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The ninth season of the rebooted Doctor Who may have come to a close earlier this month, but there’s still one episode to look forward to: the annual Christmas Special! This year will find Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor and his wife River Song reunited for a holiday adventure with plenty of snowy scenes, Christmas carols and Antlers. A week later, Sherlock fans get a new episode as well (after a two-year wait!), as John and Sherlock find themselves in 1890’s London for a Victorian holiday special airing on January 1^st.

With these two incredible specials on the horizon, what’s a fan to do? Gather all your nerdy friends and celebrate amazing British television with a WhoLock Holiday party… or two! Here's how:

(Photo credit from @neilhimself)

Neil Gaiman has always given the world much to think about: Do dogs understand when we’re trying to write and decide to impede us anyway? Is it all right to go next door for a pad of paper and a writing utensil upon being locked out? Armageddon…or tea? These are the important questions.

Though he’s surely the next Nostradamus, Gaiman is probably better known as a writer than as a Doomsday-Darjeeling soothsayer. To celebrate this sir on his birthday, and in light of NaNoWriMo, we scoured Gaiman’s tweet backlog for ages (and by ages we mean hours looking through Twitter’s advanced search function) finding the best tidbits on writing that this jovial tea-sipping nerd king has to offer.

ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is in full swing with season three, and we at Quirk can't help but notice how much shady business Coulsen and Co. have to deal with. So just for funsies, here's a list of the five most shady organizations in literature and pop culture.

Ah, Hannibal Lecter. No other fictional murderer has captured the collective unconsciousness quite like Thomas Harris’s culinarily-inclined mastermind. What is it about sleek, erudite monster that makes him so indelible? Four novels, five films and a television show might have destroyed another character, or at the least made him over-exposed. Only classic nightmare fodder such as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster seem to exist in that same rarified air as Hannibal, where repeated use does nothing to fade their own personal brand of darkness.

Part of Hannibal’s continued appeal must lie with the way Harris has chosen Hannibal’s antagonists. The women and men who go up against Hannibal Lechter are all formidable minds in their own right, and so Hannibal’s victories (and defeats) against them are always well-earned.

So how might Hannibal fare against some of the greatest detectives in literary history?