I’m not dead, i swear.

I know I haven’t really posted this week, and I have a legit reason this time!

A while ago I was asked to build a web­site. I won’t explain what it’s about quite yet, as I’m still build­ing the theme for the thing, which has been an adven­ture. I always forget how finicky PHP is, and then I start coding in it for some­thing and I want to shoot myself in the head. It dies when you don’t think it would, and then works when by all logic it shouldn’t. Joy oh joy.

I’ll give a quick run­down of what’s been going on, and I’ll try and get some reviews out this week­end between coding stints.

Another Doctor Who adven­ture comes and goes, and I’m once again left won­der­ing how this got to print. Sting of the Zygons wasn’t a bad story by any means, but the new novels just aren’t doing it for me. With the orig­i­nal Doctor Who book series, the authors were writ­ing sto­ries that were so epic that they simply couldn’t be done on screen at the time. Sto­ries so fan­tas­tic that imag­i­na­tion is a require­ment in order to read them. This is a qual­ity that I find lack­ing within all of the new novels that I have read thus far, with excep­tions being made for The Last Dodo, Stone Rose, and The Clock­wise Man.

Why can’t the new series make books that match the cal­iber of the old series. This is prob­a­bly the newest one that I have read of the original(ish) series, and its grandeur dwarfs any of the new series with out even bat­ting an eye­lash. Taking place during the Sixth Doctors’ time, The Quan­tum Archangel is a sequel of The Time Mon­ster from the Third Doctors’ time in the limelight.

So I spent the week­end up in North Bay vis­it­ing Theresa, and so I didn’t really have a post ready for Monday. Yeah, it’s a lack of plan­ning on my part but that’s just how it goes.

In any case I just drove 5 hours to get home. I’m tired, I’m hung over, and I just had a bath wherein no one told me that there was shower cleaner present on every sur­face of the damned tub. Here’s hoping I don’t get a rash or mutate through the night.

Finally! A new series that actu­ally has a little body to it. I was hon­estly start­ing to lose hope in the new adven­tures. The Last Dodo puts a little bit of that dark­ness, that deep reflec­tion of the Doc­tors that has been until now has been sorely lack­ing from the new books. Though there is only a small moment of it (part of which is quoted in this review) it demon­strates what I’ve been talk­ing about over he past couple books. I know that the authors were prob­a­bly told that they need to ease into it all, what with trying to nail such a wide demo­graphic and so many new read­ers, but have a little com­pas­sion for those who’ve stuck with the series all these years.

Today I com­pleted the Doctor Who novel “The Price of Paradise” writ­ten by Colin Brake, and fea­tures the 10th Doctor and Rose.

The syn­op­sis is fairly straight-​forward: Lay­lora is a per­fect planet. Pris­tine and beau­ti­ful, and the res­i­dents live a nomadic life and praise the planet like a deity. The Doctor and Rose show up just as another Ship crash-​lands. He lends a help­ing hand to get them off the planet, but the planet is work­ing on remov­ing them in her own way. The planet is, for lack of a better term, aller­gic to all out­side objects. This includes alien people, ships, waste prod­uct, etc. Oh, and did I men­tion that the planet can turn it’s native people into giant hive-​minded furry things with 4 arms that have scythes for claws?

Que the hilarity.

I drove up to North Bay this week­end to go see the lady-​friend. Fun times were had by all.

That being said, dri­ving 5 hours up north, espe­cially on your own really drags on you. I sug­gest every­one try it at least once so that they can know what I’m talk­ing about. There is only so much wonder derived from carved out rock until the appeal is some­what diminished.