sovay: (Silver: against blue)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-09-02 10:50 pm

Here we are half-awake

The second-best part of this highly mediocre day was a gyro on which I put a phenomenal amount of tzatziki, to the point that by the end of it the meat was probably the condiment. The best part was taking a walk with [personal profile] spatch right before sunset. I remembered to bring my camera.



Since our street has proved something of a canyon when it comes to afternoons, I have gotten into the habit of walking up to Tufts for my allotment of late sun and brick.



Their last roses of summer are particularly voluptuous.



This Karnak-wall of sandstone belonged to one of the residential halls.



Up close it was filled with the wealth of tiny shells and spines and bones, the settling of an ancient seafloor.



Rob took a dramatically sun-flooded picture of me.



I liked the interaction of the subject with the shadow.



This brilliantly dead leaf in its mesh of green looked like as good a symbol of autumn as any to me.



A moment of silence for the birch that used to grow around the corner of our block.

I am not sure that Series 13 of Doctor Who holds together at all, but since Kevin McNally was playing essentially Marcus Brody if he had started in parapsychology instead of classics, I enjoyed him very much.
thisbluespirit: (dw - thirteen)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-09-03 05:30 pm (UTC)(link)
The doorstop novel of "Around the World in Three Years" is probably not the thing to recommend to you, then. I hope you are reading as much as you like offline.

Looking at what cropped up in the tag for that episode made me think I probably did look a while ago, because that is very much all or nothing there, isn't it? And sadly, probably not! I am reading a bit better offline than I used to, though. But never as much as I would like! <3

I love so much of it and it remains possibly the only time anyone has ever noticed that Burn Gorman can be romantically adorable. And also someone the eighteenth century looks great on.

Aww. He went around doing all shades of creepy so well everywhere else, that's the problem. But I can easily believe that he is the sort of actor who's good at just about everything.

Ironically that one wouldn't be at all difficult for me to get hold of, because the Fifteenth Doctor being some kind of American co-production is on Disney+. I had to resort to the Internet Archive for Thirteen.

Oh, I thought Disney had the whole New Who back catalogue along with it, but then I don't pay a lot of attention to where it's streaming in the US. (All I ever know is that it must be around on one of the usual suspects or there would be no end to the outraged screaming in my corner of the internet).

Anyway, Ncuti's era is great! RTD did his usual trick with finales to greater and lesser extent both times, so fandom has issues, but you know fandom, it always does! But he really did come through with a great assortment of very different & very good episodes across both seasons.
Edited 2025-09-03 17:31 (UTC)
thisbluespirit: (dw - thirteen)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-09-04 09:54 am (UTC)(link)
I meant it about the audio series; I am unironically a little surprised that Big Finish never got in on that combination of characters, given their fan-favoritehood.

It takes a while - they have now got Jodie and Mandip on board & the first boxset should be out already or at least very shortly, but I don't think they've got John Bishop yet, or any of Thirteen's other companions. They have still never had Matt, Peter or any of their companions, so they have impressionists playing Eleven and Twelve and new companions for them. So it does depend on things outside their control! It is totally a natural fit for them, though. They may do it yet!

It occurred to me immediately that this would damage my book-buying habits and things like my chances of ever actually sending a letter back to you like a person, but I forgot about physical media.

*hugs*

I was always gripped by it even when I was e-mailing [personal profile] sholio highly rational reactions like "RICHARD YOU ABSOLUTE PECAN."

That is a great reaction! Turn has just never really come my way, but it sounds good.

Tubi is still hosting as far as I can tell the totality of Classic Who, however, so I can look at Martin Jarvis and the disco lights any time I feel like it.

Always important! You could watch McNally's other DW appearance then, if that wasn't a really bad idea. XD (Not his fault obv; Six's intro is a v poor story with giant slugs for villains. People think Kevin McNally was good & it was a shame they didn't keep his character on, though, so 'can we keep him?' is now the standard reaction to him by DW fans. I do know at least two people who like it, though, so I suppose you never know. Personally I had more fun watching Martin Jarvis as a giant moth on fast-forward in episode 5 or whichever ep of The Web Planet is largely giant insects wobbling about chasing each other very slowly. Painful at actual speed; instant pick-me-up on FF. XD I was going to say DW shouldn't do giant insects but then I remembered the glories of The One With The Maggots, whatever the Wirr(r)n are, and the gravity-manipulating evil woodlice.)
thisbluespirit: (dw - five)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-09-04 01:39 pm (UTC)(link)
That's kind of amazing.

They do similar things with the dead cast as well, including using their children/other relatives instead, which I just feel is going Too Far, but nobody else minds. XD

OH and I meant to tell you about two comments ago that thanks to our recent conversation, I now have a strong suspicion of where the protagonist's ahistorical but cool-looking leather coat came from.

I will look into it, but it does sound like the sort of thing where I'd be stuffed if it's not on DVD and the fact that it's not on my Amazon list as such despite me definitely having been recced it a few times by now, does not suggest that there is one over here.

LOl at the coat, though! Why not have a cool looking leather jacket in the 18th C? XD

I've been staring at this podcast and wishing it had transcripts, since I can manage eleven minutes of Denholm Elliot on Desert Island Discs, but an hour of podcast is incredibly difficult for me to manage for anyone

That is a shame. I'm not usually able to do podcasts either, so a lack of transcript is very frustrating and tantalising.

You should totally tell me about that last one.

I will, although I do need to tell you also that it struck me after that I could probably Google "the one with the maggots" and it would come up with the DW serial and I just checked and it really did, no other context needed. :D

The gravity-manipulating woodlice are in Frontios, which is a Fifth Doctor serial that I adore for having a sort of BBC Shakespearean DOOMED far future human colony where the leader is called Plantagenet among other things & features William Lucas, Lesley Dunlop, Jeff Rawle & Peter Gilmore, but which many other fans regard as merely mid, and they also feel the leader of the woodlice shouldn't have a nose. *handwaves objections* (I recommend it as a good Five serial, with a strong guest cast, a moody if studio-bound setting, and proper stuff for all three regulars to do, and also features the hatstand in a starring role. "Frontios buries its own dead.")

BTW, nothing to do with DW, but something that amused me this week - someone reacted to Gosford Park on YT (the 2nd person ever afaics), and someone else wrote in the comments that Tom Hollander apparently tells a story about Maggie Smith - that he hadn't met her before, and she turned up late and tired having been off shooting Harry Potter that day. He was too nervous to go over, until he finally said to himself this was silly, plucked up courage and asked, "How's it going, Maggie?" To which she replied, "Oh, deathly dull," and he was crushed.

And on the DVD extras there's a Q&A session in which Jeremy Northam says that on the first evening they were all together, he and Claudie Blakley were sat on a table with Maggie Smith to get to know each other, but she turned up late and tired having been filming Harry Potter, so she looked really unapproachable, and they were both too nervous to speak to her, so they sat there in silence while all the other tables were chatting away, until someone came over and said, "How's it going, Maggie?" and she just looked at them and said, "Oh, deathly dull," and finished them off.

(It may just be the JN one garbled and misattributed via YT comment, of course, but it's definitely more amusing if they really are parallel anecdotes.)

ETA: It looks like there are some German dvds, but it also mainly looks like I could only get S1 and that even if I could get really lucky with s1, 2 & 3, I still couldn't get s4. (It claims to have a s1-3 release but this is apparently just a front for 9-1-1 somehow). Amazon certainly seems to have R1 releases, though, or claims to, although maybe only already out of print.
Edited 2025-09-04 13:58 (UTC)
thisbluespirit: (heyer - gothick)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-09-04 05:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Kevin McNally, Doctor Who fan favorite the show never keeps and sharer of scenes with eighteenth-century bomber jackets.

Absolutely!

Like seeing doctors. This week has been doctors. It could be something else for a change.

<3<3<3 Yeah, Doctor Who is one thing; nothing but real doctors is another! *hugs*

The idea of that being her standard line to get people to leave her alone after a long day of Harry Potter is perfect.

More the flip side of the same conversation, if it isn't just a confusion - and poor Dame Maggie getting no luck with conversation all round if so, heh. It's what happens when you get that awesome?

This is a bit stupid, but someone actually appears to have put the entire series on Dailymotion.

Oh, well, good! I'm glad it's turned up somewhere you can get at it if you need to! It would be nice if it was available sensibly as well, but then when we say available sensibly, I suppose we do at this point between us share a very last decade definition of that. ALAS. *fistbumps*
thisbluespirit: (dw - six)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-09-05 01:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh my God he grew into his face. Those eyebrows needed another ten years at least.

Ha, you went and watched the slugs and the twin maths geniuses, didn't you? XD
thisbluespirit: (dw - six)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-09-05 01:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, and then I rewatched the entire first season of Turn to recuperate!

Understandable! XD