Arachne Kallisti

Nicholas Courtney has died at the age of 81, after a short illness.

He will be much missed - not only was he superb as Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart, but he was the honorary president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, a regular and charming participant at conventions, and by all reports a thoroughly good chap.

( Video tribute below the cut: some of the Brig's many Crowning Moments of Awesome )

The Leverage/WH40K crossover.

No, really.

Featuring the adventures of Lord-Captain Nathan Fforde, of the Rogue Trader ship Leverage; his Seneschal, Sophia Devereaux; Arch-Militant and former mercenary Colonel Eliot; Explorator Hardison ("It's the age of the Magos, baby!"); and a woman known only as Parker, who was thrown out of the Callidus Temple for not being good enough at the social skills bit.

Their plan: to save the Imperium from itself by reviving Roboute Guilliman.

"Let's go steal us a Primarch!"

(Now I just need a plot and tedious things like that).

Soundtrack is your friend. VNV Nation generally makes everything a bit more epic, as does E. S. Posthumous:.

Perhaps the best choice is Gary Numan's Exile, given that it's an industrial concept album about the War In Heaven. Adds absolute shedloads of epic even if you're trying to cope with Graham McNeill's writing style.

Note 1: do make sure you have your MP3 player set to cycle through tracks by artist, not by artist in order. Fulgrim with a soundtrack by Half Man Half Biscuit was just... unsettling.

Note 2: if the novel in question is Battle for the Abyss, hit the absinthe. You may end up hallucinating a plot and characters.

I kind of collect weird cover versions. I love them for the same reasons I love bizarre crossovers and cracktastic AUs where everyone's a gerbil. I want to see exactly how far a skilled artist can push it with a song, how far they can go with making the same tune and lyrics convey something entirely differently. Ideally, I'd want the cover version to be as different from the original as possible, and still awesome.

Top Ten: cover versions
1. Florence and the Machine - "Addicted to Love"
Turns the original's smugness into a dreamy slow build to some blazingly confident vocals and flashy piano work. Stunning.
2. Patti Smith - "Gloria"
Another slow burn here. Patti Smith has this amazing, scratchy voice with this kind of snarl to it, and this is punk as all hell.
3. Marsheaux - "Pure"
The original is sweet in a slightly twee way. This is playful, otherwordly, and lucent.
4. The Clockwork Dolls - "The Final Countdown"
It's a ridiculous, bombastic song, and therefore an ideal candidate for a flamboyant steampunk reworking with lots of violins.
5. The Raincoats - "Lola"
Having "Lola" sung by a female voice, especially one with Gina Birch's frayed round the edges DIY punk vibe, adds a whole new interesting layer of genderqueerness to the whole thing. There's a story in my head here, kind of like Tipping the Velvet updated for the punk era.
6. The Genitorturers - "I Touch Myself"
I think it was one of Kit Whitfield's essays that pointed out the D/s subtext in Twilight. Gen's cover brings out the powerplay in a song about adolescent sexual obsession. The Labyrinth vid was picked to really drive the point home. So to speak.
7. Ecstatic Frog - "On Ilkley Moor Baht 'At"
It's a techno bellydance version of a darkly funny Yorkshire folk song. How is that not awesome?
8. Tori Amos - "Raining Blood"
Tori Amos is good at covers. Really good. Turning a thrash metal anthem into something cold and creepy good.
9. Joan Jett and Paul Westerberg - "Let's Do It"
Y'know, there really is a hidden vein of punk in Cole Porter. The songs may be slick and sophisticated on the outside, but the lyrics are all about sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. I got this one off the Tank Girl soundtrack - much like the movie, it's not deep, but it is fun.
10. Johnny Cash - "Hurt"
The last song Johnny Cash ever released. It's agonisingly perfect for him. Even Trent Reznor admits that this is Johnny's song now.

( Videos under the cut )

"It is possible to articulate both the wild, unrestrained optimism and eventual disappointment and betrayal of my entire generation in one word - jetpacks."
- David J. Gunkel

Benoit Mandelbrot died on Thursday night of pancreatic cancer, aged 85.

Mandelbrot was one of the first people to use computer visualisations to explore mathematical objects, and the first to find a practical use for the idea of the Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension, the idea that some objects could be thought of as having fractional dimension. Fractal geometry has had applications in all sorts of areas of applied mathematics, from earthquake data to population dynamics. Mandelbrot even applied his ideas to explaining the global financial crisis.

Mandelbrot kept on working and teaching right up until the end of his life. Here's his talk from TED this July:



He will be much missed.

On 26th September 1983, Lietenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov saved the world.

A newly-installed satellite early warning network had misidentified reflected sunlight from high-altitude clouds as the launch of five US intercontinental ballistic missiles. Petrov deduced that five missiles would make an unlikely first strike, and based on that and the lack of corroborative radar evidence, decided that he'd rather not risk nuclear war. He was first praised for making the correct judgement call, then reprimanded for not following procedure, and later quietly retired to the town of Fryazino. The story didn't come out until the mid-90s.

Interviewed for a documentary in 2008, Petrov said "I was simply doing my job, and I was the right person at the right time, that's all." The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists records that after the incident, he went home, drank an entire bottle of vodka and slept for 24 hours.

Tell everyone. He deserves to be more famous.

1. amy_wolf pointed me at this fic by annlarimer. It is babyfic. Sherlock babyfic. And it is BRILLIANT and HILARIOUS and WRONG.

2. Hungover Owls. Ignore the captions, the pictures speak for themselves.

3. Anton Vowl of Enemies of Reason continues to post occasional bits of fluff in between taking down tabloid!FAIL. My favourite is probably his definitive list of animals beginning with O (although if you ask me ocelots beat EVERYTHING) and his work towards a biscuit hierarchy.

4. An answer to the question "do tigers like catnip?" Contains much footage of large vicious predators being adorable. Also, ocelots.

5. The Improbable Island. It's a text adventure MMORPG. I have only played it for about ten minutes, but it has me horribly fascinated already. I think I shall finish it post-thesis.

Satoshi Kon, director of Perfect Blue, Paranoia Agent and Paprika died last Tuesday, of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 46. He wrote one last rambling but extraordinary statement on his death, which his family posted posthumously on his blog, and which has been translated into English here.

We've just lost an incredibly talented artist, and the world will be poorer without him.

I am in the middle of thesis crunch time. It would be easy to despair. Fortunately, I have been pointed at things that made me laugh and thus prevented me from giving up hope. These things include:

1. Anton Vowl from Enemies of Reason on "Why do I love my ironing board?. I sympathise. I am also strangely fond of my ironing board. I can make cloth flatter with it. This makes me feel In Control.

2. Jane Austen's Fight Club is hilarious and awesome. And features Lizzie Bennett and Fanny Price fighting in their underwear.

3. A cautionary tale from fanficrants about the importance of good proofreading. It is very plausible that Sirius Black's middle name might be Orion - it's his father's name, it fits with the whole star name thing. The only problem is that it then takes one typo to plunge us into the alternative universe in which the Blacks saddled their son with the middle name Onion. As, presumably, some kind of Slytherin version of the Boy Named Sue.

I kind of want this to be canon now.

ETA: Also, a fox just wandered into my back garden, prowled around for a bit, came right up to the French windows and gave me a Look, then cleared off. And that was quite cool.