From the bottom of my heart I have to tell you your problems are stupid

Oddly, it hasn't been laziness or playing videogames - the only two reasons off the top of my head I can think of for abandoning regular posts on a blog no-one reads - but it was, in fact, doing other things that kept me at a distance from you, my imaginary audience, as I was out doing The Work, which is currently appearing in David "I wonder if he gets Alan Moore's cut of the money but I don't want to ask in case it offends" Lloyd's ACES WEEKLY, the other UK weekly anthology about sci-fi and fantasy, but with creator-owned properties instead of house characters, so it makes even less money.
I am both fortunate and honored to be one of the drains on the limited compensation David receives for the headache of putting the title out every week, and to be honest if I'd done something that got picked up and turned into a film like David did, I'd retire, convinced I had paid my dues, and I would spend my time hating comics and sniping at newer, younger creators on the internet rather than tirelessly promoting them and giving them a platform, but I suppose that's what makes me and David different people.  Well, that and the talent and success.
ANYHOO the comic I have contributed alongside my barely-housetrained writing monkey Lee Robson is Velicity Jones, a female-led spy romp  NO WAIT COME BACK set in a version of the 1960s that will be familiar to viewers of the output of ITC and Lew Grade, so all PG13 stuff, though lord knows what that means these days - I watched some of that Dark Crystal show for children on Netflix and someone had their eye bitten out in the first five minutes.  Any wonder the world is full of psychos these days.
Non-psychos will find much to admire in Velicity Jones, I am sure, and it can be viewed via Borg distribution nodes everywhere for the laughably low subscription price of £6.99 per volume, $9.99 in dollars, or €7.99 if you want to be awkward.

I have, of course, deliberately omitted any mention of Bolt-01, our letterer on this and the previous two volumes of Velicity Jones, because like all comics creators, I marginalize and dismiss the work of letterers, the people without whom making comics would be literally impossible, so yah absolutely let's bung the colourist's name on the front covers of books there.  Couldn't tell a story without lettering and monochrome comics are commonplace in the market, but okay.  Bolt-01 (aka Dave Evans) doesn't seem to have a presence on the old social media, but the official blog of FutureQuake Press - a fine publishing venture in which the lad is balls deep - can be found HERE.

I'll finally be present at the birth of something I'm proud of

The Guardians is a 13-part dystopian drama series made in 1971 about Britain in the far-off space year of 1980 and was never shown in my neck of the woods (Northern Ireland) on account of terrorists being portrayed as no worse than the British state they opposed, a once-radical notion now sadly overtaken by reality in that the British state is usually far, far worse than terrorists - if only because ISIS don't make any bones about the fact they're going to murder you and at least have the human decency to not make you jump through months of benefits claims and sanctions to get you to the point where you'll walk under the wheels of a truck, they just fly your plane into the ground.
A couple of minutes of screaming and crying and then it's all over - I'm not saying I would definately vote ISIS over the Tories, but... actually no, I probably would.  I like the idea that once The Event comes to pass and we have to deal with our political classes once and for all, I want them going to their grave hissing and spitting at me all the way so I know I don't have any choice in the matter and it's them or me, which seems much more preferable to someone blubbing on their way to the guillotine like a baby and trying to bribe me to at least spare their kids and then I spend the next couple of decades only living so that God can make me suffer with the knowledge of what I've done and develop true fear for what judgment awaits me beyond the veil... which is likely how it'll all go down if we're being honest.  We'll hate ourselves for what we do during The Event, and we might even come to resent the happiness known by future generations because it wasn't them who paid the cost of it in blood and decades of nightmares, but it's not like we can change course now.
Anyway, I liked how the early episodes would wrong-foot the viewer by making you wonder who the show's protagonists might be, as people get bumped off after being built up more than the characters that actually make it to the final episodes, though if I'm honest it didn't convince me of the country-wide scale of the government's reign of terror, the titular Guardians never really presented as anything other than regular coppers who indulge in brutality, and we have those already. 
I liked the downbeat, bummer ending where it all gets a bit theatrical and the only hope you're presented with is "if things get really bad after this point people might not stand for it."  HA HA HA I guess we'll see when we build the foundations of our future upon the literal bones of capitalists.

The Wandering Earth is a pretty decent mainland Chinese attempt at replicating dumbass Hollywood moviemaking like what Michael Bay does, and I know China is a repressive authoritarian state, but there really should be some limits to the kind of cruelty you're allowed to inflict on your population.

The story of an impending global catastrophe caused by an expanding sun which can only be escaped by strapping engines to Earth and driving it to Alpha Centauri, the film reminds me greatly of Armageddon both visually and in that for a while you can delude yourself that the movie might make good in the end and not pull anything too stupid out of its ass in the final stretch that makes you go "nope", and even though it does just that, this is essentially a movie version of Space 1999 except with Earth instead of the Moon so I probably can't act like I was expecting better than arguably the dumbest bit of big screen science I've seen in a long long time which in retrospect may actually be pretty ambitious in the scale of its breathtaking stupidity, but here we are anyway.
"Well if Earth is driving through space what happens to the Moon, then?" I hear you ask, to which I reply "you shut the fuck up."  This film is not for you.

I never drink during the daylight hours. Yay winter.

Here's something a little interesting - by which I mean probably not at all - that I noticed while catching up with my illegally-downloaded tv viewing: Witches of East End (yes, someone did actually make a product and use that name for it and even better it is not just a carbon copy of Charmed it is also a spin-off from a series of novels about teenage vampires) is a show about magic, yet the characters don't have to learn how to use magic they just can because it's in their blood - which isn't magic but genetics - and there is also much talk about the importance of not abusing magic because there are rules about how magical energy has to be manipulated rather than simply created, it has to be transferred from somewhere else - which is actually pretty sound physics.  The Tomorrow People, on the other hand, is - apart from being a remake of the British kids' show of the same name from the last century - a show about the fantastical effects of genetics, yet the powers on display are pure fantasy - teleportation, time freezing, etc - with no scientific basis, and the main character whose name escapes me - dear God I just watched four episodes and I don't even know the name of the main character - sleep-teleports to other apartments despite being based on an object traveling through space at seventy thousand miles per hour and thus would be more likely to teleport into the Earth's molten core or into the frozen nothing of space if he was simply dematerialising during slumber and reappearing somewhere random.
Anyway, my great observation that is definitely worth your time is that the show about magic works according to an internal logic based on science, while the show based on science is basically about magic.  And no, I did not get laid at the weekend FUCK YOU.

Those rape analogies don't always work, but that one's right on the money

Prompted by the debate about the attempted gang rape of a backing character in the pages of DCs Sword of Sorcery, I dug out the old Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld issues to check out the attempted gang rape (by goblins) from the first issue that everyone seems to be throwing up as a shield against criticism of rape, because, you know, rape needs to be defended from liberals, apparently, and it's clear that a lot of these armchair apologists haven't actually read the original series, otherwise they would not have stopped with just the one rape attempt and might have gone further to point out the multiple rape attempts in issue 2 while the (13 year old) protagonist is tied up and being molested by her kidnapper while they travel on the back of a robot tiger (yes, really - it is probably some clever metaphor I do not comprehend), or the cover of issue 3, which has the young heroine looking terrified as an erect pink serpent rears up between her legs and stares intently at her breasts, which does not even remotely resemble anything within the issue itself.
Naturally, I ordered the DC Showcase edition immediately, as this is a comic I cannot give to younger relatives quickly enough.

Save your tears for your dog mother in hell!