Thursday, 30 May 2024

Wednesday, 29 May 2024

TV

Richard Osman's House of Games
7x42 Week 9: Tuesday
7x43 Week 9: Wednesday
[Watch various episodes (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

October Moth (1960)
[#41 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024]

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

Well, a week and a half this time, because this week's update is so late. I've been away and busy. And no one cares but me anyway. And nothing's arrived or been purchased in the last couple of days, so the numbers are the same as they would've been on Saturday anyway. All new releases, and all arrived early — so they kinda belong in this week anyway.

Lots of box sets this week, one way or another — as you can see, only five new titles but 15 new films. That's two series box sets (the Whistler from Indicator and Shinobi from Radiance) and a two-part film (Trenque Lauquen); plus part two only of a two-part film (Dune), and one other release with multiple cuts (Planet of the Vampires). Fun times.

Number of titles in collection: 3,297 [up 5]
Of which DVDs: 1,002 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,295 [up 5]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 353 [up 1]

Number of discs in collection: 7,986 [up 11]
Number of films: 4,067 [up 15]
Number of additional cuts: 386 [up 1]
Number of TV episodes: 9,716 [no change]
Number of short films: 1,145 [up 3]

See you next week, faithful reader.

Tuesday, 28 May 2024

TV

Death in Paradise
12x05 Episode 5
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Richard Osman's House of Games
7x41 Week 9: Monday
[Watch various episodes (again) on iPlayer.]

Saturday, 25 May 2024

Friday, 24 May 2024

TV

Death in Paradise
12x04 Episode 4
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Richard Osman's House of Games
7x35 Week 7: Friday
7x36 Week 8: Monday
[Watch various episodes (again) on iPlayer.]

Thursday, 23 May 2024

Videos

Critical Role
2x22 Lost Treasures [2nd half]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube, or Twitch, or Beacon.]

Talks Machina
#70 'Lost Treasures'
[Watch it (again) on Internet Archive.]

Wednesday, 22 May 2024

Videos

Critical Role
2x22 Lost Treasures [1st half]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube, or Twitch, or Beacon.]

Tuesday, 21 May 2024

Videos

Talks Machina
#69 'Stalker in the Swamp'
It's getting to be a thing (okay, it's happened twice) that when Liam's on he refers to how far they are through the campaign — this time, he goes with "a fifth". Wrong! It's only a seventh. I wonder if he spends the last 25 or so episodes like "well, we're in overtime now"...
[Watch it (again) on Internet Archive.]

Monday, 20 May 2024

Articles

As D&D booms, Critical Role makes its own kind of nerd celebrity
by Sarah Parvini (from The Washington Post)

Me, mentioning something to do with Critical Role?! Well, wonders will never cease! But seriously, if you were interested in a sort of "state of the nation" about where CR is right now, coupled with sufficient background detail to keep the unfamiliar up to speed — i.e. a good all-round introduction for right now — this seems a good place to start.

Videos

Critical Role
2x21 Stalker in the Swamp
Bowlgate. Apparently it was some big debate in the fanbase at the time, but the YouTube comments section definitely comes down firmly on one side...
[Watch it (again) on YouTube, or Twitch, or Beacon.]

Sunday, 19 May 2024

Videos

Critical Role
2x20 Labenda Awaits [2nd half]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube, or Twitch, or Beacon.]

Talks Machina
#68 'Labenda Awaits'
[Watch it (again) on Internet Archive.]

When I mentioned the other day about passing 100 hours of Crit Role "depending how you define it", today is the kind of thing I was referring to: as well as the above, I watched about two hours of stuff relating to their Kickstarter from five years ago, which led me to an hour-or-so con panel from last year, which led to me watching huge chunks of a significant episode from Campaign 1 — which was so good, it's solidified the idea I should probably go back and watch that properly at some point. Just adding another 450 hours to my massive Crit Role backlog...

this week on 100Films.co.uk

5 new reviews were published to 100Films.co.uk this week...


Archive 5, Vol.11
Featuring...
- Dumb and Dumber (1994)
- Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
- Small Axe: Mangrove (2020)
- Out of Africa (1985)
- Rambo: Last Blood (2019)
Read more here.


More next Sunday.

Saturday, 18 May 2024

TV

The 1% Club
3x09 Episode 9
[Watch it (again) on ITVX.]

Doctor Who
40x03 Boom
Steven Moffat has written more Doctor Who than anyone else, and yet still he comes out with solid-gold five-star bangers. Long may he continue.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Comics

2000 AD #2376

Doctor Who Magazine
Mancopolis Parts 1–5
The advantage to accidentally being five issues behind with DWM is I can read the 15th Doctor’s whole first comic strip story in one sitting — the prime advantage to that being it was over more quickly…

Videos

Critical Role
2x20 Labenda Awaits [1st half]

Thus far I've been linking to episodes on YouTube because that's the only place to watch the first 19 episodes of Campaign 2; but from here on, episodes are also available on Twitch or Beacon. YouTube is the only platform where you can watch the episodes free, but with ads, so the other two are worth mentioning because, depending how you want to do things, their ad-free options might be better. For example, you can pay for YouTube Premium to get ad-free viewing there, but if you have Amazon Prime you can subscribe to a Twitch channel for free — which I do, so I've subscribed to the CR Twitch channel and intend to watch episodes there going forward.

[Watch it (again) on YouTube, or Twitch, or Beacon.]

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

Number of titles in collection: 3,292 [up 4]
Of which DVDs: 1,002 [down 1]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,290 [up 5]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 352 [up 2]

Number of discs in collection: 7,975 [up 7]
Number of films: 4,052 [up 4]
Number of additional cuts: 385 [no change]
Number of TV episodes: 9,716 [no change]
Number of short films: 1,142 [up 5]

Having weirdly gone down last month (despite my collection only ever getting bigger), what will the runnng time count do this time?

Total running time of collection (approx.):
560 days, 10 hours, and 2 minutes.
(Up 7 days, 3 hours, and 23 minutes from last month.)

Well, that's quite an increase — my last yearly increase was in the 24-day ballpark, so this represents almost a third of that — for one fairly regular month? Suggests I did do something wrong last month to make the total go down. Oh well, hopefully all is on track now...

See you next week, faithful reader.

Friday, 17 May 2024

TV

X-Men
2x03 Whatever It Takes [2nd watch]
2x04 Red Dawn [2nd watch]
2x05 Repo Man [2nd watch]

My recent focus on Critical Role and classic Doctor Who has rather left X-Men by the wayside — it’s over a month since I last watched an episode. So, here’s where I begin to rectify that. (Ironically, one of my motivations is I feel I should finish this before I start the Critical Role animated series. Ha ha ha, I’m obsessed.)

Fiction

The Once and Future King by T.H. White
The Sword in the Stone Chapters 5–6

Thursday, 16 May 2024

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

Fiction

The Once and Future King by T.H. White
The Sword in the Stone Chapter 1

No pressure, just one of the most acclaimed works of fantasy / Arthurian literature, which I've been meaning to read for years (I bought it almost four years ago, after many years of umming over which edition). Only about 830 pages to go, so let's see...

Videos

Critical Role
2x19 The Gentleman's Path [2nd half]
With this, I pass 100 hours of Critical Role content watched.
(Depending how you define it, I probably got there a while ago — this is just counting whole episodes and Talks Machina, not clips and interviews and music videos and behind-the-scenes segements and so on.)
[Watch it (again) on YouTube.]

Talks Machina
#67 'The Gentleman's Path'
Despite multiple attempts to get the below video link to work, for some reason it kept giving up partway through; so I had to resort to the audio-only version, which can be found here. ("Gif of the Week" and "Fan Art of the Week" kinda lose something — or everything — in audio-only form.)
[Watch it (again) on Internet Archive.]

Tuesday, 14 May 2024

Videos

Critical Role
2x19 The Gentleman's Path [1st half]
This episode originally aired 17th May 2018, so I'm now exactly six years behind on Critical Role. Yes, six years! Eesh. But hey, it was six years and two months at the start, so I'm slowly catching up. Long way to go, but one day...
[Watch it (again) on YouTube.]

Monday, 13 May 2024

Videos

Talks Machina
#66 'Whispers of War'
"We're maybe a sixth of the way into this story," says Liam. Little did they know... it's actually more like an eighth. (Considering they had no way of knowing exactly how long Campaign 2 would last, it's actually not too bad a guess. I presumed he pulled the figure out of thin air, but he may have been basing it on Campaign 1: that ran 115 episodes, so on that scale, 18 eps would indeed be about one-sixth.)
[Watch it (again) on Internet Archive.]

Sunday, 12 May 2024

Saturday, 11 May 2024

TV

Doctor Who
40x01 Space Babies
40x02 The Devil's Chord
Space Babies is adequate; very much in the vein of lightweight nothing-y stories that RTD tosses out when there’s something else more important going on in the episode (here: introducing the show to new viewers). What I expected it to be, basically, but it had its moments. The Devil’s Chord was a lot more fun. Not perfect, but buzzing with fresh ideas; a sense of experimentation. Promising for what's to come.
[Watch Space Babies and The Devil's Chord (again) on iPlayer.]

Eurovision Song Contest: Malmö 2024
Grand Final
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Comics

2000 AD #2375

Fiction

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
Chapters 20–23 [the end]

Found this quite tricky to get into at first, with a lot of complex concepts flung around and abbreviations I had no reference for casually dropped in; and that kind of thing does continue to rear its ugly head throughout; but, overall, an entertaining and relatively brisk thriller.

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

Number of titles in collection: 3,288 [up 1]
Of which DVDs: 1,003 [down 1]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,285 [up 2]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 350 [up 2]

Number of discs in collection: 7,968 [up 3]
Number of films: 4,048 [up 1]
Number of additional cuts: 385 [no change]
Number of TV episodes: 9,716 [no change]
Number of short films: 1,137 [up 1]

See you next week, faithful reader.

Friday, 10 May 2024

TV

Doctor Who
40x00 The Church on Ruby Road [Christmas special; 2nd watch]
Rewatching before the season-starting double-bill of new episodes at midnight.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Doctor Who: Unleashed
1x04 The Church on Ruby Road [Christmas special]
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Fiction

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
Chapter 19

Videos

Talks Machina
#65 'Harvest Close'
Well, here's one series that won't be on Beacon...
[Watch it (again) on Internet Archive.]

Thursday, 9 May 2024

Fiction

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
Chapter 18

Games

The Leaf Riders of Wrenwood
6–7 May 2024

Videos

Critical Role
2x17 Harvest Close [2nd half]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube.]

Today, Critical Role announced their own membership/streaming service, Beacon. I'm tempted to sign up, though most of the perks aren't relevant to me at this point — for example, exclusive series Critical Role Cooldown doesn't kick in until at least 207 episodes (c.830 hours of viewing) after where I'm currently at. ("At least" because that's not counting one-shots and miniseries and the like that I'll likely watch between Campaigns 2 and 3.) On the other hand, it would mean ad-free viewing from Campaign 2 Episode 20 onwards (Campaign 1 and Campaign 2 Episodes 1–19 remain exclusive to Geek & Sundry's YouTube, I guess for legal reasons).

Wednesday, 8 May 2024

TV

Doctor Who
3x36 Johnny Ringo
3x37 The O.K. Corral
aka The Gunfighters Parts Three and Four

Trivia time! The fourth and final instalment of The Gunfighters is the last episode of Doctor Who to have an individual episode title (excluding one-parters like The Five Doctors) until the new series started doing it again with their two-parters, 39 years later.

[Watch Johnny Ringo and The O.K. Corral (again) on iPlayer.]

Videos

Critical Role
2x17 Harvest Close [1st half]
"What a festival!"
[Watch it (again) on YouTube.]

Tuesday, 7 May 2024

Monday, 6 May 2024

TV

Doctor Who
3x35 Don't Shoot the Pianist
aka The Gunfighters Part Two
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Comics

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Volume IV: The Tempest
by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
Six: Then, the Immortal Blue… [the end]

Videos

Critical Role
2x16 A Favor in Kind
Matt: "You're now going to lay low for about three days, taking a break from the story, so you can do things like shopping or whatever you want."
Me: Oh, great, an hour-and-a-half of nothing much.
The Mighty Nein: Repeatedly fuck up and almost get caught; wander through the streets on drugs; somehow manage to further the story anyway.
Me: How is this show always gold?!
[Watch it (again) on YouTube.]

Sunday, 5 May 2024

Films

The Menu (2022)
[#36 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024]

Comics

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Volume IV: The Tempest
by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
Five: The Fairy-Feller's Master-Stroke

this week on 100Films.co.uk

No regular reviews on 100Films.co.uk this week, but it was time to review the month just gone...





...and also list all the films I maybe should've, but didn't, watch during it...





More next Sunday.

Saturday, 4 May 2024

Films

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)
[#35 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024]

Mazes and Monsters (1982)

Comics

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Volume IV: The Tempest
by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
Four: If Fictions Fare Not True--

Games

The Leaf Riders of Wrenwood
2–5 May 2024
Once again caught up (not ahead, just that Saturday and Sunday share a page).

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

Another moderately hefty update this week, which kind of snuck up on me. Okay, almost half of it was another bulk order from the US (a different site for different reasons this time, so not technically connected to the other two... but it's still a pile of US titles all arriving at once, so, y'know); but the rest of it kind of crept in. Three are new releases, one arriving more promptly than its label (Anime Ltd) usually manage, the other two dispatched later than normal and, consequently, arriving a few days late; and one's a new release for next week, arriving uncommonly early (by recent standards); and the final two are a couple of "black market" versions of titles unavailable in official releases (John Woo Hong Kong classics The Killer and Hard Boiled).

Across those there's all kinds of content, meaning every category changes this week — including DVDs edging ever closer to slipping below 1,000 titles.

Number of titles in collection: 3,287 [up 11]
Of which DVDs: 1,004 [down 1]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,283 [up 12]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 348 [up 2]

Number of discs in collection: 7,965 [up 15]
Number of films: 4,047 [up 10]
Number of additional cuts: 385 [up 6]
Number of TV episodes: 9,716 [up 25]
Number of short films: 1,136 [up 7]

See you next week, faithful reader.

Friday, 3 May 2024

TV

Doctor Who
3x34 A Holiday for the Doctor
aka The Gunfighters Part One. After watching OK Corral-centric movie My Darling Clementine the other month, I was prompted to finally tackle this (shall we say) divisive story, which covers the same events... in its own syle...
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

The Mystery of Chess Boxing (1979)
[#34 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024]

Comics

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Volume IV: The Tempest
by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
Three: Dawn Is But Dark's Endeavour

Videos

Talks Machina
#63 'Where the River Goes'
[Watch it (again) on Internet Archive.]

Thursday, 2 May 2024

TV

Doctor Who
15x04 Horror of Fang Rock Part Four
Sometimes I watch a Who story and think “this is great ‘n’ all, but it would also make a great standalone movie.” Fang Rock is one of those times — it would have so much potential repurposed as a low-budget, creepy, claustrophobic horror movie. That’s partly why it’s perfect for classic Who too — no futile attempts to punch above its weight (though the new effects do help in that regard); just some nicely-done confined lighthouse sets and a bunch of well-sketched and -performed characters. And a total bloodbath of a finale.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Films

Strays (2023)
[#33 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024]

Comics

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Volume IV: The Tempest
by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
Two: And an Age of Giants, Adieu

Videos

Critical Role
2x15 Where the River Goes [2nd half]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube.]

Wednesday, 1 May 2024

TV

Doctor Who
15x03 Horror of Fang Rock Part Three
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Fiction

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
Chapter 17

Comics

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Volume IV: The Tempest
by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
One: Farewell to Forever

This collected edition of the fourth and final LXG miniseries was released in late 2019, and... I think that's when I bought it? I intended to read it quickly, and I've had it ready to go here, templated up behind-the-scenes, all that time — i.e. four-and-a-half years. Jesus. Well, finally, here I go! It took some getting back in to — struggling to remember who everyone was (got there in the end, I think) and what the dangling plot threads were (honestly? Still not really sure) — but it's still good stuff, with striking art from O'Neill and dense storytelling from Moore.

Although I'm listing this as if it's one chapter, the collected edition presents it issue by issue — i.e. the bonus back matter, which previous League series have collated and included at the end of the volume, is here scattered throughout, as in its original publication. I'm certain there are good story reasons for that, but it's not worth individually listing every bonus comic and fake letters page and so on. So, take it as read going forward that "One" (etc) isn't really "The Tempest: Part One", it's "The Tempest: Issue One" (if that distinction makes sense).

Games

Box One
An "escape room in a box"-type game, specifically designed to be attempted by a single player, created by actor/author/magician/etc Neil Patrick Harris (so he's an actual toymaker as well as playing one!)

I've wanted this for a while, finally bought it thanks to a discount code, and it arrived yesterday — which seemed like perfect timing to play it as a birthday treat. (Oh, yes, today's my birthday.) So far, it's lots of fun, with at least one fantastic twist. I had sort of intended to play through it in one sitting, but I started later than intended in the end, and when I reached a point where you're asked to wait 24 hours*, it seemed a good jumping-off point.

* apparently you don't actually have to wait 24 hours (I looked it up on a forum, being careful to avoid spoilers), but, like I said, it was late and so on. I'll continue (and finish?) tomorrow.


The Leaf Riders of Wrenwood
29 April – 1 May 2024

Videos

Critical Role
2x15 Where the River Goes [1st half]
With this episode, I pass 10% of the way through Campaign 2, both in terms of episode count and running time (worth noting because, although most episodes are a similar length, they range from 3-hours to 7-hours across the campaign. Ok, there's actually only one of the latter, but there are half-a-dozen around the 5-hour mark). So far, I've watched almost 60 hours (not counting Talks Machina) and it's still just beginning!
[Watch it (again) on YouTube.]