Psychochronography

General musings. My main blog lives at http://tardiseruditorum.blogspot.com

andrewhickeywriter:

Writing this chapter is making me feel like Phil Sandifer must have felt when dealing with Doctor Who Season Five. “You mean I’ve got to watch another sodding base under siege story where only one episode still exists in the archive?”

Oddly, that got easier as it went on. For me the cratering low point was The Abominable Snowmen, which is still, in my view, one of the worst entries I’ve ever written. I had a godawful reconstruction, couldn’t come close to following the plot or dialogue, and completely pulled something out of my ass. After that I made a point of hunting down decent reconstructions and had the good fortune of The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People doing a modern day base under siege over the weeks I was doing those seasons, which let me get away with comparing the format to a modern execution of it.

But yes. I sympathize with your pain. What’s your chapter on?

That Depressing Moment

ununnilium:

andrewhickeywriter:

teatime-brutality:

philsandifer:

when you realize that if City of Death went out today it would be pilloried by many as a silly filler episode a la The Unicorn and the Wasp. 

Sometimes I regret the weird and artificial remove I maintain between myself and Doctor Who fandom.

Then I hear that The Unicorn and the Wasp isn’t regarded as the pivotal episode in a season about people turning themselves into books and I feel my choices are tip-top.

Fandoms are perverse, horrible communities that destroy everything they claim to love. At least male-dominated ones are. Female-dominated fan communities tend to be much more interesting, and it’s interesting to me that the female Who fandom community is growing up in parallel with, but separate from, the more established male-dominated fandom.

I’m trying to dissociate myself more and more from most of the fan communities I’m in, because I find myself getting involved in their testosterone-driven pissing matches and behaving as badly as them.

Honestly? I’ve gotten more and more annoyed at people who blame things on “fandom” as this strange abstract hivemind. This counts for Doctor Who as much as everything else; there are lots of fans out there, male and female, and it’s been a long time since it was possible to enforce a Single View Everyone Has To Have Or Else.

Please do disassociate yourselves from shitty communities, and please do find better ones. Because there are a lot of better ones out there, and they’re not based around gender; they’re based around the willingness of the participants to be open-minded and have fun.

Absolutely. I mean, as I said in two of my replies to this, there are obviously wonderful parts of Doctor Who fandom upon whose support I rely. I don’t want to suggest that fandom as a whole is broken.

It’s also true that there is a large amount of oxygen is sucked up by several specific communities/sorts of communities. And I think a level of reverse-metonymy is not entirely inappropriate. 

thealphapenguin asked: I know this isn't the most comforting thing in the world, but there are a lot of people out there who love your blog, and more to the point, who love it at least partly BECAUSE you deviate from fan orthodoxy. Like, well, me. Thank you.

No, no. It absolutely is comforting, and as I said, I do love the community I have on that blog. They are people I enjoy discussing Doctor Who with. But there’s something weirdly alienating about having so much of my thought on a subject be public and, even more unnervingly, influential. Like, awesome, I’ve imposed my artistic will on the universe and altered it. That was the goal. But it’s still a bit alienating and weird.

In essence, I haven’t just watched Doctor Who in a long time now. (Actually, I’ve started doing it with the classic series. The Woman and I watch episodes occasionally, and it’s really just relaxing to watch and enjoy it knowing that at best I’m going to tinker my existing essay.) 

That Depressing Moment

teatime-brutality:

philsandifer:

when you realize that if City of Death went out today it would be pilloried by many as a silly filler episode a la The Unicorn and the Wasp. 

Sometimes I regret the weird and artificial remove I maintain between myself and Doctor Who fandom.

Then I hear that The Unicorn and the Wasp isn’t regarded as the pivotal episode in a season about people turning themselves into books and I feel my choices are tip-top.

I have serious #concerns about this. Because I hate Doctor Who fandom right now. Hate it. I think it’s a toxic, miserable place that is thankfully such a small fraction of “people who really enjoy Doctor Who” that it has no particular bearing on the series right now. Because whatever one might say about Moffat, he at least gets that you do not play with Doctor Who fandom anymore, not ever. (This is an argument I should advance on my blog, actually - that Love and Monsters marks the point where the series officially divorces its fandom.) 

And on top of that, I love the series right now. I know you don’t, and I certainly don’t love the series you see on television, but I see a completely different series that I really, really enjoy and feel as passionate about as I ever have about Doctor Who.

But on top of that, I make my living writing about Doctor Who right now. And this is really fucking embittering. I mean, I love my readers. I have a really, really nice community of, it seems, fellow fandom expats. The fan debates still spill over, but even there in their most reasonable form. Even those who hate the Moffat era aren’t the hysterical “Moffat is ruining Doctor Who” camp or of the sort who turn Moffat into a Robert Holmes villain lurking in the basement of the BBC and plotting his elaborate plan to overthrow women forever.

But my God am I going to enjoy just shutting up about Doctor Who for the Twelfth Doctor era and, for a while, having an era of Doctor Who all to myself. Because I really do, these days, want to have a remove with Doctor Who fandom that I just don’t get.

Presumptuous as it might be, I really understand how Davies felt when he bemoaned that he was the only Doctor Who fan in Britain who had not gotten to see a new episode of Doctor Who since it came back. I suspect Moffat is rapidly getting to be the same way - wanting more than anything to get to watch Doctor Who again. Even though I maintain my silence on most of the Moffat era, I have to start sorting my positions now and putting the thematic pieces on the board so I can move through the era. And when the Twelfth Doctor era comes… I mean, I’ll write a book eventually, when it’s all over, but I can just watch again.

That Depressing Moment

when you realize that if City of Death went out today it would be pilloried by many as a silly filler episode a la The Unicorn and the Wasp. 

teatime-brutality:

I need to stop letting how much love my kindle preventing me from remembering what a terrible thing Amazon is.

Today has been a help with that.

I try very hard to ignore this fact given that there’s not even $10k a year of my income that doesn’t cross through Amazon’s bank accounts at one point or another in the production chain.

The problem with Amazon's new fanfiction platform, Kindle Worlds

stalungrad:

We’re gonna go ahead and assume that Amazon didn’t realise what kind of Pandora’s box they opened when they announced Kindle’s new fanfic store.

According to Amazon’s statement today, Kindle Worlds is “a place for you to publish fan fiction… engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties.” The small print being that your fanfiction must be set in “featured Worlds,”, which currently include Warner Bros. shows Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries. So people looking to profit from their Harry Potter or Teen Wolf opus may have to wait a little while longer. 

WHAT

Almost all of the ethical issues in terms of compensation to writers here appall me - it’s an unabashed move to profit off of and control fan communities. Remember the fuckstorm that was the Jayne Hats? This is setting that up on a massive scale - now that Warner Bros is profiting from fanfic they have an actual incentive to shut everything else down. I recognize that the “if we use your characters you get zilch” clause needs to be in there precisely because nobody is actually going to read all this shit and thus people need to be protected from frivolous lawsuits along the lines of “your new character is obvs based on my Mary Sue, so pay up,” but the fact that you need to stomp on creators’ rights to do that is a prime example of why allowing fanfic and corporate publishing to mix is a godawful idea.

All of which said… if Doctor Who were to sign up, it would mean that limitless streams of fanfic would all be Official BBC Licensed material. The sheer power of this weapon in canon debates is unfathomable and yet beautiful. And I kind of want it to happen.

(Source: hellotailor)

stalungrad:

philsandifer:

The wiki-admins would make good Daleks.

You think they’re bad, you want to see Wikipedia’s editors.

I still have an admin bit on Wikipedia, actually, which I maintain for the sole purpose of being able to read the useful and accurate articles that the barely sentient fuckheads that have systematically destroyed the utility of the project for anyone interested in the humanities or popular culture get deleted.

Seriously. It is currently my belief that Wikipedia is actively harmful to humanity because their content policies are epistemologically opposed to the humanities. 

I should really blog about that. I’ve finally gotten a platform large enough to lob interesting bombs like that.

(Source: stephadoo)

teatime-brutality:

andrewhickeywriter:

I know!

It gets more ridiculous when you look at things like http://factionparadox.wikia.com/wiki/Iris_Wildthyme . That’s all you can say about Iris on the FP wiki — anything else has to go on the Doctor Who wiki. Meanwhile if you look at http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Cwejen , you get the Cwejen’s one appearance in a Benny audio, and a link to the FP wiki to find out anything else.

I can only splutter at the shameless politics of licensed Chris Cwej material from licensed Faction Paradox material only counting as Doctor Who if it happened in licensed Bernice Summerfield material. 

The wiki-admins would make good Daleks.

(Source: stephadoo)

Anonymous asked: Any thoughts on the upcoming console generation?

I’m concerned about the prospect of activation codes and the killing of the used game market. If that’s real, I think it’s a death knell for gaming as a historical practice, and I think that’s disastrous for the medium as an art form.

But that’s just a rumor, albeit an all too plausible one. And past that I don’t care much, at least yet.