International Debris

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Yeah, I was gonna say, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to begin making something like that. Fantastic!

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https://www.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/1qz4zgj/my_fucking_washing_machine_needs_my_gps_location/

M-Corp is quickly becoming the most prescient episode.

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Yeah, it’s the music that reminds me most of Cyberia. Along with the stringy brown lettuce, it’s like a living punishment. 

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I’m not sure if we’re meant to draw a causal link, especially as the low crew don’t actually have any real history and were only created less than an hour ago, so wouldn’t have had time to watch any of those videos anyway.
It’s just that everything on the Low version of Red Dwarf is meant to be the trashiest, worst version possible. The videos probably don’t even play properly. The toilets are broken. The doors stick. The food is mouldy.  

Oh yeah, definitely, it’s just… I dunno, it’s so broad that it probably ends up being a touch too unfocused, maybe. Like, we’re given an explanation for Lister being so horrible, his dabbling in shitty behaviour being the entire basis for a whole person, but that’s a different concept to there happening to be terrible b-movies and horrible food sat around. It’s not like cinema hot dogs are ‘part of’ Lister’s curries, for example. 

It just feels like it’s trying to do too many things at once, which stops it from conveying as much of a message as we get in similar stories like Polymorph, Terrorform, Dimension Jump and so on, which is why I think it usually ends up being the least liked episode of V. 

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Isn’t that the Alternate Personalities featurette?

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The contents of the low bunkroom always remind me of Cyberia from Last Human. 

But yeah, there’s a slight conflation of ‘low culture’ and ‘low morals’ in the concept which does seem to align watching splatter movies and eating awful junk food with being a psychopathic killer, which doesn’t quite work.

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I still feel it should be the original. Not because of act of God, but because it was how the lives were going to play out untampered. I just personally feel that should count for something.  

I don’t think the life of the child born through time travel is any more or less valid than the child born through linear time. 

The problem is – and this is where conversations about time travel begin to get difficult – both timelines happen from the same point. You have two potential timelines starting at the point you go back to. If you decide to go back, that means some people won’t be born. But also your “interference” in the past will lead other people to be born. So deciding not to go back means you’re depriving those people of life. From the perspective of someone living at the point you arrive, neither timeline is better, unless you believe that one person is more entitled to life than the other. 

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It’s mostly that Rob and Doug could think of far more fun and interesting ways of doing the low versions of the characters. It’s hard to make high versions that are both character related and funny. 

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So?
If I’m created through a corruption of the timeline, then I wasn’t meant to exist. 

“Meant to exist” suggests a plan or a creator. I don’t believe in either, so I don’t have much of a response. 

But in short, what we think of as the “correct” timeline might itself be corrupted by past time travel. Who’s to say which timeline is more valid or correct than another?

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As Flap Jack alludes to up thread, at what stage are they culpable and who is to say what is the correct course?

The correct course is the one without time travel. 
It’s one thing to affect others around you. It’s quite another to go back and rewrite what happened. Unless you’re a complete hermit, inevitably you will affect people’s lives in some manner and those ripples will spread. Imagine someone comes back in time willy-nilly and, with the best of intentions, innocently decides to date your mother in the past. You might never even be born, and they’d have no way of knowing you should be born. But your life is just casually wiped out forever.  

Imagine you were only born because someone travelled back in time and dated your mother. Without time travel you’d never even have been born and you’d have been casually wiped out forever. 

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I find BtE needs the context of following VIII to really work. I still think it’s a mostly mediocre script, but the fact that it’s so character focused and actually Red Dwarf-ish makes it seem like a masterpiece in comparison to what came before.

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This wig tho

I’m getting proper Partridge vibes from that screenshot.

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It’s possible that AH was a common abbreviation for asshole/arsehole at the time, but I’ve never heard of it outside of Can’t Smeg Won’t Smeg. 

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I think woke has become a shorthand for the kind of patronising I described, however.

It was certainly that for a while, which was when it became weaponised. It was used to describe people whose sensitivities about social issues were perceived as eclipsing the seriousness of them. Those days have passed though, and it’s become used to describe anything socially liberal. Lists of ‘woke games’ include any game that happens to include a LGBTQ+ character, regardless of whether they are there to hammer home a message or simply exist. 

For a while it was just the latest in a long run of terms – snowflake, SJW, PC – but now it’s become a really problematic word that gets trotted out as an increasingly successful way of shutting down anything that represents marginalised groups in some form or another. 

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I’d say it definitely benefits women if they just strongly put up with being treated like shit rather than whining about it all the time. 

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That’s not the opposite. If Kochanski is 100% Lister then Lister is 100% Kochanski. 

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If they did have a kid, let’s say a son, Kochanski would give birth to her own brother in law. The kid would be his own uncle. 

 Also Lister is 50% Kochanski, 50% Lister. And also 100% Lister. Does this mean Kochanski is 50% Lister? Or would she have to be 100% Lister? In which case then he’s having sex with his mum and dad and himself and his girlfriend at the same time. 

 What am I even saying?

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Except we’ve met a series 3000, and he had a Kryten-like face.

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Durex do “tingle” condoms, which are minty, and all they do is make your bits cold and numb. A deeply unsatisfying experience for all involved. 

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Cue a lengthy discussion on how you pronounce gauche. 

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Red Dwarf frames with unsexy auras.

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Is Rimmer suggesting Lister goes on a date with him or… something…?

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Holly had been keeping it hidden from Hollister for a laugh. 

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Bajor was immediately post-occupation, uncertain whether it would join the Federation or remain independent, and generally very fractured. Renting out shops to other non-Federation races seems pretty reasonable in that context.

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Let’s take a moment to appreciate this was all in the 1990s space station show that theoretically was supposed to be post-capitalist… 

Well that was part of the thing about DS9, the Federation had joint control of the station but it was still owned by the Bajorans, who weren’t in the Federation. 

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I’m honestly more concerned about the Forbin Project being there to be honest. Doesn’t seem like a wise idea.

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Yeah, it’s definitely more Genesis of the Daleks than Planet of the Daleks. Although there is a character called Tarrant.

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I quite like the curry pot noodle, but I tend to go for the Itsu miso rice noodles if I’m getting one of those things these days. 

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I see Cappsy’s not fixed the new page bug yet, then.

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Hang on, are you saying that Pete Part Two is a good episode, or just that if it were a good episode, if would still be a bad first episode because it’s a “Part Two”?

I’m saying I missed the first “good”.

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Not having it. There’s no apostrophe in the Blakes 7 logo and we all know it.

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Any good episode is a good first episode

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The rainbow was already supposed to refer to, you know, all the colours of the rainbow. 

Sadly we’re well into the era of it being used by “LGB without the T” types, so I get why there’s a fuller one now. Agreed on the aesthetic issue, though.

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My ‘last’ episode was Rimmerworld, as I only saw it once on TV and didn’t tape it. So the DVD was the second time I saw it, which was lovely to have as a ‘new’ bubble episode. Imagine if it was something like White Hole or Thanks for the Memory instead of Rimmerworld.

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That “they don’t understand…” reply is enough to give you an idea of how biased AI can be. It’s not a nice, helpful computer giving you facts, it’s a company subtly (or not so subtly) pushing you to use its service. There are occasions when AI can be genuinely useful, and these will increase over time, but LLMs are terrible things that use obscene amounts of resources for very little benefit.

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First episode I saw was Terrorform, specifically the scene with Rimmer being oiled. My dad and I had been to the working men’s club – him for a pint, me for an orange juice (28 I was) – and come home and put the TV on. That scene was on as we turned it on. I’d been into comedy from a young age, thanks to dad always watching HIGNFY, Monty Python repeats, Blackadder, playing tapes of the Goon Show in the car and so on, so we sat and watched it and enjoyed it and decided to tune in next week. Whether it was shortly afterwards or the following year – I don’t know if this was the original airing or a repeat run – we also watched VI, and I became a definite fan. A friend of mum’s had the first two series on VHS and lent me them, which I duly devoured. I taped VI off the TV on its second repeat run, when Rimmerworld was replaced with Dimension Jump, and watched that video more times than I care to remember. VII followed, and VIII, and I became gradually disappointed in things, although had I-III Remastered tapes and IV and V off-airs to keep me happy during that period. 

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I’m pretty sure “I did kill him, you know” couldn’t happen with current LLMs.

Yeah, the novelty and strangeness has gone from it now. Replaced by… well, Grok. What a time to be alive.

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