@JimTheFish  Heh heh.  But I think even in school, you’d have to be pretty damn fast and awfully well focused to put one over on UKL.  She has a very sharp and critical mind, and speaks it straight out and frequently.  I recall a discussion in which somebody complained about “political correctness” (this was back in the eighties), and she sna…[Read more]

@lisa  Thanks!  Straight onto my fb page.  Acid for PKD, but most probably not for Ursula — though you never know, do you?

@Missy  JS&MN has just wound up here, and I stayed with it (despite too many thin white men with long dark hair and beards, a bit confusing at times) and enjoyed it quite a bit.  I’m with you on the book — its knotty, gnarly, twiddly style and massive “cast” threw me off.  The series removes that layer of fiddliness and gives you the story so yo…[Read more]

@JimTheFish  Wow, that’s gorgeous!  I’ve always thought of the Cybermen as robotic soldiers because that’s how they look and how they act.  Maybe we need a story about them restoring themselves to a less armored look?  I don’t remember their origins at all, but I don’t like the super-muscular macho look they have now.

@janetteB  Yes on copy-editing, all right; that’s why I read a piece of my own work out loud when I think it’s ready for a final edit — the ear catches errors the eye never would, and of course it’s a great check for the how the flow and pacing of the language in general is working.  You don’t even need to record your reading and then listen to i…[Read more]

@Arbutus  I’m pretty sure LeGuin took that model from the Israeli kibbutz practice of sending the kids to all day (and sometimes all night) day-care inside the kibbutz so their parents were available to take their required turns at the various kinds of work needed around the place.  I remember reading a mystery novel set in a kibbutz in the e…[Read more]

@purofilion   Wait, “Omnireligious”?  I haven’t come across that before.  Sounds a bit like the Roman Empire, in which you could worship whatever the hell you wished to in any way you liked, so long as you paid your taxes and included the Emperor in your worship, once the emperors began claiming to be gods (late Empire, as I recall).

So, in th…[Read more]

@Arbutus  You expressed it just fine.  That think about “the Abyss gazes back into you”, so unpleasantly true . . .

@Proxy  I admire you adventurousness with tenses!  When I talked about training for Clara, I didn’t mean an informal apprenticeship (traveling with the Doctor), but going through the formal training that the Doctor and the Master did at the Academy on Gallifrey — which is no longer accessible (?) since the Doctor wouldn’t know where to send h…[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip  Thanks for the diagram — it works, until I look away from it . . . told you, I have trouble with time travel stories.  So I’ll stick with the simplest explanation I can find, until The Big Reveal — whenever that comes (and it better be in S9, or there’s gonna be trouble).

@Barnable  Well, the Doctor is supposed to use brains, no…[Read more]

THIS MIGHT BE SPOILER-ISH — ?  SO, WARNING FOR THOSE WHO WANT NO POSSIBLE SPOILING.  I’d go over to the spoiler thread, but my comments below won’t make any sense without previous comments, above — by @SuzanneMS @Missy et al on this thread.

@jphamlore

. . . Missy is trying to manipulate things so that the Doctor will realize that he m…[Read more]

SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

@Proxy   What a delightful idea — Doctor Big Brother!

@lisa   Wonderful!  Thanks for that link.

@PhaseShift   The proposed thread for Faith, Philosophy, Myth, and Reason sounds promising.  You could build it (well, a foundation anyway, using some of those older posts) and see if we will come . . . Or keep the earlier posts as an unofficial FAQ on what people have said about these issues that doesn’t need to be gone over again, unless you w…[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip   Watson is definitely straight; but Watson is also someone not-scared of loving a man very deeply. He just won’t be sexually attracted to that man.

Yes; like CapDoc and Clara, actually, or at least that seems to me to be one clear way to read them.  If that’s the core of the central relationships that Moffat is working on in both…[Read more]

@JimTheFish  thanks for the Sherlock Holmes page — interesting to be reminded that in Conan Doyle’s day homosexuality was a crime.  The idea that Sherlock, that rock-ribbed intellectual, would jeopardize his image (and self-image) as a staunch, brilliant, and even heroic upholder of the laws of Queen and country by allowing sexual urges to lead h…[Read more]

Just something — I like it because it upholds the idea that I am not the only idiot who can not understand time travel in DW (or anyplace else, but that’s another story):

http://qntm.org/who

Huh.  That looks kinda bare.  I’ve got the page bookmarked so let me know if the link doesn’t work, and I’ll go get a way in through Google.  Right now, *m…[Read more]