@janetteb   I think I agree with almost everything you said there.   Big universe-threatening episodes always depress me.   How are they going to be overcome by a couple of people, even if one of them has a time machine?   And when they are, the result seems almost trivial.   Makes the previous fearsome threat look like a scuffle outside a pub at…[Read more]

Lucky Day And Ruby is back. Interesting.
Is this spooky scene in the warehouse a throwback to the Autons? Umm no, the guy just got slimed (like Ghostbusters?)
If the guy can take a snapshot of Ruby from what – ten yards away, and get a good sharp recognisable photo, his phone must be a lot better than mine, I think.
Um, not sure where this is…[Read more]

@janetteb   Um, yes.   I might have found Lux more alarming if he wasn’t so intensely irritating.   Don’t know how you’d find ‘Cool World’, the main character was seductive Holli Wood, voiced by Kim Basinger, so much more appealing (in my view) eben if she was a ruthless femme fatale.   I think sometimes the success of concepts like ‘cartoo…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u     Just noting as I watch The Well –

So, how did Belinda and the Doc know to dress in Stormtrooper uniform? Did the ‘patriots’ win in the 2020’s? Is all the future a militaristic hell?

The exploration of the base is a bit reminiscent of Aliens (or indeed a dozen other sci-fi’s. I guess there’s only a very limited number of ways to…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u   I did watch Robot Revolution, and typed a short screed about it.  But when I went to post it, most of the points were very similar to the one I posted a year ago, so I thought I’d spare the bandwidth.

Lux.   Yes, there wasn’t a lot of content in it.   Basically just “all cartoons wish to be people”.   I’m not sure if that’s a common…[Read more]

Just re-watching –

Not sure why Belinda is so thrilled to go back to the 50’s. I was born in 1947, so I was a teen in the 60’s, so naturally for me the 50’s were the least coolest thing ever, with their lame hairstyles and their frowsy dresses and their banal music and their bourgeois tastes and their puritanical morality and self-imposed…[Read more]

@janetteb   It sounds as if your stay in ICU was a lot less pleasant ( and several times longer) than mine, for which you have my sympathy.   In fact I’d paid extra for a single room rather than a shared one, just to avoid the possibility a roommate might want to watch rugby, or soaps, or something equally annoying on TV.   Only had one visit…[Read more]

@janetteb   I think the difference with ICU is that, in the latter, the patients are receiving the best care and they have rights.  And also, either fighting for their lives or in a state of relaxed consciousness.  So I think it might be less horrific for them.   (I’ve never been in ICU, other than maybe for 24 hours after my heart operation, but…[Read more]

@whohar   That story is so good it just has to be true.

(And if it isn’t true then it ought to be…)

@ps1l0v3y0u   That moment of turning down the ‘patient’s’ speaker was probably the most horrific of the entire episode.

@nerys   I just listened to that.   Peter’s part of the broadcast runs from 8 minutes to 43 minutes, if anyone is pressed for time.   (And, somewhat to my surprise, yt-dlp (which is a fork of youtube-dl) successfully downloaded it as an mp3 file – handy if you’re on a data limit and don’t want the other internetty things to nibble away at you d…[Read more]

@winston @nerys  @ps1l0v3y0u    I really started something with oystercatchers, didn’t I?

I’ve been lurking/incommunicado the last few days because we flew down to Christchurch last Tuesday and, among the things I forgot, was my laptop charger.   Since then I’ve been running on battery, just enough to check emails.  I ordered a charger online…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u   As an afterthought, I’ve just thought of a reason for Rose-Doctor – remember when, at the end of Season 1, she looked directly into the Time Vortex and acquired super-energy – which the 9th Doctor absorbed from her and promptly regenerated?   Well, if he didn’t absorb them completely, that would leave Rose with stored energy whi…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u    If I may split a hair for the sake of discussion, “They can’t make Billie the Doctor, she’s Rose” is not necessarily misogynistic.   (Though I accept it could be (mis)used as a cover for misogynism).

But it runs into the same logical continuity problem (not sure if there’s a word for it) as the fact that Sean Connery ‘was’ Jame…[Read more]

@nerys    Hi.   I was down on the beach (Blockhouse Bay) on Saturday, thought I’d check out if it was still swimmable.  Lovely high tide, 4.3  (which is among the highest that we get), lovely and sheltered in the bay,  but the water was a little bit too cool for me.  I went in (and I’m glad I did rather than dithering then wondering ‘what if’), bu…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u   Let’s say it’s the less bad alternative.

Things would have been very gloomy if Orban had stayed in power.

@winston   Thank you.   The rest of the country  (well, parts of it) didn’t do as well, major flooding and storm damage in Northland and North Auckland (just to the north of us, duh) and the Coromandel to the southeast.   This has happened several times now.   In fact these things tend to be very ‘regional’ and often quite localised.   Notoriousl…[Read more]

@winston   @janetteb   Thanks.   Unless the storm has an unexpected sting in the tail, it looks as if it’s missed us, all we got was a lot of rain (though not in torrential amounts).   Storms seem to keep causing chaos to the north of us, to the east and south-east, but the last one that hit us here was three years ago.   So we’re either well over…[Read more]

@janetteb    Update on our cyclone:   No wind yesterday, rain started falling gently about 6pm, steady rain by midnight, had stopped by 9a.m. this morning, no wind, now we’ve got steady (but not heavy) rain and light gusts of wind.   According to the forecast we should be having a severe southwesterly gale right about now, maybe we live in a shelt…[Read more]

@janetteb  Thanks.   Apparently it’s a very dramatic one.   The last few that came this way caused devastation to the north of us and the south-east of us and managed to miss Auckland.   Hopefully this one will too (miss us, I mean, not cause devastation elsewhere  🙂    We’ll know if we’re OK tomorrow morning.

The last few days have been love…[Read more]

@janetteb   I actually have all my DVD’s indexed and numbered, so I can find them.   But of course if I see a DVD in an opp shop, and it’s a movie I might like, I can’t remember if I’ve got it already.   So two bucks is a reasonable price to secure it, even if (as often happens) I find I have it already and just end up donating the DVD back.…[Read more]