haverholm

I'm not kidding, it doesn't feel like we had a years-long pandemic in between...

Fingers crossed Jo Martin will be back on screen before another five years pass!

Sorry if this is off topic, I don't mean to stir a shitstorm. I just seem to hear barbs about Pixelfed developer dansup's online behaviour every now and then, but no one ever comes out and make clear what the trouble is.

I guess it's a legitimate complaint that he holds out on open sourcing projects, and keeps them close to his chest rather than distributing workloads. Given he's currently developing Pixelfed and Loops and a messenger called Sup, I can understand the worry that he'll hit a figurative wall and take all projects down with him...

So I found this open letter just now as I were trying to get to the bottom of it, and I genuinely can't tell if this is what people have been growling about?

The above link is to the "appendix" where the anonymous authors appear to show receipts for the behaviour they flag. In shorter form, from the letter itself:

dansup, the maintainer of Pixelfed, Loops (which NLnet helps fund), and FediDB, among others, is a dangerous force in the fediverse community. With a follower count of over 22 thousand, he has repeatedly shown himself to be hostile to fellow FOSS fediverse developers, have a lack of care for open-sourcing his work, and be in favour of injecting the fediverse with advertisements. He has also proved himself to be prone to conspiratorial thinking, regrettable public statements, and embarrassingly public meltdowns.

Somebody tell me what is going on here?

[edited for typos]

If you start the third episode of "Nightmare in Eden" at 23 minutes to midnight on New Year's Eve, the clock on the screen changes from 20:24 to 20:25, and Romana presses a button on the spaceship's dashboard to set the midnight bells tolling.

When the Tardis lands in the horrors of World War I, the Doctor uncovers a threat spanning galaxies and history itself. But this time, saving the day might doom the Doctor forever.

These are my thoughts on the colourised, re-cut version of the War Games serial released on December 23 2024: https://bw.artemislena.eu/tardis/wiki/The/_War/_Games/_in/Colour/(TV/_story). It had been edited down from 10×25 minute episodes to one 90 minutes special, with new material added in, including score.

Surprisingly enough, the cuts for (much shorter) airtime worked quite well. Some parts of the plot were lost, and people were inexplicably saved from certain pickles to appear unharmed — but that was to be expected. I enjoyed the edit more than I thought I would. There were more exterior shots added than strictly necessary, and I guess they were often used to disguise cuts. They did seem a bit too frequent in the second act, but that could be just my preference.

The colourisation was pretty loyal to the colour film of the time, I thought. Especially for the genre and target audience. Quite bright, but with all the earth tones required for the initial World War One setting. The recovery of 16mm location recordings made some scenes stand out even crisper than they ever looked on screen!

I did have issues with the hamfisted way the War Chief was retroactively confirmed as an earlier incarnation of the Master, with the much later Saxon Master’s theme inserted into the soundtrack, and a sound effect of a beginning regeneration after the War Chief’s demise. That seemed an unnecessary indulgence of old fanboys’ head canon.

The reason to race through most of the serial, of course, was to get to the Time Lord trial and the Second Doctor’s [edit: previously unseen] regeneration into the Third — canonically eliminating another ambiguity from the Whoniverse that had until now allowed for ample Season 6B theorising.

The trial had some fun, 21st century additions that I rather enjoyed — if you know you know, I'm not going to spoil those — but the added regeneration sequence (pasted from this fan video) didn’t just fill a gap where fans’ imaginations had run creative for 55 years. It also gave us an absolutely atrocious CGI rendered closeup shot of “Jon Pertwee”.

Is anybody happier and better off that we have this new end to War Games? I doubt most viewers are more than indifferent to those superfluous, dreary last minutes. And I’ll definitely remember season 6B fonder than I will this ending.

Thoughts, fellow viewers? Did you watch this hour and a half more charitably?

It’s really important to point out that our own interaction with tech may have changed to be extremely controlled, and seem like we have a dependency on corporations… but the original underlying structure still exists. We have power to exist independently, and create our own alternatives too.

At the core of it, we can participate our own way, if we know where to look.
You can still create websites, your own tools, distribute your own software… and how to do that is a very important understanding to cultivate.

Tech literacy is an imperative, especially in the era that we are in right now.

what are Davies and Moffat’s secrets to telling a great Yuletide yarn? And what do they get up to at Christmas themselves? In [Radio Times'] exclusive fireside chat, they reveal all. Are you sitting comfortably? Then they’ll begin…

In which the writers of christmas episodes past and present discuss

• each other's christmas specials;
• how Joy to the world came about;
• why the Doctor doesn't just solve everything by going in the TARDIS;
• writing, and why AI won't steal creative writers' jobs; and
• what comes next on Doctor Who?

According to Radio Times,

this new version of the serial will feature a 'lost' piece of Doctor Who history – while the Second Doctor's regeneration into the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) originally took place off-screen, the special edition of The War Games will depict the changeover on-screen.

and

We're also promised the new release – which will air on BBC Four and be available on BBC iPlayer – will feature "recovered footage not seen since the original broadcast".