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Oh wow.

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Integrity shmintegrity, Michael Hogan should have fudged the ranking to prevent this:

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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jul/15/tv-all-time-top-robots

It’s not for the show itself, but our boy gets a deservedly high ranking, and the whole posse are in the main image.

Sadly he didn’t beat Data, which is especially cruel considering that he was the direct inspiration for him.

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not sure I remember this image

It’s the immediate aftermath of Lister giving aggressive mouth-to-mouth to the window of the quarantined garbage pod/Quagaar ship room in Waiting for God.

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Meatview will be Doug Naylor’s Deltarune.

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Would you believe these funhouse celebrity robots are self-aware people with feelings Even in a society where AI is occasionally accepted as being alive, I think there is enough reasonable doubt.

They make it pretty clear that the waxdroids are sentient in basically the same way that Kryten is, and not only that, Rimmer hears it first-hand:

There’s not much else Rob and Doug could have done to spell out that the waxdroids are people as much as any artificial being in Red Dwarf is. If they aren’t, then there’s no real reason to even care about the Good Droids vs. Evil Droids plot, beyond Lister and Cat being captured.

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I don’t think Doug has any more to make and Rob isn’t with us anymore.

What makes you say that? Doug was quite famously writing a new special quite recently until it was cancelled, and I believe he’s said he’d be open to doing a novel.

If companies are willing to commission new Red Dwarf in other media and Doug is still interested in writing new Red Dwarf, then it should just be Doug (and maybe Andrew Marshall, if Titan is regarded as sufficient proof-of-chops) for as long as he’s willing. An expanded universe of spin-offs would need the approval of Doug/GNP to happen anyway.

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Honestly I think Dream Barrie deserves a lot of credit just for making it that far.

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Nobody hates a long running TV series more than its fans.

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Here’s a thought: what if the reason TARB do a bunch more shows after they get fired is that they didn’t actually get fired?

If you reverse the footage to decode what the manager’s really saying, it’s just a bunch of deluded nonsense about how someone will reverse what he says and what a pathetic person that someone is. Clearly this pub manager guy has serious mental problems and just went to the dressing room to vent about whatever his current paranoid fantasy is.

Kryten interprets it completely wrong, so he must have just been pretending to understand backwards speech and was actually bullshitting his way through the entire time.

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Van guy picks up Lister and Cat at the pub, never asks them where they’re going, drops them at a random spot, gets out and gestures for them to get into the van, says he knows of the pub he just brought them from and tells them to hop in, then Cat and Lister try to explain that they want to go to the pub, then they walk away and get on a bike that happens to be there and start riding it. Then they ride the bike past its owner, who shouts at them to return it. The bike owner then spontaneously stops paying attention and goes to sleep, and Cat and Lister walk the bike backwards and leave it beside the sleeping owner.

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The Amazing Reverse Brothers started a fight in the bar, got fired, and then went out and did a show.

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I used to think it was a dead cert that Richard Ayoade would probably get the role someday.

Well I hope I’m not being too picky, but I was hoping that we could avoid having an open transphobe play The Doctor.

Also I’ve never seen him give a compelling acting performance that wasn’t comedy, but never mind that.

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So either you’re a bra fitting savant who can tell women’s cup and band sizes just by looking at them on TV, or you’re saying that Doug was a genius just for naming a vaguely large bra size in relation to Pree when the actor playing her also had large breasts.

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Based on the way Rushy was speaking I did think that Rebecca Blackstone’s actual bra size was mentioned in We’re Smegged or something and I just forgot about it. But it sounds like people just assumed it matched the one in the joke based on nothing, then Doug was given credit for ingeniously referencing it, even though he wasn’t doing that at all. Have I got that right?

Oh, by the way guys, did you know that Football: It’s a Funny Old Game was an actual book written by Kevin Keegan, it just wasn’t ever published, and only a few close friends and family ever knew of it? There, now that I’ve revealed this definitely true fact to you, that joke has become approximately 350 times funnier.

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If we don’t appreciate the comedy value of breasts, we might as well
give it all up. Pie in the face? Just nibble on it in silence. The
inconvenient arrival of rain? Wear a poncho. This is how laughter dies.
With the sad whimper of trivia.

Hey, I appreciate the comedy value of breasts as much as it’s feasible to without getting labelled as a weirdo, but it does actually have to be a joke, not just a fact. I hadn’t actually considered that I might be killing comedy itself by not finding the fact that a woman has large boobs inherently funny. If so, I can only apologise.

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I would regard the fact that Rebecca Blackstone has a 36D bra size as an Easter egg, not something that actually makes the joke funnier.

Like would Thanks for the Memory be funnier if we learned that Craig Charles had an ex-girlfriend called Lise in real life? This is just trivia.

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It’s to accomodate the joke about the actress actually having the chest
size Rimmer ordered. And it’s one of the best gags in the entire show

One of the best gags in the entire show requires you to know the bra size of a guest star before you watch the episode?

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Reading this, I’m not sure I ever got that joke. Can’t remember the last time I would’ve seen it, but I was 8 when it came out, and watched it loads as a kid, and I think I just heard it as Woody mangling his name into something nonsensical to belittle him.

You pretty much did get the joke then. The point is just that Woody is disrespecting Buzz by deliberately getting his name wrong. Although the name he says is actual words, the meaning of those words isn’t really relevant. There’s nothing inherently bad about a lite/light beer! (Excepting certain brands which periodically inhabit the “Disgusting beer” chair like Bud Light.)

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Toy Story came out just in time to still be part of my childhood (saw at
the cinema, watched the video frequently, had the SNES game), but I never saw the sequels because I was too mature and into Star Trek and shit. Maybe there’s some kind of symbolism there that escapes me.

I wholeheartedly recommend you make time to watch the sequels. They’re excellent.

Anyway,

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It’s Infinity in the title page of the 1st edition?

Yep.

Well, technically it says both Red Dwarf and IWCD on the title page, which does pivot into the “is it the title or is it the subtitle?” debate, but I don’t think it matters either way.

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The pre accident stuff in Infinity (sorry, Red Dwarf) is its strongest part.

No need to apologise, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers is the actual title we’ve been over this.

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Yes, Rob isn’t taking it seriously in the sense that it’s only a small skit, but there’s no irony in his putdown of Doug’s work.

What I’m curious about is, while you were reading Rob’s mind, did you get a chance to check what his perspective on the Grant Naylor split was? Would be cool to know!

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I’m pretty sure this is how Elizabeth Sandifer remembers the “don’t be a piece of shit while you’re alive” meme.

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I’m waiting for Cool Banana to weigh in on this.

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2 weeks notice period.

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CEX are going to be fucked.

This does make me want to know just how much of CEX’s profits come from current generation games. My instinct is that they would be in a decent position to weather this because they have such diverse stock.

Like if you can still buy NES games from CEX, it feels like it should be a while before the unavailability of PlayStation 6 games catches up to them. And movies aren’t even threatening to go digital only. (Yet.)

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This news definitely knocked me for six. I know people have long talked about platform holders pushing for the all-digital future, but I just didn’t think it would be this soon, or that Sony would be the ones to fire first.

Between the mid-generation price hikes, the dearth of PS5 exclusives, the ending of PC ports, the prospect of £1K+ PS6, and now the end of physical games, this is like a company – if not a whole industry – in a death spiral.

And of course they couldn’t even wait for the PS6 to do this, they had to do it for the PS5 too just to add an extra layer of “fuck you” to everyone who shelled out extra for the disc drive edition.

I wonder, will they at least finally make game codes a thing, so that people can still gift new PlayStation games and buy them in person, or is this Sony trying to fully kill brick and mortar game shops?

This is going to make the PS6 the most difficult sell ever. The diminishing returns on graphics and performance between generations were already getting ridiculous even with the PS5.

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Fucking hell. If Richards had done things that were genuinely immoral I can understand making a “complicated legacy” comment when you hear that he’s died, but not if the negative side was just that you thought the BBC Books range was mediocre!

Elizabeth Sandifer has written genuinely great critical essays about Doctor Who for her “TARDIS Eruditorum” series that Flibble mentioned (if you’ve been around on Who social media long enough you may have been linked to her pieces while she was still writing under her deadname, IIRC Andrew Ellard was the one who made me aware of her), but at the same time she has some absolutely bizarre and off-putting hangups.

The things that spring to mind:

– A number of years ago she decided that she would no longer write essays about Big Finish stories, despite it being a standard feature of the blog to take detours into expanded media. She planned to write about “Master” for a bonus essay in the collected version of the 7th Doctor essays, but she changed plans before it was out. This may have been a response to Big Finish platforming transphobes like James Dreyfus, but the only time I saw her directly answer why, she just said she found Big Finish’s output to be too derivative and uninteresting to cover, and compared it to the MCU.

– She hated the Chibnall era so much that she initially ended the TARDIS Eruditorum at the end of the Moffat era, but when news broke that RTD would be returning as showrunner, she complained about it on social media. Her reasoning being that RTD’s stuff was guaranteed to be worth writing essays about, but due to the sequential nature of the blog, she would have to cover Chibnall in full if she wanted to cover RTD2. Like she actively resented the fact that one of her favourite TV shows gave her a reason to be interested in it again.

– On Twitter at one point, MrTARDIS tweeted something positive about a Chibnall era episode, and she got into his replies to say that he can’t possibly like the episode in question because it was objectively bad. He argued back, and in response she essentially just repeatedly denied the existence of subjectivity, while also making quote tweets and subtweets suggesting he was trolling and borderline harassing her. This was the moment where I decided my feed would be better off without her posts.

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The EastEnders pic is clearly an excuse to show off the fact that Google’s AI is stealing its information from TUA above TOS.

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To be fair that’s not really an IMDb problem. That’s a “people tend to think better of Series XI and XII than Doomitron does” problem.

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I can’t decide whether IMDb ratings are uniquely weird, or they’re actually normal and it’s everywhere else that’s weird. For most shows 6/10 is effectively the bottom of the scoring range in terms of averages, but maybe the general population are kinder than hardcore fans and just give a pass to anything that doesn’t physically injure you when you watch it.

Still, Pete Part II has a 6.9 average, and the worst Red Dwarf episode of all time has a 7.4, the same as Twentica and Mechocracy. That is fucking bonkers.

But I do enjoy the suggestion that Doug should have balanced Series XI and XII by just somehow knowing how the episodes would be received once they came out. What a mundane use of clairvoyance.

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Kryten can only do traditional paintings while Butler can do expressionist ones. He’s jealous of Butler’s looser, more creative and emotionally driven art style.

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My brother torrented fan remasters of DS9 and Voyager, especially in light of this…

Having now watched this video and looked at the comments, I think you should be fine to pick up the DVDs of those Star Trek series. You just need to be more diligent in sniffing out bootlegs than this YouTuber was.

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I’m still confused by those adverts that showed the difference in
quality between VHS and DVD…on VHS tapes. How did they get the quality
in the DVD half of the screen?

Reminds me of this George Takei “Quattron” ad campaign where he acknowledges the fact that he can’t actually demonstrate what an RGBY display looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDrMKBE3UHg

It’s probably just a mis-memory, but at the time I remember only seeing an edited down version of the ad which didn’t include the acknowledgements, and I felt oh so clever to realise that it didn’t make sense.

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I mean, you still could! It got a remaster that brought it to consoles and added improved control options. It’s even on sale on PS4 and Steam right now.

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Don’t you hate it how at “trendy” restaurants they make the plates a weird shape just for the novelty.

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It would make the most sense for it to just be Holly doing that, because surely simulating all the complexities of human consciousness is the main thing which limits Red Dwarf to one hologram at a time.

But either way it’s clearly a different situation with Kochanski, because if the logic is that it’s Petersen’s arm, therefore Petersen has control of the arm, then that would mean Kochanski would have control over the entire body in Balance of Power, but she doesn’t.

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The Moonbase is so-so, but The Invasion is great! Quite frankly I’ve had enough of these blasphemous hot takes. We’re in a heatwave. Give me your cold, mainstream, agreeable takes please.

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While there have been plenty of releases like that, it absolutely is not “how video games have operated for a while”, nor is it “all”.

Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges are often just download keys due to cartridges not having the kind of memory needed for a lot of modern games, physical PC games are just download keys due to Blu-rays never becoming a PC gaming format, and occasionally disc based games on console require downloads to get all of the content, but generally, if you have a PlayStation or Xbox game on disc, the game is literally on the disc and you don’t need any kind of network connection to play it.

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OK, it was literally impossible not to do more.

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I’ll just get this one out of the way.

The logo really doesn’t work when the second word is longer than the first…

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Oh wow. At the weekend the whole BBC era was missing (as discussed in the comments of the ‘4 Fuck’s Sake’ article), so they must have overlooked those 2 episodes when they were updating the expiry dates to bring the episodes back.

Also, The Promised Land is still AWOL.

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