monkeys and ponies

I got interviewed for a podcast again! Episode 64 of the Reality Bomb podcast is a documentary featuring interviews with fifty Doctor Who fans in nine countries, and since we were all asked the same question – “What do you think of Series 11 so far?” – the results are fascinating, with positives, negatives, and everything in between. (Personally, I am amused that both of my quotes are me yelling about something that bugged me, but plenty of other people on the podcast discussed the same positives I did, and if my brand becomes “person yelling about how Chibnall should stop fridging women,” I can live with that.)

(xposting this on Dreamwidth, and heaven help me, Pillowfort.)

I'm on another episode of the Reality Bomb podcast, this time talking about how "The Dominators" isn't complete crap, or if it is complete crap, I at least found it enjoyable crap. Look, it's got incredible costumes like this, so obviously it is high-quality Classic Who:



Anyway, give it a listen, and be as grateful to the editors as I am that they saved me from sounding like I couldn't string two words together.

… I'm on today's Verity! podcast about fanworks. I've been enjoying Verity! since its very first recording, so I was delighted to be invited on to talk about Teaspoon and fanworks in general. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

After Gally last year, I decided I wanted to catch up on all the Classic Who I hadn't seen. Like a lot of Americans of a certain age, I started watching on PBS with the Fourth or Fifth Doctor, and while I'd seen a whole heck of a lot of the original series, PBS' broadcast schedule was … let's say "quirky," shall we? Anyway, I looked at lists of old serials and calculated that I had at most 58 (I couldn't remember if I'd seen "Silver Nemesis") stories to go, which averaged to a little more than one per week if I wanted to see everything before Gally 2015.

As of today, I'm done.

If you follow me on Tumblr, you've already seen this list of highlights/lowlights, but I'm reproducing it here regardless:

The Edge of Destruction – like a little two-act absurdist play. SO GREAT.
The Keys of Marinus
The Chase
The Gunfighters – SHUT UP, this was delightful, and the song cracks me up.
The Tenth Planet
The Power of the Daleks
The Abominable Snowmen
Any Pertwee-era episode with Delgado. Seriously, if it has Delgado in it, I will watch it.
The Curse of Peladon – full of hugely clichéd tropes, and yet utterly delightful just the same.
Invasion of the Dinosaurs – I have no excuse for loving this one as much as I did. Wait, no, I do: Sarah Jane is awesome in it. Also, the dinosaur puppets are lolarious.
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

(You’ll note this list is missing some obvious favorites, like “The Aztecs,” “The Romans,” “The Enemy of the World,” “The Invasion,” all of S7, etc. This is because I’d seen those episodes before, so they weren’t part of this project.)

A few lowlights:

The Web Planet – Thank god I never have to watch this again. EVER.
The Celestial Toymaker – how you can take the game-playing trope and make it boring to me, I don’t know exactly, but this does it. I was really looking forward to this one, too.
The Space Pirates – tedium not helped by the generally poor quality of the reconstruction I watched.
Death to the Daleks – I was literally convinced for a while that this was some kind of experiment in just how boring you could make an episode of Doctor Who. Like “The Celestial Toymaker,” not even the game-playing trope, for which I am utterly weak and will watch in almost anything, could save this one.
The Monster of Peladon – I enjoyed the first three parts … and then the giant clusterfuck of parts 4-6 rolled around.
Planet of the Spiders – Laughably bad from start to finish. Boring, racist, stupid characters, and did I mention boring?

So, that's about 270 episodes I've seen over the course of the past nearly 30 years. And now, I can rewatch the ones I loved most without the slightest guilt about not watching the ones I didn't care for.

DW/TW/SJA porn reccing comm three_settings is back, and we need reccers. I don't care who you are or what you like to read as long as it's a) well-written and b) involves characters of legal age, so please drop by the sign-up post, won't you?

(Please feel free to copy this message and/or promote the comm yourselves if you like. At this point, I have almost no shame in asking people to help me get it back off the ground. Many thanks.)

... sign up for the who_like_giants ficathon! This is an awesome way to make sure that some of your favorite minor characters (like a certain interspecies pair of lesbian crimefighters, or River's team, or Duggan, or whoever else strikes your fancy) get the fic love they deserve.

And now, back to work, or at least pretending to work until I can spend time writing my Cleaves fic tonight.

Via Slackerwood. Everything about this video makes me happy.

If I'd known before now that Arthur Darvill used to sing in an indie band, I'd have posted this video sooner. WHY SO CUTE, ARTHUR?

Via io9.com, a man using a Faraday suit, two Tesla coils, and 500,000 volts of electricity to play the Doctor Who theme with lightning.