If you have yet to see it, then stop whatever you are doing and watch Arrival. The most intelligent and thoughtful SF I have seen for ages. It is very much about language, how it is constructed and how it constructs. You will never look at palindromes in quite the same way again.
I thought I’d posted a reply last night, but it went into the nether realm. So mk2:
m -I would not recommend referencing your own work in order to make a point?
Why? Look at anyone of any note, in any field, and they cite their work as their body of knowledge builds. And also when they are teaching.
“repetition” masquerading as layered. (I’m on bloomin’ fire).
Alas, the problem with being on fire is that you get burned.
I think your mum has a copy of my story Amoreuse. Get her to give it to you, and then come back and talk about repetition. ‘cos if you don’t know how a story ends, you aren’t qualified to comment on it. Just like, once upon a time, your mum wasn’t qualified to dismiss a show about the blonde chick who kills vampires.
And watch Ashes to Ashes.
It lacks layers, in my opinion. And that’s concise.
Nope. It is much simpler than that and is a straightforward matter of observation (feel that heat!). There is a crucial difference between book and film that probably explains why you are blind to the many layers of the book (the film is one of the most important in US cinema and a true masterpiece, but that does not excuse dodging the question). A clue: The film and book versions of A Clockwork Orange differ in exactly the same way, to much the same effect.
Doesn’t appear to be on Region 1 DVD (either Amazon or the BBC America store), so unless it is on iTunes or one of the streaming services in the US then it’s a region 2 import and a region-hacked player.
Also, I have read The Maltese Falcon -recently. I loved it. But. I actually preferred the film -this never happens. The book is always better than the film but I didn’t find that this time (or on this occasion).
Then what is the most important difference between the book and the film?
And, no.
was a “conceit”
It’s not a conceit. Watch Ashes to Ashes.
Read The Big Sleep (and then Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye).
Almost everything you read and watch now owes a tremendous debt to two genres that snobs hate.
You are so comprehensively wrong about Life On Mars that you may very well have come up with an entirely new definition of wrong.
But, to be fair, you need to watch the follow-up, Ashes to Ashes, to fully understand your wrongitude.
Sometimes things are meant to be slow. And also: made in the structure and style of the shows of the era. You need to track down The Sweeney.
You get a very small allowance for not being familiar with some of the very English 1970s idiom. But only very small.
In fact, as a general observation, your failure to fully appreciate good crime drama is a big gap in your education. You need to read The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. In fact they should be the next books you read. Falcon first, then Big Sleep, so you can see the development of the genre. I expect a report back.
There is a small possibility I might have commented on the Graun thread…
Anyway, worth noting that RTD and Moff have both explicitly acknowledged the debt to Buffy.
Season 5 of Buffy remains, to me, the finest single season of TV storytelling in any genre, ever. Matt Smith’s first season (S5 also, of course) came close to catching the perfect storm of arc, performance and metaphor that Buffy caught with the run from The Body to The Gift, but that is a mighty high standard to set.
Yeah good one. And in the episode called – aptly enough – Choices there is this entire exchange, which covers pretty well every base of who gets to choose while – with hindsight – teeing up what it can lead to.
The point being, that you don’t do the right thing to earn a reward. You do it because it is the right thing, irrespective of cost or reward.
Everything else is just wage slavery.
(It’s almost as if Moff has paid attention to the storytelling doors Whedon kicked open)
Whistler: No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.
if some pattern, something greater than he put the memory of Pompeii in his head at that exact moment. He’d been wondering since his regeneration why he had the face he did
This is a self-answering question if ever there was one. No greater thought, just a intellect reflecting on things.
Stop looking for the Ghost In The Machine. There isn’t one.
Who says the dial was discarded in the desert? It manifested right where it need to be: next to the people who love him without condition. Much like the Tardis it took him where it needed to go, not wanted.
They are html paragraph marks. Sometimes, if you compose a post outside WordPress (on Word, say) then copy and paste, these get left in (words handling of html is awful and always has been, and WordPress has never handled copy-and-paste very elegantly). If I do that I usually check the ‘Text” tab to make sure there are no spurious bits of code left.
Once up they can be removed, so you have the 5-10 min window to edit ’em out.
Yes – you cannot always assume you know your destination. Interesting case: Clair Patterson wanted to establish the age of the Earth and set about doing it. But he kept having trouble getting clear readings and, in investigating, uncovered the greatest environmental catastrophe of the 20th century. Turns out putting lead (one of the most poisonous substances known) in petrol is a really stupid idea.
Probably because they haven’t been dished out yet.
It is nominated for Best Pic, Dev Patel for best supporting actor and Nicole Kidman for best supporting actress,and the film for cinematography, adapted screenplay and music.
There are several good sites for DW (and other) fanfic
That is a matter of opinion, but there is a section here and it ain’t in an episode.
Remember: Twilight started as fanfic. That should be warning enough.
Headcanon is just that, in the head where it belongs: mine is that Toby took a bullet for someone else, probably CJ, because after six years of character development there is no way that Toby would have acted as the writers had him act. That it is also Richard Schiff’s headcanon pleases me, but I have no inclination to write a huge story to ‘correct’ the writers. What’s on screen is in the episodes, is the story, is canon.
On the – annoyingly infrequent – times I write, I like to use characters of my invention, in a universe of my invention. Because they are, you know, not somebody else’s.
If it was on screen, it is canon (whether it means what we think it means is another issue – the retcon is still canon).
how in the hell are they ever going to disentangle the immense amounts of lying,
That is what historians do. It is not, in principle, any harder now than trying to discern the extent to which Caesar was bigging himself up, or Tacitus et al were sucking up to the boss (see threads elsewhere).
but would they have fought for him to save Clara had he asked?
Yes, clearly. This was spelled out in the text. “They’ll kill you”, followed by soup. That by itself tells us, but their refusal to step aside when the fighter-jet pilot practically begged them to underlined it. At no point did he ask them to stay, because he knew he didn’t need to.
They did not even whack Mayor Me on the head and let him escape back to his TARDIS with his key!
Because he pretty much told them not to. He wanted to find out who was behind things.
He let O’Donnell die because it had already happened (just as, in the end, he had to let River go to the Library. That was, literally, the first thing he knew about her). But with Ashildr he knew he had a choice. She was dead because of him and he has, since practically 1963, been willing to roll the dice on history.
I’ve certainly been feeling that way the past few days, as I’ve been chewed out by others and watched others get chewed out for not agreeing with the powers that be over what should become of the “little people” of the world, for being compassionate.
It is the people who are chewing you out that history will damn.
I know you have received orders from our commandant, which he has received from his superiors, to dispose of the population of this camp. Now would be the time to do it. Here they are; they’re all here. This is your opportunity. Or, you could leave, and return to your families as men instead of murderers.
Yes, Bannon is the power behind the tastlessly blinged-out throne. But Trump’s background strongly suggests he is the real deal as well (daddy in the KKK). But there are many fellow travellers (and I do wonder what it would take to get the federal judges to send in the US Marshals and give CBP oppos the choice of obeying the law or going to jal for contempt of court).
You need to stop this meme. The choice was between and out-and-proud fascist and by far the best qualified candidate for the job in at least 50 years (who got more votes than any other candidate ever, except Obama).
The National Debt Ceiling (the amount the Treasury is permitted to borrow) has to at least go up with inflation or you get a real terms cut in spending and therefore in services. Raising the debt ceiling is not a bad thing. Failing to raise it would leave the treasury needing to us ‘extraordinary measures’ – short-term debt, which is very expensive – so it is always better to control the debt ceiling sensibly because that is much cheaper.
It should not be confused with the national debt, which is the amount of total debt.
Debt, in itself, is not a bad thing. Problems arise when, like Greece, you structure your debt stupidly – which they did, with a little help from Goldman Sachs. The average age to maturity (ie the due date) of Greek debt was 3 years AND it was horrifically expensive debt. The UK’s was – and probably still is, despite moronic slash-and-burn economics by George Osborne – 13 years at just 3%. It was totally manageable but gullible British voters bought into the lie that we were in the same state as Greece. That was never the case, and never a risk.
(Have your tears for the ordinary people of Greece who paid the price, not for Greek politicians or their shipping magnates, who control ONE-THIRD of all world shipping yet contribute bugger all to the economy.)
Also, comparing a credit card to national debt is like comparing a Model T Ford to the space shuttle.
Because there was (as JK Galbraith would call it) a countervailing power. There isn’t now. They have a free hand and regard the constitution as something to be swerved around.
Black Lives Matter;
Voter suppression;
Gerrymandering taken to new depths;
Organised internet hate squads.
Same meat; different gravy.
They almost have enough State senates to get constitutional change ratified (how long before Trump calls for a national referendum on something or other on the pretext of ‘going over the head of the elites’? There is a reason they are banned in Germany, a reason we failed heed.)
It is not a new playbook, and decent people fall for it. Every. Fucking. Time.
It is not, in any way, a coincidence, that this is happening as WW2 goes out of living memory.
Understood. You will note that I did qualify my use of the term.
True, but if it squawks like a fascist, struts like a fascist and acts like a fascist that is what it should be called. Alt-right was invented by them as a PR ruse.
the drawback is that violence brings us down to their level…. that at this early stage,
It is not an early stage. They are in government: overt, unashamed white supremacists, militarists and nationalists.
They don’t care about ridicule (there was an awesome satirical and highly camp club scene in 1930s Berlin, until well after the Nazis were elected. Then, suddenly, it was too late). You do not defeat fascism in the pubs and clubs, or on Twitter. It is that faith in, and desire for, law and order that leads to the Good German.
Remember, people who voted for him want to keep the Affordable Care Act, but scrap Obamacare.
But the one thing they fear more than anything is being made to look weak.
On the other hand, we did get to see a Nazi get punched live on telly.
There are no circumstances where it isn’t right to punch a Nazi. There are absolutely no circumstances where a Nazi could have the moral high ground – it is an impossibility. The whine of the fascists (f.a.s.c.i.s.t is, by the way, the correct spelling of alt-right – which was a PR term dreamed up by fascists) was a joy to behold. If there is one thing Nazis fear more than anything it is being made to look weak.
They stand for what they always stood for — the perfect balance of cold brilliance with warm steadfastness.
I noted after A Study In Pink how faithful Moffat and Gatiss were faithfully to the source material with once allowing themselves to be constrained by it (I can’t recall if here or elsewhere).
Holmes and Watson are both profoundly damaged – Holmes by, it turns out, a childhood of sibling rivalry as blood sport, Watson by war (both Moffat and ACD’s Watson were wounded Afghan vets). It takes a special kind of craft to pull that faithfulness off and still be new. As you say on the ‘Hell Bent’ thread, Ichabod, fans can be extremely stupid about this (two things that cause me to totally dismiss a comment are the use of “lazy” or “soap opera” as critique, since both show the woeful limits of the commenters understanding).
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