The GardenDespatches from The Satyrs’ Forest

Posts in EnglishPage 2

The Almighty Algorithm™ recommended me this song yesterday and i can’t turn it off. This is so precisely My Kind of Shit that it’d be criminal not to post it, so… now listening:

In case it’s 2137 and this link is broken: the song is “2007”, by You Love Her Coz She’s Dead

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXVII

A WIP map of the world in 2099
I feel a little bad for posting so many link roundups effectively in a row, so here’s a preview of things to come…

List of actors to have played Doctor Who

Author’s 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
    • 1963–1966: Vincent Price (Doctor Who)
      First episode: “The Girl from Another World”
      Last episode: “Planet of the Daleks”
    • 1966–1967: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
      First episode: “Planet of the Daleks”
  • Doctor Who and the Daleks, on CBS
    • 1967–1972: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
      Last episode: “The Paradox Web”
  • Doctor Who: Alien Agent, on CBS
    • 1973–1975: David McCallum (Agent John Smith / Doctor Who, Theta Tau)
      First episode: “The Mannequin Men”
      Last episode: “Doctor Who’s Mind”
  • Doctor Who and the Cyber-Man, produced by New World Pictures
    • 1980: Clu Gulager (Doctor Who / “That existed?”)
  • Doctor Who, on UPN
    • 1986–1989: Kyle MacLachlan (The Doctor)
      First episode: “Pilot”
      Last episode: “The Deadly Assassin (Part 1)”
    • 1990–1993: Bruce Campbell (The Second Doctor)
      First episode: “The Deadly Assassin (Part 2)”
      Last episode: “The Edge of Time”
    • 1994–1998: John Rhys-Davies (The Third Doctor / The Professor)
      First episode: “For Want of a Nail”
      Last episode: “Seta (Part 2)”
    • 1999–2002: Kate Mulgrew (The Fourth Doctor)
      First episode: “Changes”
      Last episode: “Hourglass”
  • Doctor Who, on NBC
    • 2005–2011: Neil Patrick Harris (The Fifth Doctor)
      First episode: “The Interstellar Interruption”
      Last episode: “Paradise Lost”
    • 2012–2013: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
      First episode: “…We Have a Problem”
  • Doctor Who, on Blockbuster
    • 2014–2015: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
      Last episode: “The Three Doctors”
    • 2015–2019: Nathan Fillion (The Seventh Doctor)
      First episode: “The Three Doctors”
      Last episode: “World Enough and Time (Part 5)”
    • 2019–2023: Daniel Dae Kim (The Eighth Doctor)
      First episode: “Grandfather Clock”
      Last episode: “1963”

Season 26 of Doctor Who is slated for a release in the late summer of 2024, starring Matt Smith of TCM’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

Actors who played the Master include…

  • James Shigeta as “the Celestial Master”, 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 Z’Dar as “the Master of Time”, a larger-than-life egomaniac who forced MacLachlan’s Doctor’s regeneration and would regularly clash with him in the “actionised” Campbell years
  • John Anderson as “Mr. Seta”, a master (heh) of disguise who was written as a throwback to the Alien Agent era
  • Christopher Walken as “Professor Tannhauser”, who, in the far future, devises an equation proving humanity can escape the end of the universe — a plan that NPH’s Fifth Doctor gladly assists in, until one of them realises just who the other is…
  • Lady Gaga as “Claire Oswald”, a companion throughout the first season of the Fillion era who always seems to know a bit more than she lets on

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXVI

Alien: Romulus is awesome

A young white woman fires a gun in a retrofuturistic space station, a young black man cowering behind her
Super props to the trailer people, honestly — if it wasn’t for seeing that chilling first trailer in cinemas, i’d never have even considered watching the seventh film in a franchise i didn’t particularly care for.

I watched Fede Álvarez’s turn at the Alien franchise’s helm with, i sense, the ideal amount of knowledge. Online reviews are split — and the more Alien films the reviewer’s seen, the less they like it. Me? I’d 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 we’re immediately in the future. Yesterday’s future. Everything’s clicks and clacks and yellowing walls, just as James Cameron left it when he turned off the lights. What they’ve done is turn what could be an embarrassing anachronism — haha, look at what those quaint twentieth-century fools thought today would look like — into a believable path that, with a nudge and a push, technology might have otherwise taken. Certainly, the bulky CRTs and Vectrex video games aren’t better than the technology of even ten years ago IRL… but they’re 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 æsthetics 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 “““asteroid field””” we instead have the ring of an icy planet; the ship’s artificial gravity system is no mere cost-saving cop-out, but a structual Jenga block in the film’s action scenes, which mine the flip between 0 and 1 g for all it’s worth. Objectively speaking, Alien: Romulus just wouldn’t 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 haven’t 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 “breathe new life”™ 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 Álvarez needn’t waste any time explaining that to us. Equally, nobody ever says the name “Ellen Ripley”. There’s 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. I’m sure it’s 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 didn’t want to give it more space than it deserved, so i’m shunting it down here where noöne 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 — Crispin Glover sued Universal for flipping his character upside down in Back to the Future: Part II, remember! I actually don’t mind it, particularly when the character themself, like Ian Holm’s Ash/Rook, is meant to be artificial. (And as before, the same way we already know xenomorphs are bad news, we already know Mr Holm’s face won’t belong to someone with our crew’s best interests at heart.)

My annoyance is strictly technical. To understand the problem, let’s flash back fourteen years to Tron: Legacy, the first blockbuster to bring back an old face with the power of the computer:

© Disney, 2010. I’m using this clip for the purpose of criticism, as is my right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Bastids.

Here Joseph Kosinski’s legasequel flashes back to the original film’s 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 one’s life, but at worst, a voice will get a little huskier.

Then, as we pan into his son’s 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 filmmaker’s bag of tricks since Spielberg did it in Jurassic Park. This is going great. We have a believable fake Jeff Bridges. We’re 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 Bridges’s 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 couldn’t 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. (It’s harder to deepfake someone if there’s muck in the facial area, you understand.) This is everything you’re 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 — 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, he’s shot in a side profile with chiaroscuro alarm lights. I kept thinking: why the fuck are you only doing this now‽ You don’t put the bad effects first, for Gods’ sakes!

Anyway, the rubbery robot face didn’t actually bother me that much — we’ve come to the point where we’re closer to the top of the uncanny valley than the bottom. I just needed some time to explain.

Particularly i’d 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 Álvarez has aged down the cast from the series’ 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 they’re pretty thin, but hey, it’s 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 she’s 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 “and introducing” had he not been in Rye Lane just last year, but this alone already proves he’s going on to do even greater things. He’s 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. It’s the big reveal of the Alien™, 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) it’ll either be that scene or the insane body-horror third act that i daren’t even mention for fear of ruining the experience. (Annihilation would be proud.)

I’ll be straight with you: it’s not as good as Alien. It’s not as good as Aliens. But nothing ever will be. Don’t go in with sky-high expectations — go in for a rollicking sci-fi-action-horror, xenomorph or no xenomorph, and you’ll have a great time.

Stuff i watched recently, August ’24

A montage of the undermentioned works
  • First up is Enemy (2013), a movie somebody peed on. Summarising the plot it sounds a bit thin — Jake Gyllenhaal meets his evil twin Jake Evyllenhaal and not much else happens — but Denis Villeneuve does a fantastic job of building up tension and dread around a slow-burning premise which, in itself, isn’t 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 “starring”; he’s not in it so much, as it’s more about the internal tensions of our mildly psychic, mildly autistic Clarice Starling stand-in, played wonderfully by Maika Monroe. Again, the plot’s 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 Schindler’s List (1993) for the first time. Cue several hours of inelegant blubbering from me. (“I could have got more…”) 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 i’m 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: “The Olympics makes me feel patriotic for the human race”. For a few glorious weeks, it doesn’t matter that the IOC is the third most corrupt organisation on the planet behind Fifa and the Mafia. It doesn’t 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. It’s hard to review just the first part of the trilogy, but if the rest is as good as this, it’s on track for an easy 9.
  • I’ve been getting into the Eighth Doctor audio dramas recently and “The Chimes of Midnight” 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 they’d gotten a proper series, with the traditional timey-wimey twist. 9/10.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXV

A map of the Near East and Balkans with a focus on travel destinations and such
Š Zhaoxu Sui

It can’t 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 it’s not Leicester, where you have sectarian tensions flaring up. It’s not Southport, where you just had a mass stabbing. It’s not even somewhere with a properly substantial Muslim or immigrant population, like a Birmingham or a Boston. It’s Sunderland. Why here, in what is, pardon my bluntness, the White British1 working-class capital of the UK?

I don’t know. I guess i thought it couldn’t 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 didn’t have anyone to scapegoat, because we knew it’d be shit no matter what.

Ach. History will trundle on as always, and in due time i’m sure the internet shit-stirrers and fundie imams will be joining hands and complaining about all those filthy undersea neo-post-Bahá’í 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.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXIV

Diplodocus is the best dinosaur

Image macro reading "When you grow uup people stop asking you what your favourite dinosaur is. They don't even care"

Well, i care about what my favourite dinosaur is, and it’s 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, 🤘🤘🤘 Ty­ran­no­sau­rus Rex!!! 🤘🤘🤘 or 🔥🔥🔥 Ve­lo­ci­rap­tor!!! 🔥🔥🔥. 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. I’m sure this taunt would have gone down great on the playground.)

Diplodocus skeleton captioned "REALLY QUITE LONG"
Original photo by Heather Cowper

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. There’s other dinosaurs that we think were longer, but most of them don’t have a complete skeleton to back them up, which is a skill issue if i’ve 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 isn’t 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 i’m 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:

A diplodocus sporting a poorly drawn cowboy hat
Original drawing by Dmitry Bogdanov

Diplodoci are cowboys.