Now You See, I’ve Watched Enough Cartoons To Know That This Square Of The Carpet Is On A Separate Animation

Heck, there's a very good chance Littlefinger has an appointment made with Illyn Payne's sword. After all, it probably won't take long for Ned and Tyrion to put the pieces together in a conversation (one could say interrogation, but this is Tyrion we're talking about).

Hypothetically speaking, what would have happened if Tyrion managed to escape the Inn at the Crossroads before Catelyn captured him? Or better yet, if they hadn't crossed paths at all?

Catelyn makes it back to the North and starts preparing for war (which definitely makes her the protagonist of any Northern subplot), Tyrion ambles on down to King's Landing. When he gets there, it might be Ned laying charges (though his investigations may go differently, who knows when he's listening to Littlefinger). That means the entire matter is brought before Robert straight away and the Starks don't look great because the evidence against Tyrion isn't very strong and the people who were actually present for the bet about the knife know that.

So what we've got instead of rapid escalation to war is instead more of a slower-burning armed feud. Maybe Tywin retaliates with some border raids on the Riverlands (oops! were those your peasants?), but it's less likely he'd just walk in and start trying to burn the whole Riverlands down.

From there, we're back to a race as to whether Ned figures out the incest first or Robert dies...but Ned's got the time to gear up for war in this scenario, and he's probably not listening to Littlefinger anymore either.

Pls reblog if u vote :)

On the other hand, Hayles' script for The Celestial Toymaker was completely rewritten by Donald Tosh (including using the Mandarin second meaning of the title), to the point where Hayles was supposed to just be credited for the idea. Which was then again completely rewritten by Gerry Davis to the point where Tosh refused to take credit, and Hayles was ultimately credited on a technicality.

Similarly, Letts and Dicks had Hayles completely revamp his Monster of Peladon script once, and then Dicks did was was apparently a pretty major rewrite of his own.

Which is to say, doesn't it almost seem like cheating to choose a guy whose bad scripts were basically written by other people?

On the other hand (or back on the original hand?), that's a lovely essay.

Which writers have written the Doctor Who episodes most varied in quality? Gaiman? Aaronovitch?

This is framed interestingly, and I like it.

The two proposed are, of course, writers of two episodes of decidedly different receptions. But both have an all-time classic and a lesser work. Neither Nightmare in Silver nor Battlefield are unwatchable lows of the series that curl your toes and make you wish you had never taken that DVD off the shelf, and Doctor Who has those.

But by picking writers who have done more than two stories, you can get ones who have written things that are the equal of The Doctor’s Wife and Remembrance of the Daleks and who have also written ungodly horrors. There is a perspective in which it is hilarious that the writer of Listen also wrote The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe. Robert Holmes presents himself as another good target here. The mighty writer of The Ark in Space and Carnival of Monsters, the genius behind The Ribos Operation and The Deadly Assassin, who also gave us The Krotons. Though I actually like that one, so let’s do The Mysterious Planet. Or The Power of Kroll. Ouch. I mean, have you sat down and watched The Power of Kroll lately, because I fucking won’t. I will not sit down with that voluntarily. There’s no reason to do that to a man more than once.

Of course, in that regard, the really tempting answer is Robert Holmes for The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Talons of Weng-Chiang, that being the single most pathological object in the history of Doctor Who. I mean, don’t get near a discussion of something so complex as rape culture with someone who doesn’t get that this is something you should be embarrassed to have on your DVD shelf because it is fucking called The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And yet, of course, it is full of witty dialogue and charming atmosphere, and is brilliant and beautiful and feels exactly like 1970s Doctor Who costume drama should feel, and on top of that it has that gorgeous giant rat, which you look at and your heart breaks and you just think, “oh, bless you for even trying, Philip Hinchcliffe, bless you for even trying.” 

But that is, perhaps, too esoteric a point. It is a clever answer, and would satisfy the question, but one suspects that The Power of Kroll was the more revealing option. 

In other words, I think you get the really interesting results when you look at stories that are among the absolute worst ever. Sure, some of them are by one-flop-wonders like Anthony “exploding typewriter” Steven, but others are things like The Dominators, written by the same people who brought us The Web of Fear. And while The Web of Fear is not the outstanding miracle that people think it is, and is self-evidently inferior to the story before it, it is a fuck of a lot better than the sodding Dominators. In this regard it is also tempting to say something like Planet of the Dead and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, if only to make a point about rewrites.

Similarly, a really strong case can be made for Terry Nation, who really does swing into the extremes. I mean, there’s no excuse for some of Nation’s not-in-any-meaningful-sense-scripts… but Genesis of the Daleks really is good. So are the first two, even if there’s no real reason to have tried the tentacle monsters in the first place. He embodies the ridiculous and the sublime of Doctor Who in the same way that The Talons of Weng-Chiang does, but he does it with astonishing gulfs in basic visual literacy. 

But another name jumps out, and I think it is particularly worthwhile. Brian Hayles, who is credited with both The Celestial Toymaker and The Monster of Peladon, is the rare writer to land two stories on the all-time worst list, and I’m willing to say that even if we apply the Talons of Weng-Chiang principle. To either of them. And yet between them he has The Ice Warriors, The Seeds of Death, and The Curse of Peladon, two of which are absolutely fantastic things that just thinking about makes me want to watch again, and the third of which I’ll admit is worth a revisit once every couple of years. 

Because, I mean, they weren’t stories I ranted and raved about like I did in my “holy shit how is this not one of the all-time classics of the Patrick Troughton era” of Enemy of the World, but that’s still just caught up in the gulf between people who think the point of the Troughton era was the monsters and the people who think the point of it was that it started with Power of the Daleks. But The Ice Warriors is the sort of thing that proves that the base under siege could work. You can do gripping tension with relative cheapness. The Ice Warriors is an incredibly smooth viewing experience, and was even before the animation. And The Curse of Peladon, man, that’s just a beautiful, mad thing that only Doctor Who would ever do. There’s a Doctor Who tradition that consists of that, The Ribos Operation, and Warrior’s Gate that you just constantly hope they’ll try again. (Period alien planets. Work every time. Well. Every time that it isn’t The Monster of Peladon.)

That’s a very, very strange gulf in quality there, purely because of the widely varied circumstances of all of them. And I really do think it’s the widest, simply because of how passionately I am personally led to love and hate the particular extremes. And the weirdness that there’s a Peladon story at each end too. 

Yeah. Brian Hayles. 

OKAY, WE ARE AT THE END OF JULY AND I’M STILL OBSESSING OVER MAD MAX : FUCKING FURY ROAD, HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE ? Tell me please i’m not the only one

This is literally the kind of monstrous atrocity Stalin and his lackeys pulled in the gulags.

Trans Woman Dies in ICE Custody On the First Day of Pride

"For weeks, she pleaded for medical help."

A Salvadoran trans woman died in ICE custody on June 1, the first day of Pride Month. 

Johana Medina was a migrant from El Salvador. She was seeking asylum in the U.S.

Known to her friends as Joa, Johana passed away Saturday night from complications due to HIV/AIDS. Her death was announced on the Diversidad Sin Fronteras Facebook page on Sunday. 

In a statement, Casa Migrante trans leader Grecia, who was close with Johana, said that ICE agents ignored Johana’s pleas for help as her illness became worse while in custody.

Ready Player One

The following review contains mild spoilers. None of the major set-pieces or sight gags after the first act are detailed, but charac...

My review of Ready Player One -- a fun film, though also a thin one with some problematic thematic issues.

12. If I acknowledge that Ark is a brilliant masterpiece that massively advances what the series is capable of, can I prefer Genesis anyway?

16. Better than Morbius? Best solo one, sure, but...

22. Revelation? Not as good as Vengeance and flops at the end, but not embarrassing.

6-2. Can I agree that it technically accomplishes that but still prefer Let's Kill Hitler and Wedding of River Song for actually being fun?

8-2. What if I liked the idea of Kill the Moon but not the execution?

Just seeing if there are mitigating factors to at least reduce the sentencing down from eternity.

Edge of Destruction is better than The Daleks

The Rescue is better than The Dalek Invasion of Earth

The Gunfighters is better than The Celestial Toymaker

Power of the Daleks is better than everything, ever.

Enemy of the World is better than Web of Fear

The Mind Robber is better than The...

[Not the anon, but I'd be interested in your answer to these objections.]

I don't have any problem whatsoever with the ideas in the episode - conceptually, it's brilliant. "The Moon is an egg" is a contender for the best premise Doctor Who has ever had. Playing it out against a backdrop of a humanity that has lost interest in space exploration and, in the process, in its own future gives the story real weight and resonance. And putting the fate of the Moon's life and humanity's future in the hands of three women of wildly different generations and experiences is terrific, giving a fantastically feminist spin to a golden-age yarn.

But I've watched it three times, and every time, I found the execution in both the writing and directing badly lacking, and despite some lovely moments (particularly the last scene), it feels like a near-miss to me.

To begin with, the entire thing is set up by the Doctor telling Courtney she's "not special", which Clara suggests will impact her entire life, and Courtney responds with, "You can’t just take me away like that! It’s like you kicked a big hole in the side of my life! You really think it? I’m nothing? I’m not special?"

Admittedly, it’s been a while since I was a young disruptive influence myself, but I don't buy this. At all. I mean, a rebellious 15-year-old responds to getting told they're "not special" basically by rejecting it and forgetting that person exists, assuming they care in the first place. And if they do go into a deep funk and freak out about it, honestly, they're probably immature and spoiled, which certainly isn't how Courtney's been built up. Her entire reaction rings completely false, and, worse, it basically means she spends the entire episode moping around. It feels like those artificial Hollywood stories about parents who are evil for missing the kid's baseball game because they were making a living and, you know, putting food on the kid's table when they get back from the game. The drama falls flat, and Courtney, who I really liked in The Caretaker, ends up being written like an obnoxious TV 10-year-old. Ellis George is appealing when given the chance, but she can't sell this guano. This failure is especially egregious in a season that excels at building the stories on vividly real drama and characterizations.

(I do love the bit where the Doctor suggests the astronauts shoot her first, though.)

And this sort of thing comes from a script that delivers its ideas in an incredibly sloppy way. The clearest example is probably the spidery death of Red Shirt Astronaut #2. He gets all of two lines before getting spidered to death 1/3 of the way in, at which point Lundvik stops to give a eulogy about how he was the guy who trained her, and apparently his name was Duke, and she’s really upset about all this, and I’m just mildly surprised the astronauts actually knew each others’ names for all they’ve actually acknowledged each other at this point. Maybe if the script had cared to develop any of the astronauts at all, this might have some impact, but it doesn’t even get around to telling us Lundvik’s name before the end credits, let alone give her any sort of apparent personality beyond the intensity Hermione Norris gives her. Of course it doesn’t bother with the red shirts. I mean, were we really supposed to care when she delivers her eulogy?

Or there's little details like Courtney taking a big antibacterial bottle with her in her spacesuit. Even the Doctor’s advanced spacesuits look large and cumbersome, and seem unlikely to have pockets large enough for that. But even if they do, does Ms Disruptive Influence really seem like the kind of girl to go through the hassle of carrying around a full-size bottle of Windex in her spacesuit?

Even the climactic debate between Lundvik, Clara, and Courtney has moments that feel off. When Lundvik proclaims, “It is killing people. It is destroying the Earth,” Clara responds with “You cannot blame a baby for kicking.” All the coastal cities were flooded. Lundvik rightly calls it “the greatest natural disaster in history.” The baby kicking metaphor kinda breaks down once you’ve broken the 100 million mark on your death slate. All this sloppy writing climaxes, of course, with the moment where Clara asks the world to vote, but they only get 45 minutes, meaning we actually only get the votes of Europe, whoever actually has lights in Africa, and the American East Coast. That 45 minutes is completely arbitrary, just to put a bit of faux-cleverness in the cold open. Changing the deadline to 24 hours wouldn't impact the story in any negative way, and would allow the entire world to actually vote.

None of this is helped by the directing; the color is badly washed out, removing any sense of wonder to the moon, but that's the only limp attempt at atmosphere in the thing. None of the horror builds tension. The action sequences, while thankfully not the point, are poorly done. Rather than papering over the flaws of the script, the directing only exacerbates the parts that don't work, and don't help the bits that do.

Which brings me to the backdrop. The idea of the world having abandoned space travel, only recovering it when shown something truly beautiful, and thus embracing its future, has a powerful relevance. But this idea is basically mentioned offhandedly in a couple of lines. We never see this world, and the few mentions of it by the astronauts aren't enough for it to really sink in emotionally. The Doctor's speech at the end almost seems to come out of nowhere.

As I say, I love the idea conceptually. I snarked about the science on my blog, but I don't actually have a problem with that; I'm not going to object an awesome idea like "the Moon is an egg", and if I'm not going to object to that, who cares about the fact that the Space Shuttle had no ability to make it to the moon and its landing is ludicrous? It's all in fun, and complaining about it really isn't much more than snarking. I mean, yes, when you can say with a straight face that Michael Bay’s Armageddon had a superior grasp on astronomy, physics, and how the space program actually works, you could probably at least check the first paragraph of the corresponding Wikipedia pages before filming. But Moffat’s fairy tale approach hasn't bothered me before, and I love it more often than not. I mean, if you don’t like the moon hatching into a dragonfly, you’re probably watching the wrong show.

But the characterizations, atmosphere, and world-building all feel sloppy and dashed-off, leaving it to stand strictly on its ideas (which are admittedly grand) and some magnificent Doctorishness. That's enough that I certainly don't hate it, but it's very much the mess the Anon claims it to be.

Poppycock, sir! Kill the Moon is a mess.

I mean, I assume you’ve read my review of it, so where do you disagree?

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

just ran across this perfect 2000-year-old portrait of a pet who knows what he did.

"Dog Mosaic," Ptolemaic period, 2nd century BCE, floor of a house in Alexandria, Egypt. 3.25x3.25m. (Pitcher is probably gold.)