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Update on this:

My counsellor, who I've been seeing for over 18 months now, is leaving in a month and a half so I've got to deal with all this shit with someone new, I did buy that tarot deck, and in fact am now actively identifying as a Christian Witch. Wild times, gang. Wild times.

2025 has been absolutely batshit so far. I got a fucking tattoo, I seem to be having a new groundbreaking realisation in counselling every month, and apparently I'm doing significant research on tarot within a Christian context. As in, like, the two things being able to coexist and tarot as, effectively, a prayer rhythm. Me. Looking at buying a fucking tarot deck.

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there’s something almost sexual about jacking off

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it pisses me off SO bad how transphobes have so effectively used sports to launder transphobia and misogyny to people. like does nobody remember like ~5-10 years ago when it was a MAJOR feminist talking point to argue for desegregating sports and going by skill level instead of gender separation??? and now, because so many cis people hate trans people so violently and think we should be excluded from all aspects of public life, you’ve got a whole bunch of women who call themselves feminists laundering misogynistic talking points about how “women are just inherently weaker and worse at athletics than men :(( it’s just biology and women are inherently inferior :(( this is definitely not misogyny that’s unsupported by science, women are just weaker and worse at things :((“ like girl open your ears and listen to what you’re saying!!

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God dammit

I thought about 'Class' and now I'm sad again. That show was so fucking good and so deeply let down by the BBC. So much potential that just got tossed to the side because they couldn't be bothered with it.

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Most of this is (reasonably) about why this guy's approach to AI is dogshit, and quite right too, it is dogshit. But can we also talk about approaching university as 'buying the accreditation' as if it's not, like, a school. That teaches things.

Like, I know, in the modern world where the job market is so fucked that even just having an undergrad degree is often not enough, it's possibly a tiny bit too much to ask that everyone is at university entire for the joy of learning about something they're deeply interested in. I think if that were true, business and economics courses would have died a long time ago. But there's got to be some of it, right? You can't drag yourself through 3+ years of uni while deeply hating it and having no interest in what you're learning.

This guy's entire mindset is based on rejecting the basic concept of learning being a good thing that enriches your life and is worth it for the sake of it. I work in radiology, I'm just an admin and could do 90% of my job without knowing shit about radiology or medicine - I certainly didn't know a whole lot when I started - but I adore learning about stuff, I've quizzed radiographers before about stuff I have zero need to know, purely because I want to be able to know it. And yes, I do also think that makes me better at my job, but it still doesn't need to.

'Buying an accreditation'? You should be at university to learn! If you also pick your subject because you think it'll get you a good job afterwards, great, go for it, it wouldn't have worked for me but that's fine. But if you think all you're doing is buying a qualification and all that matters is the piece of paper at the end, of course you'll think putting actual work in is pointless. But you'll have a hell of a lot more fun if you actually try and care about the process of learning.

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

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Does anyone else see different US regions as “coded” as specific seasons?

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I have some news for members of the united states armed forces who feel like they are pawns in a political game and their assignments being unnecessary.

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Nothing hits like "romantic couple and a third guy who's not dating either of them but is definitely a part of this dynamic"

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Here's one smaller detail of this I've just noticed. When we see the 'perfect' world, 'John Smith' and Belinda's home, the UNIT office, it's all got this sanitised, very 50s-esque look, and that extends to things like the fashion and hairstyles as well. And yet when we see Ruby, and Shirley, and the disabled camp as a whole, it looks modern.

Conrad thinks so little of people who he can't force into the simple roles of his world, that not only are they marginalised by the people, but even the wish itself. They literally live in a different world, they visually stick out like sore thumbs. I quite like that choice

DOCTOR WHO Wish World

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2025 has been absolutely batshit so far. I got a fucking tattoo, I seem to be having a new groundbreaking realisation in counselling every month, and apparently I'm doing significant research on tarot within a Christian context. As in, like, the two things being able to coexist and tarot as, effectively, a prayer rhythm. Me. Looking at buying a fucking tarot deck.

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A couple of times on the phone to patients, when they've thanked me my brain has gotten stuck between 'you're welcome' and 'no problem' and just confidently said 'your problem'...

I literally heard myself wheeze at one point reading these. 😂

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I'm with you on the criticisms of 'Kerblam!' and 'The Interstellar Song Contest' (even if I find them to be good fun regardless), but this is a bit of a disingenuous summary of what 'Lucky Day' is even about, let alone its treatment of UNIT.

Conrad's whole thing is a complete denial of reality; UNIT become a good focal-point for that, but Think_Tank's conspiracy isn't just 'ooh, UNIT are a bit shady', it's that the existence of aliens - demonstrably proven things at this point in the show, that have done huge amounts of damage and harm to both the world as a whole and a lot of individual people - is a complete fabrication. All because he's an ego-maniac who wants the world to SEE him as a brave truth-teller, when in reality he's nothing more than Alex Jones with a younger face, convincing people to ignore the evidence of their own eyes to make himself the centre of the universe. There's a reason why this story is centred around Ruby primarily - someone who is suggested both in the episode and in discussion surrounding it to be experiencing some degree of PTSD - rather than just keeping the Doctor and Belinda in there and doing a more traditional UNIT story. It's about how conspiracy theorists exploit fear, try and play on people's desires for the world to be simple and easy to understand, and in the process do huge amounts of harm to the people impacted by the events they are claiming are fiction.

And, like, I'm sorry, but Pete McTighe's approach to UNIT is 100% consistent with how it has basically always been portrayed, at LEAST in modern Doctor Who (I've watched a good handful of classic Who UNIT stories but not enough to get a broad picture of how they're treated, although it certainly seems to be broadly positive). Even at the show's, and the Doctor's, most critical of their militarised nature, which is probably their reintroduction in 'The Sontaran Stratagem', it's really just lip-service and the Doctor more broadly not liking guns, but it's hardly like those episodes are particularly critical about their existence, and the Doctor ultimately always ends up working with them and finding people inside them to respect. Moffat's introduction of Kate as a figure to move them away from that was only ever really half-done, they were still ultimately an army. Chibnall's couple of portrayals were along the same lines. There's no real difference in how they're shown in the rest of the RTD2 appearances either.

That's not to say that ANY of that portrayal of UNIT is an unreasonable thing to criticise - I agree that their position is a kind of weird one and that having this shady paramilitary force is kinda questionable, and would be up for a well-written deconstruction of that. But the lack of criticism there isn't even vaguely new in 'Lucky Day' - if anything, between Kate losing control a bit and the suggestion that perhaps having a giant tower full of alien technology and weaponry is a pretty dangerous single point of failure, I'd argue it gets closer to paying any service to that criticism than Doctor Who has in years, even if I agree that the show would benefit from being more critical.

None of this is new, this is ALWAYS what 'Doctor Who' has been. UNIT has never and will never be a presence that is treated as a fundamentally questionable thing. It doesn't seem entirely honest to pick out the most recent time it's happened and pretend that it's a standout thing, rather than the status quo of a show that, while positively progressive throughout its history in some important ways, has and will never be anything more than a broadly liberal program that ultimately is still produced by a state broadcaster and keeps many of establishment assumptions as a result.

Right, so we have:

Kerblam!, featuring an exploitative mega-corporation who horribly mistreats their workers (but the Real Bad Guy is the angry young man planning to do terrible things in response; the exploitative mega-corporation is fine!),

Lucky Day, featuring a secretive and heavily armed organisation who have extreme power over the entire population and a history of disappearing those who cross them (but the Real Bad Guy is the angry young man planning to do terrible things in response; the secretive heavily-armed organisation is fine!), and now

The Interstellar Song Contest, featuring a corporation who literally commits genocide against an entire planet (but the Real Bad Guy is the angry young man planning to do terrible things in response; the genocidal corporation is fine!)

All three episodes focus on the wrong bad guy. Like yes angry young men planning to do terrible things are absolutely a problem. Radicalisation is a problem. Terrorism is a problem. But it's kind of concerning that their targets, who have objectively done some pretty shitty things like, you know, exploitation, disappearing people, and genocide, get off not just scot-free, but with UNIT still framed as The Good Guys!

The first two were written by the same person and you can easily say, well, that's just McTighe not knowing how to write a political allegory to save his life, but man, I had much higher hopes for Dawson. Is this a BBC thing, or is this just the direction the show is taking? Because, uh, I have concerns.

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Can I be honest?

I found the approach to the villains in The Interstellar Song Contest to be kind of frustrating. In this current climate - around several marginalised groups - 'members of a marginalised group treated by much of society as an inherent threat despite just wanting to get on with their lives' is quite a disappointing choice of villain for an episode like this, and especially in an episode written by the first trans person to ever write for Doctor Who.

And especially when they pulled the exact same 'technically sympathetic motivations undercut by making their actions comically evil' shit that people criticised The Falcon and the Winter Solider for. Like, especially if we're trying to sneak something in about Eurovision's tacit endorsement of the Palestinian genocide in there, you could definitely have written Kid in a way which made that work well. Perhaps the assumption is that he's trying to hurt people, that the plan was only ever to hijack the broadcast to expose the brutality of what happened on Hellia but something went wrong and dumping everyone into space was actually an accident, but everyone just assumed they were trying to do something big and evil because, well, 'they're Hellions, that's just what they're like!' Instead, we get a plan in which they want to murder a comical amount of people, for nothing but revenge. And to top it off, the episode has Kid basically confirm that he is actually just in it for the sake of the killing (even if Wynn ends up a little more sympathetic by the end).

Last week, we got The Story and the Engine. That was also an episode by a writer, like Juno Dawson, from a background hugely underrepresented in ALL writer's rooms, let alone in Doctor Who, who, also like Dawson, is demonstrably a proper life-long fan of the show. In that, we got a story that felt like a story only Inua Ellams could tell, as well as a story that could never have been told without a black Doctor. And it did so while also seeming to understand at a pretty basic level who the Doctor is as a character; someone who is pretty fucking scary when they're angry, and he definitely gets angry in that episode, but also someone who ultimately has a huge capacity for mercy.

I wish that the first episode by a trans writer could have done the same. The Doctor is a character whose experience of gender is certainly not cisgendered, who has swapped back and forth at least three times between male and female if you include that original Timeless Child incarnation, and who is now played by a queer actor (albeit a cisgender one, as far as I'm aware). I wish we could have had an episode that leaned into and celebrated queerness, and the DOCTOR's queerness, in the way that The Story and the Engine celebrated the Doctor's blackness and the cultures it's connected him to.

Instead we got an episode where a member of a marginalised group, distrusted by everyone around them purely because of who they are, with members of the society who actively hide who they are to gain a fragile acceptance, tries to carry out the mass murder of three trillion people, and who is ultimately shown to simply accept that he is in it for violence's sake.

Don't get me wrong, it was a very fun episode, I had a great time with it, I was expecting it to be kinda cringe and it definitely managed to avoid that. The shots of everyone getting sucked into space were a brilliant rug-pull with the tone, and it even managed to get me mostly on-board with what they're doing with Mrs Flood. I actually do have far more positive feelings about this episode than negative ones. But god, this feels like it was a missed opportunity.

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"We risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forwards together." - Keir Starmer, 12.05.2025

All people are strangers until you befriend them, regardless of where they were born. Shame on this government of bigotry.

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Honestly, I think this is the real brilliance of Game Changer. Don't get me wrong, the creativity in the premises and prompts and design is well worth praising. But I think that the thing that really makes it work is the casting. Every episode has EXACTLY the right people for the episode, I can't think of a single episode where they don't nail the balance and the dynamic.

One of my favorite things about Game Changer is always seeing which cast members are chosen for each premise. Jacob, Lou, and Vic are chosen for the One Year Later episode because they're the over the top Commit To The Most Extreme Bit guys. Brennan, Katie, and Ify are chosen for the You-lympics because they are extremely competitive (and have a very strong personal branding). Ally, Zac, and Lisa are chosen for the Earnest-est episode because they are the silliest guys. They run on bits like it's gasoline. They need bits like they need air to breathe. I'm so excited to see what the next episodes will bring

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spin this wheel of all the pokemon. you now have to fight this pokemon. just you and it, bare-knuckle