Pickwick's Papers

Dream spot

pickwick@livejournal.com — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:35:52 GMT

Sigh.

The G-spot 'doesn't appear to exist', say researchers.

Thanks for that, Tim and Andrea. You asking a few sets of twins questions totally invalidates millions of women's personal experiences.

(And now I sound like some sort of religious anti-scientist. But really.)

Andrea Burri, the other author, said she was concerned that women who feared they lacked a G-spot were suffering from feelings of 'inadequacy or underachievement'.

Can't exist, then.

I accidentally saw some of the Mail commenters' views on the matter, too.

Another lesbian myth shot down in flames.

I don't know which direction to get angry in first.

Doctor Who: The End Of Time, 4.X4

pickwick@livejournal.com — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:40:36 GMT

I was going to watch both parts of Doctor Who again today on my proper telly, but it seems to have decided not to record the second one, so I might as well witter from memory. (It's repeated tomorrow night, I'm having another go at taping it...)

I loved it. This is kind of why I wanted to watch it again, because a lot of people whose opinions I often agree with hated it, but I thought it was awesome. I've been thinking about why, and it's related to something I read recently about judging on a holistic approach rather than on details. Because yeah, there was dumb stuff about "I have an enormous decision to make! I have to shoot Rassilon or the Master!! ..Oh, no, I can just shoot this machine", and the Timelords plot was wrapped up kind of hastily, and it had more endings than Return of the King, as many people have said. (Actually, I didn't notice this at all - I pretty much thought that the episode had an ending, then the era had a wrap-up ending. A half hour one? Fine. It's earned it.)

The episode: I can't actually point to that many moments that I thought were OMG AWESOME - Wilf knocking, Wilf Skywalker, Wilf and the Doctor's mutual adoption society. There's a theme there, but I also loved "Fixing the heating?!" and "That's racist!" and Donna being the Doctor's best friend. I quite liked the cactus people that lots of people hated, I thought they brought a different "human" face to the proceedings from the one Wilf was bringing. Wilf wasn't the companion in this, really, he was the hero, and it was nice to have other people to be doing the "No, really, leaving now would be a plan" scepticism and the "What the hell?" questions. Overall, I just liked the feel. It didn't drag like the start of last week's, it didn't have anything really facile like the locking-the-Tardis-like-a-car scene. It had the Doctor going through the five stages of grief, really, for himself. It was beautifully in line with his priorities, I thought, skewed as they can be - he couldn't shoot a gun and kill the Master in order to save the entire human race, but he'd save one elderly human at the cost of his own life. He's always been better at saving than killing. When Rassilon called him a coward it was a nice echo of the first series finale when the Daleks ask Nine if he's a coward or a killer, and he's proud to be a coward. (The sacrificing-yourself-to-save-a-human-from-radiation theme is an echo too; it's interesting that Nine did it with much less angst than Ten. Yay Nine. For all of the JesusTen stories, Nine has always had much more grace and generosity of heart.)

I did get snippy about the lack of planetary effect from Gallifrey popping in directly beside Earth, but then I remembered about the whole Tardis-pulling-Earth-through-the-universe thing last season, and got over it. Lack of conclusion to the Woman story - well, I had thought it was a set-up for Moff, but apparently RTD talks about Flavia or something in the Confidential? I have no idea, and I'm not really bothered. This episode seemed much more coherent than the last one (and some previous finales), and I think part of that was because he didn't bother about explaining every little thing. He's left some things open for fans to explore and discuss and write fic about; you'd think they'd be more grateful!

The era wrap-up: I loved it, but I always love things like these. I like the fourteen endings of Return of the King - I want to know what happens to everyone, in the end. Stories that finish at the plot climax always seem unfinished to me. I love books and films that have the little "John kept his elephants for seven years, but eventually realised it was impractical in a caravan, replaced them with geckos, and lived happily ever after as a lizardman" blurbs at the end.

Specifically, then. Martha and Mickey - OK, I'm not convinced by this. I don't know why they needed to be married; I would have liked seeing them be freelance alien hunters together, and the marriage smacks more than a little of both "pair the spares" and "pair the minorities". Everyone's talking about what happened to Doctor Tom, and Martha was on honeymoon during Children of Earth, but...did the script say it was with Tom? I wouldn't be all that surprised if it didn't specify, and the fans made a reasonable assumption - but then, I also wouldn't be all that surprised if RTD just decided to ignore it.

Sarah Jane - This one got to me, not because the execution was particularly amazing (although Lis Sladen's facial expressions killed me, as usual) but because the basis of the SJ storyline when she came back in School Reunion was her issues about the Doctor not saying goodbye and her not being able to let go, so the fact that he said goodbye this time? Awesome.

Jack and Alonso in the Cantina, I adored. Jack looked like he was drowning his sorrows, which is a nice nod to CoE, of course, but he's always covered his emotions with flirting. And who better to flirt with than George the werewolf? (Yay, Being Human back shortly!) All the different species - oh, so much love, even for the ones I hated. It was the equivalent of a musical or pantomime finale at the theatre, everyone coming forward for a bow. The baby Adipose made me laugh out loud.

Wilf and Donna - oh, Donna. Unlike almost everyone else I've seen commenting, I was overjoyed that she didn't get her memories back. One of my biggest problems with RTD has been his constant undermining of his most moving stories - Dalek is one of my favourite episodes, but its impact is decreased every time more Daleks reappear; and even if I liked Rose I'd have been furious at her reappearance after the tragic melancholy of her Doomsday exit, especially when she was given a "happy ending" with her very own sex-toy Doctor. Donna regaining her memories would have ruined the horrible heartbreak about the ~waste~ at the end of season four, and undermined that scene of grief between the Doctor and Wilf. If you're going to have a sad or bittersweet ending, for God's sake leave it that way. What the Doctor actually did, with the lottery ticket and Geoffrey Noble? Meh, but fair enough. Call it companion wages. (Sarah Jane might be pissed, but she doesn't seem too badly off.)

[Edit: Oh, I forgot about Joan Redfern's daughter, or whoever she was. I did like that scene, though it doesn't seem to made much of an impact on me! I mostly liked that she was given the name Verity Newman. And I wonder if we'll get her story as a novel in that cover.]

Rose, of course, most likely to make me swear. But I thought it was pretty well done, actually - I'm so glad it was in her past, rather than yet another interdimensional rip, even if they did do odd things to Billie Piper to try and make her look younger. (And a Jackie appearance!)

The regeneration: Hurrah! I'm not complaining that it blew up the Tardis and Eccleston's didn't - I expect almost every regeneration has been inconsistent with the next, and starting to bitch now seems to miss the point, rather. I'm just going "Whoo, new Tardis!", and Matt Smith looks like he'll be great. He was a little bit too Tennant-like at the end of the episode, but I'm sure that's just bleedthrough. The trailer looks fantastic. Roll on the spring, Matt Smith and Stephen Moffat. And thank you, Russell and Julie, for bringing Doctor Who back.

Doctor Who The End Of Time 1/2

pickwick@livejournal.com — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:33:51 GMT

So, yeah....WTF?!

I really enjoyed it, at least the last 40 minutes, although you can nitpick to hell and back as usual. Overacting from Simm, weird writing/directing choices with the STARVING...the Master was all over the place this episode. Which I guess was sort of the point, but he borrowed from Buffy (came back wrong), LOTR (Gollum!Master), Hammer Horror or something with the maniacal laughter, plus random superpowers, which I suppose I can accept the "he came back wrong" handwave for.

WILF! And Cribbins in the credits! I'm scared he's going to die, now. But Wilf is awesome. And Donna. And Donna's mum, in fact. There seemed to be hundreds of characters in this, it was all a bit messy - or maybe it'll work better when you watch both eps at once.

I knew there was going to be something insane at the end thanks to the Facebook status update of the subtitler, yesterday, but...yeah. That was insane o.O Being (John) Master. Bits of that could have been cut better - the Doctor stood around for a LONG time being useless, really.

What was the "if we die before we regenerate, we're dead" thing? That was weird.

Obama. LOL. Actual LOL. So weird, because up till now they've invented PMs and presidents - must just be RTD fanboying, I guess.

Was that a totally different ring to the one we saw at the end of S3? I thought it was a faceted gemstone, but I haven't watched it since it aired, so I'm not sure. Bets they'll release the ring for sale though. (Speaking of which, I have a Time Lord fob watch! Yay!)

I was watching for shout-outs, because I expect RTD to crowbar them in. The Tardis in the stained glass window and the Doctor being a god - the household gods in Fires of Pompeii. The bus company was Sparrow something, and one of the women on it was called Sally - Sally Sparrow from Blink. Someone talking out of the TV - Idiot's Lantern. Alien tech "fixing" people so they're all the same - Empty Child/Doctor Dances. (I don't know when it stops being a shout-out and stars being a recycled plot, mind you.)

I liked the Master Race pun.

It was packed with religious overtones again, especially Dalton's narration, and the bit at the beginning in the church, of course.

Not enough Donna.

RTD did his usual thing of always having to top himself, so to speak - the only thing bigger than "the end of the whole multiverse" is "the end of time itself", I suppose.

Next week, THE END OF TIME, and I have to watch it at work. I didn't see much of the trail.

pickwick gives it WTF/10 points.

In David Tennant taking over the telly news, he was quite good on QI last night but mostly got drowned out by Lee Mack being a twat. Bah. But Hamlet is on tomorrow, and I've seen a bit of it, and it's MADE OF WIN and you should all watch it, even if you hate Doctor Who and David Tennant and Shakespeare.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, how much is a picture, four words and two spare letters worth?

pickwick@livejournal.com — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:39:17 GMT

Year In Review 2009

pickwick@livejournal.com — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:19:11 GMT

(There are some questions missing, but I can't be bothered re-numbering...)

1.What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?:
Was a witness at a wedding. Was off work sick for more than a week or two. Um. Not much, really.
2. Did you keep your New Year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?:
Can't remember if I made any, so I have no idea if I kept them, but probably not. (They're usually "go out more, smoke less, stop biting fingernails" - fail, fail, fail.) Not making any this year.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?:
spiderpixie in July.
4. What countries did you visit?:
Cornwall ;)
5. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?:
Fewer anxiety/ panic attacks. More motivation. A Roomba. A whole series of Doctor Who!

6. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?:
I don't think any specific dates have managed to remain etched upon my memory now, and it's not even the end of the year. Neil Gaiman might have been the 19th and 20th of August...
7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?:
Paying off my student loan, probably.
8. What was your biggest failure?:
Saving money, probably.
9. What was the best thing you bought?:(or was bought for you)
Oooh. I'm still very keen on my The Raven t-shirt. I got loads of great books. And my shiny HDTV. Oh! Oh! And my Atheist Bus Campaign panel!
10. Whose behaviour merited celebration?:
My parents', laerad's, Charlie Brooker's, the Lib Dems, the Guardian's. The "Twitterati". Terry Christian! Obama, mostly.
11. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?:
The Met Police. Most MPs. The CEO of my company. The Iranian government. Bankers. Tony Blair.
12. Where did most of your money go?:
Books and tech shinies, as usual.
13. What did you get really, really, really excited about?:
Various book festival things, especially Neil Gaiman. The people-power-potential of social networking. Future tech. spiderpixie and pooka_joe's wedding. Battlestar Galactica, and Glee, and Misfits. Dark Heresy, and recently I'm getting excited about Unhallowed Metropolis.
14. What songs will always remind you of 2009?:
Anything by Jonathan Coulton. Holy Fuck by Lord Cut-Glass. Defying Gravity from Wicked. The 69 Love Songs album by the Magnetic Fields. Inaugural Trams by Super Furry Animals. Killing In The Name by RATM!
15. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i) ...happier or sadder?:
Happier, mostly
ii) thinner or fatter?:
No idea - my weight's been fluctuating all year.
iii) richer or poorer?:
Richer.
16. What do you wish you'd done more of?:
Seeing my friends. Making new friends. Keeping in touch with friends. (Do you see a pattern here?) Cleaning. Anything productive. really. Computer games.
17. What do you wish you'd done less of?:
Being ill, reading fanfic (well, I enjoy it, but I have lots of actual books to read), lying in bed hitting the snooze button for hours, smoking, procrastinating, dithering.
18. How will you be spending Christmas?:
With my parents, my brother and his new-ish girlfriend in the morning. Bro & GF head off at various points to her parents'. In the evening I shall be watching Doctor Who and talking about it online.
19. Did you fall in love in 2009?:
No
20. How many one night stands?:
None.
21. What were your favourite TV programs?:
The Big Bang Theory, Being Human, QI, Misfits, Doctor Who (theoretically, and giving the next two the benefits of the doubt), Torchwood Children of Earth, Glee, Dollhouse, BBC4 documentaries, OOglies.
22. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?:
No.
23. What was the best book you read?:
I have absolutely no idea. I'll go look around blankly. Um... Small Favor by Jim Butcher. Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context by Sheenagh Pugh. Loads and loads of books of essays on pop culture, including Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Battlestar, Buffy, Narnia, His Dark Materials, Watchmen, and probably some I've forgotten. I must have read other good novels... I enjoyed all of John Scalzi's novels, and the first couple of Hidden Family ones by Charles Stross. One of the Torchwood novels was actually Really Good, though I can't remember its name offhand. The Phonogram comic. Just A Phrase I'm Going Through and By Hook Or By Crook by David Crystal.
24. What was your greatest musical discovery?:
Jonathan Coulton, with special runners-up mentions for Amanda Palmer, Lord Cut-Glass and the Magnetic Fields.
25. What did you want and get?:
I probably got most things I wanted - materially, anyway. Lots of good stuff.
26. What did you want and not get?
A social life?
27. What were your favorite films of this year?
I've probably seen, like, four films this year. So...Watchmen, which I saw twice. Um. The Gamers. And Coraline. They were all good...!
28. What did you do on your birthday?
I can't remember. Must have been exciting.
29. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
Geeky t-shirts, jeans, hoodies. Same as when I was 16, really. With some added cardigans.
30. What kept you sane?
The internet, and the people who live in it.
32. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?:
My mind's gone totally blank, and I know there've been loads. Ben Miller & Rob Brydon. Mitchell from Being Human. Matthew Morrison in Glee. Gaius Baltar from Battlestar. Alan Rickman. Derren Brown.
33. What political issue stirred you the most?:
Loads, notably ID cards, the death of Ian Tomlinson, and the secularism/religion debate.
34. What was your favorite moment of the year?
At the Richard Dawkins talk at the Book Festival, I sat beside a genteel little old Edinburgh lady, who started chatting to me. She was 85, and she had always been an closeted atheist, because it just wasn't something nice people talked about. She was almost overwhelmed at how big and open and popular the "atheist movement" has got. (And she thought Dawkins was a bit too nice to religion in his talk, too.)
35. Who was the best new person you met this year?
sudge, cos he's awesome.
42. What was your least favourite moment of the year?
Ooh, probably the mega panic attack that started my weeks off work, when I spent a couple of hours flailing about whether to call an ambulance.
43. Where were you when 2009 began?
On the internet, I think. Well, I'd been working till 10.45, and it was raining...
44. Who were you with?
Nobody *sob* except all you little people in the box who talk to me.
45. Where will you be when 2009 ends?
In a soundproof booth in my office, with one other person also in a soundproof booth at the other end of the office, providing subtitles for STV's increasingly drunken Hogmanay Live! show. Plus, on the internet.
46. Who will you be with when 2009 ends?
See above.
47. What was your favourite month of 2009?
The start of March was good, with Cornwall and London. And then August was fab.
48. Did you drink a lot of alcohol in 2009?
Nope. Probably drank a couple of dozen times in total, and got drunk...twice, I think.
49. Did you do a lot of drugs in 2009?
Might have smoked occasionally, yes.
50. What are your plans for 2010?
Plans?! Well, I'm going to buy a Roomba, does that count? Get a pension. Maybe go and see my mate in Australia, depending on how long he stays there. Figure out some kind of exit strategy from my job, not that I plan to leave in the near future, but it'd be good to have options.

Whovian linguistics

pickwick@livejournal.com — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:24:55 GMT

As the resident expert (sorry, sudge), I've been asked to have a look at our style sheet for Doctor Who. Naturally I have Opinions, but I want them backed up by you lot.

(Actually, I'm well aware it should probably be TARDIS, but it annoys me. I think Tardis is fine: I know it's an acronym, but it's like Unicef or laser, a proper acronym rather than an initialism. And all-caps is shouty. Breaks the flow. Also, I'm pretty sure Time Lord is two words, but just to check. These are all things the BBC website has both ways...)

View Poll: Do my job for me

Every Christmas should be the same

pickwick@livejournal.com — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:58:21 GMT

The number of times the varying species of postmen have woken me up in the past three days is ridiculous. Clearly I should get up earlier or stop buying things online.

I don't think I mentioned on here, at the beginning of the week I won a charity auction for one of the atheist bus ads. Original bus panels like these ones:

It turned up the other day. It's...kind of...bus-sized. Heh. It's in two parts which currently appear to be devouring my other sofa. I'm not quite sure what to do with it - I'd like to get it framed, but it'd have to be custom framed and that would be a) very expensive and b) probably impossible to get up the stairs of my block of flats once it's done, what with it being about 5m long. And I doubt you get home visits from picture framers. Maybe I'll just nail-gun it to the wall.

I've been buying Christmas presents too - I got a little bit carried away and seem to have bought 9 books and a DVD box set for my dad. (And some toffee.) It's not quite as bad as it sounds - five of them are the Hitchhikers Guide trilogy (£6.99 from the Book People just now, if anybody on my flist doesn't have them, which seems unlikely.) I lent him the original book of Last Chance To See after he'd watched the new series, and he adored the humour, so, yay. And my brother will be very happy to pay me for some of the other things and use them as his presents!

Speaking of books, the balance between technology and my disorganisation means it's now significantly quicker to bittorrent an ebook copy of, for example, The God Delusion and search it for a quote, than it is for me to FIND my copy, far less find the quote I wanted. Is this some kind of minor singularity?

Ooh, yay. Two new eps of Dollhouse to watch.

December!

pickwick@livejournal.com — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:24:30 GMT

I can't believe it's December. Except that it's bloody freezing. It was all frosty this morning, and a beautiful sunrise:

So Borders in Glasgow is definitely closing down. I stuck my head in to the sale yesterday, but it was terrible - 20% off everything, but they'd got rid of all their other offers (£5 off new hardbacks, buy-one-get-one-half-price, that sort of thing) so most books were actually more expensive. I'm assuming I'll hear if they make the sale more impressive - I'll check on Thursday when I'm in town, too.

I suspect Whittards is going to shut down too - we were in there yesterday, and there wasn't a great variety of tea and no coffee at all. They haven't had my flavoured instant coffees for a few months now, and mostly the shop seemed to have of crockery spread out on the shelves to make it look full.

Today none of my software is working right - my main subtitling software is crashing every time I use a shortcut that uses the control key. Sigh. I'll reboot at lunchtime, since it takes about 20 minutes...

On the up side, I get to use my Christmas icons!

Good Thing Bad Thing

pickwick@livejournal.com — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:06:51 GMT

Good Thing! The new series of QI starts tonight. YAY! Also, more Misfits.

Bad Thing! These American anti-gay-marriage ads are insane. Edit: But good thing! This parody response is wonderful, and has George Takei.

Good Thing! Anton Vowl's Christmas cards for Daily Mail readers are fabulous.

Bad Thing! People think they have the right to know what BBC employees earn. Problem is - apart from privacy concerns and all that - unless they know what other people in the media industry earn, the raw figures for the BBC tell them nothing. It's just another excuse for the Mail to have a go at the BBC. When I worked at the Beeb, you actually earned slightly less than the competitors because of the benefits of working there (job security, status, looks good on CV) and because it's publicly funded, but it would obviously still look like a lot to someone on minimum wage.

Good Thing! That kid who peed on a war memorial got community service. Seems to have had a sensible judge who wasn't going to imprison him just to "send a message".

Also, it's sunny. Hurray!

Dead Girl

pickwick@livejournal.com — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:19:48 GMT

*shuffles surreptitiously into view pretending she's been here all along*

Well, it's been an exciting few days, I have to say. I mean, I have a new blender and juicer (courtesy of dermfitz) and a new iron (courtesy of Argos - my old one died.) What could be more amazing than that?! I also have a new shaver with six different heads, one of which is apparently an eyebrow shaper. I'm slightly scared of it. Tonight I plan to make a smoothie, iron some clothes for tomorrow and trim my eyebrows into funny shapes. Any good smoothie recipes that don't involve banana?

Monday night I went to see Rachel Stamp at King Tuts. They're a glam rock-ish band from the late 90s - I saw them loads of times then because they were my best friend's favourite band, and they are kind of fab. Especially the drummer. They were supported by Shatterhand, who were pretty good too - I think they'd be really fun to play on Guitar Hero, for some reason! They remind me of the Dropkick Murphys a bit, or Green Day.

Rachel Stamp. Note awesome drummer.

The news is all crap, isn't it? Bank charges, racism, stupid internet laws proposed, more Iraq whitewashes, Borders probably closing down. And we seem likely to drown in Glasgow sooner or later - my jeans have only just dried out from walking to work earlier.

Oh, hey, TV - Misfits is GREAT, isn't it? And Paradox was a bit crap.

Doctor Who: Waters of Mars - 4.X2? Do we have a naming convention for these things?

pickwick@livejournal.com — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:24:35 GMT

Lookit! An entry from me! And all it takes is a new Doctor Who.

Best Doctor Who this year!!1!!! Which means, you know, better than Planet of the Dead. HA. But I did actually like this one. It was solidly OK for 40 minutes or so, and then spiralled off into Made Of Awesome for a bit, though sadly thunked back down to earth in the end. (SPOILER!)

The plot and the acting was serviceable verging on good, the directing was good and it looked gorgeous except for some dodgy CGI, the music didn't annoy me. The main thing that stuck out to me was Russell - and possibly the entire team - leading up to the finale by doing a Greatest Hits set, pretty much. Let's see what I've written down, after I started noticing:

Maggie saying "stop mucking about" was a direct quote from Rose
Shots of Doctor/ Adelaide through the windows of the airlock were reminiscent of the Doctor/Donna window conversation shots from 4.01 (the name of which I've repressed), and I think Martha in 42
"Gay Agenda" check
Shot of the Doctor from the robot's POV, in blue tones, was very similar to the Doctor from the Dalek's POV in Dalek. (Oddly, the later shot of YoungAdelaide from the Dalek's POV wasn't blue.) Plus the Dalek being there, of course.
Riding on the robot down the tunnel was like riding the Segways in...Doomsday?
The zombies' head movements in unison were like at least one other monster - the Family?
I'm not sure if his hedgehog hair was a deliberate callback or not, heh
The last-minute rescue from heroic suicide was like Rose & Nine's last-minute rescue of Jack in The Doctor Dances
Aaand the Ood again.

I've decided these were callbacks and not lazy writing, yes.

There was a definite Lonely God theme going on in this one. The first shots of the Doctor arriving on Mars reminded me of Watchmen and Dr Manhattan, actually, so I had that whole train of thought going from the start. There's probably an essay in comparing the two of them. And yeah, at the end it went from subtext to text, really. Master of Time and Space!

But oh, I really thought we were going to get InsanePsychoDoctor for the Christmas specials, that would have been fabulous. And having to be killed for the good of the universe, or something. We might still, but he seemed to have come down again at the end, even though he did leave the dead body of someone who couldn't possibly have been there lying around. And a robot. And really, he was bloody lucky he didn't rip time apart; your gran shooting herself in her own house is likely to give you slightly different ambitions to her being killed on the first colonist mission to Mars, I'd have thought. I can't decide whether the "Daleks are indirectly responsible for humanity expanding to the stars" is cool or overly smart-arsed.

The Doctor - or Ten, at any rate - just can't function without a companion. That's why he ended up telling Adelaide all about everything - he kept telling her bits, and she didn't ask for more, so he kept having to just blurt out more and more truths in an accelerating series of non-sequiteurs. Angsty speeches about how lonely he is and how he's so sorry that he can't save everyone because the universe needs to go on, they're the companion's job to listen to. Giving them to the people he's currently failing to save is entirely unhelpful and counterproductive. And the episode was compared to The Fires of Pompeii, which was the same situation - and he couldn't find the will do do what had to be done without Donna. So without an outsider companion this time, he ended up telling someone to kill themselves for the good of humanity. And they did. Lonely god, indeed.

It was all a bit vague - we didn't find out why the Doctor had gone to Mars, unless the Tardis took him there again, but why would the Tardis take him places he wasn't allowed to save people? We didn't find out what Adelaide hadn't forgiven Shane From Neighbours for, either. And we didn't find out what the monsters actually were. They did resemble zombies an awful lot, though, which now means we've had the vampire-werewolf-zombie triumvirate during RTD's tenure.

Three final things:
I'm assuming this episode was originally scheduled to run next Saturday, yeah?

I know it's hard to do communicators that don't just look like mobile phones these days, but I'm not sure that using Dymo LabelWriters is actually an improvement.

And I'm pretty sure there was a HORRENDOUS AND APPALLING MISTAKE in one of the Brainipedia pages that they showed briefly - something about an "unexplicable death". Aaargh.

Overall, as I said on Twitter, 7/10 from me, distributed unequally throughout.

waves

pickwick@livejournal.com — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:22:12 GMT

Just another "I Aten't Dead" note. F1 was great today, what what? Go Jenson! But mostly, go Kubica, and whee, things on fire!

Quick run-through of opinions: Jan Moir and the Daily Mail are complete expletives; Charlie Brooker is right about everything; I support the Post Office workers' right to strike until I have to fight with HDN to get my Amazon parcels; Nick Griffin being on Question Time is a good thing; Twitter is great and Carter-Ruck are...not.

At the moment I am reading: The Democratic Genre - Fan Fiction In A Literary Context, which is great, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, also great. Hurrah!

And CIF's religion section has an article about unicorns. Hee.

Who Fandom Implodes Over Minor Change. Again.

pickwick@livejournal.com — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:38:32 GMT

Ooh, hey, it turns out it was my company who designed the new Doctor Who logo. Should have realised that before, actually, but the office monkeys have less than nothing to do with the creative media types, especially us in Glasgow.

I like the logo (and I said so before I found out it was my company, too). Shiny and kinda retro - the font is a bit reminiscent of the very first logo. With added lensflare, because lensflare is now compulsory. I'm assuming they'll use the two parts separately, as the title card and the logo, and I like the video version. Lots of people getting upset about it, as usual, because it's Doctor Who and you Can't Change Things. Except everything ever, all the time, because that's the whole point of the show. (Also, people are saying that the new logo is a spoiler. WTF, people?)

Filming photos for the 2010 series are interesting. Cautious optimism coming from here.

Miscellanea

pickwick@livejournal.com — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:59:22 GMT

Yeah, so this updating regularly thing isn't going great. Sorry. Hello!

Things:

Letterman talking about his blackmailer was pretty funny. And I admire him for it. And I really, really wish people would stop going on about his "affairs" and his "cheating" - have they never heard of open relationships or polyamory? I'm not saying either of these things apply to his relationship with his now-wife, but I'm not assuming they don't, either.
Interesting how media opinions on the Polanski thing have changed in the last few days. Looks like quite a lot of the industry mouthed off before reading about the facts, or were very out of sync with public opinion, or both. Wonder how many people regret signing that petition now. (IMO, if anyone cares: He was convicted of a crime and fled before sentencing. He should be extradited, and if he thinks there was judicial misconduct, he can ask for a mistrial or appeal, like anyone else. I wouldn't if I were him, mind you, because I doubt he'd get off with a "sex with a minor" charge these days - it was rape, pure and simple. And now he also has to do his time for fleeing.) Good list here of celebrities supporting the extradition. (And jeez, if Kevin Smith is more sensitive to gender and rape issues than you, take a look at yourself. Much as I love him.)
Less than 24 hours between the first girl-dies-after-cancer-jab story and the information that she actually died of a huge tumour in her chest that could have killed her any time, and yet people are still claiming the vaccine's unsafe, it's a cover-up, it would be irresponsible to have your daughter vaccinated without more testing, and so on. Argh. Hoping Ben Goldacre gets round to ranting about it soon.
New TV season! Derren Brown's been great. I quite enjoyed the first three new Heroes, though (judging by the number of downloads and the number of pages of TWOP forum comments) the viewership has plummeted. Although it helps that one of the new characters reminds me of a younger Anthony Stewart Head. First Dollhouse ep was very good (as was Epitaph One). I quite enjoyed the first Flashforward, too, and am about to watch the second - I've read the book, so I'm in that weird place of knowing what happens in some storylines, *until they change it*. All a bit Schrodinger. And I've got two Big Bang Theory eps to watch, too, yay.
Also: Unspeak wonders how to spell I'ma/Imma/Ima. Comes to the same conclusion as I have at work, and is therefore Right. Rats playing miniature musical instruments. May be my new wallpaper. Almost Cththuloid balloon creatures. Escher bunk beds. (Want!) Onomastikon - names from many countries and time periods. RP resource, but fascinating. Best porn I've seen in ages - Beautiful Agony; people film themselves from the neck up while orgasming. (Probably NSFW. Especially if you have speakers.) Salon talks about Polanski. A companion project to FML, My Life Is Average. Strangely heartwarming. Gay teens in Oklahoma. Straightforwardly heart-warming. Carl Sagan talks about the pale blue dot. Awesome.
And worthy of a line of its own, fjm's book Diana Wynne Jones: The Fantastic Tradition and Children's Literature is out in paperback. I've had the hardback on my wishlist since it came out four years ago, but could never quite justify the £60. £20? Hell yes.

Thanks to all those I've nicked these links off, over the last week or so!

With whom to dance

pickwick@livejournal.com — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:53:41 GMT

Ahh, procrastination. I'm sure I used to have a procrastination icon, but I can't find it. I have Things to do, so I'm playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook and posting here. Idiotically, it's not even dull or annoying things I should be doing, it's things I want to do, but I'm procrastinating anyway. So, a list:

Write a 1,500 word Nine/Donna story for sudge. I actually have a triptych in mind for this, in different styles, but we'll see.
Set up my shiny new PS3 that arrived today and have a go at Guitar Hero 5. All Along The Watchtower!
Finish off the Eisenhorn book that I really need to get back to laerad.
Do some ironing, I suppose, before my airer actually collapses under the weight of the things on it.

That's not unreasonable, I don't think. Writing first, or I'll never do it.

I'm listening to the Magnetic Fields, who I should obviously have started listening to at least ten years ago. Making up for lost time now.

Some linkage:

Great video about the acceleration of technological change, via andrewducker.

The guy behind the Alan Turing petition writes about his phone call from Gordon Brown.

miss_s_b has been interviewing Nick Clegg, in a Doctor Who t-shirt. Jennie, not Nick.

Salon interviews Dennis Baron about how the internet is NOT breaking our brains, any more than the ability to write made us forget how to learn things by heart, as Plato worried about.

And I'm not sure if I need a Rubix-esque dodecahedron with pentagonal faces, but I really want one. Not that I ever mastered the original Rubix cube, so...

Prediction

pickwick@livejournal.com — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:59:39 GMT

There seems to have been a lot of online bitching about the Derren Brown lottery Event, but I thought it was pretty cool. Lots of people sound massively annoyed that he didn't actually tell us how he "predicted" the lottery numbers, and are whining that it was obviously just camera trickery and blah-de-blah, but I think that's missing the point. The Friday night show was entertaining even if most of it was nonsense designed to misdirect (no, the wisdom of crowds doesn't work like that; no, those experiments on willpower's effect on randomness by the PEAR group were pretty nonsensical too.) Also there was a cute mouse, so yay. And just because something could have been done by camera trickery doesn't mean it was. I'm not saying it wasn't, but either we'll never know, or it's all building up to something later on in The Events.

(Hmm, actually, this web page is quite convincing that it was done with split screen. Doesn't matter. Moving on.)

There are posts from someone in the studio audience and one of the 24-strong "crowd" doing the prediction which are pretty interesting. But I love the whole huge conspiracy feel of it all, with what seems like most of the internet trying to explain or predict or discredit the trick. Brown managed the important thing - it was definitely An Event.

My prediction? His ratings will stay good, if only to see how he fixes us to our sofas this week.

Updatery

pickwick@livejournal.com — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:53:42 GMT

The sky was doing cool things tonight:

What's happening?

Richard Curtis is writing a Doctor Who episode.

Scott Lynch smacks down a batshit crazy emailer. (I'm more likely to buy his books now.)

Derren Brown is predicting the lottery numbers tomorrow night, and then back for more shows starting on Friday. Hurray!

And the recession is officially over. So presumably if you're still skint, it's now your own fault. Or something.

I was watching Lost Land Of The Volcano with my dad tonight. I learned many things: you can get HUGE stick insects; teeny parrots are cute; nature tends to bite. Also that I still have a crush on Springwatch's Gordon Buchanan, who is on Twitter. I can has stalkericity!

Currently reading: We-Think by Charles Leadbetter. Thumbs up so far.

All I Really Wanna Do

pickwick@livejournal.com — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 14:46:25 GMT

Sitting watching '80s music videos on YouTube. Look! Angry Anderson with footage of Scott & Charlene's wedding!

Things that have amused me today: a trade union newsletter which said "From my union: "If every Member recruits one more this year then we can DOUBLE our Membership!" It's our maths skills that have got us where we are today, you know. (Also our Capitalisation skills.)

And the people on Countryfile who are actually, actually talking about hugging trees. Measuring their trunks, apparently - a "standard British hug" is about 1.5m. So now you know.

Oh my GOD, I just found a fan-made video to the B-side of Especially For You. By Kylie & Jason. Look! And clips of Smash Hits Poll Winners Parties...no, no. Countryfile.

A celebration, mister blue sky's up there waitin'

pickwick@livejournal.com — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:54:23 GMT

*phone rings*

Me: Hello!

Dad: Hi, how are you doing? Are you at work?

Me: No, I'm not working today.

Dad: But I called your house and you weren't in! The phone rang out!

Me: I do leave the house occasionally for things other than work, you know.

I mean, I know I don't do all that much, but REALLY. Anyway, today I did many things, and took many photos, and also discovered that the Gaiman photos I thought I'd lost were just...on a different bit of my phone's memory or something, and have inexplicably reappeared. I'm not complaining, just bemused. So, photos of Collectormania this afternoon, and the Book Festival ten days ago and tonight.

Neil Gaiman
Gaiman taking questions:

Gaiman, Rankin, Mina and signer:

Me and Gaiman:

Collectormania: Amber Benson, Peter Davison, Kai Owen
I was lurking, rather than paying £10 or £15 for a signed photo. Low quality Amber Benson (for MMSing, but the high quality one I took is blurry):

Peter Davison:

Bored Kai is bored:

(I was annoyed about the person who wandered in front of me with a carrier bag, till I realised it had a Tardis in it.)

Douglas Coupland
Coupland (left) and host:

Coupland up close:

What's a photo post without a couple of randoms?
Tardis photo I liked (thankfully you can't see that they've painted it black):

Station symmetry:

And the books I bought today:

Generation A actually sounds like a return to form for Coupland, and I must find the JPod TV series, although he didn't sound too keen on it. And I picked up the new Best Of Tom Leonard poetry compendium - I've been meaning to get some of his poetry for ages.

As a prize for getting this far, two video links people showed me on their snazzy iPhones today: Literal Video for Birdhouse In Your Soul, and a fan-made "trailer" for a Green Lantern movie with Nathan Fillion.

Thus spake

pickwick@livejournal.com — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:20:59 GMT

There seems to be a series of three hour-long programmes about Doctor Who on TV just now - the first one was last week and is on the iPlayer for a few more hours (or a few more weeks if you download it) and the second one was transmitted last night. So will also be on the iPlayer. I didn't know about them, so I'm guessing some of you didn't... First one is The Doctor, second is The Companions, and last one is The Enemies, I think.

Today I have put a bunch of books on to my new phone. The speed of phone advancements amazes me. If I had access to a recharger, I could amuse myself off my mobile for about a month without internet access (and indefinitely with it.) I've got dozens of books, hundreds of music tracks, a bunch of games, a camera with editing suite...nuts. And the only down side is that my phone crashes occasionally, which phones never used to do.

The ebook reader I use is mobipocket, and I download free books (free books!) from Feedbooks, which I recommend with a million gold stars. Well, if you like classics, technology and SF/fantasy. And politics. I've got Bertrand Russell, Thoureau, Mills, lots of Nietzsche. Essays are great to read on the underground.

Geekmania

pickwick@livejournal.com — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:50:01 GMT

Argh. Right, in September, I'm going to post at least every other day. AND reply to comments. Honest.

In August, I have been mostly watching Battlestar Galactica. I've finished it now, and it is fantastic, obviously. So the next thing to do (after reading the TWOP recaps) is to find fanfic. And...I can't. I can hardly find any, and all of it is crap (except one crossover with Jasper Fforde's Bookworld, which was great, if odd.) Anyone got any idea where to look for good Battlestar fic? I was so sure it was a breeding ground for amazing, amazing stuff.

Just found other the other day that Collectormania is on at the weekend - I thought it was usually in November, but that might have been Memorabilia, which I've just realised was different. Anyway, I'm heading along on Sunday morning-ish, to see Amber Benson and Kai Owen, before I have to go off to see China Mieville and Douglas Coupland. Good days.

And I've been avoiding the games on Facebook for about a year, but someone got me sucked into Vampire Wars yesterday (pun intended) and now I can't leave it alone. I'm sure it'll wear off soon enough.

Let her tell stories, and dance in the rain

pickwick@livejournal.com — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:28:19 GMT

I don't seem to have been around much this month - no particular reason, apart from a lack of tuits. I've been... I've been mostly watching Battlestar Galactica, actually, and reading the recaps and the forums on Television Without Pity. Jacob's recaps are an integral part of the viewing experience for me now, and the episode threads on the forums are only slightly less essential. And considering the threads are an average of 30 pages long, yeah, that's a lot of reading. I finished the first half of the fourth season last night, so only have the last ten eps to go. (I've been spoiled on the final Cylon, though - bloody Twitter.) Seriously fantastic programme.

What else? I've been to see two (TWO!) Neil Gaiman talks this week, and met him after the second one. w00t! Wednesday was Neil on his own, reading from the Graveyard Book and taking questions, then reading Blueberry Girl. Thursday was Denise Mina chairing a conversation between Gaiman and Ian Rankin, which, awesome. They've all done novel-writing and comic-writing, so there was a lot of talk about different mediums and how storytelling works in them, etc. Gaiman (I think) said that comics are a medium that gets confused with a genre, which is true enough. Rankin has just written a Constantine comic, and was talking about how much hard work comics are, heheh. Also there was a signer-for-the-deaf, so they spent half the discussion dropping in phrases like "balls-to-the-wall" and pausing to see how she signed them - mean, but very funny!

I was with a friend from work, and we decided to skip the enormous signing queue on Wednesday, and wait on Thursday night instead. We ended up almost at the end of the queue (sigh) but it was shorter than Wednesday's 3.5-hour effort, and we got chatting to the lady on her own standing behind us, and geeked out about Gaiman, Doctor Who, Buffy, and many other things for the hour or so we queued. And it turned out that she used to be a subtitler too, in Newcastle, one of our satellite offices. That's some freaky coincidence there, considering there's only a couple of hundred subtitlers in the UK, probably. (Also we only discovered this because she told us something I'd just read on a Twitter search for @neilhimself, and I realised she was that tweeter, and we read each other's profiles. Yay for internet phones.)

So yeah, Ian Rankin is lovely, and so's Neil, of course, and we chatted and got things signed and then trundled back home to Glasgow. I've still got Mieville and Coupland and the Richards Dawkins and Holloway to see. Horrifically, I managed to lose my photos from the signing, because it was the first time I'd connected my new phone to the PC and I hadn't installed the software and it all went nuts. Gutted. I'd twitpicced one of them, though, and I think our new friend is going to send me some others. They pretty much looked like this, though, with me instead of a random person...

Fantastic!

pickwick@livejournal.com — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:52:10 GMT

via andrewducker

I loved the song, too, so I went and bought the album. Doctor Who indie music, how can it be wrong?

Disappearance

pickwick@livejournal.com — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:05:34 GMT

Meep, my computer at home is broken. Something of a crisis. I think it's probably fixable, so I'm currently trying to restrain myself from buying a laptop. I can get into it in safe mode, but system restore doesn't work, and I don't really know what diagnostic things to try and do (and I'm worried about making it worse). It's not starting up, is the problem, and I *think* it's because I closed it down when it was in the middle of starting up the other day, and it's taken offence.

Anyway. I've got my Eee, but it's better for checking stuff briefly than hanging out on t'internet for six hours, as my normal evening goes. Oh, and I'm in the middle of transferring my phone number to my new sim card, so that might disappear too. Basically I'm going to vanish off the face of the earth, is what I'm saying. I'm on leave for a week or ten days from tomorrow (book festival yay!) so won't even have the computers at work to play with.

Last night, thanks to no computer, I read one and a half of Scalzi's Old Man's War books. I am enjoying them a lot, but finding them quite...shallow, somehow. I'm not getting much sense of difference from the different types of people/alien/clones etc, or many consequences from the lives they lead.

Hot Tub Time Machine

pickwick@livejournal.com — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:51:09 GMT

Not dead, just...not on LJ, for some reason. Read about a week's worth last night, but I probably skimmed some important things.

Two awesome videos to embed, although I have a vague feeling it wasn't working last time I tried to crosspost embedded video from Dreamwidth. We'll see.

This will clearly be the best movie of next year:

Silly geeky timetravellingness with John Cusack! Can't go wrong. (He's on Twitter, which is squee and fab. Can't spell or punctuate, but I can forgive him.)

And I love this song, from Malcolm Ross and the Low Miffs:

Malcolm Ross is very 80s Glasgow indie - Josef K, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera - and the Low Miffs add a mildly Divine Comedy-esque vocal. Makes it more glam and dramatic than a lot of the 80s jangle pop stuff. Other things I've been listening to lately: Lord Cut-Glass, who is one of the ex-Delgados but I like so much better than I ever liked them. And various stuff on Spotify, which I've now started paying for. Forbidden Broadway! Mull Historical Society! Wannadies! Sinatra! Just whatever comes to mind, really.

I have other links, I'll get to them later.