Lord Samper's Library

I've got a busy weekend ahead of me, what with one thing and another, so I thought I'd take a little of the load off by pinching another post from the dim annals of an old blog of mine. You wouldn't believe it but I really try not to do this too often but like I said, busy weekend and Monday is going to be brutal as I try and clear as much work as possible before going into hospital on Tuesday (nothing serious, just something that really needs to be done). Which kind of leaves me here, with another old 'Doctor Who' post for your reading pleasure ;o) The full review can be found Here but you won't be missing much by not reading it (not unless you really want to hear me wax lyrical about cheese on toast, I love cheese on toast...) And it's also worth mentioning that since this review originally went up, I have finally watched 'The Ark in Space' and you read about that Here if you like ;o) 'Doctor Who' was an absolutely massive part of my chil...

'Alien: Romulus' deserved to have a post all to itself but I have been watching other movies over the last few days. This is a quick post where I can get them all in one place and say a little bit about them all. You know, like all the other movie posts here ;o) Here goes... 'Final Days' (2020) As the world crumbles outside, Aidan barricades himself inside his flat. With the infected at his door, Aidan finds that it's the loneliness that is the greatest threat to his sanity. Until one day, he looks out of his window to see a fellow survivor in the flat opposite... 'Final Days' has been sat in my queue for far too long so the other day, I took the plunge and gave it a watch. It's not a bad movie, a little lightweight and straightforward but tense in all the right places and an interesting study in loneliness. What I really got the most out of though was taking the time to listen to what the infected were screaming as they did their thing, it added an int...

I somehow never got round to watching ‘Alien: Romulus’ at my local cinema (and there’s a big question over whether anyone will watch anything there ever again but that’s another story) but after a few weeks of waiting for the price, on Prime Video, to come down, ‘Romulus’ suddenly became affordable and that was my cue to grab a copy, order a pizza in and give it a watch. I’ll be honest, I’m more of a ‘Predator’ fan myself but I’ll never pass up the chance of watching an ‘Alien’ movie and the prospect of an ‘Alien’ movie directed by the same guy who directed the ‘Evil Dead’ remake was an intriguing one to me. So, slice of pizza in hand, I started watching and… While scavenging a derelict space station, a group of young colonists looking for a better life find the most terrifying life form in the universe instead. And there may well be something even more terrifying on board… As I’ve got older, I’ve found that my natural ‘movie run-time tolerance’ peters out at about an hour and half. An...

Last night was a bit hectic so I never made it round to writing a blog post for today. Lets just say for now that 'Alien: Romulus' was as good as I'd hoped it would be; not brilliant but good, solid 'Xenomorph Fun'. Maybe I'll even go into a little more detail about that soon, we'll see. All of which led me to looking for an old post (from an older blog) that I could purloin. I found this quote instead, I think it's one that we can all do with remembering every now and then. 'This is the reader's book. All proper names are therefore to be pronounced in any way he chooses, except in conversation with another reader, in which case the two must settle their differences as best they can, for there is no rule.' From the 'Author's Note', 'The Well of the Unicorn' (Fletcher Pratt) Because if life is too short to be reading books that you don't enjoy, it's certainly too short for you to be tying yourself in knots over whet...

It took me a little while to get round to reading ‘The Last Shield’ but I got there in the end and I’m really glad that I did. I know, I’d normally say something along those lines at the end of the post but sometimes, a book is just so much fun that you have to open the proceedings by saying exactly how you feel. And ‘The Last Shield’ is a hell of a lot of fun, mostly because I’m a bit of a fan of ‘Die Hard’ but there’s a lot more to it than that. Let me try and explain a little better... The ancient forest realm of Sunweald is bordered on two sides by far mightier nations – a precarious situation. At its centre, the Sunweald Palace is home to the Lord Regent and the heir to the throne, together with numerous precious and powerful artefacts. The Palace is protected by the realm's elite Shields, dedicated to guarding the royal line against all foes. A group of vicious brigands called the Wildwood Reivers have been stealing arcane artefacts and smuggling them across the borders, o...

Page Count: 141 Pages I actually managed to get a couple of books read over the weekend, go me :o) I’m going to leave ‘The Last Shield’ a little longer, just to let it percolate in my head, but a ‘Doctor Who’ novelization is always little more straightforward so, here we are. The further back I go with the Doctor’s stories, the less experience I have of them; go right back to the first Doctor and I’ve seen/read ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ and read ‘Doctor Who and the Zarbi’ & ‘Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet’. Not a lot then, considering just how many stories there are. When I saw ‘The Time Meddler’ in the shop then, I had to buy it so I could fill in that gap, just a little bit more. When the TARDIS materialises on an apparently deserted Northumbrian beach, Steven disputes the Doctor’s claim that they have travelled back to the eleventh century. The discovery of a modern wristwatch in a nearby forest merely reinforces his opinion. But it is 1066, the most important date in Engli...