clearheader

[clearheader]

Might be a hot take, but idk, Empire of Death is worse than the Reality War, because it was chosen to be written that way.

Cause, Reality War is awkward, anti climactic, and low-key misogynistic towards Belinda, but I mostly feel all of that was unintended. There's too much set-up without pay-off, and pay-off without set-up, and we already know there were reshoots. Ncuti wanted out, most likely due to delays, and the episode has to pivot on itself and it breaks. It's a bad episode, but you can understand why.

Empire of Death on the other hand, no one forced them to make that. No one held a gun to their head. No one made them make an episode largely compromised of sitting around doing fa in a wasteland, and bungling a mystery. It wastes it's villain even more than they say the Rani was wasted, but at least the Rani did something. And there's no behind the scenes drama really, it's just poorly executed.

Also, Space Babies is overhated but that's another story

[clearheader]

Invaders From Mars

Eighth Doctor audio drama #5

Recommended? Nah… 🥲

I have loved audio dramas since I was a child. My father burned old Buck Rogers serials to CD for me, and I wore those suckers out.

On paper, this should be one of my favorite Doctor Who stories. It’s practically a love letter to radio drama history and 1930s pulp, camp and cheese, mixing together gangster, noir, sci-fi and WW2 tropes. But the mix doesn’t cohere.

Some things I loved:

It’s called Invaders From Mars very cheekily

Orson Welles being a character in a Doctor Who story

References to The Shadow and Welles’ Hamlet

Setting a Doctor Who story on the day that Welles’ War of the Worlds radio drama incited panic — what a genius idea!

The idea that the invading aliens are just running a planetary protection racket, like gangsters. lol

The idea that the end of the story takes place moments before this photo of Welles was taken makes me so happy:

Orson Welles explaining to reporters that he had not intended to cause panic (October 31, 1938)

Something I didn’t love: Every character is 1-dimensional.

It was almost impossible to keep track of all the gangsters because they all sound like cartoon goons.

Don Cheney could have been interesting (I can’t believe he was voiced by Simon Pegg) because he was self-conscious about his facial disfigurement, but they didn’t do anything with it.

Glory Bee could have been interesting since she was a Russian spy, but aside from the twist they didn’t do much with it (frankly, bringing a Russian spy trope into this made me realize the writers weren’t trying to tell a coherent story so much as cram in tropes).

And don’t get me STARTED on Cosmo Devine. The gay man who loves Nazis???? What are we doing here? They made Simon Pegg use the f-slur on him???

The plot moves at a halting pace throughout. And the ending is insane. The Doctor's clever plan to scare away the aliens with Orson's performance fails because he forgets to turn off the broadcaster while shit-talking the aliens. Well, that's a little unsatisfying. But then, coincidentally, Stepashin the Russian scientist invents the first atomic bomb in recorded history?? and detonates it within the alien ship, within the earth's atmosphere??? And this is okay??

5/10

UPDATE: FUCK ME. MARK GATISS WROTE THIS?? THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING. WHAT THE FUCK? WHY DO THEY KEEP LETTING THIS MAN WRITE DOCTOR WHO STORIES??? Okay, sorry, maybe Mark Gatiss is a nice guy. But he is a consistently bad writer for Doctor Who.

[clearheader]

Predictions for the future of Doctor Who

disney backs out

2027 gives us a special that explains whatever the fuck's going on with billie piper. It makes everyone very angry but it ends with us getting a new doctor and the promise of a full new series in 2029!

the 2029 series has less budget and is only six episodes long. The producers try to explain this is actually a Good Thing because they can make a really tight epic story arc that's going to be Doctor Who Like You've Never Seen It Before!

It's followed by another 6 episode series on 2031. These series are generally agreed to be Shit, with a couple of absolutely amazing completely bizarre episodes that will be remembered forever.

The BBC do not cancel Doctor Who. It's just going on a little bit of a hiatus. Don't worry about it.

Wilderness Years 2 Electric Boogaloo begins.

Big Finish gets a big boost in popularity as people go there for new Doctor Who content. They produce more and more adventures with no more plot than, "And we have this Fan Favourite Character back to team up with this other Fan Favourite, and fight this Classic Monster!!" as quality goes steadily downhill. By 2035 they're releasing a new audio every day and using AI write their scripts.

The BBC licences a new series of novels that they don't really care about, which are generally agreed to be some of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time.

In 2050 or so Doctor Who is brought back as a hard reboot, using a lot of ideas from the 2005 series (the Doctor is the Last of the Time Lords, there's a large focus on the companion's home life). This makes a lot of Doctor Who fans extremely angry but also genuinely refreshes the franchise and makes for an extremely good series. David Tennant makes a guest appearance as the Master.

In the 2062 season finale, there's a surprise appearance from Jodie Whitaker, who comes out in costume and frantically explains to the current Doctor that the Division have Done It Again and erased a whole lot of their past.

This leads into next year's 100 year anniversary special, which retroactively reconises all of original Doctor Who. It's bad.

[clearheader]

My only hope is that the dismal reception to the past two seasons humbles RTD in the same way that that dismal reception to seasons 6 and 7 humbled Moffat.

To this day, I think the fact that we got so many mature, thematically-rich stories in the Capaldi era — written by the man who wrote The Wedding of River Song — is miraculous.

I just hope that RTD has the introspective capability needed to focus up his scripts, stop going for the “maddest” ideas just because they’re mad, and deliver some real payoff. That’s all people really want.

[clearheader]

Just found out a bunch of the Eighth Doctor audio dramas are adapted from old FAN PROJECTS??? from the 80s

Minuet in Hell and Sword of Orion both!!

A long time ago, I was involved in a fan project writing unofficial audio dramas. It didn’t go very far (and I was never very good at it) but it was always a lot of fun and I’ve cannibalized many of my unused concepts for other projects.

The idea that the founders of Big Finish were cannibalizing their unlicensed fan stories into licensed, official ones is deeply heartwarming to me. Never let your dreams be dreams.

[clearheader]

Wish World

was a much, much better "alternate reality" episode than The Wedding of River Song -- at least there was a meager point to the alternateness of the reality -- however, that's an incredibly low bar. I kinda hate The Wedding of River Song. I always complain about this, but why is Doctor Who so allergic to straightforward finales? Why do we need to shift to an alternate reality (which will be forgotten after next week's episode) when the Rani could do a million interesting things in our reality? I know they want to raise the stakes, but it's actually not that hard to raise the stakes without doing stupid reality-breaking shit (see World Enough And Time, or any Brandon Sanderson finale). Empire of Death would be SO much more interesting if the people Sutekh was threatening were the ~12 characters we care about in UNIT headquarters instead of 12 trillion lifeforms all across the universe. There's so much interesting drama you could get out of those 12 characters facing down death, but they're blipped out effortlessly, just as Sutekh later is.

I don't foresee a satisfying wrap-up next week. I could be wrong about The Reality War, but that title alone makes me think I'm right.

[clearheader]

Minuet in Hell

The fourth eighth doctor audio drama.

Recommended? Yeah!!

This one is super interesting, lots going on.

The tone is a little darker than typical Doctor Who — it opens with nearly two minutes of frightening noise and frantic mumbling before chants of “HELLFIRE.” And the subject matter is obviously not the type of thing mainstream Doctor Who would touch: corrupt evangelicals, abuse of the mentally ill… uh, human trafficking?? Bold choices. Surprisingly, I think it all works, though it doesn’t get past surface-level criticism of these topics.

It does however, manage to balance the tone with some great comic relief, in the forms of:

A hilariously cavalier, wise-cracking demon from Hell

The aging Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

Listening to the Brigadier use a dial-up modem to slowly type emails one letter at a time like an old man was a particularly inspired choice. LOVE it.

I also loved the inclusion of Gideon Crane, a man who believes himself to be The Doctor (a whole 7 years before The Next Doctor Christmas Special) and who repeatedly gaslights the Eighth Doctor into believing he’s schizophrenic. The only part of his character I found skeptical was the idea that Gideon got his Doctory memories from the TARDIS, but then, conveniently, gets his original memories back from the PSI brain machine. Seems like quite a coincidence. And, as is mentioned, the Brigadier being here at all is also a massive coincidence.

The only other things I didn’t like were:

The way Dr. Dayle was tormented by her fear of younger, sexier women. Really? :/

Becky Lee being a demon hunter descended from Saint Peter?? There’s nothing INHERENTLY wrong with this, it’s just a BIG pill to swallow for something that never really pays off?

Otherwise I loved it!

8/10

[clearheader]

The Stones of Venice

Recommended? Mmm, nah, unless you like something surreal.

The Stones of Venice is the inverse of Sword of Orion: Starts messy buts ends strong.

The premise is surreal and confusing right away. Venice is sinking into the ocean but there are thousands of people here to party? Weird. Venice is now populated in part by a underclass of fish people? Wh- where did they come from?? When? A cult is worshipping a duchess who died 100 years ago? …Why? Charley takes a drug that makes her act like the duchess even though she doesn’t know anything about the duchess? ???

You just have to accept these oddities because they are not satisfactorily explained.

This story also takes the prize for most predictable twist. The Law of Economy of Characters clearly states that the Mysterious Old Woman who keeps appearing but has no apparent plot involvement must be the legendary duchess.

I also think the moral about how we shouldn’t turn real events into myths is pretty asinine, since I was thinking the whole time “what a weird thing to mythologize.” I feel like, either I’m missing some crucial context — like perhaps a real-world parallel — or the person who wrote this story just didn’t understand myths or cults but wanted to criticize them nonetheless.

All that being said, things wrap up nicely. The duchess proves an interesting, bitter character. And while I did not find the duke’s sudden change-of-heart-sacrifice emotionally convincing, it was plot-ly convincing thanks to all the setup!

6/10

[clearheader]

Sword of Orion

Sword of Orion: The second eighth doctor audio drama.

Recommended? Nah

This one wasn’t very good! Fortunately, I’d been warned of that.

The introduction was promising and the setting was interesting. I liked the grimy side of humanity’s future. The scrappers were fun characters for the most part and I liked the idea of an android uprising happening in the background — though more detail would have been nice.

The pacing unfortunately, gets extremely muddy and confusing very quickly once the cybermen appear, and never recovers. There’s not even much of a satisfying ending either. The twist at the end was particularly predictable — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — but there was actually a bit of a disconnect when the Doctor assumed the Captain’s secret identity was that of a soldier fighting the androids. I had already long since deduced she was an android by that point, so it was strange for the Doctor to not even consider it.

4/10

Oh well! Onwards and upwards!

[clearheader]

Storm Warning

So I started listening to some Doctor Who audio dramas because they have them on Spotify

(he's preemptively coping with the idea that the Season 2 Rani finale is going to be bad)

Storm Warning: the first ever Eighth Doctor Big Finish story in 2001.

Recommended? Yes!

Some slightly clumsy stuff but fuck me if that's not par for the course with this franchise — on the whole I thought it was super gripping! It was kind of electrifying to hear Paul McGann (the guy from the shitty Doctor Who TV movie) getting a chance to crush it with some good long-form material for a change.

The R-101 dirigible was a pitch perfect Dr Who setting — I’d never heard of the thing prior but I loved learning about it — and I loved the finale where Rathbone attacked the Doctor with an axe because neither of them could fire the tresquillion(?) gun near the ship’s hydrogen gas bags. The part where the Doctor went into detail about the R-101’s crash was pretty chilling. And the very last beat, where the Doctor realized he shouldn’t have saved Charley, but then quietly decided to let her live, was really sweet and rather… cinematic? Atm I’ve no idea if that ever comes up again.

Anyway, it was so refreshing to experience a straightforward, solid Doctor Who story with no gimmicks, just competent setup and payoff.

Solid 8/10!

I've been hearing about Paul McGann's audio dramas from hardcore fans for a long time, so I'm really happy to have them on streaming so l don't need to buy CDs from 2001 or $5 MP3s from Big Finish’s website :)

[clearheader]

special defense

does this count as anything ???is this art

[clearheader]

i am exactly 3,527 days late with this meme

[clearheader]

I know the caveman speech meme is funny, but also, as an anthropology student... that's not how that works. On multiple levels.

All human languages are equally complex, yes that includes the ones our ancestors spoke back when they lived in caves. Also they didn't live in caves that much - just sometimes, but archeological sites in caves are disproportionately more likely to be preserved which is where this misconception comes from.

Did pre-Homo sapiens human species speak like we do? Honestly we don't know. Based on skeletal morphology we think maybe Neanderthals could make speech sounds similar to ours, with a few exceptions - we make some sounds they probably couldn't. But as for whether they had the brain power for what we consider language ????? We don't know. Still a mystery.

[clearheader]

Fuck It, Internet Guide

Hey there! As social media becomes more and more inhospitible for the local user, I wanted to post some useful/fun links to just about anything I can think of! Enjoy! Also, if you'd like an invite to the P!rated Games discord, lmk! ^_^

I AM CURRENTLY STILL UPDATING THIS POST AND I WILL REBLOG IT WHEN I ADD TO IT! Feel free to comment things I've missed, I'm sure there's way more than this came from!

WEB CENTRIC

CURLIE: THE COLLECTOR OF URLs (Curlie strives to be the largest human-edited directory of the Web. You can save sites and create your own mini webring!)

Internet Archive (A collection of over 818 Billion websites, books, movies, music, and more. Hosts the Wayback Machine, which can be used to access a multitude of sites, given they were indexed in time.)

Wiby (Human submission search engine for older webrings, as well as a how-to guide on how to develop your own search engine)

Unicode Text Converter (Easy way to make your text illegible to Google but be warned, it will make screen readers malfuction)

Embed Responsively (Easily convert links and embeds to work responsively within your site - perfect for neocities!)

Generator Land (Generate a list or prompt for just about anything!)

GifCities (Part of the Internet Archive, a special project done as part of the 20th anniversary in an effort to save data from GeoCities. Find a gif for just about anything!)

Animated Images (Another gif repository, though this one is easier to search and includes small animations.)

Gifs-Paradise (Another gif repository. I swear I collect these. Searchable and categorized.)

ASCII Art Archive (Database of ASCII Art, also known as text art)

Christopher Johnson's ASCII Art Collection (Another, arguably larger, ASCII Art database)

MelonLand (A web project and online arts community that celebrates homepages, virtual worlds, the world-wide-web and the digital lives that all netizins share, here at the dawn of the digital age. See their thoughts and the WEB REVIVAL they're starting.)

Sadgrl Webrings (Webrings brought to us by Sadgrl.Online - 60+ different ones to be exact) and Sadgrl Links (70+ links just like the ones in this post)

Districts at Neocities (Remember neighborhoods on Geocities? Imagine that but for Neocities!)

Neocities Banners (Banners from all across neocities. Blinkies, banners and more leading all over the web. Mostly 88x31, though there are bigger ones too. Technically counts as a webring.)

Blinkies.cafe (Site for blinkies where you can even make your own! I get most of my blinkies here and off DeviantArt.)

88x31 Collection (Possibly the largest collection I've seen for 88x31 buttons)

90's Cursor Effects (Want a funky cursor for your blog or website? Wanna be able to realtime preview what cursors would look like? Come get some code!)

The Malware Museum (Interact with malware and viruses from the 80s and 90s through emulation! No nasty virus interactions needed :D )

KNOWLEDGE BASES

Library Genesis - LIBGEN (Scientific journals - dedicated to archiving every science journal and their articles in existence.)

Information Mesh (A web platform celebrating the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web that explores social, technical, cultural and legal facts throughout different interactive timelines.)

Web Design Museum (Over 2,000 sorted websites showing web design trends from '96 to '06.)

The History of the Web (A twice monthly newsletter about web history, and the incredible people that built it. Goes from 1989 to present.)

Field Guide to Web Accessibility (Principles and applications to every day web scenarios in order to make the web a more friendly place!)

CARI - Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (an online community and collective association of researchers and designers dedicated to carrying on the important work of categorizing "consumer aesthetics" from the late midcentury, when work on the subject somewhat trailed off, through today.)

The Eye (Archive consisting of 140TB of books, websites, games, software, or anything else you can really think of.)

The Uncensored Library (A project from Reporters without Borders, where they use a loophole using Minecraft to distribute information.)

National Gallery of Art Public Domain (The National Gallery of Art has an open access policy for images of works of art in their permanent collection which the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are available for download free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial.)

Library of Congress Public Domain (Features items from the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use.)

Public Domain Review (an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.)

New York Public Library Public Domain (Our digitized collections are available as machine-readable data: over one million records for you to search, crawl and compute.)

Official articles from NASA (PubSpace is NASA's designated public access repository. It is a collection of NASA-funded scholarly publications within the STI Repository, aiming to increase access to federally funded research in accordance with NASA Public Access Policy.)

Universal Hint System (Wanna get some vague help for an older video game without getting spoiled? Check out these awesome hints!)

Smithsonian Open Access (Download, share, and reuse millions of 2D and 3D digital items from their 21 museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.)

Instructables (Wanna know how to make just about anything? Check here!)

QZAP Zine Archive (Archive of LGBT+ Zines, began in 2003 with zines dating back all the way to the 1970s. NSFW AT TIMES, BROWSE AT YOUR OWN RISK.)

P!racy Masterpost (Tumblr-based masterpost of game piracy, last updated 2021. A bit old but some of the stuff there is still good. If this link breaks, please contact me.)

P!rated Games Megathread (masterpost created by r/P!ratedGames includes required components as well as anything else you need. NOTE: PLEASE HAVE SOME SORT OF PROTECTION WHEN NAVIGATING THIS SITE)

Geocities Gallery (A website hosting a working archive for many abandoned Geocities Sites.)

Snipplr (Code Snippet repository. Great for coding issues.)

GeoCities (Archived) (Great for searching ancient webrings for gifs and website ideas. Not so great for downloads.)

Freeware Guide (Archived) (The Freeware-Guide died sometime in 2021 [we think March] but it's still full of VERY valuable information. Links are broken pretty much all the way through, but the names of software as well as what they do can be useful in finding them elsewhere thru some google searching)

Peelopaalu (Where I got a good handful of these links - AND THERE'S MORE!!!)

The Simple Site (More links to so much more cool stuff!)

ART TOOLS

Untitled - Paint (An in-browser version of classic Microsoft Paint!)

KidPix (In-browser version of classic KidPix for the public domain!)

Pixel Logic - A Guide to Pixel Art (Comprehensive guide to making cool art for $10 USD, updated semi-frequently and you get all new versions for free)

SAI - Bootlegged (A version of SAI with a multitude of brushes and textures pre-installed. Quite literally the only thing I use to draw aside from Clip Studio Paint.)

Stripe Generator (Need some easy stripes for an art piece? Can't be bothered to try and space stripes evenly? This is for you!)

Photopea (Free online photo editor supporting files for Adobe Photoshop, XCF, Sketch App, Adobe XD, and CorelDRAW, as well as many more!)

blender (A FOREVER free and Open Source software for 3D Modeling, full of tutorials and assets. I feel like most people don't know it's completely free to play with)

Vertex Meadow (A web-browser tool that renders 2D images as explorable 3D terrain. With it you can create detailed and unusual 3D environments to explore using a 2D paint-program-like interface.)

OpenGameArt (Need art for your game but you're not an artist? Consider checking here first [or just hire a real artist looking for work on here!])

MUSIC TOOLS AND DISCOVERY

BandLab (Social music platform that enables creators to make music and share their creative process with musicians and fans. Completely free with an option to set up stripe where you get 100% OF PROFITS. Available for apple/android/desktop)

JummBox (Free online beat-maker with a very simple interface that runs on your browser)

Mydora (Mydora is a continuous streaming player that gives you a deep dive into the lost archives of Myspace Music, based on some recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, with some additional metadata (most notably the locations and genres) from a different scan of Myspace conducted back in 2009. Contains 490,000+ songs, only a fraction of what was wiped out.)

Radiooooo (A place where people are able to play hit songs from the decade of their choosing from whatever country they wish.)

WFMU (Independent freeform radio broadcasting. Currently ongoing.)

Gnoosic (A sort-of music search engine that finds you songs/bands based off of your music taste.)

Khinsider (3.1 TB worth of video game soundtracks)

Radio.garden (Listen to thousands of radio stations all around the world.)

FUN STUFF

FrogLand (The purpose of Frogland is to show that the Internet can indeed provide a wealth of useful information and still be fun. Mainly, this site is dedicated to the many teachers out there who are finding new uses for the Internet as a tool for educating youngsters. Hopefully, it will inspire some young minds to find new interest in herpetology, biology, and environmental issues...not to mention providing some inspiration for young future computer "wizzes"! No longer active but still useful.)

Windows 98 icon Viewer (Want clear jpgs of all the Windows 98 symbols and icons? They're all here!)

GifyPet (Create your own embeded pet that people can play with and feed when they visit your page! See my version HERE [only works on desktop tho])

Ultimate Mushroom (Like the idea of picking mushrooms in your area but no idea what to look for? Check out this info hub!)

Gif Gallery (Another gif repositiory, only sorted by being numbered 1-100,000. Fun and silly, not so much useful unless you're looking for random gifs. Part of the MelonLand Webring)

Interesting DOS Programs (A host of DOS programming, guides and links.)

Internet Archive: MS-DOS Games (8,000 games right in your web browser! Your browser can play DOOM!)

Tiled Backgrounds (Need some small jpegs for easy website bg tiling? Browse this collection sorted by color.)

cOOl & EMO tEXt cOnVERTer xXX (Flashing warning. Wanna type like you're in the 2000s? Need a funny Green Day lyric as a caption? This is probably the best place for you.)

0x40 (Flashing Warning. Anime images synced with music. Fun for parties, lol)

WebGL Fluid Simulation (In browser fluid simulator, great for art backgrounds and desktop wallpapers.)

Flashpoint (The biggest collection of preserved Flash Games and Animations)

NCase (Free games and open source projects from Nicky [THESE ARE REALLY COOL AND FUN, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND])

Your World of Text (A huge interactive text doc that anyone can add to anonymously.)

Text To Speech (TTS in more than 30 languages and over 180 voices.)

ASCII Art Generator (Make ASCII Art from any image.)

Petit Tube (Random Youtube videos with less than 10 views)

Noclip Website (Noclip around various video game maps in your browser!)

Monster Mash (Create and animate some monsters in browser! You can also download their files.)

[clearheader]

The night is cool and balmy.

Your SECURITY GNOMES are raising an alarm.

> define 'balmy'

Balmy means "pleasantly warm."

Your stock of DICTIONARIES has decreased to 31.

Your SECURITY GNOMES report BANDIT ARTILLERY!

> observe night

The night is cool and balmy.

Your SECURITY GNOMES have entered COMBAT DELIRIUM.

> resolve temperature discrepancy

You haven't acquired enough THERMOMETERS to notice the discrepancy.

Your SECURITY GNOMES have activated the MEAT THRESHER.

[clearheader]

@Poetryisnotaluxury

[clearheader]

One of the best shot of Total Solar Eclipse from 08-04-2024.

Via @nasa-official