paintings

[paintings]

I used the U streaming service to watch “Future Echoes” last night.

They played the entire tape as issued to broadcasters. 60 seconds of the “vertical colour bars” test pattern, then the 30-second countdown clock, then the programme itself.

Unfortunately, the subtitles started playing immediately (during the test pattern). This meant that the subtitles were – quite literally – “future echoes” themselves.

[paintings]

It doesn’t feel like it’s been updated at all in the last 10 years, it’s beyond dreadful.

They have in fact been doing “updates” all along, just nothing to improve the user experience.

The most recent update was to insert extra adverts if you try to use the player controls (e.g. pause) while viewing a programme. IIRC that “feature” was added last month.

[paintings]

Looking at the picture posted by Podey at the start of this thread, I know exactly (pretty much to the inch) where that picture was taken. In that location, Starbug would have been partly under cover (it was directly underneath the walkway to the front entrance of the building) but the cockpit area would have been almost fully exposed to the elements. IOW, the deterioration wasn’t 100% down to it being on some bloke’s drive for the past year.

(Of course, they may have wheeled it out of one of the nearby storage bays to take the photo, in which case you can just ignore my wittering…)

[paintings]

We don’t know what direction Holly went in and whether he stuck to it or wandered around. Though they are consistent in describing Earth as “three million years away” from Future Echoes to Out of Time (thanks, Smega Drive), and Holly doesn’t correct them when he’s there, so it sounds like it would take the same amount of time to go straight back.

Them sticking with the same “3 million years” figure is the most believable part.

The show has been running for nearly 40 years and there’s that extra 200 years of suspended animation at the start of Series VI. Call it 240 years in total.

* If they were consistently headed towards Earth, they’ve still got 2,999,760 years of the journey to go.

* If they were consistently headed away from Earth, the journey time has lengthened to 3,000,240 years.

Both of these figures round to 3 million years (the error is approximately 0.008%). I suppose you could make a joke of sorts about Holly correcting them (“It’s actually two million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, seven hundred and sixty years”) and Lister or Rimmer (or perhaps even Kryten) complaining about Holly’s pedantry…

[paintings]

Yeah, I wonder if that’s a common thing in general, I always get dreams where I’m trying to text someone or note something down and autocorrect is so bad I literally can’t.

Dorothy L Sayers mentions a related concept (IIRC she called it a responsibility dream) in her novel “Busman’s Honeymoon”, which suggests the phenomenon goes all the way back to Sigmund Freud, or perhaps earlier. Call it 100 years…

[paintings]

I mean even if that one doctor was just particularly ignorant, that doesn’t explain why Kryten was sent to him in the first place.

I was wondering whether it was a reference to an episode of “The Phil Silvers Show” entitled “The Court Martial” (first broadcast 6 March 1956). In that episode, a series of mix-ups during a mass recruitment drive resulted in a chimpanzee being enrolled into the US Army.

This does rather depend on whether Doug watched much (or any) Bilko in years gone by, but it was an extremely well-known show and “The Court Martial” was one of its most famous episodes.

[paintings]

Is the Bisley 2000 a reference to Simon Bisley?

I thought it was a reference to the village of Bisley in Surrey, home of the National Shooting Centre.

[paintings]

Legion may have reasoned that his position was decidedly bleak:
* He could only exist onboard the space station, or in an equivalent environment with the necessary computing power.
* The space station had – deliberately – been positioned where it wouldn’t be bothered by passing traffic.
* The space station had no (or very limited) propulsion capabilities, and the available power sources meant that there would be next to zero energy for a new propulsion system.
* Even if a propulsion system were available, Legion would have to be very careful where he repositioned the space station. Any new additions to the crew would have to be either (a) volunteers, or (b) people that no-one would miss. These would, in effect, require diametrically opposing strategies: “volunteers” implies a large pool of potential crew members and a tacit acceptance of the space station’s existence and purpose by everyone else in the vicinity, whereas “people that no-one would miss” implies running in stealth mode, sufficiently far from any busy space lanes.

As for why his plans went awry, I can think of three scenarios, all in the “bad luck” category:

1. Legion had devised some long-term plans, but the last few scientists died within such a short space of time that he didn’t manage to put the plans into action.

2. Legion’s plan was “Use the homing beacon to ensnare any passing spaceships”. Legion did not know that the Psirens had set up shop nearby, so was starved of spaceships coming within range of his homing beacon.

3. Legion came to the incorrect conclusion that he would still have a residual conscious existence when the last scientist died, so didn’t bother to implement any plans.

Obviously, option 2 is closest to the episodes as transmitted.

[paintings]

Yeah, but what about using celestial bodies as advertisements? That surely can’t be a particularly common idea.

I give you the Isaac Asimov short story Buy_Jupiter (first published in 1958).

[paintings]

speaking of Queeg, has anyone ever tried to actually play out the chess match, and did it work?

Many of the moves are missing or incomplete (e.g. at one point Holly says “to Queen 3” and Queeg says “takes pawn”, both of which don’t state the piece being moved).

The one clear view we get of the chess board shows the bishop on its way to Knight 5, with Queeg’s voice announcing the move. However only 4 other pieces have moved from their starting positions, so it should have been Holly’s move.

Allowing for the fact that all of the moves aren’t detailed, the moves we do hear are (or could be) legal chess moves, although it is odd that Holly says “Prawn to King 4” near the end when he had started with that exact move. It’s not necessarily an illegal move (another of his pawns could – by taking one of Queeg’s pieces – have ended up on King 3) but it’s a bit odd.

To summarise: Close, but no cigar.

[paintings]

Does MI6 recruit people based purely on whether they can order a vodka Martini while doing a Sean Connery impression?

Given the stories about MI6 agents that have emerged over the years, I would opine that the answer to that question is “Yes” :-(

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