Lord Samper's Library

It's funny how time can get away from you, isn't it? One minute, it's January and I've just posted my review for Volume One of 'I Hate Fairyland' . The next thing, it's September and I'm just getting round to reading Volume Two. Seriously, I feel like I blinked and nine months just happened which is just plain weird as most of that has been Lockdown and that just dragged... Anyway... What's also funny, and says a lot about my relationship with this series, is that just like in January, it's the start of a crappy week (trying to squeeze five days of work into two days before I go on leave) and my first thought was to pick up 'Fluff My Life' and get a few laughs back into the day. And it worked, of course it worked. There's nothing new here but to be honest, I was giggling too much to really care.. All hail Gertrude, the new Queen of Fairyland. After thirty years of wreaking havoc across this magical world to find her way back home, s...

I'm ashamed to admit it but I will always be sucked in by persistent advertising. Honestly, bang on about something for long enough and I will end up buying it (and probably buying it again). So it was then that the adverts/trailers for 'Blood Machines' started off as 'just getting in the way of my watching clips of 'The Office' on Youtube' (I really need to get myself a life at some point), moved on to making me think that 'You know, I really should give this a go' and finished, earlier this evening, with my watching it. I'm not sure why Shudder have split the film into three chunks, and are presenting it as a 'Season' (when everything else says it's a film) but if you watch 'Blood Machines', you'll find out that there are other questions that you really should be asking. Like, 'what the hell...?' and 'did Blood Machines end up breaking the record for 'most naked identical women in a finale?' You will ...

I don't know what I was thinking... That's not true, I know exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking, 'I want my kids to have memories of a Dad who didn't take himself too seriously and was always up for a bit of fingernail painting,' Should really have checked that I had some nail polish remover before I went home though... Oh, well. They haven't done a bad job and if I go out tomorrow, I'll just have to keep my hands in my pockets :o) So yeah, a great way to end a week that hasn't been great. It's the weekend though and I'm only working two days next week so plenty to look forward to. But you're here for the books really, aren't you? Of course you are :o) It's been a fairly quiet week for book buying; payday is next Friday and I'm also trying to rein it in a bit anyway, it's my birthday next Wednesday (there, I said it!) so I'm saving the book buying for then. That's not to say that I didn't get anything this ...

 I've been feeling pretty low the last few days so I'm afraid it hasn't been much of a week for reading. The plan right now is to just make it to the weekend so I can regroup a little and then have another crack at everything next week instead. Do you ever have those kind of weeks...? What it has been a week for though is catching up on movies that I want to see again as well as ones that I've never seen before. A little bit of horror to take me away from things, you know how it is ;o) Have a quick look then at what I've been watching over the last few days. I'm rubbish at keeping up with movies so you've probably seen these already but if you haven't then I'd recommend these two, especially with Halloween getting closer... 'Stung' (2015) It's the same drill every summer for Paul and Julia, two catering staffers who have been hired to wait tables for a fancy garden party at the remote country villa of eccentric recluse Mrs Perch. All ...

I don't know about you but as much as I love to read about mighty heroes ('super' or otherwise) and wrathful gods, I have the most fun reading about the little guy who lives in the shadow of the aforementioned. You know what I'm talking about, the armies of nameless soldiers fighting so that others can reap the rewards, the... it's mainly soldiers really, isn't it? Or people trying to uphold some form of justice. More often than not, that's where the real heroism is found, in ordinary people who can barely hold a sword (or laser gun, whatever) but do it anyway because it's the right thing to do. All of which leads me onto this first entry in an occasional re-read of the 'Gotham Central' books (I say 'occasional', I've only got the first two trades at the moment, had to get rid of the rest, a long time ago, and now I need to wait until next payday before finding the books again). Because what's more heroic than a regular...

Well, it's taken me far longer than I'd originally planned (I'm not going to look at exactly when I said I'd do this particular re-read, I think the answer would depress me...) but I've finally finished reading 'Elric of Melnibone' :o) I felt like I'd never get through it but I looked at the book yesterday and, somehow, I only had about fifty pages to go... Of course I knew what I had to do and it was duly done. And it got me thinking... This is only the second time that I've read this book the whole way through, the first time was almost twenty years ago and I remembered that I'd had trouble with it then as well and hadn't gone back to it since. So, what's all that about then? I absolutely love a bit of 'Sword and Sorcery' but 'Elric of Melnibone' doesn't quite hit the spot, despite being a bit of a classic in this sub-genre. Let's see if I can tell you why... Elric, 428 th Sorcerer-Emperor of the fading empire...

This week, at work, is gearing up to be a bit of a horrible one so you might just see a few more movie posts over the next few days, I'm not sure just yet. Lets see how it goes... You can have too much of a good thing (you can have too much of a bad thing as well) so I thought)I'd give the zombie movies a miss, last night, and try something else instead. I'm trying to get some value for money out of my Shudder subscription, that I keep forgetting that I have, so the only rule was that whatever I watched had to be off that channel. With that in mind, I watched... 'Host' (2020) Six friends accidentally invite the attention of a demonic presence during on online séance... It really didn't take long for someone to come up with a horror movie off the back of the Coronavirus, even if it only plays a peripheral part here; being the reason why everything is happening online. I'm not a big fan of 'found footage' movies so was really ...