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@janetteb   I wanted to like it (the movie).   Maybe I was being a bit indulgent of it.   I haven’t felt impelled to re-watch it though.   And as I recall, it didn’t really feel like Doctor Who.

Night of the Doctor, now, was an excellent little cameo.  (Is ‘cameo’ the right word?)   Moff’s dialogue was on its best form.   As it was with the only other scene with Ohila on Karn, in the prologue to The Magician’s Apprentice.   (Ohila:  “Why do you always lie?”   Twelve:   “Why do you always assume I’m lying?”   “It saves time.”)       I love interesting and original dialogue, and if it has a dash of irony, even better.   And the ability to imply things rather than having to spell them out in tedious detail, which both flatters the intelligence of the audience and keeps their interest.   Moff was a master of that.

Most of my liking for Blakes Seven came from the script and the dialogue (it certainly wasn’t the sets or the special effects  🙂   First example that comes to mind is when Servalan and Avon found themselves stranded in the desert (IIRC):   Servalan:  And, I want a gun.   Avon:  We only have one gun.   Servalan (sweetly):   I only want one.

I’m not sure that fandom is always a sufficient attribute for a successful series.   RTD and Moff were long-term fans, but then so was (ahem) Chibnell.   A large degree of talent is also required.

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@janetteb    You mentioned the Who movie with Paul McGann.   I think, based on seeing him in The Night of the Doctor, he would have made a fine Doctor.   He had the gravitas, the personal magnetism, the looks.

Most unfortunately, he fell into the Gap.   I’ve seen the movie.   Taken as a random sci-fi movie, there was nothing wrong with it.   Just, it felt like a Hollywood sci-fi movie.   I don’t know what unique quality Doctor Who (the series) has, but whatever it is, it was somehow missing from the movie.

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@nerys   @janetteb   Well that Guardian article was – interesting.   What took me by surprise was the author’s nomination for all-three-in-one   – Peter Capaldi.   Seems a bit startling at first.   But maybe not so far-fetched.   Could he do Bond – I think as an ageing but still deadly Bond he certainly could do it.  Could he do the Doctor – we know he can, and Doctors have come back before (cf TENnant).   Could he make a good PM – well, half the job is to make sensible decisions, and the other half is to convince the voters that he’s made the right one.   I think he could do those, at least as well as many recent PM’s.    There is only one drawback that would apply to anybody filling the slot – doing all three simultaneously would lead to very confused public perception as to which hat he was wearing at any time.

I think my nomination would be Mark Carney, if Canada could be persuaded to lend him.   Or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but maybe he’s getting a bit old.

Anyone else got any wild suggestions?

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@craig    We have spammers!   Two in this forum, and this ‘werryping’ has also spammed in The End of Time and  The Story and the Engine.   You may wish to do something Imperial about them   🙂

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@ps1l0v3y0u    @janetteb   I didn’t know Wells was so personally  interesting.   We had to do some Wells novel in English at school, so of course we were scornful of the old-fashioned language.   It wasn’t The Time Machine or War of the Worlds, and I was never sure if the latter was written by H G or Orson anyway  🙂       In my early sci-fi I preferred John Wyndham or Arthur C Clark, or Conan Doyle.

I always had a bias against  Dickens for similar reasons – it you want kids to dislike an author, make him compulsory study at school.   (Fortunately Conan Doyle was not on the syllabus.   Of course his Holmes stories overshadow the rest, but I found his sci-fi fascinating – I can still name some of them from memory – The Lost World (dinosaurs!), The Horror of the Heights (which probably carried a lot more conviction in days when no balloon had gone higher than a few thousand feet), The Day the Earth Screamed with a deep borehole, for some reason I was expecting ‘The Hungry Earth’ to be similar and I was a little disappointed when it was just Silurians in a cavern).

Oh, and I always found Dickens’ attempts at humour, with his slightly bombastic circumlocutions, to fall flat.   Not to my taste, I far prefer leaner, more economical prose that lets the reader join the dots.   I think the style in which a story is told is probably more important than the story itself.   Speaking of stories, I just rewatched The Story and the Engine and posted a few comments on it.

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After a re-watch of The Story and the Engine –

Hmmm. Last series in this mid-series slot we got Boom!, 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble. (As the incorrect menu on my probably-bootleg? DVD reminds me.) What it links to, though, is The Well (very good), Lucky Day (not so good) and The Story and the Engine. So how will this turn out?

Hmm, ethnic. I hope this doesn’t foreshadow a rash of the PC’s. We shall see. Well the Doctor is getting all folksy. Not a good sign.
Umm, how long has the Doctor been black? I ask only because he seems to have had a substantial history in Nigeria, and it’s only been a few episodes since he changed colour. (And no past Doctors were non-white, the Doctor said as much, and we know the identities of all the preceding ones (I’m ignoring any Chibz-fuelled confusion of the timeline)). So this is a bit disconcerting.

Okay, we have the deserted alley and a cryptic warning sign – this is getting a little better. The Barber certainly has a ‘presence’ – good casting I think. He reminds me of (and I had to google this) Khan from Star Trek. Same mature good looks, same gravitas. Quite a sympathetic villain.

Hey, is that Ruth (Fugitive of the Judoon)? What a pleasant surprise. Not sure where she came in the list of Doctor’s (from the future I guess) so this doesn’t fix the glitch about the current Doctor’s Nigerian past. And is that a golden teleport bracelet (shades of Blakes 7 and, I’m sure, many other sci-fis).

The Doctor’s Belinda story is a little too reminiscent of Nurse-saves-patient’s-life-while-docotors-were-baffled, which can be seen in hundreds – no thousands – of AI-slop look-alike videos on the Internet. A little bit OT, never mind, it didn’t take long. Wish he’d talked about Daleks, though.

This is a little bit like the premise of the Thousand and One Nights, with the Doctor as – who was it? – Scheherazade. But hey, every sci-fi story element is a copy of something else.

And the door that opens different from opposite sides – slightly reminiscent of the hotel room doors in Joy to the World? But the giant mechanical space spider – to quote some Hollywood guy, ‘Who ordered that?’

The Doctor certainly seems to have met a vast array of ancient gods. If this was a Chibz episode I’d say it was a desperate display of name-dropping to give the Doctor some verisimilitude.

And then the Doctor morphs into Ruth, who apologises to Abena for not taking her with her/him. Umm, I thought Doctor Ruth was in this current Doctor’s future (because we know his past timeline and Ruth isn’t in it). Or am I missing something?

Abena was also excellently cast.

“Humans are tied to the gods. Destroying them would harm the very essence of humanity. A world without stories? How would they pass on tradition?” Reminds me of Death and Susan in Hogfather:

“WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN’T SAVED HIM?” [The Hogfather]
“Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?”
NO
“Oh, come on. You can’t expect me to believe that. It’s an astronomical fact.”
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
…
“Really? Then what would have happened, pray?”
A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.”

In other words, facts are just facts – we give them meaning.

But mostly I included that because it’s way overdue I re-read some Pratchett. I wish he’d been persuaded to write a Doctor Who story.

So finally, via some metaphysics I still don’t understand, we have a happily-ever-after ending. And oddly enough, I don’t mind one bit. This story (to sound corny) had heart.

So last year we had the excellent Dot and Bubble, with shallow and unlikeable characters asking for their grisly fate. This year we have almost the inverse, where even the villain are engagingly human, but equally good. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it so much, I was pleasantly surprised.

(By the way, my understanding of the interactions was much helped by the transcript at chakoteya.net, as so often I miss some dialogue and bring up the transcript to clarify. Many thanks Chrissie).

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@janetteb   Well, I think I can recommend The Well and The Story and the Engine.   But of course it’s all a matter of taste.

And I do agree also about UNIT and the series.

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@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 closing time.

Incidentally, H G Wells was guilty of almost the same thing – the invincible, destroying Martians were defeated by – bacteria, which found them tasty.   Go bugs!!   But because War of the Worlds was very early science fiction, and his solution was – credible, Wells got away with it.

Anyway, I’m erratically working through the last season, I just posted my comments on Lucky Day, which aren’t very good.   Never mind, The Story and the Engine comes next.

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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 going (though I have a dim recollection it isn’t something good). The Shreek gave me a heck of a jump scare when Kate tapped on the glass of its cell. I kenw it was coming but it still works, they always do.
Those two fake-Shreek were really risking their lives, Unit might have shot them (but I guess that would have made an even better story for their conspiracy theory). But Conrad, what a total slimeball. Not so much for thinking UNIT were doing a cover-up, but for leading Ruby on and then deriding her. Loathsome creature (and I don’t mean the Shreek). Incidentally, how did the fake-Shreeks produce those unearthly howls?
(Maybe it’s just me, but I think all scurrilous Internet ‘influencers’ should be taken out and shot, or at least have their phones permanently disconnected. The trouble they cause is out of proportion to any good they do.)
I’m not a fan of these UNIT episodes, and besides there’s the Vlinx, the most fake-looking Disney robot.
I did cheer when Kate let the Shreek nibble Conrad. She, (or Ruby?) should have let it finish its meal.
And Belinda seems to have been elsewhere for the duration. What’s with that?
I can’t say I really enjoyed this episode. On to the next.

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@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 ‘cartoon comes to life’ depends a lot on how well it’s executed, rather than just the concept.   I’m not sure how the best-known one of these (probably), Who Framed Roger Rabbit, fares – I’ve gt the DVD but haven’t got around to watching it yet.

I’m sure someone could write a savagely scathing episode about McCarthyism, I’m just not sure whether it would be enjoyable to watch.   For the same reason I don’t watch prison movies, I find them depressing.

@ps1l0v3y0u   I won’t venture into the realm of food, since my favourite food is probably a nice burger with cheese, bacon or pineapple and NO tomato sauce.   Now that all the takeaways are run by Asian immigrants the standards of fast food have improved immensely, I can actually reliably get a burger with no sauce, unlike the old days when some bored kiwi guy would reflexively splurt orange slime all over my burger before I could stop him.   🙂      I’m a culinary philistine but picky with it.

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@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 explore a dangerous alien planet.)

And hey, there it is. “Nuke this site from orbit.” Don’t know how the actor kept a straight face, but I cheered.

I can’t help wondering if Aliss will turn out to be like Sky in Midnight, a mild-looking person who is incredibly dangerous.

Apparently the TARDIS can translate text on-the-fly as well? Because Aliss can read Belinda’s voise-to-text translator?

And the planet was called, aeons ago, Midnight. (Did anyone not see that coming?). And once again RTD uses the scariness of an invisible ‘thing.’ The Moff did the same in the abandoned base in Listen. What you can’t see is always more frightening than what you can. (And also much cheaper in CGI time 🙂

I have to say I was rather pleased when Cassio got slammed. Not a character you could ever come to like. And also, his departure prevented him from clumsily interfering with events thereafter, which must have made the script easier to write.

Now the Thing is finally settled on Shaya, is she going to do what I think she’s going to do? As in, what Ripley did at the end of Alien 3? Well yes.

And then Mrs Flood crops up? What the ??? There’s a long game going on with her.

Right at the end, Val thinks she can see – nothing – behind Mo. Is the nightmare not over? And as we fade to black there’s a whispering noise. Very similar to what happened at the end of Aliens, and similarly disconcerting.

Scifi in general owes a lot to the Alien series. But in saying that, I won’t take anything away from RTD for this episode. It was truly scary. The fact that almost every scene was reminiscent of something we’ve seen before is almost inevitable in sci-fi. The trick is to do it well enough to make it still watchable, and RTD and his co-writer certainly succeeded in that.

@translatorcircuit   If you count up, four of the crew survived – Mo, Aliss, plus the two troopers escorting her, plus of course the Doctor and Belinda.   Not ‘one’, as you claimed.   I never watched Star Trek (I can’t arouse any enthusiasm for the US military), but I do know it went on forever.    If you have a sufficiently large body of work then almost every subsequent story will have similarities, and if you relax your criteria sufficiently then everything is a ‘copy’.   To me, Aliens is far more significant than some nondescript Star Trek story.    I expect Doctor Who, in its long run, has also covered almost every plot known to man or alien.    Does that make everything a copy of Doctor Who?

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@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 theme, certainly it was the theme of Cool World (which I thought was an under-rated film, I guess people thought cartoons were for kiddies, but it wasn’t really aimed at kids.)

I called the fans a fourth-wall moment, not sure if it technically was – I believe traditionally it refers to occasions when an actor directly addresses the audience (camera).   But I don’t know if there’s a better term for when a fictional hero becomes ‘real’.   I think there’s been an actual fourth-wall moment in nuWho, but I can’t remember what it was.

As regards recent history (i.e. segregation), there was a nod to it, but maybe RTD thought it had been covered already in Chibz’s Rosa Parkes episode.    Not sure if post-gap Doctor Who has covered McCarthyism or Reds-under-the-Bed though.

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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 censorship. They were the epitome of uncool, the pinnacle of banality. [End of irrelevant rant]

Well the setup is interesting, even if Lux is terminally annoying. This episode has some similarities to Cool World, which I need to watch again (got the DVD).

The breaking the fourth wall (if that’s what it was) with the fans is – weird. And kind of disorienting. Are the fans another illusion? And their favourite episode is Blink. Good choice. Or did the AI Google it? [Later: That was a good guess, that they were AI-generated, even if kind of obvious]. And I think RTD was cracking a wry joke about the popularity of Moff’s episode.

And Lux says it – “Doesn’t every cartoon want to be a man?” That is straight from the plot of Cool World.

Not sure if nitrocellulose film stock is actually explosive when burned. In fact I’m pretty sure it isn’t, unless confined. In fact one essential reason it was used as a propellant (guncotton) is that it wouldn’t detonate. And Belida was just trying to set fire to the place (she said so), to what end I’m not sure, she wasn’t expecting to blow a hole in the wall.

And I’m not sure how blowing up the stock room and evaporating Lux brought back the disappeared people. There’s a lot that doesn’t hang together about this episode, even by the relaxed standards of Doctor Who. Still, it was entertaining enough.

 

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@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, but I never felt lonely for some reason.

All I can say is  that mine was, as I said, perfectly innocuous, probably because I felt limited only by my own physical condition and the nurses encouraged me to move around as soon as I felt  comfortable.   I actually have a phobia about being trapped, but it never manifested itself.    It’s all about feeling in control.   I once spent a couple of nights on a hostel in Christchurch in the old Addington jail, repurposed.    I had great trepidation about booking there since the rooms were the old cells, complete with massive doors.   I was apprehensive of my own reaction.   But in fact I felt no worries at all, because of one big thing – I had the key to the massive door in my pocket, and that changed everything..

I was just thinking of the hanta virus ‘suspects’ in quarantine near Perth.   I hope they’re being well treated, which is to say, I hope they have all the creature comforts and room service of a five star hotel.  Partly as compensation for their inconvenience, partly because it’s easier to avoid that feeling of being trapped if the ‘imprisonment’ is comfortable.   I wonder how much the aircrew was paid for going to fetch them (since they were also having to isolate).

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@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 I was certainly confined to a bed for a couple of days and in hospital for seven.   And – side issue – I won’t say I enjoyed it (that would give totally the wrong impression) but it wasn’t unpleasant, and what i did enjoy was the chance to relax and do nothing without the usual guilty feeling of ‘I ought to be doing something’)     I think a better comparison might be a secure institution for psychiatric patients.

@ps1l0v3y0u   Oh yes, I’d forgotten them.  I guess because the ‘speaker’ incident was the first horror.

Moff did also show how such horrors could arise from perfectly commendable motives, carried too far.   The desire to cure ailments and stop people dying.   How far should one go, and at what point should one stop?  Heart operations  – no  (I say, as the beneficiary of one).   Pacemakers – no, they surely are entirely beneficial.   Artificial hearts – I’d say that’s fine, so long as the patient agrees.   But there must be a line somewhere.   Maybe it lies with the patient to agree.   (‘Okay, you can fit me with robotic arms, wheels and half an electronic brain?  Go for it!’)    Or not….

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@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.

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@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 data while you’re listening.   Just go to the page, copy the URL from the browser, open a text window and type ‘yt-dlp ‘ and paste the URL and away it goes and downloads the whole thing in ten seconds.)   But anyway, interesting.   Myself, having listened to a little bit of Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It and being quite impressed by his linguistic abilities, I was quite surprised that he could cool it down for the Doctor.   (I would have even even more surprised had I known that quite a lot of the invective on A Thick of It was apparently Peter’s own invention – he said the writers set up the situation and left him to fill in the blanks.)

@ps1l0v3y0u    You said “the Mondassian Cybermen were Peter’s rec.”   ‘Recommendation’?   (You can be a little cryptic at times  :).    I had thought they were Moff’s, but I could easily have misremembered, or of course they might both have been aficionados of them.   I’ve said before, I used to think the original Cybermen were the most cringingly naff villains in all of Who, painfully obviously just human extras in overalls.   It took Moff’s genius in World Enough and Time to make me realise that was exactly the point and how painfully horrific it could be.

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@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 (which, ironically, came from New Lynn five miles from our house, and has arrived), ordered its mains (power) lead from another supplier and it ain’t here yet.   But today we discovered the plug on the niece’s charger lead fits my charger.   Panic over.

Also, I couldn’t get the Season 2 (new season i.e. with Ncuti)  DVD that I hacked from Bluray to work with my laptop.   But I eventually managed to order Seasons 1 and 2 on DVD, they arrived just before we left Auckland, so (with a portable USB  DVD drive) I should be able to watch them here.    Can’t help wondering if they’re pirated though, the discs and their packaging look absolutely authentic, but I can’r get S1 disk 1 to read  (not a biggie, I’ve got S1 already); and Season 2 Disc 2 has the titles of S1 eps 3-5 (Boom to Dot & Bubble) but when I click them I get the correct S2 eps  (The Well to The Story and the Engine).   But I’m not sending them back for a refund!

 

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@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 which, in time, could somehow lead her to turn into the Doctor.  Or maybe better, the energy which Nine absorbed from Rose was ‘flavoured’ with her personality and appearance, which manifested itself decades later as a regeneration into Rose-doc.

 

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@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’ James Bond, so all the Bonds since then are logically impossible.   (Which is not say that I didn’t enjoy watching them).

Also brings to mind the same problem with Peter Capaldi who was previously the Roman guy in the Pompeii episode, or Amy who was a priestess in that same ep.   I seem to recall Moff was sufficiently concerned to suggest that Capdoc consciously or unconsciously chose that appearance out of some sort of guilt at not saving him.

Rose’s appearance as the interface of The Moment was explained away by The Moment having picked Rose out of the Doctor’s future memories.   That worked.

I guess Doctor-Rose could be satisfactorily explained by some similar mechanism, and I rather hope it would be.

Another possible (non-mysogynistic) reason for being unhappy about the prospect would be if one felt Rose was the best companion ever and bringing her back as Doc was somehow ‘milking’ it.   A bit like all those old companions who suddenly reappeared us UNIT operatives in a recent episode – much though I like to see them, it just felt too corny to me.

But I’ll say right now, that’s not a misgiving I have, I’d love to see Rose-Doctor.   Partly because, as the Doctor, nobody could complain that she was just being used as set-dressing.   And I think and hope she’d make a much better one than Whittaker did.   She has the advantage of being thoroughly familiar with the Doctor’s persona, after all, which Whittaker notoriously wasn’t.

 

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@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’), but after a minute my fingers and toes were tingling so I came out again.   Water had dropped a couple of degrees since last week, so that’s it for the year.

Anyway, there was good flock of oystercatchers on the little beach, maybe 100 or so.   This ‘beach’ is a patch of sand 70 metres across that arrived on a Council truck some decades ago, and I think they top it up occasionally.   You can get within maybe six feet of them before they walk or run or fly away.   Periodically some young kid will chase them and they all take off in a flock and fly in circles for a bit before landing on the other end of the beach.   There is  patch of rocks, exposed at anything less than high water, that they also favour, or the roof of the Boat Club hut.    Google says they’re  Variable Oystercatchers  (what a delightful name!), a New Zealand species.   I think ‘variable’ refers to them being anything from all black to big white patches on their chests and underbellies.    But still with the absurdly long red beaks.

@ps1l0v3y0u   I did like Billie as  Cassandra-possessing-Rose.   Maybe it was camp (I dunno, what exactly is ‘camp?), but I cracked a grin.  I think Billie was having fun with it, what actor doesn’t relish the chance to play the evil alter ego?

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

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

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@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.   Notoriously so around Cook Strait between the North and South Islands, for example in 1968 the 9000-ton ferry Wahine was driven aground at the entrance to Wellington Harbour with much loss of life.   On the same day, people in Paraparaumu, just 30 miles north, were enjoying a sunny day on the beach.

On our local beach at the moment, we get flocks of oystercatchers, which I think look slightly absurd with their long red beaks.   And a couple of pukekos (aka swamp hens, big birds with long legs) have taken to stalking across our garden.  They can fly well enough to get over fences and into low trees but that seems to be their limit.  They have adapted well to ‘civilisation’ and can often be found  in the bushy/swampy strips beside motorways and the like.

In totally different news (and if I may be forgiven for being political for a moment)  I’m raising a glass to the defeat of Viktor Orban, in spite of (or maybe because of) endorsements by those shining beacons of enlightened democracy Donald Trump, J D Vance, Vladimir Putin, Bibi Netenyahu and Elon Musk.   [End politics].   I hope that isn’t too controversial in this forum.

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@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 overdue for another, or we’re somehow less susceptible to getting hit.   Not sure which is true, but I favour the latter.   (Optimist!)

It’s just occurred to me that we have 35 gallons in our hot water cylinder.  Now when the mains pressure is off, we can’t get anything out of the hot taps (since it relies on fresh cold water going in the bottom to displace hot water out of the top) but last time the pressure reducing valve failed, I installed a tap on the cylinder drain, which would make it very easy to ‘tap’ it (no pun intended) for water.

Fresh snow looks great.   Such a pity it doesn’t stay that way, at least not in urban areas.   It turns to slush, which is never nice.

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@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 sheltered spot.  Fingers crossed.

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@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 lovely fine weather, even while the weather man was pointing to dramatic multicoloured patches on his map and forecasting doom.   I had a couple of nice swims in very calm weather down the beach.   Nice to hear about your river, if we didn’t live near the beach I would at least want to live near running water.

@winston   I’m pleased to hear you survived your ice storm.

I just saw in the news that our supermarkets are completely out of bottled water.   We never buy bottled water (we have things known as ‘taps’) but we do buy industrial quantities of cola.   So a quick search and a raid on the recycle bin produced a dozen empty bottles and we now have 20 litres of water.   Should be more than enough.

I particularly like mature pine forests for walking in, the clear space under the pines is always calm, sheltered on windy days, shaded on hot days, with a carpet of pine needles but open views under the high ‘roof’.   Almost no undergrowth.   Ecofanatics grump about lack of ‘biodiversity’ but as a walker, I’d much rather the bio diversifies somewhere else and not wrapped round my ankles.

 

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@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.   Though this does lead to the disconcerting conclusion that I may have bought the exact same DVD several times over the years…   🙂    I have about 200 movie DVD’s, not including series like Doctor Who or Sherlock.

In other news, I’ve just booked for us to fly down to Christchurch and see our daughter who we haven’t seen in several years.  She assures me it’s still fairly warm down there, so I can go for walks in Bottle Lake Forest  (pine plantations).  Here in Auckland the tattered remains of summer are still hanging on, went for a swim yesterday and the water seemed to have warmed up very slightly.   Air temp is 20 to 23 C most afternoons.

@nerys   I’m quite unused to snow.   When I lived in the South of England I would be all excited if we got a few days’ snow at Christmas, but that only rarely happened.  Here in North Island NZ, the only place to reliably encounter snow on the road is up Mt Ruapehu in winter.   It does often snow down to lower levels in one place or another, but not predictably.   Anyway, fascinating though snow is, I think one could very quickly get tired of it.    I used to like driving at night, but now my night vision is just adequate, so (like you) I try to avoid long night drives.

@winston  I’m like you in that I like to have my own DVD’s and hard drive files.   I’m not sure I could survive eight days with no power, though I do have about 1500 books so I’d never run out of reading matter.   One huge change from a few decades ago – LED lights are so efficient these days that a carton of AA batteries would get me through 8 days of blackout quite easily.   Also, it makes it worthwhile to carry a little pocket torch when out walking in the bush with the knowledge that it will last for hours in an emergency.   (I haven’t ever needed it for that, but I once drove five miles on a pitch-black night on a winding gravel hill road with a ‘flat’ car battery that could only just power the ignition – no lights – by the light of a little 3-cell LED torch held out of the drivers’ window.   I just followed the edge of the road.  Far enough to reach a main road and cellphone coverage.   The sort of thing which is far more satisfying in retrospect than it was at the time…   in fact most of my fondest memories are of disasters narrowly averted.)

 

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@janetteb   I like to have control of media I have paid for.  If I buy a book, it’s mine.  The publisher can’t break down my door and take it back.   I can sell it again.   Same with DVD’s.   In fact there’s something physically satisfying about a DVD.   (Of course I can’t (legally) copy the DVD and sell it, same with a book, I can’t copy the entire book and sell it, that’s simple copyright).   Most of my DVD’s came from op shops.    (Sometimes I buy one then find I’ve already got it.   For a couple of dollars, that doesn’t hurt, I just consider it a donation).

Same with computers (all my laptops are Thinkpads, because Lenovo publish complete repair manuals as free downloads from their website; and they all run Linux because I control when (or if) it updates).   And all my files are on hard drives on my server, not ‘the cloud’ whatever that is.

I don’t have a Kindle, I’ve read that Amazon can ‘withdraw’ a book from circulation.   It’s paper copies for me, or a PDF that I can keep on my hard drive.   (‘Kindle’ – doesn’t that sound reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451?)

 

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@janetteb   As with the possums, so also with rabbits.   And deer in South Island I believe, and goats.  (There are deer in North Island but they live on farms surrounded by high fences).   Fortunately for us, nobody thought of cane toads   🙂   And, I noticed that everything had gone quiet too.

Currently Summer is still hanging on – late summer seems to have the most stable weather.  Eventually, some time after Easter, it falls off a cliff.   But today was beautiful, warm, sunny, and calm, the water in the bay was – just warm enough to venture in.   I’ll see how long it lasts.

I do agree that UNIT was far more intriguing when it lived in secret headquarters under the Tower of London, (actually, a bit reminiscent of early  Torchwood) than its high-tech tower which reminds me a bit of Big Brother or some other fascist regime.

@ps1l0v3y0u   I’m not a big fan of John Barrowman, he’s fine in small doses.   However, Torchwood was much more of an ensemble series I think.   Darker than Doctor Who in the first three series, and it went depressingly dark in the last two.   I usually like ‘dark’ (to quote Xena), but it has to be leavened with a good dose of humour – black humour will do fine.   Moff knows this.   Not sure RTD does, and Chibs is officially a humour black hole.   Similarly, I’m not a fan of shallow everything-is-fine wisecracking comedies.   I guess a nice mix of the two is optimum for me.

I’m not sorry I skipped Legend of Ruby Sunday this time round, I seem to remember it as a bit of a shambles.   On to the last season.    Which, incidentally, still doesn’t seem to be out on DVD.   At least, nothing on Ebay.   Only on Blu-Ray.    I bought a Chinese copy (probably a legitimate copy for the Chinese market?), but then my laptop couldn’t play it – it has trouble with the really nasty encryption built into Blu-rays, I think.   I eventually managed to rip the episodes and burn them to a DVD.   This was a lot of hassle but I just want to watch the episodes that I paid for on my laptop.

 

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@janetteb   Possums – we have ’em here in NZ, but they’re regarded unfavourably as they eat our native bush.   A couple of decades ago we had one in our garden, I was always cautious about approaching it because I’d heard they   have sharp claws and, when alarmed, a possum will climb the nearest tall object and if that happens to be you, ouch!   I don’t know if that’s true.

Doctor Who – watched Rogue a few weeks back, started The Legend of Ruby Sunday last night, got 5 minutes into it and abandoned.   I’m not a fan of UNIT, less so now it seems to be a sort of old folks home / dumping ground for erstwhile companions.  Rose(2), who I like, was in the first scene, but – to me – it seems like her character (and the others) is just being added in to try and ‘pep up’ UNIT.   The inverse of Osgood, who started as a UNIT staffer but became a character in her own right.

So instead I watched Joy to the World, which I found entirely watchable  (also, I recall being confused by the timeline first time around, this time I could understand it.)

Waiting hopefully to see if Rose (1) is the next Doctor – I’d love that! – if and when it eventuates.

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This is basically a fresh review, since it’s long enough since I watched that I’ve forgotten much of the ep.

‘Orient Express, Italy, 1962’ See my previous post for 5 ways this is technically incorrect. 🙂
The book the girl is reading, though, does look like an authentic Penguin paperback.
And I don’t think the mountain in ‘Everest Base Camp 1953’ is actually Everest. I’d like to ID it, it isn’t the Matterhorn or K2, I suppose I could try a reverse image search but my geek streak doesn’t stretch that far.

The dialogue in the Time Hotel is interesting and witty – who wrote this? Oh, Moff. What a surprise.

“Make yourself comfortable. And don’t attract attention. You should be dead quite shortly.” Yep, definitely Moff.

I really like Anita as the harassed manager of a modest hotel.

That countdown on the briefcase – FutureDoc bursts in with the code, then ducks back into the Time Hotel with Joy and leaves NowDoc in the Sandringham Hotel to go the long way round. Moff absolutely loves these ‘long way round’ scenarios, any immortal can expect to encounter at least one in their ‘lifetime.’ In fact this one was the inverse of The Day of the Doctor where the 3 Docs were in a dungeon and the Screwdriver needed 400 years to work out the molecuar structure of the door – which the newest iteraion of the Screwdriver had just completed (and then Clara walked in because the door wasn’t locked).

The relationship developing between the Doctor and Anita is rather charming. Love the sink-plunger joke – ‘Is this armed?’ And Anita’s Satnav now takes her where she *needs* to go, and her car is now blue.
And the little row of Tardises – “Where d’you get them?” “Online, mostly. For some reason there’s loads of them.” Nice little nod to the fans, I think.
And I had a tear in my eye when the Doctor left Anita to close the time loop.

But I still can’t figure out where he got the code for the briefcase, maybe I missed it.

And *of course* the villains are Vilengard.

Geek mode on again – when he lassoes the track behind the train, causing the rope to pull the door in the chamnber open – why do the train wheels emit sparks? – they’re not transmitting any brake force.

I have to admit the last few minutes were a bit too mystical for me; how did Joy acquire the ability to fly and take the starseed with her into deep space?

Never mind, for a feelgood Christmas episode it was entirely wachable.

 

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@winston     Congratulations.   I’m sure we could all use a little bit of sunshine.    I wish the best for his future.

 

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@winston Fortunately, the bottom (in the harbour) is only muddy, not weedy – that would add an extra level of creepiness. Also, whether in ‘the bush’ or the sea, we have very little in the way of bitey stingy things. We do have a few sharks offshore (though nothing like Oz gets) and they usually only – rarely – attack surfers who are out in the deeper water, not edge-waders like me. Though last week, standing on the sea wall, there was an enormous splash in the water a few feet away – I thought someone had fallen in. Then it happened again. Neither nearby passers-by nor I could see what did it, but it must have been big. Complete mystery, my only guess was a lost sea-lion (we get them very occasionally, last year there was one sunning itself on the nearby boat ramp). Later a friend suggested it was probably a kingfish, which can reach 3 or 4 feet long and apparently will come into shallower water. So I hope that was it 🙂

@thane16 Your brother sounds very capable. I have no objection to acquiring new skills, but I prefer to make my mistakes somewhere out of sight and less conspicuous than my father-in-law’s gravestone 🙂
If you can do handstands then you’re a lot more athletic (or maybe just braver) than I am! I have ‘lost’ my car on occasion, now I (usually) remember to take careful note where I left it.

 

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@syzygy The Doctor is not so much ‘impersonating’ humans, as that Gallifreyans happen to look identical with humans. And the Doctor does conveniently have a soft spot for Earth.

There have been many, many alien races in Scifi that happen to look conveniently humanoid, or at least like a human in a rubber monster suit 🙂

‘Farscape’ actually made a plot point out of it – Crichton* who was ‘lost in space’ was constantly speculating why his nemesis, the Peacekeepers who were of the Sebacean race, looked exactly like humans. This became almost an obsession with him as he tried to find his way back to Earth. (Eventually, according to Farscape.fandom.com, it emerged that the Sebaceans had been abducted from Earth 27,000 cycles ago and genetically modified. I’d missed that bit).

[*No relation to Kryten from Red Dwarf]

Galaxy Quest – There was one plot point I loved, that the enemy had activated the self-destruct and the heroes had to run the gauntlet of the ship to reach the timer, only to be a few seconds too late – but the timer had stopped on One. Because the friendly aliens who built the ship had modelled it on Earth TV sci-fi series and of course, on TV, it *always* stops on 1. Makes absolute sense.

@winston Yes, we’re fine. Though New Zealand has been having un-summery weather, torrential rain and disastrous flooding and slips all over the place, but somehow it’s missed Auckland.

On an unrelated note, have you ever been an accomplice at a slow-motion disaster, that you could neither avert nor walk away from? I was ‘volunteered’ by Mrs D to help her brother smarten up their father’s grave. I thought it might involve a bit of scrubbing and weeding, no worries. No such luck, the brother had the idea to cover the concrete plinth with tiling, to which end he had bought a stack of glazed bathroom tiles, grout, a tile cutter gadget, and watched a Youtube video (which made him exactly one Youtube video more experienced than me). The plinth was on a sloping base and his plan of attack was to lay the ‘easy’ tiles first and work out the rest as he went along. This predictably did not go well, but I couldn’t exactly walk away. I did at least manage to persuade him not to grout between the tiles as they were mostly off-white and the grout he had bought was black – which would make any irregularity in applying hideously obvious. So now he has gone back to Aussie and I have been left to finish off the last few tiles and – hopefully – grout between them with white grout. How did I get myself into this? I do hope father-in-law won’t haunt me forever for desecrating his grave. Please forgive me for ranting, I just needed to share my frustration with someone. If the worst thing I can report is, I’m going to have to spend an afternoon fiddling with tiling, I guess I’m not too badly off.

And of course we’re generally warm. I usually manage to get in a swim most days. I always used to swim at Piha on the west coast, but it’s a 50-minute drive each way, and Mrs D has arthritis and is not very mobile, so I can’t often get there. Instead I swim at Blockhouse Bay 3 miles away which, being a harbour bay, has a bit of sand on the beach (arrived on a Council truck), then firm mud which gets oozier further out, so only swimmable at high tide. Hence I am a slave to the tide tables. The good thing is that it’s a very enclosed little bay, with a high ridge on the southwest side, and since the prevailing wind is south-west it’s almost always very calm in the bay even when there’s a gale going on out round the point, making it a very nice little spot.

Stay warm and safe.

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[Tap, tap. Is this thing on? Is there anybody out there? (My inbox has gone really quiet this week)]

So, after a long hiatus from Dot & Bubble, I just re-watched ‘Rogue’. I found it a little better this time – first time around I was so disconcerted by the bird people I could hardly follow the plot.

This time I was more used to them but – why were they five totally different species? Or is there that much genetic variation in the Chuldur? Would still have preferred if they looked a bit more similar. But still, humanoids with bird heads looked kinda ridiculous.

Next thing, I’m so not a fan of Victorian period drama. That the plot managed to hold my interest is, I guess, a credit to the writing.

And third, isn’t the concept of aliens impersonating humans a bit hackneyed by now? We had the Slitheen, the Zygons, the Dalek ‘skin jobs’ of Moff’s series (was there ever a name for them?). I’m probably being picky, the general concept is so often used in sci-fi, it’s a bit like complaining about the prevalence of ‘outlaws rob bank, get chased by a posse’ in Westerns.

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@nerys   @whohar

@ps1l0v3y0u Avon was definitely a criminal, and a computer genius – I believe he hacked the Federation banking system of millions of credits. They were all criminals except Blake, who was a dissident.

The Liberator was absolutely *not* a problem. It was a product of advanced alien tech. How many of the spaceships on Doctor Who are completely alien tech? Almost all of them, in fact. I wouldn’t describe Avon as sleazy or unpleasant. Calculating, cunning, the smiling assassin type, but never needlessly offensive. And Servalan was imperious, haughty, I’d never say a ‘stuffed shirt’.

Your impressions are almost the antithesis of mine.

By the way – Zen, the computer that controlled Liberator. Similar to HAL in 2001, though IIRC Zen never went mad.
Orac – the genius supercomputer in a plastic box.
Slave – the cringingly obsequious computer that controlled Scorpio, the ship they acquired after losing Liberator.

@janetteb They couldn’t ‘find’ the Liberator, it disintegrated with Servalan on board. After running through a clump of integralactic fungus that ate it. Incidentally, that was one big plot booboo – there was fungus and rust popping out of all the joints in the wall cladding and neither Avon’s crew nor Servalan noticed it. However, I guess Liberator had sister ships that a reboot could acquire, I agree it was too awesome a ship to dispense with. But any remake would absolutely have to have an Avon. Blake or his replacement Tarrant (ever notice how similar they were? – compared to Avon’s suave ruthlessness) were, I think, less integral to the series. Incidentally, how many of the original ‘seven’ made it all the way through every episode? I think, only Avon and Vila. I used to be able to name them all, and roughly when they arrived and departed. Gan was the first casualty. Then Cally the telepath I think. Then Jenna the pirate and Blake. Then Tarrant arrived, then Dayna the hunter, then Soolin the assassin. Anyone I missed?

I never watched Babylon 5, didn’t know it was partly inspired by B7. Another one I think probably owed something to B7 was Farscape – a crew of fugitives, being hunted by a military power, in a huge alien ship (Moya), having adventures along the way. I suspect though, that trope is quite common in sci-fi. It does lend itself to changing cast members on occasion as actors drop out or join. Farscape, by the way, was notable for wild plot twists, as some of their fiercest enemies in the Peacekeepers were deposed and sought refuge on Moya. (‘Peacekeepers’ – what a lovely name for a ruthless militaristic mercenary culture. Some cynic dreamed that up. A bit like the Colt .45 ‘Peacemaker’ – all very peaceful when you’ve killed all the opposition. I won’t even get started on the FIFA/Nobel Peace Prize… 🙂

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@ps1l0v3y0u Which ‘rubbish’ computer do you mean? Zen, Orac or Slave? Probably the most interesting one was Orac, with the sarcastic temperament. Zen (shades of Hal from 2001) was taciturn. Slave was painfully obsequious.

@whohar @janetteb As for a reboot, I do hope it is a ‘re-imagining’ along the lines of Battlestar Galactica 2. (Which apparently old fans hated, calling it GINO – Galactica in Name Only. I never watched the old series, so I didn’t care). I think the original Blakes 7 was much constrained – even in its plotting – by budget and effects.

The relationship between Avon and Sevalan could certainly be – more developed. Back when B7 was made, just like with Who, any hint of s*x or strong romantic attraction was considered suspect. I’m absolutely not saying the ‘new’ series should have Avon explicitly leaping into bed with Servalan, an implication would be enough, or just a suggestion of mutual attraction; it was there in the original, I think, but buried so deep you’d need a metal detector to find it. It could, I think, be rather more along the lines of the relation between Holmes and Irene Adler in ‘Sherlock’.

As for who played Servalan, she would need to be a strong character, with considerable screen presence and sophistication and a hint of humour. After all, she did rise to the top of the (unseen) power struggle in the Federation. And mature enough to be convincing. Like Missie (no, I’m not necessarily suggesting Michelle Gomez for the role). Come to think of it, Lara Pulver (Irene Adler) could do it.

As for Avon – can’t reincarnate Paul Darrow? 🙂 Not sure who to nominate there. Blake would be easier, any action star would do. Interchangeable with Tarrant, I think.

I do agree with Janetteb that models probably hold up better than early CGI. Still, some of the early FX were a little painful – I’m thinking of the neutron blasters in B7, or the energy bolts from the Gods of Ragnarok in Greatest Show in the Galaxy. In the way of weapons, B7 was probably the worst off, they had some singularly unconvincing guns (surely it would have been easy and cheap to manufacture better, just take an existing real gun and stick a few extra bits on it); Dr Who (or so I think from a very tiny sample) tended to use real guns which stood up much better, I recall one ep where the enemy were using broomhandle Mausers with stocks fitted which looked quite futuristic in their original form. As for creatures and costumes, K9 was always painful, and the Cybermats were all too obviously little props being pulled along on bits of fishing line. I was going to include the early Cybermen in the painfully unconvincing category, all too obviously extras in silver overalls with boxes stuck on and humans inside, I would have thought that nothing could salvage them until the Moff’s genius made that very fact horrifyingly convincing (World Enough and Time).

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u @whohar (Delurking suddenly) I’m on the fence about a reboot of Blakes 7. And I say that as a past addict. I used to get dirty looks from my boss when I shot out the door at 4-30, I couldn’t muster the courage to point out it was only on Thursdays and it was so I could get home in time to catch a B7 re-run (first time for me) at 5.30. (This was before VCR’s became universal). Incidentally, the final episode was screened several weeks late and in a late timeslot, apparently killing a few people or having them go missing was okay but (spoilers!) killing them all was too much.

Anyway, if there is a reboot, I rather hope it’s completely different from the original, rather than just recycling old stories with better FX. Though frankly, the ‘better FX’ wouldn’t be difficult, I think B7 had the most painfully unconvincing guns of anything on television. And its model spaceships were fairly obviously just that, I think even Red Dwarf had better FX; what a difference a decade makes!

I have a theorem that up to a certain point, better FX really do help the story; beyond that point, they tend to take over and weaken it. B7 was definitely on the left-hand side of the bell curve in that respect.

I watched mainly for Kerr Avon, okay he was as ‘stagey’ as all hell, but Paul Darrow could carry it off. And there was some killer dialogue, I’m a sucker for sarcasm, irony and black humour. (I was also quite intrigued by the irony that, most of the time, there weren’t seven of them, and for half the run Blake wasn’t in them either. One could argue they weren’t even really Blake’s after the first few episodes, the rivalry with Avon lent a certain ‘edge’ to the saga.) It was a shade darker than contemporary Doctor Who, I think.

I’d forgotten it was invented by Terry Nation! The name I remember most in connection with B7 is Chris Boucher. (Um, the reboot is being proposed by a Matthew Bouch. Odd coincidence).

I’d say it will be interesting to see the results, if they get it done while I’m still around to see it. 🙂

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@thane16  @winston   Dark Side of the Moon is still my favourite album of all, musically.   And also, the cover is perfect – a simple strikingly individual design undiluted by any text  (which I thought showed supreme confidence).

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@nerys   I was joking about the VHS.   I can’t see it ever coming back into fashion, for several reasons:   Compared with DVD’s, or other electronic storage, it’s much lower quality, much bulkier, VHS players are mechanically  highly complicated, the tape wears with each playing, jumping to a specific place on a track requires the whole tape to be rewound, so is very slow; and DVD’s can offer many extra tracks such as ‘commentaries’ and language options.     Our local charity shops won’t accept VHS any more because nobody buys them.   Though some are for sale on Trademe (our Ebay equivalent) so I might advertise mine for a couple of bucks in case ‘somebody’ wants them still.

Hopefully your VHS’s were sufficiently long ago that people did buy them.

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@nerys That happy circumstance happened to me just once. Decades ago I had a turntable and a couple of dozen LP’s. When cassette tapes came along, they were so much more handy (even though of doubtful sound quality) that I never listened to records any more. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of my LPs in their artistic sleeves. Then CD’s came along, as convenient as cassettes and as good quality as LP’s (better, in fact, because they were immune to dust and scratches).

So several decades later I finally bit the bullet and found, to my surprise, that ‘vinyl’ is now ‘collectable.’ Sold them all, except for Dark Side of the Moon, which I kept for its iconic** cover.

(**Badly overused word, but in this case it fits so I use it, reluctantly.)

And my turntable, which was a nice belt-drive Yamaha (yes, that old) in a nice wooden enclosure (yes, that old) – well, it was too nice to throw away even though it took up a lot of space and its belt was slipping badly, but I found that I could actually get a new belt for it. Which I did. And then I found that it too was collectible, got $400 for it.

Now I’m waiting for VHS to come back into fashion 😉

 

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@janetteb If I don’t have my camera on me, I also use a cellphone. They have become remarkably good for what they are. My 150-dollar Android phone will take perfactly good photos and videos in a good light. But I think dedicated cameras will always be a step ahead, for simple reasons of physics – there are only so many photons per square centimetre per second, so a big lens will always be better, particularly for short exposures and/or in a dim light. That’s something phones can’t do anything about, it is physically impossible to fit a large lens into the thickness of a cellphone.

I just Googled and Panasonic don’t own Leica. That was a guess on my part from the prevalence of Leica lenses on Panasonic cameras. Pleased to hear your father’s Leicas were ‘collectable’, it’s nice when that happens.

 

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@nerys      f/2.8   Wow.   That’s pretty nice.    The TZ80 is f/3.3 to 6.4.    I’m – almost – tempted to consider and FZ, but the same argument applies as did to my Konica (though obviously less cogently) – I can’t take photos if my camera isn’t on me, and the TZ is small and light enough to just carry as a matter of habit.   TZ has a Leica lens too, I assume Panasonic probably bought them at some time.

@ps1l0v3y0u    That’s true about the droplets, so maybe that is the actual heavier-than-air weight.   Of course if the latent heat of condensation is enough to produce strong enough updraughts (thunderstorm) to keep the droplets aloft long enough to coalesce into ice – they become hailstones and really not very gentle at all.   🙂

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@thane16 syzygy And a merry Christmas to you, thankyou. So a cloud weighs 500 tons (or tonnes – pretty much the same thing). Does that include the weight of the air in it, or is that the additional weight of the water vapour? (Is water vapour heavier than air?) That would imply 500 cubic metres of liquid water. But (Googles) water vapour is lighter than air – of course, which is why steam rises. So it must just be the weight of the cloud, air included, I guess.
Sorry for being such a geek. As you could guess, Kill the Moon caused me acute distress.

I do love quirky ‘fun facts’. I’m a fan of the Monty Hall problem, which seems incredibly simple yet so deceptive that professors of mathematics have gone into print with the wrong answer.

 

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@nerys Your FZ’s are a step above mine, in lens size certainly. I did love the light-gathering capability of my Konica film cameras with great big hunks of glass, but when I went digital I wanted something more portable. I also wanted a wide angle – 35mm or even 28mm, it was surprising how difficult that was to find in those early compact digitals. My first decent digital was a Panasonic TZ2 and I’ve stuck with TZs ever since, currently a TZ80. Which is just a ‘pocket camera’ size if your pockets are large. I guess at 24-720mm it’s a ‘superzoom’, though maximum zoom is only useable because it’s got OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation) which really does make a difference, essential on a small light camera. The steadying influence of a great big 200mm f3.5 lens on a 35mm SLR was something you only really appreciate when you don’t have it 🙂 In dim light it can’t quite match a full-size SLR, but almost, and it’s way ahead of anything I’ve had on a phone, as one would expect. As always with anything digital, it’s got 57 modes of which I’ve only ever used three or four.

I don’t use ‘the cloud’ for backups, like you I prefer to have my stuff in my possession. Except maybe texts on my phone.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@nerys    As you say, extra shots in digital cost virtually nothing.   Great, compared with 50c-a-shot film, but it can be a problem.   I don’t weed out nearly as many as I should.   Ones that are out of focus or accidental shots of my feet are obvious candidates for deletion.   Deciding which of several similar okay shots is the best is just too time-consuming so I tend to keep them all.   I don’t get completely swamped, only because terabyte hard drives are affordable these days, and I have four in my computer downstairs.   (I do backups by copying everything to a different hard drive).

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb I’m not sure if the word is ‘dedication’ or ‘geeky obsession’. When I first went digital, c.2004, I saved the results on DVD’s, which naturally prompted me to put an index on each DVD. My first digital camera was a dreadful little thing, best forgotten, in 2005 I upgraded to a Fuji which gave adequate images. Then my first ‘good’ digital, a Panasonic TZ2, in 2007.
Up until that time, I used a film camera – a Konica T3 and a TC, with an impressive selection of lenses, the digitals were just for convenient carrying when I didn’t want to lug around a big camera bag. But the TZ2 made my nice Konicas obsolete overnight. Sad, in a way, they were beautiful pieces of tech.

Anyway, aside from all my digital photos, next job is to scan the prints of all 450 films I took with the Konica and index them. 🙂 I did say I was obsessive, didn’t I? They do all have details written on the back.

You were much more adventurous in your Trans Siberian trip than me – I did it in 2017, when Russia was quite tame. Coincidentally, my camera developed a random fault – I think the optical image stabilisation lens came loose – which meant about half the photos were distorted round the edges. Cropping them on my computer helped. I’ve also once lost a whole batch – in 2008 I followed the Silver Fern (car) Rally round South Island and I lost a SD card. Ouch! More recently, last year in France, when I put my rental car on its roof, I got the paramedic to snap a couple of photos on my phone, which then got pickpocketed in Paris. Luckily all my other photos were on my camera. When I got home, at a friend’s suggestion, I wrote an email to the local Chief of Police asking if they had any photos they could kindly share with me, and by return I got a most courteous reply from the Brigadier (?) with four good photos.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@nerys Sorry if it looks like I’m bragging. But its just so nice to be able to go and swim every day (and this year Summer seems to have arrived early, at least up this end of the country). What I also love about summer are the long evenings, it doesn’t get dark until 10pm or so (of course anyone in the mid-latitudes can say the same). It always catches me by surprise how suddenly the long evenings arrive, and also how rapidly they decay at the other end of the year. Guess I’m just slow on the uptake.

But anyway, I’d feel I was somehow selling my good fortune (in living here) short if I didn’t at least mention it.

Minuses – well, the biggest minus is, we’re 1200 miles from anywhere (‘anywhere’ being Sydney, Australia). I do so envy Poms (i.e. ‘Brits’) who can just pop across to France or Spain or Norway for the weekend. By car, ship or train if they don’t want the hassle of flying. From here, it involves a 20-hour-plus flight with all the accompanying complications so it’s something we can only afford to do – in terms of cost and time – every few years at best.

Cataloguing photos – it’s taken months, on and off, since I re-started. I was more-or-less up to date until 2017, when I did my big trip via the Trans-Siberian to Europe (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, UK) and came back with about 20,000 photos. Admittedly only about 10% were worth keeping. But whenever I drove somewhere obscure – like English country lanes which I prefer to main roads – I took a snap of the signs at road junctions so I could later retrace my route on the map or Streetview (I’m also obsessive about maps and knowing exactly where I am, or was). Much quicker than noting it at the time. I have no photos labelled ‘somewhere in Cornwall’, they’re all ‘Tolcarne village heading west’ or something like that. Maybe I’m weird. I just note them all down in order in a large plain text file, I can just do a word search in any editor to locate the ones of interest.

After 2017, I let it all lapse until a couple of months ago when I decided I really had to break the logjam and catalogue that trip. So now I’ve broken free of that and just have a few evening’s worth left. But it’s quite pleasant ‘work’, and every now and then I come across a photo that’s good enough (at least in my optimistic imagination) to make it worth the effort.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb @nerys @whohar

Merry Christmas / New Year / solstice.

I’ve been absent [minded] for a while, time always sneaks past when I’m not looking. Been swimming every day, here (water’s warm!) And also indexing all my digital photos, of which I have literally tens of thousands, I tend to binge on shots. A luxury I could never afford with film, but with digital it’s virtually free. The downside is extricating the decent shots from the so-so ones (the really bad shots are easy, make like a Cyberman and Delete). I’m currently up to 2018, not too far to go. But it’s a huge time sink, which is why Who has temporarily taken a back seat. It’s temporarily stalled at ‘Dot and Bubble’. Hope to resume shortly.

 

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@winston   @nerys    I think a lot of the anti-society attitude stems from the myth of the hardy pioneering individual who did everything for himself and was beholden to no man.   So that, reinforced by the successful American Revolution (which was really a rebellion), morphed into the ‘all government is a threat to my freedom’ frame of mind.   (If anyone really, truly  wants to be totally self-sufficient and beholden to nobody, there’s plenty of space in Alaska, the Yukon, or eastern Siberia available).

It also led, I think, to the gun-lovers of America’s favourite argument that the ‘right to bear arms’ was a vital safeguard against a dictatorial government.   So now their great chance to prove it has come.   I’m waiting…

Oh dear I’m getting political.

On a non-political note, AI-generated video is getting alarmingly good.   Youtube is choking with trashy patently fake videos with stunningly good graphics and puerile plots.   Any Who producer of the past would have wept at the quality of the graphics.   They would have wept even harder at the ‘plots’.    (These aren’t political, just clickbait.   Occasionally the AI gets it laughably wrong, like, say, a beautifully rendered giant python – with legs.)     Unfortunately Mrs D watches a lot of them.

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