@jynersolives It finally stopped here in my little part of Bavaria just last night, and is due to start again in an hour or so. It literally didn't stop at all for 38 hours at one point.
Folks, in a weeks time the most important #EuropeanElections in your lifetime is happening. The long-standing centrist majority in the #EuropeanParliament is in danger from the extreme right. And don't let yourself be fooled from people like Meloni or Le Pen distancing themselves from the AfD: their intentions are to lure the center-right towards them and build a new majority beyond the center-left, beyond the Social Democrats, Socialists, and Greens. So VOTE for a center-left or left party!!!
Also: VOTE!!! The more people voting means that the relative share of the extreme right will go down = the old centrist majority can hold and things like the #GreenDeal can continue. Otherwise we will see a rollback on environmental policies and a gridlock over the next 5 years. #EuropeanElections
Trump being found guilty will have exactly zero effect on his election chances. As long as the majority of White America feels threatened by everything that does not look like them, Trump is gonna win. Political memories are short anyway.
I was just reading up on Covid again. Official death toll is about 7mn people. But I was reminded about a piece in The Economist two years ago, in which a model was shown that esimated the true number being around 3.3x as much. If that model still holds, we are talking about roughly 23mn people worldwide. At the same time, it is estimate that in the EU alone around 14mn people suffer or have suffered from some form of long Covid. This thing will haunt us for years to come.
What is wild to me however is that we do not talk a lot about it anymore. I always wondered how the Spanish flu seemed to vanish in the history books so quickly. But now I understand...
Hot tip for anyone interested in getting into (modern) #DoctorWho
Get a good VPN so that you can access the BBC iPlayer and watch for free
DO NOT START WITH ROSE OR ANY EPISODES 1!!! Instead start with these episodes:
s1e6: Dalek
s2e4: Girl In The Fireplace
s3e10: Blink
s4e10: Midnight
s5e10: Vincent & the Doctor
s6e11: God Complex
2013: Day Of the Doctor
s8e4: Listen
s9e5: Girl Who Died
s10e3: Thin Ice
s11e6: Demons Of The Punjab
s11 special: Resolution
Why these you ask? Because they are stand-alone episodes highlighting the character of (a) their Doctor, (b) their relationship with their companions, (c) their writers and showrunners, (d) different (arche)types of DW stories.
You can then pick and choose what you prefer most and dive into that particular era.
@jynersolives good picks! I'd probably add the Impossible Planet two -parter (or Family of Blood) just as a great example of those, but otherwise those would be exactly what I'd suggest as a best of/intro to Dr Who to people.
There's probably one issue I have with a lot of RTD-written episodes of #DoctorWho Season One: they rarely establish a rulebook and play by it. It's all very vague and whimsical a la "and then this happened". In "The Giggle" we had some rules laid out with the Toymaker but e.g. in "The Devil's Chord" I had no idea why stuff that happened actually happened. It's a bit similar with "73 Yards", which was held together by atmosphere and Millie Gibson.
@jynersolives this isn't just "Season One" though, this is just "how RTD writes Doctor Who" - his original run follows mostly the same pattern, after all (and of course the original New Who Season One ended with a literal deus-ex-machina as close to magic as RTD could get away with back then...)
@aoanla True, RTD has his style. But here it seems amped up to eleven, it all feels a lot like wiggling your arms and see what kind of card falls out of your sleeves. I don’t mind magic in DW, but you need some kind of rules to not make it meaningless. Again, I enjoy the characters of the Doctor and Ruby, I love Boom and am intrigued by 73 Yards. I just wish it wasn’t all mystery box trick of cards.
#DoctorWho#73yards doesn’t make a lot of sense but of the four "magical" episodes so far, it utilized the fantasy angle the best imo. Great performance by Millie Gibson, without her all the plot would fall into one of its many holes. Still on the fence with this iteration of DW, but the casting is super strong and I‘m really glad that Gibson will stay on for one more season
Fantastic interview with Elias Toufexis on #VoiceActing in #VideoGames. It also strengthens my belief that VA is different from acting and you cannot just take a live-action actor and give them a VA role.
Man, thanks to my two #Covid infections in 2020 and 2022 I have absolute brain rot at times. I forget stuff so damn fast and easy, never had that before. And sometimes I'm standing there, looking for words in stories I was telling a million times before. Fckd up.
I haven’t seen a lot of #StarTrekDiscovery discussions on my home feed, despite the fact that I follow a good many #StarTrek hashtags and Trekkies. Is nobody watching the final season?
Great to hear on the replies that people seem to watch and enjoy the final season of #StarTrekDiscovery! It's just that I won't subscribe another US-centric streaming service. There's still all the old Trek available on Netflix here in Germany. I will pirate Disco once its finished. It was imo really a mistake from Paramount to go into streaming.
@jynersolives I have watched it, and I have found it entertaining. The subtle (and overt) connections to ST history have been fun. My issue with the series overall is sustaining the energy for a “galaxy threatening event” every year is exhausting. Can’t the holodeck just mess up one ep? SNW has become my favorite nuTrek (with LD close 2nd)
@jynersolives I don't think anyone* was arguing that it would happen within a few months. The alarm is that Threads is the beginning of an Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish campaign, and those typically take years. We shouldn't expect any major problems this soon.
okay, maybe a few overly-alarmist people who didn't really understand the situation, but not by any means the main bulk of people against Threads/Meta