Midweek

I know what you're thinking.

"You're on holiday... Not in the office for the whole week... why aren't you blogging every half hour or something?"

Well, I do have other things to do.

Not that I've been doing them, by and large. I had planned to more actively look into property, and the purchase thereof, but a quick chat with one of the salesmen at work last week put me right off that idea. The market, it is said, has reached the point where so many 'buy to let' schemes are failing, banks are no longer mortgaging them, and there's likely to be a huge flood of such properties returning to the market. Prices could plummet, and buying now may mean losing a fair chunk of the value of the property before I'd even moved in. Better to wait till the new year...

Not ideal news, to be honest. Yeah, great, there's a chance I'll get something better at a lower price, but that doesn't do anything about the fact that I'm still living with my parents. On the other hand, while discussing all this with them, it was said that, should one of my grandparents die anytime soon, I wouldn't have to worry about a mortgage...

But I know roughly the areas I'm interested in, and that's a start. It means I won't be quite so blindly fumbling around the property market once I'm properly looking to buy.

In the time I might otherwise have spent doing important things, I've been reading (returning to the first Thomas Covenant trilogy having finished both Wintersmith and Thud! recently), working on a TransFormers repaint that's rather more 'all-over' than my little movie figure touch-ups (pictures to be posted later!), attending to some of my oft-neglected writing, and watching the remainder of Captain Scarlet series 2.

And what an amazing series it is. I know I've said this before, but the storytelling really is leaps and bounds ahead of series 1. The models look slightly more real, landscapes and cityscapes are more complex and used more impressively, movement is better... there's even something approaching lip-synch most of the time (which puts Hypermarionation even further ahead of Supermarionation). Of course, there are a few duff episodes... But my biggest concern about the package is that (a) the synopsis for the final episode in the sleeve is wrong (presumably based on the episode that was rewritten dozens of times before finally being abandoned because it was considered 'too scary for children'), (b) the penultimate episode really should have been the final episode and, (c) the actual final episode would have worked far better at any other point in this series, or as an opener for series 3.

Returning to point (b), it occurred to me some time after I'd seen the whole of series 2 that, if one were to re-edit and splice together the series 1 pilot episodes "Instrument of Destruction (parts 1 & 2)" and series 2 episode 12 "Dominion", one would have a rather fine "New Captain Scarlet - The Movie".

I hope they do at least one more series of this... The story isn't over by any stretch of the imagination, and they've opened so many doors for possible future plots and events... But it seems that this experiment into computer generated Hypermarionation may have come to a premature end.