The New Doctor: Welcome, Twelve!

Two days ago I finally got to see Deep Breath, the first episode of series 8 and the first episode with Capaldi as the Doctor. From the moment Capaldi was announced as the new Doctor I instinctively knew he'd be awesome. And after seeing Deep Breath I really think he was. Sure he started out weird and to begin with I wasn't really sure what to think about him, but then he grew on me and when the episode ended he had surpassed both 9th and 11th in my book, and gone straight to my heart.

Don't read any further if you haven't seen the episode.

What I loved most about Deep Breath (except 12th obv) was all the references to earlier episodes. The dinosaur in the beginning was a reference to a Classic Who episode where there also is a T-rex in London.

12th saying he needs new clothes and a really long scarf was obviously a hint towards 4th Doctor Tom Baker - the most loved Doctor in Classic.

Then ofc the comment "You've redecorated. I don't like it." It's a classic comment, said by every single incarnation of a Doctor that ever visited another one. This time Clara said it, but it worked just as well.

They mentioned a pocket watch and if it is what I think it is, then it's a reference to the fob watch 10th used when he hid in 1913.

He mentioned Amy! :D

And then the robots and all these references to The Girl in the Fireplace. When we were told that the robots were from SS Marie Antoinette sister ship of SS Madame de Pomadour I was on the edge of my seat "Oh! Oh! Oh!" :D

And then his face. The fact that 12th walks around the episode wondering where he got his new face, convinced that he recognises it from somewhere before, is obviously a hint towards all the fans who complained that Capaldi couldn't be the new Doctor because he had already been in an episode before. I love it. It feels so in your face.

They said "Geronimo"! :D

And then the cameo by Matt Smith. It had me teary eyed and I knew who it was already before it was revealed. I recognised his voice instantly.

All in all I love 12th. He made a fantastic impression and I'm no less excited about Capaldi's run now than when I was when he was first announced. This is going to be epic. 12th feels like a best friend. He also feels similar to 1st, a young soul trapped in an old man's body. Although the Doctor really isn't young anymore. He has similar quirks as 2nd and 10th. He's amazing. Already, he's amazing. I've seen one episode and he's already amazing. (That's too many "amazing" in a row). He should have credit for that. I wasn't convinced of 9th, 10th or 11th after their first episodes. Basically, I started loving 12th when he opened the TARDIS door and told Strax to hush! :P

And I'm not worried about the Doctor. Both Moffat and Capaldi are life-long fans of the show. This is going to be great.

I'm the Doctor. I've lived for over two thousand years, and not all of them were good. I've made many mistakes, and it's about time I did something about that.

You can't see me, can you? You look at me and you can't see me. You have any idea what that's like? I'm not on the phone, I'm right here. Standing in front of you. Please, just... Just see me.

Neil Gaiman's teeny tiny children's books

Last week the major Swedish Sci-Fi book shop celebrated its 30th anniversary and as part of the celebration all orders from their Internet shop of over 300 SEK were free of postage. I decided to take advantage of that and do something I had planned for a really long time - order all of Neil Gaiman's teeny tiny children's books in one go. It went mostly well. They didn't have Crazy Hair, Melinda basically doesn't exist on the Internet and Chu's Day got out of stock before my order was dealt with. But those I did get were:
• The Dangerous Alphabet
• Instructions
• Chu's First Day of School
• Blueberry Girl
• The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish
• The Wolves in the Walls
So now I'm only missing Crazy Hair, Melinda and Chu's Day. I don't count Fortunately the Milk, Coraline, Odd and the Forst Giants, The Graveyard Book, M is for Magic, InterWorld or The Silver Dream among his teeny tiny children's books. The teeny tiny ones are the really thin ones with more pictures than text.

I had to read The Dangerous Alphabet thrice. Once to read the text. Twice to look at the pictures and the story told only in them. Thrice to find the secret within the book that Gaiman hinted towards in the opening. The text was pretty dull tbh, but the story told in the pictures alone was amazing and that's why Gris Grimly should have more credit than Gaiman for this book. The secret was pretty funny once I noticed it... And here I've gone and thought myself to know the alphabet really well! xD

Instructions was really good and I almost ended up seeinig it as an instruction book on what to have in a fantasy novel. It was an interesting story, almost like having put a dream on paper exactly as it unfolded. It was random and still made sense, just like dreams. Instructions is easily one of my favourites out of the six books I got today. The illustrations by Charles Vess made the strangeness of the dreamlike world yet stranger and somehow they made reading the book feel the same as I it did when I was little and read Elsa Beskow's books.

Chu's First Day of School was simply adorable and one I could definitely imagine a parent reading to a child the day before school starts for the first time. I don't remember my very first day of school, but I remember the nervosity of starting a new school and a new class, which I've done several times, and Chu's First Day of School shows that nervosity really well from a childish perspective. It went straight to my heart simply for being so adorable. If this is how I feel about the second book I wonder how I'll feel about the first one, Chu's Day, when I get my hands on that :) Adam Rex's illustrations are perfect and fitting and very imaginative :)

Blueberry Girl was presented as a prayer to a little girl. Gaiman explains in the end that he wrote it for Tori Amos before her daughter was born and with that perspective the book becomes really lovely. It's a children's book from an adult perspective and I'm not sure a young child would appreciate it, but for an adult with a childish mind it's absolutely perfect. Although I'm not a parent I can recognise a parent's hope for their child's future in a lot of the words, and it's simply brilliant. Once again Charles Vess brings that Elsa Beskow-ish feeling to the book, which gives it a whole new level.

The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish was a classic tale of a child messing up and then spending the rest of the book trying to fix what he or she caused. It was the most fun one out of all the books and I can definitely recognise the bickering between brother and sister in the book. My sister and I did that all the time... It was pretty obvious how the book would end, but the way there was hilarious. (What's up with the Queen of Melanesia?) The illustrations by Dave McKean was amazing ofc (it's Dave McKean) and I could definitely re-read this one an infinite number of times without getting bored. The real story in the end of how this book came to be is also an interesting little tidbit that made the overall grade of the book go up one.

The Wolves in the Walls is my favourite out of the six books I got today. How is it even possible to fit that much story into so few pages? The story was intriguing and slightly spooky, and it pulled me in. Little Lucy was a perfect heroine and her parents and brother were just annoyances. Stupid annoyances who didn't take her seriously. I love how Gaiman managed to make it seem like the most natural thing to have wolves in your walls! Dave McKean's illustrations just added to the spookiness of the story and they fitted perfectly. This story had me smiling in the end, and I could take a dive into that story once again - no problems. I just wish it were longer... (Once again, what's up with the Queen of Melanesia?)

What gave me the idea to bunch buy all of Gaiman's picture books to begin with was when I bought Fortunately the Milk. It seemed silly, but I liked the cover text. The story was amazing. Immersive, hilarious and completely transported me into another world with a time travelling stegosaurus. I decided then and there that if he could make a book like that amazing, then I ought to get his other books for small children.

Having read these six my favourite children's books by Gaiman are now:

1). The Graveyard Book 2). Coraline 3). Fortunately the Milk 4). The Wolves in the Walls 5). Instructions

Now I wish I could bunch order all his graphic novels and comics as well, but they are a bit more pricey than teeny tiny children's books. So I'll probably have to get them one by one. 

Dealing with backlog: The Wolf Among Us

A problem with playing an MMO is that you tend to get a whole lot of backlog of other games. I intend to deal with that... Somehow xD I started yesterday evening when I decided to finish playing The Wolf Among Us.

I started playing it ages ago when the first episode was released since it was Telltale and I usually like Telltale Games. But although there was some weird stuff going on it never really got to me. I played the second episode too when it was released, but after that I didn't start the game again until yesterday.

That's when I discovered that everything up until episode 3 had just been a prologue. Shit really hit the fan in episode 3 and after getting into episode 3 I wouldn't be able to stop playing the rest even if I wanted to.

The ending of episode 3 was insane. That final battle. Omg. O_o

Although episode 4 was mostly investigating and not that much action it was still really really intriguing and you could feel the end approaching.

Then episode 5... Epic battle against a pretty creepy opponent. But Bigby is friggin' awesome in his original form.

If you haven't played it - do it. You won't be disappointed. The game starts off slow, but it more than makes up for it in episode 3 and on. The first two episodes leads you on and gives you an opinion of who the bad guy is. In episode 3 you get a hint that it's so much bigger than that. And it really is SO much bigger than those first two episodes tell you. 

I played a mostly nice Bigby Wolf. Although I did kill and backstab characters that weren't nice to me ;) But I have a hunch that the game would turn out and end very differently if I had played a douche bag Bigby. 

Books I've read in July and August

I'm having a blogger's block. Like writer's block, but with my blog. I want to keep it going, but I have no motivation or inspiration to blog. But I did notice that I haven't written about the books I've read since I read Skulduggery Pleasant: Playing With Fire, and that's a while back. I've read 7 books since then, excluding school books. So here goes a small presentation of each along with a teeny tiny review.

Skulduggery Pleasant: The Faceless Ones was the best Skulduggery-book thus far. The excitement was on top throughout it all, and the feeling of doom got stronger the closer I got 'til the end and I realised that nothing would work out alright in this book. The Faceless Ones, those godlike beings, really were just as horrific as all those whispers in earlier books implied. The book ended with a humongous cliffhanger and I was very happy that I had the next book already so I could continue reading instead of agonise over the cliffhanger.
Skulduggery Pleasant: Dark Days was interesting. I love how Valkyrie has started dabbling in
necromancy. Skulduggery hates it, but Valkyrie just isn't as good with Elemental magic as with necromancy. He has to deal with that. The return of Lord Vile was a surprise. There were a lot of bad guys in this one, especially Sanguine's father.
The humour in this series is basically what keeps me going. The books are hilarious. The characters are also really well written for being a childrens' book. I need the next one in the series.

The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains is Neil Gaiman's latest work and it's beautiful. Basically it's a live storytelling session by Gaiman, where he told this story and an artist drew sketches for the story that were shown on a screen while Gaiman told the story. The words and the sketches are now combined into a small book of only 80 pages, but the story is amazingly gripping and it becomes impossible to put the book down. It's a classic story of love, death, vengeance and magic, and the main character is a dwarf. A badass dwarf. This story is just another Neil Gaiman masterpiece and it's well worth your time reading and re-reading.

The Wild Hunt: Trinity Rising is the second novel in The Wild Hunt series. I like how the first part of the book tells us what happened in the last book, but through the eyes of Savin and Tanith rather than Gair's. Gair doesn't play as big of a role in this second book as he did in the first, but there's enough of Gair and Alderan to go around. Rather this book is more about Teia. Teia is introduced to us in this book and she's basically amazing. While Gair is the standard "why me?" character of high fantasy, Teia is this strong and amazing woman. And she happens to be pregnant. Heavily so, by the end of the book, and I imagine that baby will turn out to be something very special. Along with Teia we're introduced to the workings of the North and its tribes and peoples, which was very interesting. What happens in the North is probably the reason for what's going on in the next and final book. Basically, the North fucks up and it has consequences.

Burton & Swinburne in The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man is the second novel in the Burton & Swinburne series. The first book, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, was incredible and this second one was far from a disappointment either. I am in love with this steampunk series and its universe. I love how the main character is conscious of the fact that it wasn't supposed to be like that. Burton knows that history was supposed to move in a different way (our way), but time travel messed things up and now we have steampunk. I also love that most (if not all) of the important characters have actually existed, and there's an appendix in the end of each book explaining who they were in our world. The author actually says in the beginning of the first book that although they have existed in our world and are well-known British historical people, he (the author) felt that they were too well-known to have their reputation tarnished by his work. I'm not British and I've never heard of most of those people before, but there are some familiar names that show up throughout the series. Like Oscar Wilde :) I need the next book in my life!

Doctor Who: Ten Little Aliens was the first Doctor Who adventure I read. It features the First Doctor along with Ben and Polly. I would've preferred Vicki and Steven as companions, since I liked them better. Anyway, after a boring beginning the book really kicked off and I sat up reading late into the night. There were mysteries, enemies of several kinds and a lot of twists. There was an element of horror in it and it was really good. I love how the author hints towards the Doctor being alien and apart from the humans, but he never explains anything or goes into any detail. Basically because that part of the Doctor wasn't known before he regenerated the first time. Until that point the Doctor was only a person from the far future, and the author takes that into consideration. This first Doctor Who book (for me) promises great things from other Doctor Who book adventures!

Doctor Who: Dreams of Empire is number two in the 50th Anniversary collection (11 stories, 11 authors, 1 Doctor) from which Ten Little Aliens was the first. Dreams of Empire features the Second Doctor (my favourite!) along with his companions Jamie and Victoria. This book contains a lot of politics and warfare (quite the theme for Second actually). But it also has all the elements that make Doctor Who amazing: adventure on a medieval fortress built on an asteroid with an artifical atmosphere, lots of robots, the Doctor being a clown, laser guns, and a lot of chess metaphors! The story basically revolves around a person named Kesar, who is imprisoned in the fortress on the asteroid for trying to overthrow the Republic, turn it into an Empire and make himself Emperor. He still has a lot of supporters in the Republic and while most people think what happens next is his supporters trying to kill him to make him a martyr for his/their cause, there are so many twists to the story that the ending comes as a total surprise! Dreams of Empire didn't linger in my head as Ten Little Aliens did, but it was still really, really good.

Right now I'm reading Dancing Jax by Robin Jarvis. I've only read the first chapter thus far and I'm not sure I like it yet. But if there's something I learned from Ten Little Aliens, it's to never judge a book on its first chapter!

The Sims 4

I had planned on doing this post last week before I went awat for four days, but other things got in the way and I got tired too quickly. So I'll do it now.

Last week EA released the Create A Sim demo for The Sims 4 on Origin. I've played The Sims since the original game back in the beginning of the 00's, and although I never really liked 3 I'm really, really looking forward to 4.

So I played around with the demo for about an hour. I made three families. One a girl and her twin brother. She's an evil mischief and he's a heartbreaker :) Second a living-alone, very cute, Japanese inspired girl looking for The One. Third a girl and a boy who are BFFs and living together as roomies. When I buy the game I think I have my drama cut out for me already xD

The demo was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, creating Sims was never the funniest part of the game for me. Now I'm really excited about building and gameplay :) Only two weeks to go! :D

I really wish that Origin had a screenshot button so I could post photos of my Sims, but apparantly I have to share them to Facebook to be able to do that, and I just don't want to do that...