timebones

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I was going to make a post about this guy but tumblr shat itself and the post autosaved as "this guy tries" and tbh i can't think of anything better than that

this guy tries

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Moisturize me

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I am positive there’s already someone cooking up a LARP scenario based on this episode.

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Rogue has one (1) set of dice and it’s sitting around loose, I’m betting this is a case of “I just got introduced to D&D and I already love it”.

You telling me this guy plays dnd enough to name himself after one of the classes but can't improv?

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Also incredibly funny move for the TARDIS to painstakingly translate every name in a way that preserves alphabetical order across languages. But not, you know, just number them or something.

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The fact that the TARDIS knew to translate all of the Finetime names in a way that preserved alphabetical order across translation. She probably has a whole module that jumps into the future purely so it can cheat on translations.

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When developing an AI, it’s important to make sure its training data incorporates a diverse set of perspectives. Once a model is trained, it’s very difficult to go back and fix any behaviors it may have learned from its human training data. For example, if you train it on a bunch of people who would throw their fellow humans to the slugs,

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The distant woman was sort of spooky, but there were 2 specific moments in 73 Yards where I genuinely felt the hairs on my neck standing up:

The campaign staffers talking about huge crowds and an event right after an election that’s “going to be wild”

Mad Jack commenting on Marti being a “boy’s name” after that eyeliner kid said “I’m the one he’d kill first, and you know why”

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Boom: and really, isn’t love the most powerful magic of all? ❤️

73 Yards:

image source

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73 yards away from. her house

doctor who really be like "we have a time machine where you can go anywhere or see anything. this is cardiff wales your year

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Love the dual imagery of the old woman. How she represents both the previous generations that dealt with Mad Jack the first time, and the current generation worrying what their future will be. Will the older version of me look on me kindly? Is that even the older version of me, does that person even survive? Or is it only the past, silently watching us walk into destruction?

The old woman appeared after the the circle was broken, yes, but also after Ruby became aware of her own mortality due to the Doctor’s slip of the tongue.

As a representation of the previous generations, the woman is distant and offputting. Not even the oldest folks in the pub are worried about Mad Jack anymore, and when Ruby tries to bring other people in, tries to let those now-dead generations speak, Ruby becomes the problem.

She’s left to embark on this (in retrospect) decades-long mission virtually alone, getting involved in politics, taking calls, holding coats, pulling every strategic lever available to her even if it means working for this terrible man. She has to, because she’s one of the few people who fully recognize the danger he poses.

And both the past and herself-from-the-future are watching.

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The Doctor loves to shit on human politics, meanwhile every time there’s an election they’re like “here’s Fairytale McWarcrimes, an ancient evil I just released, please don’t elect them prime minister teehee bye”

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How dare you assume it’s witchcraft just because you’re in wales. For unrelated reasons though your timeline is cursed and you will lose everyone you’ve ever loved

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WHAT (affectionate)

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British sci-fi does have some very specific moments where (and I say this with love) the writers don’t even realize how British they’re being.

The funniest one is when you can tell the writers heard that Ursula K Le Guin quote and took completely the opposite message from it. “By jove, you’re right! We HAVEN’T escaped the divine right of kings!”

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Something I think about a lot re: Doctor Who is how time travel flattens the universe. Not just for the time travelers themselves, but for everyone around them too.

For example, why DOES capitalism keep showing up in almost exactly the same form, even in far future civilizations? Why DO people interact with religion in such recognizable ways?

Now, I get that this is a genre convention of sci-fi. There’s a long tradition of depicting the future as Not So Different™️ in order to put a lens on current issues. But, in-universe, it’s really strange.

The way money works, shareholders work, churches work, we treat these things as natural/inevitable. But there are a lot of very specific decisions baked into them, based on a specific history. They behaved very differently in the recent past and they’ll continue changing into the future. Societies are not doomed to fall into the same patterns over and over again. Future civilizations are liable to have triumphs and issues that are much, much weirder than we can even conceive of. It won’t be Capitalism Part II: Capitalism Harder.

…unless, of course, there are a bunch of time travelers wandering around. Panspermia-ing concepts from 20-21st century earth all over spacetime. Solving problems and picking timelines based on their understanding of how reality works. Some of that understanding may be fact, but some of it may be the result of hanging out with a bunch of UK humans.

Capitalism is inevitable and natural in the DW universe, because the Doctor thinks that it is. They’re always restless, always moving, and they don’t always stop to look at the different planets in the sky.