" and normal people won't look at you funny.

...I'll get my coat. :)

Thar be spoilers in this post, no doubt, so proceed with caution (if at all). Also, no cartoons like Zeus Blog because I'm not as good an artist as Peter.

Continue reading "Doctor Who Series 3 (episodes 1 - 5)"