Flavours of the Month: April 2014...

LOOKS:

Lost Season 6 - and so ends the return trip to the island. The final season did feel a bit over-long, and certain elements didn't tie-up quite as well as they should have, but ultimately I was still impressed by how the show ended.

The Trip To Italy - a second series of the delightfully entertaining comedy starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as slightly askew versions of themselves. It's a welcome return, although a subplot about infidelity does, to me at least, sit a little uneasily with the generally jovial tone of the show. We'll see how that particular thread plays out over the remaining episodes.

South Park Season 10, 11, and 12

Mad Men Season 7 - the final season, annoyingly split over two years. The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad are more my kind of thing, but even still, I'm a big fan of this show. Three episodes deep - so far so good. A year-long mid-season break is going to be a pain though, just like with the final season of BB.

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Californication Season 7 - another final season, and it's probably a good time to wrap-up this show. After all, how many times can they really do these kind of stories before it becomes stale? The good news is that, albeit just going on a handful of episodes, this seventh season is very enjoyable. It'll be sad to see it go, but at the same time it's right that it's drawing to a close.

Twin Peaks - both the movie 'Fire Walk With Me' and the main show. I saw it for the first time a few years ago and I've been wanting to give this wonderfully weird series a second spin. I've got about eleven episodes left to go and am currently in those awkward few episodes between the resolution of the 'who killed Laura Palmer' mystery and what came afterwards. Season 2 was definitely too long (a full 22 episodes compared to the 8 episodes of season one) and they didn't get the new bad guy plot up-to-speed soon enough to make for a smooth transition from one story to another. It's a shame because the show quickly picked itself back up by the end of the season where it promptly left viewers with a cliffhanger that has so far never been resolved. Hopefully that '25 years later' element in the red room could come into play for a new movie or series ... we can but dream, dance, and talk backwards.


SOUNDS:

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" OST

M.O.O.N. "Dust"

Carpenter Brut "Escape From Midwich Valley"

The Handsome Family "Far From Any Road"

Cuff the Duke "If I Live Or If I Die"

The Melvins "A History Of Bad Men"

The Hat ft. Father John Misty & S.I. Istwa "The Angry River"

Alice Cooper "Constrictor", "Raise Your Fist And Yell", "Trash", "Hey Stoopid", "The Last Temptation"

Velvet Revolver "Contraband"

Hotline Miami OST

Julee Cruise "The World Spins" and "Into The Night"


VIBES & FLAVOURS:

"Sleb" novelisation - the current word count is 71,389. I'm still on-schedule and I'm on the home stretch. Very soon I hope to have the first pass of the story completed, although when I say 'first pass' it'll really be a third draft. I write a chapter or two, then go over them again, then have fresh eyes cast over them to point out anything that doesn't quite work, and then I make those changes. So by the time I get to the end of the story I'll be sitting at a third draft state. Then the plan is to go back to page one and go through the whole thing - I've got a few bits that I want to add-in specifically, but it'll also be a chance to take an overall view of it. Then another read-through from my helpers to look out for anything else and I'll be ready to go about publishing it on Kindle.

Stag Do - at the beginning of the month a bunch of us headed off to Birmingham for a stag do, which included clubs, drinking, the dog races, steak, but best of all off-road buggy racing. You can see a video of some of the latter here.

GTA V - I played this obsessively when it first came out, but I haven't gone back since the end of November. Anyway, as a bit of a reward for keeping on-schedule with my writing (somewhat ahead of schedule, in fact), I've been dipping in and out over the last couple of days for a little more mayhem in the world of Los Santos. The aggression of the cops in the game is still annoying though - too good at pitting/blocking/crashing your car, too accurate when shooting at you, too overwhelming when backed up by more than one helicopter. As I've said before, it stops you from getting a really good dose of chaos under your belt outside of the main missions, which is a shame as it's a smudge on an otherwise brilliantly executed game. Hopefully they can adjust it to be more forgiving in the up-coming story DLC (fingers crossed for an on-disc release of that, too, for those of us who don't have Xbox Live!)