sleepey

[sleepey]

Are you suggesting they “bookolded” him?

Gold star

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I would like to get into the litverse at some point, but:

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Is that the one where the Master calls the Doctor a crack-brained freak

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Discovery & Picard had some really good characters & ideas but they never quite got the hang of that serialised storytelling. Most seasons fly off the rails at the end, and/or sag heavily in the middle. That said though, the back half of Disco was pretty great (minus about half an hour of pure wank they tacked onto the end to wrap it up when it got cancelled). Picard was better as a series of novels than a show but it did have its moments – Raffi is a strong contender for my fav Trek character across the whole entire thing.

I ordered the Section 31 movie when it came out but still haven’t worked up the courage to put the disc in.

I’m halfway through Strange New Worlds & Lower decks, they’re both generally good shows but they both have certain recurring “bits” I really don’t care for (Gorn horror movie episodes, Peanut Hamper, Badgey, etc).

Prodigy & Starfleet Academy were both marketed as like, “Trek spinoffs for people who aren’t me”, so I was just going to skip them originally, but then I kept hearing they’re secretly the best ones so I’ll probably give them a go at some point.

[sleepey]

The presentation of it in the previous episode with the weird metaphorical flashbacks is pretty interesting, but then they have to actually explain it which ends up being a big drag. Also the way it’s designed to *sound* like a big shakeup to the canon while really just kind of hoverhanding it totally limits the impact. So overall it’s a bit wank in a way that makes it hard to defend. But ultimately I do think it’s clear (especially after it gets epilogue’d in Flux & she physically flushes the whole thing down the toilet) that the point of it all is the rejection of that legacy & the refusal to be defined by the circumstances of her birth. Which makes it very annoying how everyone still goes on as if she learned she’s a Palpatine & flew off with her Super Timelord 2 powers & that was the whole storyline.

[sleepey]

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Someone explain the Rimmerworld wormhole to me. They say time moves more quickly inside it, but also that time moves more quickly on the other side of it? Isn’t the other side of it just somewhere else in normal space? Why would that run at a different speed? Or is the effect just applied to Rimmer’s pod? If they flew there without using the wormhole would they find everyone moving really fast? When they follow him through, aren’t they now on the other side of the wormhole from Red Dwarf, losing hundreds of years of ground (if the time difference comes from the travel time inside the wormhole)? Or is it frozen in place (if the time difference comes from being on the other side of the wormhole)? I can’t make sense of it & it’s been bugging me for literal decades.

[sleepey]

Time to Wave the laughs goodbye

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Emotion Hawk: Polymorphic Organism the Second

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Red Dwarf would be immeasureably better if an angry Michelle Rodriguez was wandering around pointing a gun at vending machines

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Whenever Holly’s not on screen he’s with one of the several other groups of survivors around the ship.

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They both have about 3 good episodes’ worth of material, so basically do you prefer 6 half-good episodes that let you down at the end or 8 mostly-bad episodes with the occasional spark of life

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I stand with Frank

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I like the time wand and some of the captain’s office stuff, the morse code bit, the first scene with the dinosaur. Honestly Pete doesn’t lose me until a little while into part 2 when the story gives up.

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Sure, but do they junk the AR unit after realizing it is so dangerous?

Lister knows it’s a hoax, Cat doesn’t care, and Kryten figures out it’s a hoax when Lister doesn’t make any attempt to replicate it with one of his AI girlfriends.

[sleepey]

Their intentions are in tension you see, it’s actually really clever 😑

[sleepey]

Try causing a paradox & see what happens. Might get some extra storage space out of it.

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It’s in the model footage on the DVD but not the actual episode

[sleepey]

Adding soy sauce to cheap ramen?

Hey it’s only like 40% of your salt RDA, there’s plenty of room for more!

[sleepey]

As a kid I saw part of an episode (p sure it was Legion) at someone else’s house & made a mental note to track down the show later. Caught some of VII as it came out, but I only really got into it when Remastered happened (around the same time I got a TV in my room!) & I watched through series 1 as it re-aired. My first “current” series was VIII, so I suppose it’s fortunate that I was an idiot teenager at the time.

For a long time my main sources for Red Dwarf were: taped copies of III & IV off UK Gold, the first byte of series 1 remastered, the last byte of VII with the A-Z on it, and the programme guide book. I had the Smeg Ups/Outs boxset as well so I know a lot of those better than the actual scenes. I never saw Stasis Leak or any of V until the DVDs.

[sleepey]

I asked Grok to help me peel a big pile of potatoes, you’ll never guess what happened

[sleepey]

Oh yeah I don’t believe for a second that they knew what the monster was until at least season 3 (first mention of Jacob iirc), but making it turn out to be just some guy means it all hangs together well enough, because any inconsistencies you can say he changed his mind, he got angry & lashed out, he was being arch & mysterious, etc.

I seem to remember the island moving being very explicit but I don’t think there’s a Lost Smegadrive to search up a quote.

No idea how they got back though. Island magic.

[sleepey]

The soapiness never gripped me and I wanted to know why a cabin was moving and why the smoke monster was showing people visions of their past and seemingly casting judgment on them and where the island went when it disappeared and what actually happened when the bomb went off and a load of other stuff and absolutely none of it was even given a handwavey answer, it was just completely ignored.

The smoke monster was poking around everyone’s memories looking for someone he could manipulate into killing Jacob. He’s also just generally kind of a dickhead, which can account for a lot. The island moved to one of the other places around the world that’s connected to the life/magnetic/whatever-it-is energy (on Eloise Hawking’s big pendulum map). The bomb cancelled out the meltdown at the dig site, or something like that (it’s vague but the gist of it is they saved the island by causing The Incident we heard about at the Swan, & ultimately caused their own crash). Idk why the cabin moved.

[sleepey]

They wanted to check out the giant ship & it’s too far to walk anywhere, seems pretty reasonable to me?

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I think he was the showrunner on Star Trek Picard.

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Maybe spelling just isn’t such a necessary skill in the future when everything can talk to you. Handwriting is already in decline. He probably couldn’t read an analog clock either.

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Yes it was a dot-to-dot he was doing in Pete. The colour-by-numbers was Thanks for the Memory.

[sleepey]

Thurfday

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Auntie’s Smeggers

TV’s Smeggiest Blunders

It’ll Be Sorted Out In the Dub

[sleepey]

I mean, we have no evidence that nano-humans don’t also degrade at a rapid rate.

Lister’s nano-human arm still seems to be holding up.

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Been reading volume 2 over the weekend, it’s unsurprisingly a lot like volume 1. I’m noticing a lot more little mistakes though, and cries of plot hole that could easily be reasoned away. Not enough to sink it or anything, & I can understand putting more thought & rewatches into something like Gunmen than Pete, but that’s why it’s a published book & not just some blog post, you’re supposed to full-ass it.

The photo section is actually Red Dwarf-related this time, so that’s cool. Fans of lists will enjoy the section at the back which has a load of broadcast dates, home media releases, video games (missing the java phone game though), & a brief summary of every Smegazine comic.

G&T (specifically the Coral Canvass) is cited a couple of times as evidence that certain episodes are shit. However the author did not seek a second opinion before giving 4.5 stars to Officer Rimmer, putting it on par with Marooned & Queeg.

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Maybe he’s doing the CBeebies thing? The original post just said he’s “acting”, could be voice acting

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I only recently noticed that the restaurant in Better Than Life is playing an arrangement of Tongue Tied. Did Cat already have that dream & the game pulled it from his memory? Or did the song originate in the game & he subconsciously appropriated it for his dream? Who’s dreaming this chicken?

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Sounds a bit silly but I’ll happily take a book if there’s one going

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Don’t forget to set some time aside to find & cast a lead actor who’s only available for one of those months

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Excited to see what RTD can do with a full year to work on a single script, plenty of time to really lock in & half-bake it to perfection.

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The release date for volume 2 has slipped a couple of times, now due at the end of November.

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Sorry, I didn’t want to start an argument… I’ll shut up

[sleepey]

… yes? If the text is “the JMC does things this way”, but there’s no commentary or jokes undercutting the idea actually in the show, then ultimately it’s just presenting it as something completely neutral and normal.

No, if the text says “the JMC does things this way”, & there’s nothing modifying that, then that’s all it’s said. You’ve conjured “works perfectly” out of thin air.

There is plenty modifying it of course, like that whole Kryten subplot it exists to serve in the first place. But then we’re just back at the first thing I said. Dickless man encounters flaw in dick-based policy. No one else interacts with the concept at all, it does one thing & it’s stupid & bad. Where is the ambiguity here.

[sleepey]

But it does say something about humans, that’s my point. It says “this penis based system of gender classification works perfectly when applied to humans”.

Does it?

Not just that it’s the standard applied by the JMC, but that it works? Perfectly?

[sleepey]

It is open to interpretation, but in my opinion, yes it is the Series VIII logic.

But if the joke is about robots & doesn’t say anything about humans either way

And if extrapolating the concept to humans leads you to an implication that’s good & correct

Then at what point did series VIII actually take a dodgy position on it?

[sleepey]

According to Series VIII logic (which is the only thing that was being discussed in the first place) you would in fact become a woman overnight.

Is that actually series VIII logic though, or is it the in-fiction bureaucratic logic that’s clearly understood by the characters & audience to be so farcical that it doesn’t even merit much discussion? Like at what point does literally anyone endorse it or take it seriously as an idea?

Sure it comes off a bit crass to joke about now because it’s become such a specific line of attack, but when Kryten says “I’ve been classified as a woman because I don’t have a penis”, & Kochanski looks baffled & the audience laughs, to me that’s a heartening reminder that when people weren’t actively having their minds poisoned with that kind of thinking, they saw it for the nonsense it is.

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I’m with Rushy on this one, VIII looks gr-VIII quite good most of the time. They managed to blend together the different aesthetics from the previous series really well, so you’ve got the brightly-lit officers’ areas from III-IV coexisting with the more spartan submariney bits from I-II, & then when they go on an away mission it’s all grimy like V-VII. All unified by splashes of orange & purple, be it from cartoonish coloured lighting (to suit the more broad tone when dealing with the crew) or from rust & prison jumpsuits. There’s maybe a bit of an intangible “BBC sitcom” vibe to it, but I think that’s fair given that it is one. The only real complaints that come to my mind would be the calculator font, & the bit where they try to show that Pete is asleep by just rotating him 180 degrees.

[Author]

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