Random Dent

I kind of did this once! Essentially I got laid of from a job but happened to have a good money buffer and life was quite inexpensive at the time, so I just thought “fuck it” and went as long as I could without working, I made it about a year.

It was awesome! My mental health has never been better, I wrote most of a book, got pretty decent at Blender, started working on learning to make games… and then I had to go back to work and it all went to shit lol, that was several years ago and I haven’t touched any of it since.

Actually it was a two-parter, S09E5&6 (of the reboot), called The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived.

Here’s a clip of the relevant bit!

There’s a Doctor Who episode with that idea in it too, the Doctor saves a girl in Viking times but brings her back forever, and when he meets her in mediaeval times she has a whole library of books that are just her memories that she’s written down over the years.

It seems like a lot of people complain about Doctor Who not really having any canon or rules, and contradicting itself constantly (sometimes within the same episode) but I don’t think that’s necessarily a failing because it’s not trying to do that at all.

The trend these days is for a lot of shows, especially sci-fi ones, to be sort of ‘internet-proof’ and be designed to withstand the people who go through frame-by-frame looking for little errors and contradictions to pull apart, and Doctor Who ignores that completely and just aims to be big fun campy dramatic nonsense, which I think it mostly succeeds at. I think the only cardinal sin for that show is don’t be boring, which IMO it pulls off more often than not.

And it’s fine to not like that of course, but I don’t get it when people try to call the show out for not doing something it’s never really tried to do, at least since it came back in 2005.

Yeah I think seasons 4-12 are the kind of ‘safe’ era, but you can go a few seasons either way and still get some bangers, it’s just a little more patchy.

I thought the general broad strokes of what happened were fine (IE with

), I just thought it was rushed and done in a kind of sloppy way. I really didn’t like

'cause I fucking hate that character lol.

My first car was an ancient Renault that was plagued with electrical issues, to the point that it was actually pretty funny. I was also a penniless student at the time and I don’t know how to fix cars, so I just sort of put up with it.

It used to drain the battery when it was parked, so I kept a spare battery in the boot and some jumper cables and used to have to jump-start it every time I switched the engine off.

One time I was driving at night and the headlights started dimming until they were nearly off, I turned the radio off and they came back on again.

Eventually I finally took it to the scrap yard, they said it was worthless but they gave me £10 for the tape deck lol.

Technically the worst car I ever had, but also one of my favourites.

Yeah same here, I thought it was one of the few cases where the adaptation was better than the book. It cuts out a lot of the waffle from the books and patches up lots of holes, especially with characters like you said.

Our local library is really cool, it has a recording studio, a makerspace with 3D printers, and a service where you can borrow tools. You can even borrow a radon detector!

We went Aldous Huxley when we should have gone Iain M. Banks lol

I think we’ve still made amazing progress, just in different areas. For example, communication. In the 40s, if you were in the US and needed to contact someone in, say, Australia, the options would either be to send a letter and wait maybe weeks or months for a response, or possibly a prohibitively expensive phone call.

Nowadays you could click two buttons and have a six-hour HD video conversation if you wanted to, essentially for free. And you could send them documents, videos, money, whatever you want basically instantly. Heck, if you really wanted to you could both create realistic 3D avatars and hang out in VR if that’s your thing lol

Yeah same here! I had no idea it was that much now.

House of Leaves feels like reading some sort of forbidden text.

I literally had one on Friday! Long story short: mine was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.

I had a wisdom tooth removed a couple of years ago and that sucked but it was bearable - it hurt for about two weeks, but Tylenol made it manageable. So I was expecting something along the same lines here. The actual procedure itself was fine - the scraping out of the inside of the tooth is a weird sensation, but not painful 'cause they freeze you up. Then afterwards, once the freezing wore off it hurt for about three hours and I was expecting it to suck for a while. But I had a Tylenol and a nap, and when I woke up it wasn’t hurting at all and it’s been fine ever since.

Other people have told me that they had pain for a week or so, so your mileage may vary, but yeah for me it was literally just a few hours of discomfort and then back to normal. Nowhere near as big a deal as I thought it was going to be.

I think in the UK we have a similar thing but they’re called Refreshers.

Yeah as someone living in Canada that seems wild to me. I can’t imagine they still do that in places with snow, that would be madness.

Also Smarties! These are Smarties everywhere else in the world apart from the US as far as I can tell.

This is a bit beside the point but I really wish Tarantino would drop his whole “10 movies and done” rule. I feel like it’s making him procrastinate too much about his final one and he’s already chucked out at least one promising-sounding project that was almost ready to go from the sounds of it.

Hans and Sophie Scholl, brother-and-sister members of the White Rose resistance movement within nazi Germany, who were executed for producing a series of anti-nazi propaganda leaflets at the ages of 24 and 21 respectively. I always have a soft spot for people who use art and language to combat fascism, and Sophie in particular had a real way with words:

The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

And her final words before being executed:

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?

NB: I should note that there’s a bit of conflict about this, as the nazi executioners were not meticulous record keepers. But it seems that it was either this or “Your heads will also roll”, but either way she apparently said both and either one is great IMO.

Scrofulous - a) having a diseased run-down appearance. b) morally contaminated

I learned this word when I heard someone being described as a ‘scrofulous drinkist’ lol