Anonymouswizard's Random Banter #227 and Free Cup of Tea

[Asmotherion]

Fedoras don't require confidence to not look like a clown. Fedoras require the entire rest of the ensemble to go with it. Like, if you have a fedora and an unbuttoned short-sleeved shirt over a white t-shirt and some cargo pants, you can have all the confidence in the world and it's gonna look terrible. Gotta pair that with a suit (ideally a same-fabric one).

I don't know. Minous the white t-shirt and use swim shorts instead of the cargo pants... use a white fedora and you have a decent look for a beach party.

[el minster]

In my experience fedoras look fine with a suit jacket and similarly colored pants

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Jeez, I hated Matt Smith's Doctor for so many reasons.

I like Tennant's Doctor better, but I much prefer Smith's companions (other than that one-off jewel thief in the desert planet), and since companions are so crucial, I tend to prefer Smith's episodes better.

Grey Wolf

[Rater202]

Jeez, I hated Matt Smith's Doctor for so many reasons.

Hey, at least he wasn't Tennant, I hate Tennant's Doctor.

And I count my lucky stars that the BBC didn't get the Tennant 2.0 they wanted.

*Pumps Shotgun.*

Them's some fightin' words right there.

You don't compare doctors. You don't hate doctors. Every single Doctor is Great, but only on their own merits. comparing them is just going to lead to disappointment that they're not your favorite and thus an irrational dislike of their adventures.

[Anonymouswizard]

*Pumps Shotgun.*

Them's some fightin' words right there.

You don't compare doctors. You don't hate doctors. Every single Doctor is Great, but only on their own merits. comparing them is just going to lead to disappointment that they're not your favorite and thus an irrational dislike of their adventures.

When you're more human than One you're a bad Doctor.

[Fyraltari]

12 > all the rest > 6.

[Peelee]

You don't hate doctors.

I dunno, I managed to.

[Rater202]

When you're more human than One you're a bad Doctor.

Being more human than One is a natural consequence of coming after One.

The more time that The Doctor spends living around humans, traveling with humans, reacting to a human perspective of events, spending time on Earth, the more humanlike his own perspective becomes.

[Fyraltari]

Being more human than One is a natural consequence of coming after One.

The more time that The Doctor spends living around humans, traveling with humans, reacting to a human perspective of events, spending time on Earth, the more humanlike his own perspective becomes.

Pretty sure that was a reference that back during One's run the Doctor wasn't stated to be an extra-terrestrial and several episodes imply that he is just a human from the future. This got scapped obviously.

and then Eight goes around telling people he's half-human on his mother's side.

[Bartmanhomer]

Hey everyone. Last night I dream that the dragon deities were playing Dragon Poker. It's a variation of Texas Hold'em Poker. All the four dragon deities (Tamara, Faluzure, Hlal, and Garyx got eliminated. It's was only Bahamut and Tiamat. Tiamat went all-in with her gold pieces. So did Bahamut. Tiamat was all four Aces. (Four of a Kind.) And Bahamut best Tiamat with a Straight Flush, (King, Queen, Jack, 10 and 9 all hearts.) Bahamut won the whole Dragon Poker game.

[Anonymouswizard]

Pretty sure that was a reference that back during One's run the Doctor wasn't stated to be an extra-terrestrial and several episodes imply that he is just a human from the future. This got scapped obviously.

Yeah, half 'I don't like overly human Doctors' and half 'it took them two actors to decide the Doctor was an alien, and even that only in the last story of Troughton's'.

and then Eight goes around telling people he's half-human on his mother's side.

And Seven was apparently weaved on a Loom. Plus Eight A) had recently recovered from being actually dead, B) stopped saying that pretty soon, and C) is still a lying liar who lies. Remember when One claimed to have built the TARDIS? Yeah, lying liar who lies.

[Rater202]

Yeah, half 'I don't like overly human Doctors' and half 'it took them two actors to decide the Doctor was an alien, and even that only in the last story of Troughton's'.



And Seven was apparently weaved on a Loom. Plus Eight A) had recently recovered from being actually dead, B) stopped saying that pretty soon, and C) is still a lying liar who lies. Remember when One claimed to have built the TARDIS? Yeah, lying liar who lies.

I mean, he might have.

Spoiler: courtesy spoiler

Show

What wit the recent reveal that The Doctor is also the First Timelord, millions of years old, having lived countless lives but only remembering the current cycle. It is entirely possible that one of The Doctor's forgotten lives invited the TARDIS or else built the specific one The Doctor uses and weird things from the Early days like claiming o have built the TARDIS or like, I think Two or Three claimed to be able to Regenerate Infinitely? Stuff like that could be brief flashes of memory that didn't get full erased but failed in later lives.

[Anonymouswizard]

Spoiler

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Ah yes, the ever regenerating being who was a complete unknown in their Xth life despite using the same name forever.

I'm sorry, but going back and watching Hartnell, the Timeless Child twist is flawed. Maybe if the Doctor was kept entirely on Galifrey for 99% of their life, but unlike the new series (where they're a legend) in the Hartnell era the only people who know who he is are the Daleks, and only because they've meet him before.

I remember watching later parts of the original series and nobody knowing who the Doctor is unless they're a returning enemy, and I'm fairly certain they always got to know (I think some people knew of Time Lords, and a very small number already knew of the Doctor, but both him and his enemies tended to begin in the dark not knowing of the other).

It made sense, the universe is a big place, heck the galaxy is massive, and there's so many forms of life there that you could encounter a new one every month for over twenty years and not come close to running out. The Doctor is, at a generous estimate, maybe 4000 years old, they're not really old enough to have been everywhere yet. But if they're as old as the Time Lords (and when you live for about 6,500+ years it takes a long time to get decadent) then why do people only really start knowing about them after the Time War? We've got pretty good evidence that they didn't stay put on Galifrey.

It makes more sense if seemingly destroying both the Time Lords and Daleks at once got him well known around the galaxy, but not too the point of being every good wizard (which, as I remember, is closer to hire it was in Davies run?).

I'm still going for Susan or Rassilon really being the Timeless Child. It just makes more sense to me. The Doctor can have a lot of regenerations if they want to establish that (and they've laid the groundwork for it with 'we don't know how many are left in this cycle'), but the fairly book dumb but very inventive Time Lord should not suddenly become the Only Reason^TM. the Time Lords exist. Even the Cartmel Masterplan didn't go that far (genetic reincarnation of the Other yes, actually the Other no.

[Bartmanhomer]

I'm actually going to write all my fan-fiction stories at my writing thread.

[deltamire]

I mean, he might have.

Spoiler: courtesy spoiler

Show

What wit the recent reveal that The Doctor is also the First Timelord, millions of years old, having lived countless lives but only remembering the current cycle. It is entirely possible that one of The Doctor's forgotten lives invited the TARDIS or else built the specific one The Doctor uses and weird things from the Early days like claiming o have built the TARDIS or like, I think Two or Three claimed to be able to Regenerate Infinitely? Stuff like that could be brief flashes of memory that didn't get full erased but failed in later lives.

I haven't been keeping up with the latest season, so my only reaction to the first bit of information involved in this spoiler was a strong ???????????.

Like a Victorian dandy waking up after being frozen in ice for more than a hundred years, walking into a tv shop, and wondering who the little people in the nice colourful boxes are.

[Rater202]

I haven't been keeping up with the latest season, so my only reaction to the first bit of information involved in this spoiler was a strong ???????????.

Like a Victorian dandy waking up after being frozen in ice for more than a hundred years, walking into a tv shop, and wondering who the little people in the nice colourful boxes are.

Spoiler: Spoiler

Show

The Time Lords weren't always like that.

A Gallifreyan scientist was exploring and found a strange child near the Boundry. She took the childt home and ultimately adopted her...

And then an accident with another child resulted in the child falling to her death... And then regenerating, coming back to life in a new form, something that had never, ever been seen before on Gallifrey or anywhere else in the universe.

And so, the scientist began experimenting on her adopted child to figure out the biological factors responsible for this power, eventually succeeding and splicing it into herself and then testing it. She regenerated into a man, and is implicitly The Other(assuming that the Timeless Child didn't become he Other.)

The kicker? We see the child between experiments, always laying on somekind of examination table... But in a dozen or so forms. Boys, girls, every ethnicity. Either Tecteun, the scientist, deliberately forced the Timeless Child to regenerate in order to study it... Or the experiments were so horrible as to be inevitably fatal in and of themselves. I honestly don't know which would be worse.

The Timelord's ability to regenerate, if not all of their special powers, are the result of genetic engineering to gain the abilities of a tortured child.

The Kicker? when the child is falling to their death? Every time we see them in a new face during the experiments, they, look, bored. As if they have, already in their young life, died and regenerated so many times that a painful death followed by becoming a completely new person no longer fazes them.

How horrifying is that?

Also

The Master, having learned about the Timeless Child while exterminating the Timelords and using their organic parts to give the Cybermen the ability to regenerate, becuase why the hell not, claims that The Doctor is the Timeless Child, that the Timelords would periodically completely erase his or her memories in order to keep the existence of an infinitely regenerating Timelord secret(presumably for various reasons) until

Now... It's the MAster saying this, so it could be a lie, but since he's saying this to try and break The Doctor, blames the doctor for his own existence and the Timelords in general, and the Doctor accepts it as true... (and completely turns it on him: 13's happy to realize that she's lived more lives that she can remember.)

A lot of people don't like it, but I personally think it ties a couple of things together. Notably, Tom Baker's curator who all but outright says that he's a version of the Doctor that's regenerated so many times that he's started becoming previous incarnations of himself. And the Second Doctor claiming that he can regenerate infinitely, which contradicts later lore. And the implied previous incarnations from The Brain of Morbius. And why the Doctor in various incarnations seems uncomfortable in hospital settings. And why Eleven's regeneration into 12 was so big and destructive(basically, the unknown number of lives worth of energy the Timelords gave him was completely superfluous.)

Any further conversation on this topic belongs int he Doctor Who thread in Media Discussions, however.

[Aotrs Commander]

Last point, for the sake of details:

And why Eleven's regeneration into 12 was so big and destructive

Spoiler: For the sake of argumenet, but not really a spoiler, particularly

Show

Ten to Eleven. Eleven to Twelve was "blink and you'll miss it." (Under two seconds, which made sense, because until that point, they had been getting more and more destructive, so as I had observed at the time, this being the start of a whole new regeneration sequence, it made sense it would be stable.)

[deltamire]

Spoiler: Spoiler

Show

The Time Lords weren't always like that.

A Gallifreyan scientist was exploring and found a strange child near the Boundry. She took the childt home and ultimately adopted her...

And then an accident with another child resulted in the child falling to her death... And then regenerating, coming back to life in a new form, something that had never, ever been seen before on Gallifrey or anywhere else in the universe.

And so, the scientist began experimenting on her adopted child to figure out the biological factors responsible for this power, eventually succeeding and splicing it into herself and then testing it. She regenerated into a man, and is implicitly The Other(assuming that the Timeless Child didn't become he Other.) . . .

I understand now, but somehow now understand less that I did before. That's more of a facet of Doctor Who. I believe my friend attempted to explain this to me at like midnight once after these episodes came out, but this sort of actually makes sense, thank you!

[Anonymouswizard]

I haven't been keeping up with the latest season, so my only reaction to the first bit of information involved in this spoiler was a strong ???????????.

Like a Victorian dandy waking up after being frozen in ice for more than a hundred years, walking into a tv shop, and wondering who the little people in the nice colourful boxes are.

Spoiler: A Stupid Twist From The Latest Episode

Show

The Doctor is no longer a Gallifreyan (Time Lordiness currently in question), but instead a being able to regenerate an unspecified number of times. Who is the source of Time Lord regeneration.

Which you'd think would make them a Great Vampire, but £5 says they're no longer a major part of ancient Time Lord history. And nope, that bit of lore has been thrown out to make the Doctor a special snowflake.

Now I know what you're thinking, if the Doctor is millions of years old instead of about 3000 (give our take a few centuries) then how come they are presented as a bit of a dim spark for a Time Lord? Because a) the writers didn't think this twist through, and b) who cares about old lore, the Doctor has to be awesome^TM. Oh but they grew up on Gallifrey with the Master because the notCIA who they worked for decided they were dangerous and seated then.

As you might gather, I'm in the hating the (specifics of*) the twist camp. Also what happened to the Celestial Intervention Agency? They were still around ten years ago, did stuff with Eight in the audio plays.

* Which Time Lord do we know had infinite regenerations and thus immortality? Missed a chance to explain that one in order to make the Doctor special.

[Rater202]

Last point, for the sake of details:

Spoiler: For the sake of argumenet, but not really a spoiler, particularly

Show

Ten to Eleven. Eleven to Twelve was "blink and you'll miss it." (Under two seconds, which made sense, because until that point, they had been getting more and more destructive, so as I had observed at the time, this being the start of a whole new regeneration sequence, it made sense it would be stable.)

Spoiler: I know I said we should move it but its just a little detail.

Show

I was referring to this bit here, actully The regeneration process started here and finished with Smith sneezing and then he was Capaldi. A massive bonfire that destroyed Dalek fighters and a Dalek Mother Ship, shot up for a mile or so, and created a shockwave that resulted in winds strong enough to destroy individual Daleks that were felt for what looks like a few hundred miles.

I suppose you could say that that's more of a prelude to the Regeneration than the Regeneration itself, but you get the idea. "an unknown extra number of lives all getting burned off at once becuase they're completely unnecessary" would explain why that particular regeneration was so much more than the last couple.

[deltamire]

Spoiler: A Stupid Twist From The Latest Episode

Show

The Doctor is no longer a Gallifreyan (Time Lordiness currently in question), but instead a being able to regenerate an unspecified number of times. Who is the source of Time Lord regeneration.

Which you'd think would make them a Great Vampire, but £5 says they're no longer a major part of ancient Time Lord history. And nope, that bit of lore has been thrown out to make the Doctor a special snowflake.

Now I know what you're thinking, if the Doctor is millions of years old instead of about 3000 (give our take a few centuries) then how come they are presented as a bit of a dim spark for a Time Lord? Because a) the writers didn't think this twist through, and b) who cares about old lore, the Doctor has to be awesome^TM. Oh but they grew up on Gallifrey with the Master because the notCIA who they worked for decided they were dangerous and seated then.

As you might gather, I'm in the hating the (specifics of*) the twist camp. Also what happened to the Celestial Intervention Agency? They were still around ten years ago, did stuff with Eight in the audio plays.

* Which Time Lord do we know had infinite regenerations and thus immortality? Missed a chance to explain that one in order to make the Doctor special.

Spoiler: Not directly about the episodes in question, but spoilered just in case

Show

Yeah, the relatively modern obsession with making the doctor the centre of the universe, Da Big One Who Makes Da Rules and is incredibly awesome and has skin in every universe-shaking conflict was kind of what turned me off doctor who. I got about a season or two into Peter Capaldi's run - I was hyperfixating on DW hard for Matt Smith's time, so I was less critical about it - but found the obsession with making every single plotpoint about the fact that the doctor is morally grey and how they do super bad not good things. Just, like, off screen, because consequences are for hacks. Also, the Missy plotline made me kind of uncomfortable for a couple of reasons. I'll always love doctor who, it'll always have a special place in my heart, but I can't really get up the enthusiasm like I used to.

[Fyraltari]

I have yet to see anyone happy with the latest episode and its « twist » and I think that’s saying something.

[Aotrs Commander]

I have yet to see anyone happy with the latest episode and its « twist » and I think that’s saying something.

Last last word: the only positive I can say for it was that the point leading UP to the BIG TWIST made for a better series than the previous one (the mystery made the jounrney fun, if the destination was... Not good), in that I actually watched and enjoyed the season, as opposed to giving up after about three episodes.

(The previous season was merely agressively okay, and "agressively okay" is not worth me makign time for nowadays. And it entirely the plot (and lack thereof) that turned me off. I thought rhe Doctor and the companions were Fine - actually the companions might have actually been a notch or two above average, honestly; the problem with Thirteen is that she wasn't outstandingly good, and she desperately needed to be with this sort of change - she needed what for me was the Eleven "basica, run," moment for as many people as possible and kind didn't get that. Bjut when it reached the point of "I could force myself to watch this episode about spiders oin a hospital or watch QI XL was the point I went, "no." But I watched the New Year's Special with the Dalek and I was like "really, was that so hard, chaps and chapesses?" And, like I say, this past season, WHATATWIIIIST aside, was fine.

(The Master was fracking GREAT, nearly as good as Simms, who - and yes, you can feel free to throw things - is my favourite Master.)



And entirely changing the subject, so we HAVE something else to talk about... I have, for a few years no,w been slowly picking away at an entirely alien campign world. (Specifcally, a tide-locked world orbiting a highly modified RCB variable star.) I spent a lot of time doing Maths and getting a plausible, if unlikely set-up with the minimum slathering of narravitium over it as possible (currently limited "why the solar wind doeasn't blow the atmosphere off" and "how a variable star has existsed long enough for a planet where life evolves to happen and whay the dimming period are so damned long and thus cause all the civilisations to collapse.")

Anyway, I have been stalled out for a good while once it came down to start populating it. The first nominal party with be an approximartely paleolithic tribe forced to make a migration down an ancient roadway. The issue has been, logically enough, exactly how to design the species. On the one hand, convergeant evolution and convergent narrative conveniance leans back towards "two arms, two legs" - simply because in experimenting with the four-leg-robot-spider Yrgynela in their space IKEA and something as simple as "Nod Rocket Cycle for the four-spider-legs humanoid torso Elenthnars" have proven stepping too far out of that makes it a task to even work out what chairs and beds look like. But on the 'tother hand, anthropamorphic animals is something I hate (especially just "animal head on human body." It thus needs to be not-human, but at the same time, not TOO alien, which as you might imagine, has created some difficulties. And more than "human with forehead bits" or "has a lot of extra natural weapons" which another too-easy out.

I am considering something along the lines of something endothermic (kind of a given, what with the need for a high-functioning brain) creature with some sort of chitinous or scaly covering; though the presence of continuous wind suggests some form of insulation might be requried (but by the same toke, sort of need to not have much so they need clothes...) But with, like, bird-legs or something (tail under consideration.)

As I was waiting for the bin men to come at Nanny's, so I could head home, I started properly reading Bampy's old World of Wildlife books (number 3 being a volume With Crocodiles that I also used to want to have looked at when I was a small child). And as I was skimming through I spotted a picture of a standing gerenuk (more or less straight from the front).

Spoiler: reasonably close picture from the web

Show

The one in the book had a little bit of a pot-belly which looked even better.

And I went... "Huh. At least in terms of the shins to upper belly, that looks like that might work as a good basis..."




Edit:Also finished the vast majority of the Aotrs fighter forces at 300th (6mm)

Spoiler

Show

Crater (old cardboard-scratchbuilt circa turn of century vrs 3D print)


Foulwing (ditto)


Apparition (cardboard vrs print (28mm verson os Spectre II, on which the Apparition is developed is fold-flat cardboard)


Rend (new model)


Dirge (original model 28mm cardboard foldflat)


Fallen Soul


(Now notably the only vehicle to exists at fleet-scale, 6mm, 12mm and 28mm...)

(In fairness to Smugmug, once they got that bug fixed, the slightly redesigned UI IS actually slightly faster now, since it automatcially copies the link with one click, rather than having to multi-click select.)



So all i have to do now is print a couple more Fallen Soul 300s, (now that we have a working printer and some filament that actually works...), paint the Dirge 144th and finish out and print the Murder at 300th (which will be MASSIVE and will have to be printed in 3-4 parts, not including turrets) and maybe considered whether ot not I want to do the Terror/Death Swarm as new models (considering how big they are and the Aotrs fleet now only just fits into the two boxes...) and the table-top Aotrs forces will be finished finished - at all four scales!

[Fyraltari]

(The Master was fracking GREAT, nearly as good as Simms, who - and yes, you can feel free to throw things - is my favourite Master.)

*Throws a singular stone*


You know that thing that all earpods do? When one starts working only half the time unless you fiddle a bit with it and then stop working at all?

Mine just did that. Before I was even home from the shop.


In other news, it's been announced that the Dungeon of Naheulbeuk video game will be out one day before my internship ends which is all kinds of awesome.

For context Naheulbeuk was an audio parody of RPGs that started all the way aback in 2001 and is a cornerstone of French geekdom. Since then it has been adapted in books, comic books, a failed animated show (the company that was leading the project crashed for unrelated reasons after the pilot was done and most people thought it would take the video game project with it) and an actual (if still very silly) tabletop RPG. I wouldn't know the first thing about tabletop RPGs if it weren't for this show and it is bery dear to my heart.

[Cazero]

For context Naheulbeuk was an audio parody of RPGs that started all the way aback in 2001 and is a cornerstone of French geekdom. Since then it has been adapted in books, comic books, a failed animated show (the company that was leading the project crashed for unrelated reasons after the pilot was done and most people thought it would take the video game project with it) and an actual (if still very silly) tabletop RPG. I wouldn't know the first thing about tabletop RPGs if it weren't for this show and it is bery dear to my heart.

You forgot the boardgame.

[Fyraltari]

You forgot the boardgame.

Yes, I did.

Edit: Oh! And the songs, too!

[Rater202]

Today I learned that John Cena, the actual guy not his wrestling persona, apparently has superhuman abilities of recovery.

Supposedly, he's been injured badly and made full recoveries in a much shorter time than the average person would.

[Bartmanhomer]

Today I learned that John Cena, the actual guy not his wrestling persona, apparently has superhuman abilities of recovery.

Supposedly, he's been injured badly and made full recoveries in a much shorter time than the average person would.

Really? He's the Mewtwo of Wrestling. Mewtwo use Recover.

[Peelee]

Today I learned that John Cena, the actual guy not his wrestling persona, apparently has superhuman abilities of recovery.

Supposedly, he's been injured badly and made full recoveries in a much shorter time than the average person would.

I have tons of respect for the guy for his dedication to the MAW Foundation.

[enderlord99]

If my (remaining) dog flinches when I touch her, that tends to mean she's thirsty. I think, anyway.