For the last post of the year I haven’t been able to finish a review, but here’s a TV recommendation instead: after the huge success of the Shaun the Sheep Movie, Aardman has produced a brand-new half-hour movie called The Farmer’s Llamas for Christmas! The premiere broadcast is on Saturday, December 26 on BBC One at 18:10 with repeats on December 27, 09:05 on CBBC and January 1, 16:05 on BBC One again (all GMT times). It will also be shown on German television on Friday, January 1, 17:05 on the children’s channel KiKa with repeats on Saturday, January 2, 08:45 on WDR and again on KiKa at 13:20 on the same day (all CET times).

There’s a short trailer and a featurette with more footage on the Shaun the Sheep Youtube Channel promising all sorts of shenanigans involving the new farm arrivals and the BBC is also airing a new, hour-long Aardman Documentary on Saturday, December 26 on BBC One at 14:25 GMT following an airing of the classic Wallace & Gromit debut A Grand Day Out.

The Farmer’s Llamas will also be released on DVD in the UK on February 8 and in Germany on March 10 – although the prices are a bit steep for just an half-hour movie. This is one DVD I will not be buying, but instead I will finally get the boxset of Series 3 & 4 soon, which has already been released in October and I only just found out about – I haven’t even seen those episodes yet!

Since this is the last post of the year for DVDLog, I’d like to wish everyone Happy Holidays – I will post some more season’s greetings soon over on my blog. I’m not sure when I’m going to start up DVDLog again, but there will be a Winter pause until early to mid-January, although there could be some occasional posts in the meantime. Stay tuned! :-)

In between writing something new, I finally did what I should have done a long time ago: to prepare a new Review Index with only the English-language articles in it. I replaced the older index, which I had not updated for over a year, with it, but still left a link to the original. This is just a quick fix to end the chaos of the old index, but in the future there will be three lists: the master index with the English reviews, a legacy list of the German reviews and a third index of all the DVDs in my collection, the latter two for requesting purposes. At the moment, there are “only” 44 reviews in the new main index, but I hope to write slowly, but steadily more. If anyone has requests for unreviewed discs or untranslated reviews, I’d like to hear them! You can always contact me here in the comments, via Email or over on Google+, Twitter or Facebook.

So, in lieu of any actually new reviews, please accept this index as proof that DVDLog isn’t dead yet! Two brand-new reviews are in the making, but judging from the extremely warm weather coming in the next days, they are still going to take a while – one of the discs hasn’t even arrived here yet!

Continue to Index »

Almost exactly one year ago I had announced that DVDLog will be slowly transitioning completely into an English-language site and since then I have been writing exclusively in English. But the website template and the pages were still in German, something which I finally managed to fix yesterday – and it wasn’t as easy as it looks! Everything except all the old reviews, the review index and the caselist is now translated. The last two are going to need some more work, especially the unmanagable behemoth of the review index, which I still need to split up into German and English reviews and remove all the dead links and older reviews. I will keep a backup of the original list around, though.

I also moved everything over to the DVDLog domain, meaning that there will be no more linking over to Bibra-Online.de for the reviews and some other pages. This is only for new articles, because I don’t want to try a risky search and replace in the blog database – the old files are still on the server for “backwards compatibility”, but new ones will only be uploaded to the DVDLog domain to keep everything under one roof.

Now I just need to go back into writing mode, but don’t forget that I’m running this website alone, so I might not get back into the one-review-a-week rhtyhm very soon. I also still write on my old website at Bibra-Online.de and post photos on my Photography Blog, which is actually the most active of the bunch at the moment. You can also circle me on Google+ or follow me on Facebook and Twitter for all my website activities and the RSS feed of this webseite also works!

Rumours of this website’s demise, etc… I had great plans for DVDLog this December, but for a whole lot of different reasons none of these really worked out and I’m still sitting on a pile of un- and half-finished material. This happenend mainly because I lost my writing mojo a little again, but also because of the low influx of new DVDs at the moment. But this does definitively not mean I’m giving up here, quite the contrary – the plan is still to review a few new discs, translate more of my older articles into English and maybe write some other posts about movies and television.

I will try to do at least one little review before the holidays and maybe write another article – I hope I can get this done before the week is out. But I’m not sure if I will be doing the traditional DVD Recap this year, since there are only very few discs worth mentioning. Perhaps I’ll do it later in January after a winter break, which I will need to recharge my batteries, make some adjustments to the website like translating the menus and cleaning up the review list – I hope I can get back to a semi-regular update rhythm at the latest in February. 

But I’m not gone! I’m actually a little busy elsewhere – I’m posting daily images over on my Photography Blog and sometimes over on the original Bibra-Online.de website about everything from Space & Astronomy to Vintage Computers and Webdesign. And of course you can follow all my shenanigans on my Google+ stream – and on Facebook and Twitter, but I’m not as active as on G+ there.