Happy New Year Of The Horse

Cute Google Doodle for the Chinese New Year of the Horse.

A quick look around Wikipedia on the horse in Chinese history and mythology and we find...

Zhang Qian, a diplomat and explorer who brought strong horses and alfalfa seed for fodder back to early imperial China in the mid second century BC - a vital development, and one of his many achievements and discoveries, along with the development of trade with the West that would become known as the Silk Route. Without him, China might have remained isolated and impoverished for decades, and it would be easy for someone wishing to so alter history to waylay him on his travels. And the Doctor loves meeting fellow explorers...

The War of the Heavenly Horses a few decades later, a historical event grown to myth about massed battles to seize the greatest horses in the world. Who would control the steppes if history was rewritten? Would China be wildly different - or even there at all? Would the Mongols run wild over the world even more freely in the centuries to come?

Ox-Head and Horse-Face, demon guardians of the underworld, enemies of MONKEY! - who also travelled with Tripitaka’s dragon-turned-horse - and the sort of monsters often seen in the Davies era of Doctor Who. What might bring these nightmare images to life?

Have a good day and a good year!

The Look Of The Future

I find it highly unlikely anyone here will not have seen this already and will not want to, but I’ll put it behind a cut anyway. Peter Capaldi in his new costume as the Doctor.

"Look, it says "Quiet". Be QUIET."

Doctor Who won best drama at the National Television Awards, and Matt Smith won Best Actor, with this acceptance speech again demonstrating that some of it was Matt just being Matt. Or possibly just being the Doctor.

(Arthur Darvill picked up the award for him, and is keeping it safe...)

The unexpected heroes of the robot invasion

From concept artist Eduardo Peña.

JMS on DW?

J. Michael Straczynski would like a crack at writing Doctor Who. While I am not a fan of Babylon 5, I can certainly believe that he could produce an interesting episode. Just maybe not forty episodes in a row.

Star Wars scaled Peter Capaldi

Character Options do some action figures - mostly slight variants apart from Twelve, and a Zygon. Clara gets an entire new sculpt in the same outfit, so she now looks more like... Jessica Hynes...

Titan, meanwhile, make a load of characters I would want as those weird vinyl chibi things. Damn it.

I actually really like getting early figures like newly-regenerated Doctors. Plenty of time for kids to imagine adventures in the Maybe before they air. This can lead to things like Boba Fett fandom, of course...

And, fair play, the Dalek fighter ship thing would be a bit big in 5” scale.

And now also making retro figures in the new scale. Not just Ten and Amy, but as far back as Genesis of The Daleks. Which is changing their minds, I think for the good. The previous plan to only make classic figures in the old scale and new in the new seemed unduly divisive. Let fans of both scales have toys! (Hilarious use of a Peter Capaldi shot from The Thick Of It there...)

"Why not this one?"

A girl and her medbot discuss the viability of reviving the dead, as she was dead herself when they met.

(What ever happened to the Raston Warrior Robots anyway?)

Happy 80th birthday to Tom Baker, the Doctor of my childhood.

It’s also Martin Luther King Day and Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday. Quite a day for my heroes.

THE OBJECT Is... a bit of pipe.

Following previous amused reports of exaggerated freakouts, it turns out that THE OBJECT that stopped the five-storey drill in its tracks is... an eight-inch steel pipe. Which suggests an issue with the drill, really.

More Doctor Who fanart by Peter Capaldi

Yes, I said more Doctor Who fanart by Peter Capaldi.

What are the odds we see this image recreated in the show?

Time Trips

More ebooks, for various Doctors and companions, from some pretty literary names. AL Kennedy, Jenny Colgan, Nick Harkaway, Trudi Canavan, Jake Arnott.

Check out the blurbs for adventure hooks even before the books arrive. A golf club in the 70s, a planet that should not exist, a hole in time, future Australia, John Dee's Angelic Conversations.

Tales Of Trenzalore

One of the gaps in our knowledge of the Doctor's life to come from the anniversary year is about to be partially filled, with the ebook Tales Of Trenzalore showing four of his adventures in the centuries defending Christmas town.

Like the UNIT years, it parks the Doctor in one time and place (for a lot longer from his perspective but only one episode from ours) as he defends it from a higher-than-average number of monster invasions, and could be the basis for a more grounded game than the usual weekly jaunts across all of reality.

Still no Monoids, though.

Anybody in NZ?

Fifty: an adventure at Kap-Con, Wellington NZ this weekend, by Morgan Davie, with a disarmingly frank description:

It is also the Moffatiest adventure I could come up with... Oh, and I have no idea how to end it...

I’m sure it’ll go well anyway. Morgue is that good. (Damn him.)

Particularly amused that Doctor Who is also listed as genre and style.

Sherlock, secrets, and Sherlock secrets

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss on how Sherlock works. Whacking great spoilers for that other show they make, but also some handy observations about how to foreshadow twists.

Dian Fossey

A Google Doodle honouring zoologist Dian Fossey, who would have been 82 today.