Wednesday 9 November 2011

TV

The Case
Part 4 (of 5)
A twist-y cliffhanger! Except it's not really a twist if the thing your main/hero character thought to be true turns out to be true, is it?
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Frozen Planet
Part 2 Spring
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Junior Bake Off
Episode 2 (of 13)
Episode 3 (of 13)
This is tougher than the adult version: there, each week there were three challenges in which to impress the judges, with one person (sometimes two) kicked off; here, there's just two challenges in which to do well, with three people being sent home. Poor kiddies.
[Watch episodes two and three (again) on iPlayer.]

Comics

Batwoman #1 by J.H. Williams III & W. Haden Blackman
[2nd read]
Batwoman #3 is out today... but I won't be getting that until at least Saturday, so, as with Animal Man (and soon Aquaman), I'm having an in-print re-read of the issue I previously read digitally, and...

Batwoman #2 by J.H. Williams III & W. Haden Blackman
...catching up issue 2, too. And it's not as if I don't have enough other DC stuff to tide me over until this week's releases finally arrive.
Anyway, the art in this series is exceptional. Williams's art is beautifully detailed, the inks making everything unusually crisp and accentuated, sometimes inverting the style to make characters different (e.g. the DEO agent), and that's not to mention his varied and interesting layouts; while Dave Stewart's colours are thoughtfully applied -- look at the opening four pages, for instance, where Batwoman herself is very painterly, the location and Plebe have modern comic colouring, and the nameless gang of stock robbers are rendered in the blocky simple colours of old comics. This kind of thing goes on throughout. Brilliant stuff.

Articles

Treasury to close loophole that allows VAT-free DVDs
(from BBC News)
That would be the loophole exploited by the likes of Play.com to offer their low prices -- it's how they started out, and various other companies have copied it since, including Amazon for some of their orders.
It'll be interesting to see how this change effects things, mainly in terms of if prices for consumers shoot up. Supposedly this is to help smaller UK-based businesses be able to compete, but I can imagine bigger companies like Amazon keeping their lower prices and swallowing the cost of VAT in order to price out the competition. Or they might not bother. Fingers crossed things don't get jacked up too much...