Lord Samper's Library

Me and Deadpool (ok ok, Deadpool and I ...) have been through some tough times together, by which I mean that the only comics I didn't sell, when I was moving around Lewisham, were those featuring the Merc with a Mouth. No matter who is on writing duties, Iydo the job nicely. I knew that Deadpool and mutant time traveller Cable are supposed to be on fairly good terms but I've never read any of their early stories so when I saw 'Cable & Deadpool Volume 1' going crazy cheap on Amazon... Well, it was way past time I gave it a shot. And check out the Liefeld art on the cover, strange how you can't see their feet isn't it...? Well, 'Cable & Deadpool Volume 1' was alright but... I'm not in a massive hurry to pick up Volume 2, lets put it that way. Wade Wilson and Nathan Summers are, and this time they're stuck with each other! Can two grown men armed to the teeth with deadly genetic weaponry live together without driving each...

Once again, where a TV show is concerned, I feel like I'm late to a party where all the interesting conversations have been had already. But I'm going to metaphorically stand in the corner, self conciously nursing a drink, and talk about 'The Mandalorian' anyway. Why? Because I watched the first three episodes last night and really enjoyed it, that's why. I'm what you might call a 'lapsed Star Wars fan'; loved the original movies, kind of enjoyed the prequels, thought 'Rogue One' was amazing but am having trouble really working out what the point of the new movies is (still to see 'Rise of Skywalker' but 'The Force Awakens' felt like it was trying to please fans at the expense of the story while 'The Last Jedi' lost me when Poe Dameron tried to put General Hux on hold as the resistance base was about to be attacked...) And 'Solo'... Nice idea but again, what was the point? We knew all the good stuff alre...

So I took myself to Asda today, to do a bit of shopping for some people and oh my goodness... Everyone was keeping to the spirit of social distancing outside the store but when we all got inside... Well, it was everyone for themselves. I tried to keep my distance but it was like people suddenly got blinkered vision and would go through you if you didn't get out of the way. Honestly, by the time I got to the fruit section I was starting to panic a little bit. People just weren't taking it seriously in there and we need to start taking it a bit more seriously otherwise the government is just going to lock us down even more. Oh well, it's nice and quiet back in the flat and I can social distance the whole world from here :o) And talk a bit about books. Shall we...? Go on then. It's been another really slow week for books which is totally understandable but does make it difficult for me to spin this out into a full length post! I think I'm going to have to come up wit...

Well, the plan was to tell you all what I thought of 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth' but it hasn't arrived yet so we're jumping forwards in time to the Peter Davison era and 'Enlightenment'. I was the tender age of seven when this was first broadcast, and I hadn't seen it since, so my memory of it was a little hazy. All I could remember was something about racing boats in space, which sounds really cool doesn't it? Well, when I saw the DVD for sale in Oxfam (for all of £1!) I had to give it a go. After all, you can't go too far wrong for a pound. Can you...? Materialising on an Edwardian sailing yacht in space, the Fifth Doctor and his companions T egan and Turlough find themselves caught up in a mysterious and deadly race. The prize is Enlightenment - the wisdom to find your heart's desire - and it quickly becomes clear that one of the crews will let nothing and no-one stop them claiming victory. As the Black Guardian pressures Turlo...

Yesterday was a bit of a funny one as I stayed in the flat all day trying to get work done. By the time the day was over, I was going stir crazy (I know, it was only a day...) and I needed a little break between books so... A movie night it was then :o) Little did I know, as I started the first film, that my night was going to be longer (and a little scarier) than I had planned... 'Itsy Bitsy' (2019) Youtube has a nice habit of chucking up random horror trailers for my attention and as a result, I've had half an eye open for 'Itsy Bitsy' ever since early(ish) last year. Amazon Prime gave me the nod last night and so 'Itsy Bitsy' was the first and only film that I was planning on watching last night... An ancient mysterious relic unleashes a giant prehistoric spider that terrorizes a single mother and her two children in their new house. That's it, that's all there is to this movie but bloody hell they did so much with that...

In an attempt to prove that I do actually read all those books I buy, from charity shops and the 'used' section of Amazon, here's a post about 'Caliban's Hour', a book that I bought a couple of weeks ago. I used to have a copy but, given the state of my life over the last three(ish) years, it's no surprise that I have absolutely no idea where that copy has gone. All I can hope is that someone, somewhere, is enjoying more than I did when I read it last. That was years ago, in case you were wondering, so it was way past time that I read it again and found out whether it's still the book I remember reading. Which was a bit silly really, people change over time and that means books do as well, especially if you're going back for a re-read. Let me tell you all about how a book I read years ago turned out to be something different when I read it last night... Caliban is a monster. This much we know from William Shakespeare's play,  The Tempe...

Disclosure time... I really enjoyed Stephen Kozeniewski and Wile E. Young's contributions to the 'Clickers Forever' anthology so jumped at the chance for a free read of 'The Perfectly Fine House', in return for a fair and honest review of course. As it happens, I couldn't work out how to get the file onto my Kindle, and I hate reading off my computer (I've found out...), so ended up buying a copy for my Kindle and reading that instead. Sometimes, I can't believe that I work in IT... Don't worry though, the review will still be fair and honest. It took me longer than I'd intended to get round to reading 'The Perfectly Fine House' but the title alone meant that I'd be on it sooner or later. It's a title that tells you that Kozeniewski and Young are not afraid to set themselves a little challenge and I needed to be there to see how it all went down. And I was there to see it. The second I finished work yesterday, I pic...

It turns out that I can really watch some absolute rubbish when I put my mind to it :o) Well, that's what you get when you pick up a DVD for 10p, the quality gets lost somewhere along the way... 'Humans vs Zombies' is one of those movies that I invariably watch at the end of a really shitty day'; one of those movies where you hit 'play' and just let the movie wash over you, you're not thinking about it but that's ok because there's nothing really to think about. Or is there...? Well no, not really. Sometimes all a movie is good for is background noise while you pick yourself up after a bad day and yesterday was a pretty bad day, all things considered. I know I'm in the same boat as everyone else but there is something soul destroying about all this, isn't there? Oh well, that's what 'Humans vs Zombies' was for. Normal service will resume very shortly, I promise. I can't watch another film like this for a long time, I j...

I saw this on Twitter, last night, and thought it would be worth sharing :o) I do love me some Angry Robot and can pretty much guarantee that there's a book of theirs just waiting for you to pick it up and enjoy it. The site is Here  (but you knew that already...), you don't need me to tell you what to do next... 

If you can remember all the way back to last week (I can but only because I scrolled down the blog until I found what I needed...), you'll remember that I was going on about the 'Dalek Omnibus' book that I had, as a child, and how I had this urge to go and watch the TV serials that the novelisations were based upon. Well, I'm going for it! Last week was all about 'Day of the Daleks' and now, thanks to eBay, today is going to be all about 'Planet of the Daleks'. You might have to wait a little while until 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth' though, lets see how the post holds up under what's going on out there... It also gives me a little chance to get to see more of Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor. I've been watching 'Doctor Who' for almost as long as I've been alive but there is still so much that I haven't seen. I'm not too bad as far as anything from the last couple of fourth Doctor stories onwards, anything before...

I'm swapping this for the regular 'Saturday Doctor Who Post' because I ended up being really busy today, I've got a new cheese toasty maker though so I'm counting today as a win :o) Yep, it has been one of those weeks for book purchasing; by which I mean the 'hunt' has fallen strangely silent. It was always going to happen though. Over the last week, I've seen the shops in Lewisham close one by one until it's pretty much just Sainsburys and Iceland left. Plus all the little takeaways actually so we can still get a kebab or a bit of chicken. There's that, I guess. It's weird out there at the moment and I'm guessing that it's the same wherever you are. Stay safe guys, be kind to each other and especally to yourself if you're stuck indoors somewhere and can't get out. Hopefully it won't be for too long... But the book... Yes, I did buy one book this week, more out of bloody mindedness than anything else although it has ...

There are a whole load of things that happened to make me a right geek (most of these seemed to take place in the early to mid-eighties) and in amongst watching the 'Star Wars', the 'Doctor Who' and reading various books and comics, you'll find a weekend trip to the cinema to see 'The Dark Crystal'. I loved it, of course I loved it, but it's only recently that I've begun to understand that it wasn't just the same old tale of good vs evil that sold it to me (along with the fact that that it was all played out by a group of funny looking puppets) but the fact that the film itself was just a window into a much wider world and we were being invited to be a part of it. That's why I keep going back to my copy of the 'Dark Crystal' DVD, even after all these years there's still so much to see and be a part of. And now, it's time to revisit one of the stories that has sprung out of this cult film. In what is now becoming a f...

I know, I’m posting a lot about movies… I’m working at home now, for the foreseeable future (same as everyone else), and my reading time has somehow taken a real hit off the back of this. Seems like I read more, on the bus, than I thought… I’m hoping that normal service will resume, on that front, very shortly (I mean seriously, I thought working from home would give me more time for reading…) but it’s another movie post today ;o) I’ve always had a soft spot for the Terminator films, even the rubbish ones. Okay, not the rubbish ones so much; ‘Terminator: Genisys’ was awful wasn’t it? What was that film even about? Anyway… I had a little look in CEX yesterday and somehow, despite the fact that ‘Dark Fate’ was only in the cinema last year, the DVD was there on the shelves. Fingers firmly crossed that it wouldn’t be another ‘Genisys’, I bought myself a copy and went home to watch it. In Mexico City, a newly modified liquid Terminator -- the Rev-9 model -- arrives from the f...

I used to love the Discworld books when I was (a lot) younger, up to and including deliberately losing the family Christmas game of Monopoly just so I could get back to whatever the latest paperback was. As I got older though, and the lens of the Discworld turned on our world instead of the fantasy genre, I gradually stopped reading. If I wanted to see the real world, well… I’d just look out of the window. And then it all turned full circle. The last (utterly horrible, yes I’m looking at you 2017…) few years have seen me go back to the early Discworld books for some comfort reading and a few friendly chuckles with some old friends. They say you should never go back but that clearly doesn’t count with Discworld books, you should always go back. So I’m all about the re-reading then but when I saw a copy of ‘The Last Hero’ in the Cancer Research shop, I had to have it. I’d never read ‘The Last Hero’, and was keen to give it a go, but a whole book about Cohen the Barbarian? I lov...

So I'd already promised myself that I wouldn't leave it too long before watching 'The Purge: Election Year' (and the nap that I took yesterday afternoon made it very clear that I probably wouldn't be reading much...) so once I'd woken up and sorted myself out with a little dinner, I settled down to polish off the last part of the main bit of the franchise. I know there's a prequel film and a spin off Amazon series but I'm not in a mad rush to get to these now I've finished the three main films. Maybe one day... The problem with posting so quickly about 'the sequel', after you've just posted about the last film, is that you run a really big risk of making yourself look stupid by just repeating stuff that you already said the day before. Nowhere is this more apparent than with 'The Purge: Election Year' and not just because Michael Bay's fingers are all over this film as well... As a young woman, Senator Charlie Ro...