The Almighty Algorithm⢠recommended me this song yesterday and i canât turn it off. This is so precisely My Kind of Shit that itâd be criminal not to post it, so⌠now listening:
Posts in EnglishPage 2
Boring post but last nightâs BBC Two quiz night had possibly the greatest game of Only Connect ever played by man. Both teams kept getting the connection on only the second example. The first group solved the connecting wall in, like, ten seconds. It was incredible.
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume XXXVII
- The wonderful miniatures of The Hudsucker Proxy
- ĺĺĺĺ
- In which the maintainers of the universal time-zone database find out a Norwegian town wants twenty-six hours in a day
- Streamer wanders into a network of machine-learning-generated accounts, goes slightly insane
- âAurora is a rumored mid-1980s American reconnaissance aircraft.â
- The quest to beat Minecraft in under sixty seconds
- Marco Pierre White, the final boss of cooking
- âA true hermaphrodite rabbit served several females and sired more than 250 young of both sexes.â What an icon.
- The National Gallery demolished some false columns and found a note from a rich donor saying he always thought they were ugly
- We have successfully made Doom run on nothing
- Four Thieves Vinegar: âRight to repair for your bodyâ
- Putting a classified nuclear warhead schematic in your product logo like a boss
- Cooper*
List of actors to have played Doctor Who
Authorâs note: I first wrote up this wee bit of allohistorical silliness in March of this year, posting it a few places online, but never actually bothered on my own website until now. Enjoy.
-
Doctor Who?, on CBS
-
1963â1966: Vincent Price (Doctor Who)
First episode: âThe Girl from Another Worldâ
Last episode: âPlanet of the Daleksâ -
1966â1967: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
First episode: âPlanet of the Daleksâ
-
1963â1966: Vincent Price (Doctor Who)
-
Doctor Who and the Daleks, on CBS
-
1967â1972: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
Last episode: âThe Paradox Webâ
-
1967â1972: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
-
Doctor Who: Alien Agent, on CBS
-
1973â1975: David McCallum (Agent John Smith / Doctor Who, Theta Tau)
First episode: âThe Mannequin Menâ
Last episode: âDoctor Whoâs Mindâ
-
1973â1975: David McCallum (Agent John Smith / Doctor Who, Theta Tau)
-
Doctor Who and the Cyber-Man, produced by New World Pictures
- 1980: Clu Gulager (Doctor Who / âThat existed?â)
-
Doctor Who, on UPN
-
1986â1989: Kyle MacLachlan (The Doctor)
First episode: âPilotâ
Last episode: âThe Deadly Assassin (Part 1)â -
1990â1993: Bruce Campbell (The Second Doctor)
First episode: âThe Deadly Assassin (Part 2)â
Last episode: âThe Edge of Timeâ -
1994â1998: John Rhys-Davies (The Third Doctor / The Professor)
First episode: âFor Want of a Nailâ
Last episode: âSeta (Part 2)â -
1999â2002: Kate Mulgrew (The Fourth Doctor)
First episode: âChangesâ
Last episode: âHourglassâ
-
1986â1989: Kyle MacLachlan (The Doctor)
-
Doctor Who, on NBC
-
2005â2011: Neil Patrick Harris (The Fifth Doctor)
First episode: âThe Interstellar Interruptionâ
Last episode: âParadise Lostâ -
2012â2013: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
First episode: ââŚWe Have a Problemâ
-
2005â2011: Neil Patrick Harris (The Fifth Doctor)
-
Doctor Who, on Blockbuster
-
2014â2015: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
Last episode: âThe Three Doctorsâ -
2015â2019: Nathan Fillion (The Seventh Doctor)
First episode: âThe Three Doctorsâ
Last episode: âWorld Enough and Time (Part 5)â -
2019â2023: Daniel Dae Kim (The Eighth Doctor)
First episode: âGrandfather Clockâ
Last episode: â1963â
-
2014â2015: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
Season 26 of Doctor Who is slated for a release in the late summer of 2024, starring Matt Smith of TCMâs A Song of Ice and Fire.
Actors who played the Master includeâŚ
- James Shigeta as âthe Celestial Masterâ, a one-shot villain from the Price era who would reoccur as a trickster figure in army fatigues in Doctor Who and the Daleks
- Robert ZâDar as âthe Master of Timeâ, a larger-than-life egomaniac who forced MacLachlanâs Doctorâs regeneration and would regularly clash with him in the âactionisedâ Campbell years
- John Anderson as âMr. Setaâ, a master (heh) of disguise who was written as a throwback to the Alien Agent era
- Christopher Walken as âProfessor Tannhauserâ, who, in the far future, devises an equation proving humanity can escape the end of the universe â a plan that NPHâs Fifth Doctor gladly assists in, until one of them realises just who the other isâŚ
- Lady Gaga as âClaire Oswaldâ, a companion throughout the first season of the Fillion era who always seems to know a bit more than she lets on
âAustralianâ is an anagram of âSaturnaliaâ. I donât know what it means, but i bet it means something.
Mandarin Chinese implies the existence of Fed English and Apparatchik Russian.
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume XXXVI
- The Poozeum of Williams, Arizona, self-described as â#1 for fossilized #2â.
- The Ivorians recruited for a football team that doesnât exist in a country that doesnât exist
- i guess we doin circles now. I love these dumbass memes.
- An Italian burglar was caught after stopping to read a book about Greek mythology. Heâs literally meâŚ
- An abandoned underwater strip club off the southern coast of Israel
-
Several articles that can be summed up as âthe what people of where now?â:
- The Confederates of Brazil
- The Marshallese of Arkansas
- The MÄori of London
- The ManichĂŚans of China, still around long after their religion stopped being a major player on the world stage
- The Cagots of France and Spain, a group who were persecuted for reasons nobody really knows and then assimilated into wider society
Alien: Romulus is awesome
I watched Fede Ălvarezâs turn at the Alien franchiseâs helm with, i sense, the ideal amount of knowledge. Online reviews are split â and the more Alien films the reviewerâs seen, the less they like it. Me? Iâd sat down for the first and second, once, a while ago, and that was it. No slogging through assembly cuts or failed comebacks or stealth prequels or anything of the sort. Where they saw the gasping regurgitations of a dying and overexerted setting, i saw a darn good film.
The opening credits start rolling and weâre immediately in the future. Yesterdayâs future. Everythingâs clicks and clacks and yellowing walls, just as James Cameron left it when he turned off the lights. What theyâve done is turn what could be an embarrassing anachronism â haha, look at what those quaint twentieth-century fools thought today would look like â into a believable path that, with a nudge and a push, technology might have otherwise taken. Certainly, the bulky CRTs and Vectrex video games arenât better than the technology of even ten years ago IRL⌠but theyâre cheaper, exactly the sort of thing a fledgling colony would use to save money, and one gets the sense that the predilection for tactile tools and fuzzy screens is the result of ĂŚsthetics cycling back to where they were a hundred years ago, not everyone collectively forgetting how to make a liquid-crystal display.
Two sci-fi pet peeves of mine are nicely resolved, too. In the role of the astronomer-aggravating âââasteroid fieldâââ we instead have the ring of an icy planet; the shipâs artificial gravity system is no mere cost-saving cop-out, but a structual Jenga block in the filmâs action scenes, which mine the flip between 0 and 1 g for all itâs worth. Objectively speaking, Alien: Romulus just wouldnât work on a hard sci-fi rotating spaceship, which is a rare thing!
Seven films into a franchise, it would be easy to bog oneself down in continuity and lock out any viewers who havenât melted into their couch for a twelve-hour marathon. (This is the predicament which Marvel films have found themselves in as of late.) Equally, it would be easy to go too far in the quest to âbreathe new lifeâ⢠into the world and leave us wondering why they put the Alien name on it at all. Romulus finds a sensible middle path. Its connection with the Alien brand is chiefly a matter of economy. We know, for example, that xenomorphs are bad, that they have acid blood, and that they get you boypreggers. We know Weyland-Yutani is an unscrupulous corporation in the business of space colonisation that wants to use xenomorph DNA for its own gain. We know that androids are made of milk for some reason. And so Mr Ălvarez neednât waste any time explaining that to us. Equally, nobody ever says the name âEllen Ripleyâ. Thereâs no mention of the ancient progenitors of mankind or whatever those prequel films were about. Our story is set in the world of Alien, not the wiki.* (Please ignore that Asterisk of Doom. Iâm sure itâs fine.)
*The Asterisk of Doom, or, the dead CG elephant in the room
This was an exceedingly minor thing to my overall enjoyment and i didnât want to give it more space than it deserved, so iâm shunting it down here where noĂśne will see it. So. That, uh⌠that Ian Holm deepfake, huh?
There has always been spirited debate over the ethical quandaries of reviving old actors with effects, even before the current wave of machine learning â Crispin Glover sued Universal for flipping his character upside down in Back to the Future: Part II, remember! I actually donât mind it, particularly when the character themself, like Ian Holmâs Ash/Rook, is meant to be artificial. (And as before, the same way we already know xenomorphs are bad news, we already know Mr Holmâs face wonât belong to someone with our crewâs best interests at heart.)
My annoyance is strictly technical. To understand the problem, letâs flash back fourteen years to Tron: Legacy, the first blockbuster to bring back an old face with the power of the computer:
Here Joseph Kosinskiâs legasequel flashes back to the original filmâs time period, so faces the task of bringing back Jeff Bridges as he looked in 1982. It starts with just his voice. Perfect: faces and bodies change drastically in oneâs life, but at worst, a voice will get a little huskier.
Then, as we pan into his sonâs room, we see him first from the back, then a side profile, in the dark. Again, perfect. Hiding shoddy CGI in the dark has been a go-to in the filmmakerâs bag of tricks since Spielberg did it in Jurassic Park. This is going great. We have a believable fake Jeff Bridges. Weâre hitting our audience right in the nostalgia zone, which, as we all know, is the most profitable zone of the body. And then⌠oh. Ohhh no. Ohhh no no no.
Mr Bridgesâs doppelganger turns around directly into the bright light and opens his mouth. Every weakness in early-tens computer graphics comes out at once. The plastic skin. The dead eyes. The mouth that never moves the same way as the rest of the face. This is not Jeff Bridges. This is a changeling who has stolen his name and skydived into the uncanny valley. The illusion is shattered, because the filmmakers couldnât help themselves from giving the game away.
I bring this example up because Alien: Romulus has the exact opposite problem. The crew, exploring a dank, dark ship, finds Rook face down on the messy ground, having barely survived a close encounter of the third kind. They plug him in, and⌠a heretofore unknown bright light turns to shine directly onto his face, on which not a jot of blood or waste is to be found. (Itâs harder to deepfake someone if thereâs muck in the facial area, you understand.) This is everything youâre not meant to do, and though technology has advanced tremendously in the fourteen years since Rubbery Bridges Syndrome, a cluster of neurons in the back of your head knows that something is deeply wrong. There is no light in his eyes. I kept looking at his eyebrows, wondering if the problem was there, but no. Every bit of his face looks perfect â but all put together in motion⌠one shudders at the sight.
But the further the film goes on, the smarter it gets. After our scavengers leave the lab where they found him, they interact with him chiefly through fuzzy CRT screens, smoothing out the imperfections. Unable to move, assorted gunk and alien goo piles up on his increasingly ravaged face, and when we do properly cut back to him, heâs shot in a side profile with chiaroscuro alarm lights. I kept thinking: why the fuck are you only doing this nowâ˝ You donât put the bad effects first, for Godsâ sakes!
Anyway, the rubbery robot face didnât actually bother me that much â weâve come to the point where weâre closer to the top of the uncanny valley than the bottom. I just needed some time to explain.
Particularly iâd like to single out the cast, none of whom i had heard of before barring a passing recollection of the name Cailee Spaeny, but all of whom do great jobs. Mr Ălvarez has aged down the cast from the seriesâ usual monster fodder, not burnt-out truckers but wide-eyed twentysomething pirates looking to steal some cryo pods to blast off after a better life. (Outside the lead two theyâre pretty thin, but hey, itâs a monster movie.) Our lead is the orphaned Rain Carradine, a serviceable Sigourneyalike played by Ms Spaeny, who reluctantly goes with the scavengers after she finds out sheâs been assigned another six years on a black-skied mining colony⌠and because they require the services of her android guardian Andy (heh), the only one who can interface with the systems on the derelict space station they have their eyes on. David Jonsson, who plays Andy, would deserve an âand introducingâ had he not been in Rye Lane just last year, but this alone already proves heâs going on to do even greater things. Heâs given the task, without spoilers, of playing what amounts to two different (but similar!) characters in the same body, and shows off his naturalistic chops in every little micro-movement.
A certain scene with his character early on will be etched in my brain forever. Itâs the big reveal of the Alienâ˘, facehuggers jumping out from every corner in a room flooded by molten ice and red lights⌠and he stands there, rebooting, the same pose he was two minutes ago, his arms wide, as if nothing happens. Two seconds later, he takes total command of the situation, going from timid to Terminator in five seconds flat. If anything from this film is passed into the annals of pop culture (other than the Asterisk) itâll either be that scene or the insane body-horror third act that i darenât even mention for fear of ruining the experience. (Annihilation would be proud.)
Iâll be straight with you: itâs not as good as Alien. Itâs not as good as Aliens. But nothing ever will be. Donât go in with sky-high expectations â go in for a rollicking sci-fi-action-horror, xenomorph or no xenomorph, and youâll have a great time.
Stuff i watched recently, August â24
- First up is Enemy (2013), a movie somebody peed on. Summarising the plot it sounds a bit thin â Jake Gyllenhaal meets his evil twin Jake Evyllenhaal and not much else happens â but Denis Villeneuve does a fantastic job of building up tension and dread around a slow-burning premise which, in itself, isnât necessarily the scariest thing. 6/10.
- Took a trip to the cinema to see Longlegs (2024), starring the greatest living actor himself, Nic Cage. I say âstarringâ; heâs not in it so much, as itâs more about the internal tensions of our mildly psychic, mildly autistic Clarice Starling stand-in, played wonderfully by Maika Monroe. Again, the plotâs a bit thin, falling apart with a whimper in the third act, but the style and execution more than makes up for it. There are so many looming shots of doors and windows just at the edge of frame, snippets of interspersed terror, ominous rumbling soundscapes⌠pretty good! 7/10.
- Green Room (2015) is a solid little low-budget thriller where a punk band get trapped in a nazi bar. Not much to say other than 6/10.
- Watched Schindlerâs List (1993) for the first time. Cue several hours of inelegant blubbering from me. (âI could have got moreâŚâ) I would like to apologise for calling John Williams a hack. I was not familiar with your game, sir. 10/10, but it feels wrong to give it a numbered score in the first place.
- In Bruges (2008)! The online hype for this is ravenous and iâm not quite sure it lives up, but i was suitably entertained. Colin Farrell has very kind eyes. 6½/10.
- The Olympics were as uplifting as always. A Discord friend of mine put it best: âThe Olympics makes me feel patriotic for the human raceâ. For a few glorious weeks, it doesnât matter that the IOC is the third most corrupt organisation on the planet behind Fifa and the Mafia. It doesnât matter that there are wars raging across the old world. All that matters is that the most fit people on the planet have come to show what the human body can really do when pushed to its limits.
- After years of putting it off, i finally got around to The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), all 3½ hours of it. Itâs hard to review just the first part of the trilogy, but if the rest is as good as this, itâs on track for an easy 9.
- Iâve been getting into the Eighth Doctor audio dramas recently and âThe Chimes of Midnightâ might be among the best things to come out of Doctor Who. Very dark. Very weird. It builds up this offputting atmosphere perfectly, Paul McGann and India Fisher making you wish theyâd gotten a proper series, with the traditional timey-wimey twist. 9/10.
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume XXXV
- Britain should build a new town where the East Coast Main Line and EastâWest Rail meet
- Highway 1 is falling into the ocean
- How thick cold water could (could) have jump-started multicellular life
- Surfing (in) the American Dream (shopping centre)
- New Euripides fragments just dropped
- In âwe live in a world of unparalleled luxury and itâs kind of boringâ news: American Airlines has so many flights theyâre running out of numbers
- Terry Wallis, a man from Arkansas who randomly woke up from a vegetative state after nineteen years
- What to do if a nuclear missile is heading for your location right now. Thankfully, itâs not, because nothing ever happens.
- Danny Filippidis, a Canadian skier who went missing only to turn up in Sacramento six days later with no memory of the incident
- Big fan of this âWorld Travel Mapâ by one Zhaoxu Sui â with a thematically appropriate use of the Mercator projection, to boot!
It canât happen here
Feeling really quite glum over the news of far-right riots near here yesterday. I just keep coming back to the question⌠why Sunderland, of all places?
Not that it would be okay in any situation, but itâs not Leicester, where you have sectarian tensions flaring up. Itâs not Southport, where you just had a mass stabbing. Itâs not even somewhere with a properly substantial Muslim or immigrant population, like a Birmingham or a Boston. Itâs Sunderland. Why here, in what is, pardon my bluntness, the White British1 working-class capital of the UK?
I donât know. I guess i thought it couldnât happen here. That we were nicer up north. Or that the scenery was too nice for people to get angry. Or that we were too left-wing even though Reform beat the Tories in every constituency. Or maybe that we were too deprived, and that we didnât have anyone to scapegoat, because we knew itâd be shit no matter what.
Ach. History will trundle on as always, and in due time iâm sure the internet shit-stirrers and fundie imams will be joining hands and complaining about all those filthy undersea neo-post-BahĂĄâĂ immigrants from Atlantis taking our jobs. Maybe we can set up a football rivalry for everyone to redirect their hate into like they did in Glasgow. Who knows.
A very minor thing, but iâve refreshed my blogroll. Do check the linked sites out if you havenât already. :-)
Just bought a month of Discovery+ to be able to watch the Olympic surfing and iâm not happy about it.
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume XXXIV
- The saola, a large mammal which was discovered in the Vietnamese forest in⌠wait for it⌠1992! Really makes you wonder what else is hiding out there.
- Circuits
- â Can studies of living animal colour constrain the colours of dinosaurs? A case study with big theropodsâ
- A record history of the Cannonball Run, the illegal street race from New York to Los Angeles
- Really enjoyed this documentary about the varied weirdos of the life-extension movement. I came away surprisingly endeared by that one billionaire guy with the cock monitor.
- Absolutely gutted to find out that you could stay in a hotel shaped like a giant beagle until just this year.
- Walking Nairobi
Diplodocus is the best dinosaur
Well, i care about what my favourite dinosaur is, and itâs Diplodocus, that lumbering old fool. Allow me to be possessed by the spirit of my nine-year-old self for a little bit.
Reason number one why the diplodocus is the best dinosaur is because it is called a diplodocus. This is a very fun name to say and does not strike the same terror into the hearts of men as, say, đ¤đ¤đ¤ Tyrannosaurus Rex!!! đ¤đ¤đ¤ or đĽđĽđĽ Velociraptor!!! đĽđĽđĽ. I like to think this is because they are, themselves, gentle creatures, being peaceable herbivores and all that. (My favourite dinosaur could beat up your favourite dinosaur, but chooses not to because it is a conscientious objector. Iâm sure this taunt would have gone down great on the playground.)
Another reason diplodoci are great is how long they are, getting up to thirty metres from tip of the snout to top of the tail. Part of me thinks it would be fun to be that long, but the other part likes being able to turn around corners. Thereâs other dinosaurs that we think were longer, but most of them donât have a complete skeleton to back them up, which is a skill issue if iâve ever heard one. If my species was about to be wiped out i would simply do the smart thing and die in an area that would preserve my fossil better. Suck it, Maraapunisaurus.
That long neck isnât just for show, either. This is the kind of thing that causes massive arguments among palĂŚontologists, but a study in the Journal of Vertebrate PalĂŚontology (yes iâm backing up my dinosaur preferences with a source) suggests that, because their centre of mass would lie so close to their hip socket, they could assume a bipedal stance without much effort, lifting them high up into the canopy into the land of only the most gourmet leaves. Then, when a foodie diplodocus was done with its land-based course, it could dip its neck into the riverbank and feast on some fine vegan seafood.
One last thing. After PangĂŚa broke up, the land where the diplodoci reigned shifted and drifted until its reached its present place, in the American southwest. The implication is clear:
Diplodoci are cowboys.
More Diplodocus links
- The tale of Bone 37
- A most wonderful article title: âI Have Opinions About Dippyâ
- Restoring a celebrity diplodocus in art