#classic marathon

[darsynia]

My husband did something yesterday that was written about in PC Gamer (among others) and I am just so proud! He's more of a BNF than I could ever aspire to be.

explanation: my husband has, with permission from Bungie and with a team of other fans of the game, ported a trilogy of games from the mid-90s to multiple platforms and helped keep it alive for its many fans for over two decades. That hard work culminated in the opportunity to spearhead posting the game(s) on Steam (with enthusiastic permission) so that more players can enjoy it.

[spectralish]

space dads

[geoztinker]

me when im fighting off 10 phantoms and 5 seed spitter phantoms and a phantom spawner

[judy1926]

Mylene Demongeot on the set of The Giant of Marathonin 1959

[ryustana]

Who’s ready for scary movies! What’s your favorite scary movie?

[i-would-like-a-jelly-baby]

I can’t believe Doctor Who predicted “unalive” in the 80s…

[funnywizard3000]

HI im funnywizard3000‎

‎ ☥

they/them ↀ 20 ↀ bearer of many curses, curser of many

i tag shit when i feel like it, which ends up being a surprisingly small amount of the time. good luck.

MY POSTS ARE TAGGED WITH #my

non-exhaustive list of junk and media i throw on here In No Specific Order:

Destiny 2 (Kill Me) , Robots. (ultrakill. transformers), Dai Dark, Dorohedoro, all the sassy AIs in every series ever (marathon. portal. 2001. you know the deal), throwing rocks at my friends heads, blood sex and general faggotry,killing people with rocks ,wh40k, trigun, enhancing my torture lair, outer wilds, dungeon., caves. im stopping now.

minors dni with suggestive posts or im blocking you as fast as fucking possible.

Spam likes/rbs are fine. Go for it 🗣️

[fangirlinglikeabus]

been a while since i've done one of these but under the cut are my thoughts on the novelisations of doctor who, season 8

doctor who and the terror of the autons by terrance dicks this is one of those early actually pretty decent dicks novelisations. it's the little details i think, like having a lot of What Characters Think of Each Other (without stating the obvious) that gives it some substance, or the physical effects of action like the ropeburn being paid attention to. MY personal favourite added detail is yates encountering the master (who he doesn't know is the master) and as a result briefly fantasising about what HE'D look like with facial hair. also we get an evil auton energy octopus, which is a nice added detail. there are recaps of several different stories when they have bearing on this one's plot, but the mention of liz is cut altogether, which means that the novelisations as well as the tv series are lacking in any clarification as to her departure. to my great regret the other thing that's cut is jo going 'oh! hello :)'. in terms of actually bad bits, there's a relatively minor but pretty glaring issue in not only the master being consistently referred to as foreign looking but the evil doll subsequently being described as having 'a slant-eyed oriental face', both of which seem to link the human(oid) foreign/other to the villainy of aliens invading england. there's also a line about jo and women's intuition that bothered me a bit but not nearly to the same extent. overall: i think it manages to differentiate itself enough from the tv version to be an interesting skim at least, but go in forewarned at the handful of dodgy bits.

the mind of evil by terrance dicks i have NO idea if this is worthwhile. for the record i'm not too big on the tv serial (i like it well enough until the missile plot comes to the fore, at which point i almost completely lose interest) so keep that in mind…but i think the novelisation is this weird mix of legitimately good and frustratingly half-arsed, with some racism sprinkled on top. i can't speak on dicks' rendering of hokkien, which is presented from the brigadier's point of view ('it sounded like…') so i'm assuming is not a 100% accurate transliteration. however the bit i REALLY have an issue with is the description of barnham having a 'low bulging forehead, protruding jaw and huge powerful hands' like…why are we reviving victorian criminal science in my little sci-fi book. there's also a really gross line comparing the master's black chauffeur to the car he drives. the narration also really doubles down on what i SEEM to remember as a mike line from the original about chin lee's attractiveness by describing her face as 'marred' by a near permanent scowl. sorry she's not constantly performing beauty for you guys! the final bit i have actual beef is that the doctor thinks of jo as 'this feather-headed child' which isn't problematic so much as it feels mildly mean-spirited. ON A LIGHTER NOTE there's a cute bit where benton pretends to be james bond, and there's lines like 'naturally, the master was lying' which made me laugh. i also think it's got a really strong opening, which builds up to the keller machine experiment by describing it to prisoners' reactions to executions throughout the ages. we get a greater elaboration of the fear visions than seen on tv too (the benefits of not needing to worry about budget!). overall…i think there are interesting points to this one, but also some Very Dodgy Bits, and it does kinda fizzle out by the end which disappointed me given i enjoyed the opening.

doctor who and the claws of axos by terrance dicks ok i need to open with this because 'author describing character's hair as a colour i would never consider it' is becoming a recurring Thing so for the record jo's hair is described as brown in this. tardis wiki has a whole List of changed things in this serial but tbh i think a lot of them were so small that i didn't even pick up on them, so for that reason i'm not certain if its worth it, personally. a brief rundown: as per usual the violence/body horror is a bit more pronounced than on screen, and the special effects are improved on in prose. i quite liked the opening wrangle with chinn and the brig, not least because it tells us that the brig forgot to establish the doctor's official existence and i found that funny. chinn's 'britain for the british' argument with the doctor is cut, and while i SORTA get that for space reasons, i think it also diminishes the critique of his character if his general behaviour/philosophy no longer so explicitly tied to xenophobia. there's a nice new closing scene where jo goes to join everyone arguing how to get the tardis down for some rubble while thinking 'it was nice to see things were going back to normal'. there was also a line i liked: 'in the space/time continuum axos traced an unending spiral course, whirling forever in an endless figure-eight'. but overall….i'm kinda 'eh' on this one.

doctor who and the doomsday weapon [aka colony in space] by malcolm hulke the most significant change in this is PROBABLY that its position in jo's time as companion has been moved: she's now in her very early days at unit (just become the doctor's assistant, hasn't met the master) which is understandable given this was one of the early novelisations where hulke perhaps felt the need to have an excuse for providing necessary context and easing the reader in - he does a similar thing by expanding the prologue bit with the time lords, positioning one as a trainee who doesn't have knowledge of the doctor's life - but i was disappointed that as a mechanic it's dropped very quickly. this is not a story that lends itself well to exclusively focusing on jo, given that she gets sidelined in the second half; still, i felt it was a missed opportunity, especially since she knows the doctor less well than on tv and is understandably thus a lot more combative when this comparative stranger whisks her off to another planet, before the plot snaps back into the path the tv version takes. in terms of that path: if you're looking for a novelisation that addresses some more questionable aspects of the original then i'm afraid this isn't it - if anything it exacerbates any issues of racial coding and its relation to the real world that a story about the colonisation of a planet inhabited by a 'savage' race already has, with lines like 'a few primitives, who, if handled properly, would be no trouble.' there's also a few minor moments that suggest a pretty gender stratified society among the colonists that hulke is depicting unquestioningly, which is frustrating but not unexpected. on the other hand, there's actually quite a lot of detail about the imc men and life back on earth that i appreciated being included. we also get a few funerals that weren't depicted onscreen. ashe has some jesus imagery surrounding him that MAY be making a link between christianity and morality (since in this horrible grasping future the bible apparently isn't very well known) but it's not so explicit that i can say that definitively. there are a few lines that jump out to me as cuts - 'i want to see the universe, not rule it', the gag about the brig saying 'come back at once' and, most tragically, 'wiggle away'. we do get a dr who pun to make up for it though. aside from that, the moment where the doctor finds out jo is tied to a bomb is reduced to summary, which seems an odd dramatic choice to me but i do also realise that hulk had to cut a six part story down into 40k words, so something had to go. final point: dent makes a comment about how imc never break the law and the narrator immediately contradicts him, and personally i feel it would be more interesting if that was TRUE - what does it say about a society where THEY'RE not actually breaking the law? anyway i realise this might sound like i'm complaining a lot but after the last two i found this one quite refreshing in how much detail there was to it, and i do generally enjoy reading hulke's novelisations. it's probably not his best, but it's interesting enough to check out even if it does maintain the original serial's flaws.

doctor who and the daemons by barry letts what is there to say about this one, except that it's a very solid rendering of an already solid tv story? one minor quibble in terms of the process of adaptation is that the scene near the beginning where the gang are watching tv is something i found less interesting when we're not watching with them - because it's prose, we lack that moment of complete identification where we're ALL watching tv together. but otherwise i think the writing is lively, and while it may not diverge significantly from the tv version it does flesh out what's already there for the prose medium. a personal favourite for me was azal being 'as amused as a man warned to leave his own home by a kitchen mouse' when the doctor tells him to leave the planet. it's been a while since i've seen the tv version but i did a brief skim of the transcript and i THINK most of what goes on with the villager (and at some point cult member) stan is new to the novelisation. various minor heads' up: there's a character in chapter three who's a bit self-conscious about his weight, and a bit later on a brief mention of a child being hit as punishment; the inside of the barrow has carvings of the "old witch religion, literally thrust into the darkness of the underground by the light of christianity" which is a characterisation of christianity-as-civilising-influence that i suspect originates in the genre dr who is cribbing from here; barry letts describes azal as having a hooked nose which isn't necessarily INaccurate to his screen depiction but i do think letts is still unconsciously drawing on cultural assumptions of what (racialised!) facial features signify evil. also there's a bit where stan acts to help jo 'as quickly and as naturally as one might reach out to prevent a child from falling' which just minorly irritates me - jo is an adult, please don't compare her to a child here. other than that…i'm a big fan of letts' 'trying to teach the kids road safety' bit where jo falls out of bessie and the doctor thinks 'if only she had put on her seat belt!' oh and jo is wearing that white robe OVER her clothes and therefore wasn't stripped by any of these men, thank you very much. on the minor edits level, letts keeps the mary had a little lamb joke but he rewords 'five rounds rapid' and the brig's response to mike asking him for a dance. but he also says the doctor's name is doctor who so i win! this is longer than i meant it to be but i think my overall conclusion is that this is maybe marginally less of a must-read than it was in a time before home media and the internet made the daemons easy to watch - letts makes more tweaks than i've listed here but i think they're mostly minor - but i never felt that he was phoning in the process of turning it into a novel, and AS a novel it's largely enjoyable.

[overly-hubristic-mad-scientist]

The amount of good and enjoyable older sci-fi/ horror movies that are just online for free (usually via YouTube and/or Tubi) is fucking wild to me. What do you mean I can watch 5 consecutive Godzilla movies free of charge whenever the fuck I want

[demigodofhoolemere]

Watching the Behind the Sofa features for the season 2 Hartnell episodes (surprisingly they’re on YouTube but who knows when that could get taken down) is a weird experience because a lot of the time it’s really enjoyable seeing the various reactions and they’re often very complimentary towards things that you don’t see people appreciate enough, which makes me quite happy, and then other times out of nowhere you’ll get odd comments of a few of the actresses perceiving certain lines as sexist or something. Specifically in The Time Meddler, which was otherwise a crowd favorite among them, Steven complimenting Vicki on being clever was apparently patronizing, and they acted as if the Doctor telling Vicki to keep her nose away when he was messing with the Monk’s TARDIS was him brushing off her questions as if she needs to stay in her place or something, when in context he’s dealing with precarious electrical wires and was telling her not to get her face so close because it could give her a shock — he says as much, but they talk over it. I enjoy very much that they were often appreciating things that people look over and really getting into a lot of it, but every now and again something like that would take me out of it. Don’t like when people attribute their own assumptions or biases as the meaning of something that was totally innocent.

[princess-ligma]

ughghghgh i just wanna fuck and watch old horror movies. why does everything be so complicated 😩

[doom-nerdo-666]

I wonder how common it is when some FPS character sprites/models show weapons not in the actual arsenal.

Doomguy's case might be because of the unused rifle from early versions of the game, but even the rifle in his sprites look different from that one with the bayonet rifles or the box art.

(Yes i'm using Spriters Resource stuff)

Ranger has a weapon that Quake Champions eventually used as a skin for the Rail-gun.

Even Duke kinda has it too, like a shotgun that looks different or this rifle:

Marathon actually splits sprites between the upper and lower halves of a character, so security officer 54 does show the current weapon held.

[bijouxcarys]

Marathon Man (1976)

Dir. John Schlesinger

with Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider

“Oh please, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying. A live, freshly-cut nerve is infinitely more sensitive.”

[stevebuscemieyes]

"Any plans for October?"

Me:

[nthflower]

Storm is definitely living her Cyclops road to revolution era but better. Scott only befriend mags not pegged him -1 point for him.