Bernard Horsfall was in one of my all-time favorite James Bond films, as well as three awesome Doctor Who serials (and Planet of the Daleks). R.I.P.

The appendices in A Song of Ice and Fire are downright strange

They're constantly lying (or at least really, really hedging the truth) when it comes to Cersei's kids' father (Jaime is described as Joff's mother's brother in Storm, for example, which isn't inaccurate). But what's extra-bizarre is that House Frey isn't in the appendices for A Game of Thrones, but House Martell - including characters that won't even be mentioned elsewhere until A Feast For Crows - is.

It just bugs me.

Doctor What and Doctor When

So there's going to be an audio drama featuring everyone for the 50th anniversary. Television-wise, there will be a one-hour special, which fans will note is thirty minutes shorter than the anniversary special thirty years ago.

And then there's this. Argus Filch will be playing William Hartnell in a documentary about the creation of the series. (Thanks to a case of Game of Hey It's That Guy, I'm now picturing Hartnell saying "mayhaps" and Walder Frey saying "impossibissibility.")

Me, I'll check it out, but I'll probably stick to celebrating by watching An Unearthly Child as well as this oh-so-helpful guide.

For Your Eyes Only

I watched this film twice recently, so let's talk about it.

But first let's talk about two things that were going on behind the scenes, because they inform a lot regarding this movie's tone.

First, For Your Eyes Only was originally promised after The Spy Who Loved Me. But that film came out in 1977, and the success of Star Wars that year changed everything. 1979 gave us Alien, Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture, and the original Battlestar Galactica, all of which owed something to Star Wars. (This is neither the time nor the place to get into a discussion of Star Trek: Phase II. I am aware of it, I don't need the lecture. This is me making a generalization.)  The James Bond franchise decided to follow suit and make Moonraker that year. And as awesome as James Bond In Space With Lasers could be, Moonraker was pretty awful. So the producers made the (correct) decision to go (relatively) down-to-Earth for the follow-up film.

Second, Roger Moore's original three-film contract expired with The Spy Who Loved Me, and after that he renewed it one film at a time. He took his sweet time renewing it... and here's where apocrypha sets in. Supposedly, the producers were actually in talks with Timothy Dalton to take over the role here (it's not quite as ludicrous as it sounds; they'd been sounding him out ever since Connery quit), and they even went as far as talking about how his James Bond would be different than Moore's. (For completion's sake, another name I've seen tossed around as a possible replacement for Moore was Sean Bean. I'll have a GoldenEye review up eventually and probably touch on this a bit more there.) Anyway, it's undeniable that the Bond of For Your Eyes Only is a lot closer to the Bond of License to Kill than the Bond of Moonraker.

With this in mind, let's dive in.

A lion still has claws

Am I the only one hearing this?

Not nearly as much a ripoff as other things. But I think the one inspired the other.

Is it the future already

So there's now a desk-sized tablet. It weighs 15 pounds and is the size of eight iPads stuck together.

And it hacks into the Pentagon and runs fifteen different light-cycle games on the game grid simultaneously.

In all seriousness, go put your iPad down on a flat surface and tell me how comfortable it is to use. I don't know anyone who doesn't prop it up at an angle.

I believe my point is made.

End of line.

Dusting off some Mass Effect 3

and for the first time since my first playthrough, I somehow screwed up the quarian/geth peace at the end of Act 2.  Since my Shepard was romancing Tali, I was obviously going to sacrifice the geth.

The renegade interrupts to shoot Legion repeatedly were remarkably cathartic.  After all that legwork, after going out of my way to do the most boring, dull, uninteresting, limp, mind-numbing, lackluster, tedious level in the game (that's the geth server mission, in case you didn't know), something, somewhere, went wrong and I didn't get the peace... giving Legion a death that actually made sense just felt so good.

Also the little snot did try to kill me. Nobody tries to kill the Shep and lives.