Flap Jack

[Flap Jack]

I solved it, but it came down to the wire. Good stuff.

Not 100% sure about how one of the clues fits into the cyan group. 

The colours change depending on what order you solve the groups in though, right? Maybe you could name the clue, and then if someone else knows they could explain it in rot13 or something.

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If you zoom in enough, the badges say “Chicken McNugget” and “Gareth Gwenlan fucks kids” respectively, so legal insisted they be scrubbed out.

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04/09/2026 

1/5 

She* rides**! 

* Kochanski

** Appears in this scene

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Gerry just has his own code.

£50 -> “No.”

300%! -> “I’ll think about it.”

(7 + 8) -> “Yes, please.”

#@JONKD -> “Excuse me, I’m foreign. Could you point me in the direction of the nearest Wagamama?”

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Internal Doors on Starbug Which In Certain Shots Look Like Green Screen Backgrounds That They Forgot to Key Out in Post Production But Actually Aren’t

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The OtraZone Solution

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So sad that after just squeaking through the rigorous G&T application process, you’ll have to be banned for multi-posting.

Seriously though, these are some great pictures.

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There’s nothing wrong with idea as far as I’m concerned – I loved The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, which is a similar deal. It would just be disappointing to get it instead of a proper new episode.

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… 2.

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Doug sweats as he looks over his notepad.

Ideas for Robert not having to wear the Kryten mask:

1. Kryten died off-screen.

2. Kryten regenerated into Kryeleven off-screen and is now played by Hugh Skinner Nick Mohammed Diane Morgan?

3.                                            

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I see none of you have faith that Robert could manage to play Kryten in full make-up again, but I do. He’s 70 years young and doing great. And he probably won’t even be 90 by the time they go into production on a new episode.

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You can deduce that it is in its natural form when it looks like something that doesn’t look like anything else.

But it has multiple forms that don’t look like anything else – the small form that sneaks around, and the big slobbering monster form. They can’t both be its standard form, right? If one of the forms is either a mimicry of another GELF we haven’t seen or something from someone’s (or its own) imagination, there’s no reason they can’t both be that.

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The Polymorph in its standard Polymorph form, not when it’s impersonating someone else, obviously.

Like… could you have a chat with the Polymorph?

Well, if it can morph itself some human language capable vocal cords (and has the intelligence to use them) when it’s impersonating someone, there’s no reason it can’t do that whenever it wants, whatever it currently looks like.

Plus, do we even know for sure what its “standard” form is?

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I just never thought of the Polymorph as having dialogue, I just thought it was silly monster noises.

?????

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I definitely agree that it’s good characterisation and a good scene, I just don’t think it amounts to a story in and of itself, and story is what I felt was lacking in the latter part of the episode.

Perhaps it would have been inauthentic for “Rimmer finds out he actually wasn’t disadvantaged” to be the catalyst of the story (although if it had been, it needn’t have been Ace who told him) because it would have been out of character for him to sincerely self-examine, but there still could have been something there. You’ve got the easy set up of “Rimmer and Ace have to cooperate/spend time together but they clearly hate each other – what’s going to happen???”, but then what happens is, essentially, nothing.

Probably everyone else will think this comparison is way off base, but to me it’s like if Rimmer never stole Lister’s body in Bodyswap, and the last 5 minutes of the episode were just a series of conversations about the situation where Rimmer continues to insist that he didn’t do anything wrong and is annoyed that Lister won’t let him swap bodies again. They could drop some interesting reveals into that final stretch, but fundamentally the story is over.

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It’s a brilliant reveal, but the issue for me is that nothing actually happens because of it, either character wise or plot wise. The revelation that Rimmer was the one who got the break could have been a new identity crisis for him, but he doesn’t even learn about it because there’s no time left in the episode at that point. The held-backstory is good for understanding both Ace and Bonehead, but it’s retroactive. It’s not a story, it’s just lore, excellent lore such as it is.

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Dimension Jump is lousy with great ideas and gags, and the performance of Ace Rimmer alone distinguishes it, but there is a point in the episode where the plot just becomes “and then they hang out with Ace for a bit, then he leaves, the end”.

There’s a gap for Rimmer to have some introspective moments or character development or for him to properly come to blows with Ace in some way, but then he doesn’t. The two of them just privately tell Lister that they think the other is a prick, and then the episode is over. There isn’t even any follow-up to to Rimmer being insecure that nobody on board likes him.

All in all, Dimension Jump is one of the best ever half-episodes of Red Dwarf.

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Yeah, I was going to say, as far as I’m concerned it’s a self-solving problem. If Andrew wants to make more (and not just for the money), then that is in itself proof that he’s invested enough in the series for the job. Rob trusted him as an equal partner in the writing of Titan, so I trust him too.

Right up until the moment he releases a shit novel, of course.

I still like the Eoin Colfer Hitchhiker’s for what it’s worth, but it’s still true that being a huge fan of something doesn’t necessarily make you best suited to write a follow up to it, and a lot of the time a non-fan is preferred. For Doctor Who all the showrunners of the modern era have been megafans, but the results haven’t exactly been consistent brilliance compared to the older eras where non-fans were at the reins. And a consistent pitfall is the weird obsession with continuity that only fan creators seem to have.

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Out of the Red

Never give up on the dream.

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It feels too soon to be doing a full ranking, but I can say with confidence that Titan ranks above Last Human for me, because although Last Human is doing more emotionally resonant storytelling with clearer character development in theory, in practice it does it too crappily for me to care.

Also Titan doesn’t have a comedy rape chapter. That counts for a lot.

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I have a disappointingly low score of 11, because I generally watched the first episode of each series first, despite the order being all over the shop.

That would actually be 23, right? Because you get a minimum 1 point per series plus a minimum 1 point for your starting series.

I actually did watch the show fully in release order – because I was introduced to it after the DVD releases had started, and by a friend who had his priorities right – so my score is 14. (Unless I’ve completely misunderstood the rules.)

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He’s saying it because he already saw himself say it, therefore he knows that’s what needs to be said, not because he personally judges it to be bizarre in the current moment.

Also it is still pretty weird even if you know what it means.

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True. Maybe she genuinely feels bad for indulging Cat’s fantasies even when he was fully aware (in theory) of what was happening.

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Do you think Camille actually apologised to Cat, or he just heard it that way because Pleasure GELF?

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Why do you quote-reply backwards?

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Oh shit, now you’ve got me doing it.

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So how are we feeling about Season 14, 3 episodes in? I’m really enjoying it. Maybe not a huge improvement over 13 as a whole, but definitely a stronger start, as I recall the first 2 episodes of that were quite weak and the third was just decent.

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Had no idea RTD had a new book coming out, so when I saw this email subject there was a small part of me that was wondering if they were going to get him to sign a bunch of other authors’ books at random.

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Save some talent for the rest of us please Dave.

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The futility of the “Is a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit?” debate crystallised for me when I looked up the dictionary definition of “biscuit”.

Though I will say that for anyone who wants to take a side, acting like the old “they decided in court that a Jaffa Cake is a cake and not a biscuit because it goes hard when stale” factoid is the beginning and end of the conversation will not earn my respect. Language is not a hard science and legal rulings about tax do not control culture!

If a hot dog isn’t a sandwich, then it’s because most people don’t call it a sandwich, not because it’s empirically un-sandwich-like and not because a judge somewhere decreed it so. If enough people were to persistently call a tomato a vegetable, then it will become one. Embrace the chaos that is human communication, where “literally” can legitimately mean “figuratively” and “rawdogging” can legitimately mean “taking a long flight without any electronic devices or external entertainment”.

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I don’t see any controversy about Jaffa Cakes. We all agree it’s pronounced “jar-fah”, right?

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This is like finding out that a large minority of English speakers genuinely do say “pot-ah-to”.

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I’ll trust that Ben’s rhymes work in a Scottish accent, but written down they don’t compute in my brain.

To me, “troll” 100% rhymes with “mole”, and I have heard other English people pronounce it to rhyme with “doll” but it just doesn’t sound right. In the word “trolley”, sure, but not otherwise. I certainly don’t particularly associate the “trole” pronunciation with America.

But the real mystery is, what does this have to do with Red Dwarf? Maybe going off topic was the real trohl all long.

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I think it would have been both better for continuity and funnier if Lister’s Entangled line was “Kochanski was 31! … when she was 31.”

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I can’t remember, when Titan was just being pitched as a cartoon, was it mentioned if the plan was to get the original characters to voice their younger selves? Because in its current form I think Kochanski is the only returning character you couldn’t do that with, if you were to do a full cast audiobook.

At the end of the day the Yorkshire thing is not an actual big deal or anything, it just doesn’t have a clear explanation.

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Doesn’t make sense to me. An underlying and explicitly stated premise of the book is that it’s “one universe to the side” after all, and some characters are virtually identical to their original versions while others are noticeably different. Why is Kochanski alone the one who needs to have her origins shifted in order to distinguish her from her prime universe counterpart?

Like if that was a serious concern they should have made Lister Geordie or something.

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That’s a pretty wordy way of saying “from this point onwards, no writers of previous episodes come back”.

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15/08/2026 

5/5 

Annoyingly recognised this as the Shakespeare expressions conversation but blanked on which Series X episode it actually appeared in.

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I was picturing Grogan, but only because I assumed Rob himself would have been picturing the only actor to play Kochanski while he was actually working on the show (Dona DiStefano notwithstanding). In terms of characterisation Titanski fits Kochannett as well as or better than Groganski, because Groganski appeared so little that she pretty much had no defined personality.

Plus she’s noted to have an English accent in Titan. Not the right one, but still.

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If Hollister was that reasonable in The End, Lister would have died. Makes u think.

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Hollister isn’t even stern in Stasis Leak. I’m pretty sure that as long as it happened within the confines of that particular episode, Rimmer could have violently stabbed him to death, and in his dying breath Hollister would have said “That’s it! 5 years PD, no take backsies!”.

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When the satnav interrupts music in the car with directions, I always say ”’those aren’t the lyrics!”.

Repetition is key, until your ungrateful family fucking LAUGH. And even when they eventually do, out of politeness or fear, you still repeat the joke forever.

Your dad was fighting the good fight, and I applaud him.

My version of this is that whenever someone mentions a 12-hour-clock time without specifying whether they mean the morning or afternoon/evening, I interject with either “AM?” or “PM?” – whichever is obviously not the time of day they mean.

It was funny maybe twice maximum, and it’s got to the point where people don’t even acknowledge I’ve said it. But now I can’t stop.

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That depends on whether Rob thought that calling someone the most naturally moral human to exist was an insult.

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Not a real quote. Not a picture of a hard light hologram.

Verdict: Fake fan.

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This is fantastic news! Now to celebrate the traditional way, by combining the first 4:3 and 16:9 images I get on the home page.

I never would have noticed on my own, because I disliked the asymmetry enough that I just stopped using the Smega-Drive to combine GIFs with different aspect ratios…

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If we’re feeling generous, the “I’M DUANE DIBBLEY!” thing is Rob and Andrew making fun of sitcoms expecting applause just for showing a fan favourite character and nothing else – hence why Cat repeats it over and over – but the issue is that it falls into the trap of “if you’re satirising a crap thing by doing it, you’re still doing a crap thing”.

Whatever the intention, it’s still way too out of character for Cat to be happy and enthusiastic about being Duane Dibbley, just as it was in Back in the Red. It’s bizarre, because “Cat is forced by circumstance to be uncool and hates it” is such an obvious comedic choice, yet Doug and Rob both independently went the opposite way.

If they really wanted to get Duane in the book, they could have had him be a real guy that Lister and Rimmer inadvertently drag along for the adventure, and then have him turn into The Cat by merging with Frankenstein. Maybe they accidentally get into a teleporter at the same time? It would require a few other details to change, but at least they could have actually had some proper time with the character. As it stands it would have been better not to bother.

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“What are you doing there, Carzon, you pretentious trash can on legs?”

“Taking one last look, sir… at the thickest thicko I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.”

[Author]

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