FROM THE SFX OFFICE

A visit to the Doctor's, shooting people up the backside and Sporch woes in our latest peek inside SFX Towers.

One week after the “big move” and team SFX are finally settling into their new positions in SFX towers. Jordan’s getting a bit of colour in his cheeks from all the sun streaming through the window (that’s the plan at least), art bods Catherine and Jon now have a ginormo board between them for the next issue and Russell’s moaning about the fact he has further to walk to give pages to Nick to proof. You can probably guess it’s been a bit of a slow week.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been some excitement. Dave B and Ade are out of the office today visiting Great Ormond Street Hospital to hand over the £2,000 raised through the SFX Weekender charity auction, and Dave Golder’s charity haircut. Rob’s out of the office today too after upping sticks and moving to Bath last week. The problem is no-one’s quite sure where he is. Our working theory: his new landlord has him imprisoned in some dungeon cellar. Or he booked the day off. Or he’s at his induction. We like the first theory best.

Nick is deep in prep for next issue's mammoth Doctor Who feature - a calling that even found him meeting Steven Moffat's cat on Monday night (it's the most beautiful cat in the world, by the way, and he had to be persuaded to hand her back as he left Chez Moff). Elsewhere, he's finally started to whittle down the perilously tottering pile of SFX 's that have been breeding on his desk for the past three years (tip to Nick - file horizontally, not vertically). Kirky is blinking in the sudden sunlight, and rather grateful that she hasn't died beneath a glossy landslide of back issues.

After spending Saturday at Cardiff International Comics Expo, on Monday travel chaos meant Jordan gave up trying to get to work, and spent the day lounging round the house all day in his pants, playing Bulletstorm for giggles. For those that don’t know, Bulletstorm is a shooter where you earn awards for pulling off “Skill Shots”, like kicking someone into a cactus (Pricked) or ramming an enemy to death with a hot dog cart (Fast Food). His favourite? “Fire In The Hole”, which you earn for shooting mini-bosses where the sun don’t shine. And Ebert thought videogames could never be art. He also spent yesterday to-ing and fro-ing between screenings in London, and had no problem keeping himself occupied in Soho for three hours during the wait between the second and third films. We’re saying nothing.

Rich is trying to wrangle new ideas for the news section into some kind of tangible form and is really looking forward to watching Rubber , a film about a psychotic tyre. What could possibly go wrong? Dave G meanwhile is still smarting at his failure to get “Sporch” trending on Twitter after Sunday’s superb episode of Being Human . To cheer him up we’re patenting a range of caravan-friendly kitchen/tool-bench hybrids for future creation: Spoondriver anyone?

Ian has been weeping with relief that this issue just involves doing a reviews section (albeit a bigger-than-ever-before reviews section...), without any interruptions by Christmas, New Year, or the SFX Weekender, or having to edit a special issue of the mag simultaneously. This allowed him to spend two whole days on Monday and Tuesday catching up with his unread emails. It also means that he has FINALLY got round to compiling the results of the SFX Art Challenge that we issued, er, some time in November. Ahem. Expect to see the results of that go live very shortly...

On Tuesday the entire team went down to the Art Studio two by two to have their mugshots taken for the next issue. Russell decided to wear a white shirt, despite explicit instructions not to, and the fact he never wears white. Oh how we laughed. Speaking of Russell, he stayed at home yesterday and wrote the ed’s letter to a special he’s editing in six months’ time. The loon. We can’t tell you what the special is yet, though...

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Random Quote Of The Week: “Jack Duckworth was my childhood hero. We were obsessed with Jack Duckworth.”

Whose Mug? (last week’s answer: they were Russell’s kicks)