@Pitermach, I plan to catch up on the last two episodes of new who this week. My dad and I have been watching them on Tuesday lunch, though I must confess the Mof continues to be underwelming. For much of my thoughts check the Dr. who thread, so I'm not expecting too much of the finale at all. as you said, the Finales even in the Davies era (the 9th and 10th Doctor), were a bit hit and miss, and sinse the Moff took over they've just dropped into cheese and convolutions and ridiculous deus ex from hell. Either way I'm not holding out much hope, for me, there are only 10 incarnations of The Doctor.

On the plus side the audios are awsome, and if your going through the 8th doctor set Minuette in Hell, Invaders from Mars etc, your really on a good stretch. minuette has a few issues (mostly the rather ropy American accents), but I love just how crazy it gets with Charley being almost turned into a prostitute and The Doctor in a mental hospital with his mind wiped and his fellow inmate believing that he! is The Doctor. The demon marcosius is also both hilarious and completely evil, his "charley is my darling! my darling! my darling!"  always makes me laugh .

I've actually just finished 67 The Game, a rather nice satyrical outing taking the micky out of Football with a society who play a team sport involving bladed hockey sticks, they even got one of the regular Bbc sports casters to play the commontater which was good, though I'm less sure it needed the extended Gangster bit at the end.

I keep thinking I should go off and read something else, (I've still got most of Iain Banks Culture series to go), but the audios are just too good and I keep running across absolute gems, even in stories which the first time through didn't impress me as much.

My parents have now gone, and my bathroom is painted blue and sealike, which is nice. We also went out for a meal last night and I had Zebra meatballs with Turreso sauce yes Zebra! rather good, though I thought a trifle over cooked sinse the one previous occasion I had Zebra it wasn't quite that tough, still rather nice and very different from the usual burger or pizza etc.

I have also started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. it's odd, usually in tv series or books with a paranormal or fantastical focus, I'm really interested in the fantasy elements, world, genealogy etc. Yet, in Buffy the Vampires (and the other couple of monsters I've seen in the episodes I've watched), have been a bit bleh. I like the way they just go savage with the teeth and chomp on people (much nicer than Twilight style sparkly happy vampires), and I like the way the series response to vampires is that they should be pounded on with lots of martial arts, but at the moment I don't find them that interesting. Not compared to say being Human's fantastic drug adict style vampires, or some of the Vampires in Doctor who, whether the intergalactic race of blood drinking conquerers who had a war with the timelords from the tv story State of Decay, or the bio engineered gangster vampires from the audio Project Twilight.

Either way, at the moment in Buffy the world of the supernatural isn't doing a lot for me, ---- though bare in mind I'm just on episode four so I suspect this to change later.

What I am however really enjoying is the very witty dialogue and quite engaging characters. Buffy as an airhead who is quite matter of fact about smacking around vampires is probably to me the least interesting character at this stage, though with joss Weeden at the helm I'm confident things will change. Zander reminds me of Socka from Avatar the last airbender with his rather fun insites, though he's a lot less intelligent and a bit more dispicable. Willow I really like, but then again I suppose I would find an intelligent girl who is something of a social missfit but quite a nice person undernieth appealing as a character. Giles amuses me with his general exasperation with everybody and everything, and i do appreciate the fact that unlike most English characters in American programs he's not a walking set of cliches, (I wince whenever The Simpsons attempts an English character).

The only character I really don't think much to thus far is Angel, just because he has "I am a mysterious stranger with a tragic past!" written across his forhead. I'm willing to see what Joss Weeden will do here though.

A friend of mine said the two things she liked best about Buffy were firstly that unlike a lot of modern urban fantasy such as Dresden, it really didn't take itself seriously, and sinse I'm a little board of "look at my terrible aaaaaanxt!" that is nice. Also she said she approved of the idea that vampires were evil savage demonic monsters that needed to have 7 shades pounded out of them! I definitely agree with her there, (I'm sick of Bloody pathetic vampires who winje about how terrible being immortal and attractive forever is constantly and can be killed by tripping over a carpit, pun definitely intended).

Today I don't have any major plans, though possibly will try and do something db wise, if I can stay away from the lure of more Buffy or More Doctor Who audios :d.

Hi Aaron.

Ah, I didn't realize Joss Wheaden was involved with agents of shield, that certainly bumps it up the list of stuff to watch. I initially only saw a couple of episodes of Buffy when it was being shown in the early 2000's, and was less than impressed, however I absolutely loved! Firefly, a truly fantastic sf series, which got me interested in trying Buffy out.

Glad you  liked Spirited Away. Pretty much anything by Studio Gibly is awsome and very surreal, especially considering they're basically run by Miazaki who is just god! I have loved everything I've seen, from their original and surreal things like Spirited away and Kiki's delivery service and the very famous Princess Mononoke, to their reimaginings of popular books.

Spirited away I liked for just how wonderfully surreal it was, sort of a dark version of Alice in Wonderland, and Yibaba the wtich is just plane scary (appologies for mangled spellings).

I find it interesting Gibly have also done some films based on popular fantasy books. All of them have not exactly been like the books, but all have been awsome. These include Arietti based on The Borrowers, (probably the most faithful to the book, but actually rather better sinse I found the book a little dull), Howl's moving castle, ---- which is rather different and was written slightly as an anti iraq war film, though is fun none the less even if the characters are far nicer and less engagingly selfish than Wynne Jone's originals. Also, Wizard of Earthsea, ---- yes Earthsea got the miazaki treatment! Well at least the third and fourth books did, as the film combines the story from The Farthest Shore and Tehanu.

This tends to get bashed by fans, but I enjoyed it myself, then again I was less than impressed with Tehanu anyway, and having it Miazakified was a definite improvement (particularly sinse it missed out on Leguin's very dismal feminism which made up most of the book).

Either way, Spirited away is fantastic, just like the rest of Miazaki's and Gibly's work. I particularly like thee scene where the little girl (who's name I won't attempt to spell), is having to run home before all the lights are lit, and is running up the steps while the little spider creatures behind her are setting the street lamps alight. A lovely moment and fantastically surreal. A friend of mine actually said she didn't get Spirited away because she thought it was too heavily based on Japanese mythology, what with the river Dragon and other slightly unusual elements, but I never found that myself, I just took it as a fantasy world with it's own logic and rules that was a bit alien, but all the more interesting because of that.

@Aaron, that is a good idea, more people should see Gibly. I don't know whether to be disturbed or amused that a friend of mine has been showing his four year old daughter the Gibly films (apparently she loves them), though even he admited he might need to change stratogy in a year or so when she can pick up on the disturbingness of the plot .

This morning I am going to put my Victor Stream through it's paces on a train journey, even more so sinse I managed to get first cclass tickits. East Coast is the best railway in the country for first class, sinse you don't just get free internet and more leg room with perhaps a free coffee if your lucky as happens on Midland, you get a full choice of drinks several time es a journey which go from tea and coffee to alcoholic drinks , and free grub from small snacks like biscuites and crisps to free meals, (they do some good cake and a pretty nice lassagnia).

There's nothing quite as nice as sitting on a warm train on a cold and blustery winters' day, sipping a coffee (possibly with a dram of wisky thrown in), and listening to Doctor Who audios, or playing something like the choiceofgames titles or The Engsign.

I actually considered as I'm watching Buffy buying the choice of the vampire games for a bit of thematic similarity,but then I remembered those are a bit closer to Anne Rice being set in 19th century Nuorleans than Buffy's modern hard rock type of atmosphere.

I'm also now having a try at Astro Galaxy. It is a game I've liked the look of for the past year or so and have just been waiting for the access fixes to make navigation possible with a screen reader, great that that has finally happened, and I look forward to seeing what in the galaxy I can find.

Watching yugioh in  Egypt?

Hi

Someone was talking about how expensive the passports could be? well, here's the absolute best consumer model and I found it for 112 bucks, I say absolute best because passport ultra has quite amazing speeds, I know because I have the 1tb black model and from an internal ssd it gets and average speed of 325 to 375 mbps down and about 275 to 300 mbps up on USB 3 and that's not even a super amazing SSD, this is also the special silver addition so it's aluminum instead of plastic, and it's the 2tb model with a 3 year warranty.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications … No=9103842

Honestly with the average lets say graphic audio book even, with all those sounds and music and 256kbps which is what you get when you buy them from the graphic audio site, that's like 400 to 800 mb per book usually, so lets say 800 just to be on the safe side and that's more than 2500 books, EBooks would be insane, and regular audio books would still be amazing, along with anything else you wanted to store, considering the drive is about half an inch thick, 5 inches in length and 3 and a half inches wide something that can easily fit in most medium pockets in pants and almost all in jackets and hoodys.

And that does account for the operating system that lets you use it as cloud storage with the right set up, the 256 bit =encryption, the drive utilities for keeping it in shape, the password protection etc, all of which only take up about 7.5mb all together, also even the plastic one is strong I've dropped it while transfering a few times, one of those o shit moments when you pick up the computer to move it and the drive is waving around on the end of the cord and hitting things...

I don't believe that someone couldn't get this type of thing as a christmas gift or something, nor that a person on SSI, though crap as it may be compared to other countries support systems, couldn't save up for this even if it took 2 months.

Hi,
@nin: I haven't seen Godzilla 2014 yet, but I'd definitely like to. Wow, this is a nice find and now I'm looking forward to it even more.

Hi everyone,

I would like to ask you a question. Has anyone had problems with iTunes 12 or not? I'm asking this because Apple has decided to remove the sidebar from this product.
In my opinion, this decision is very disapointing and leaves me with the sense that Apple is gradually reducing iTunes accessibility for JAWS users by not letting them choose whether they want the sidebar or turn it off completely. Are there any petitions I could sign online to persuade this company to bring back the sidebar or these don't exist? If these petitions exist, could you give me the links to where I can sign them, please?
Take care,
André

Hello,
iTunes 12 is still usable without the sidebar, it's just a bit more clunky, unfortunately.
I agree about this topic being good to talk about life in general.
Speaking of which, we're getting ready for Christmas over here, and I am quite excited as I managed to find, and I got permission, to order a quite niche product. I tested it to make sure it worked so I wouldn't have to send it back. I then asked my parents to hide it until Christmas. I won't reveal it until after Christmas as I'd like to do a better review of it.
Suffice it to say though, the test was successful, and I am looking forward to next year because of it. It's not really a huge, next-gen gadget, but it is quite geeky in nature.