terastalungrad

[terastalungrad]

To him, you are someone who stays.

Past Lives (2023) dir. Celine Song

#watched this film yesterday and i think it's an all-time favourite maybe?? #past lives

[terastalungrad]

It's been a while since I shared any of my writing on this platform, so here's a piece I'm extremely proud of.

It's an email:

Checking my account, this invoice still hasn't been paid. I wonder if we could establish a system where these can be paid on time, rather than when I notice they haven't been?

#creative writing #freelancing

[terastalungrad]

inspired by boop day, reblog this post if its ok for people to send you random asks and interact on your posts with no judgement. i want to talk to people.

#i don't think it's the vibe i put out #but i enjoy the words of tumblpeeps

[terastalungrad]

Happiness advice is hard to compose, since we're all born with different brains, producing different chemicals in different quantities at different levels of efficiency.

"Try regular exercise!" chirrups an influencer whose brain has never known a day of depression in its squiggly grey life.

But I do think I've noticed behaviours that poison joy, and I haven't ever heard it as advice. My theory: bullying is bad for your happiness.

Of the four types of bullying, three of them - intimidation, humiliation and harassment - are usually committed by insecure people, trying to make themselves feel more powerful by taking that power from another.

(The fourth type of bullying is exclusion, and I have no citations for any of this, since it's just a bunch of stuff I reckon. I do think I'm right though, for what it's worth.)

The least happy comedians I've met are the ones who smoke weed in their flats while watching and scoffing at clips of their rivals. Their enemies. Their friends.

I'm slightly transfixed by the story of a relatively well-known comedian who became obsessed with the Instagram stories of an amateur comic. The established comic would watch the videos, share them with friends, play them at parties - mocking the comic's lack of self-awareness.

This newer comedian wasn't internet famous or anything. Just a guy starting out, trying his hand.

To operate like this, you must believe that some people have value, and others do not. Once you've decided this, how can you expect your brain to permanently accept that you're one of the worthy? You can make yourself feel powerful in the short term by humiliating another. But in the long term, you curate a worldview where a person's eccentricities are a reason they deserve to suffer.

Good luck enjoying what you see in the mirror.

[terastalungrad]

Sometimes, you’re a comedian with a touring show to promote, so you do an interview with a regional newspaper.

I think that’d be the funniest possible time to reveal a big scoop, wouldn’t it?

Stewart Lee is currently touring, and to promote his Yeovil performance, gave an interview to Blackmore Vale Magazine.  According to Wikipedia, the Blackmore Vale is an area of north Dorset, south Somerset and southwest Wiltshire.  According to the comedian Jake Baker, the magazine would cover his school sports day as he grew up in Dorset.  That’s the level of news you’d expect.

The questions are friendly and easy, from a journalist clearly familiar with Lee’s work and history.

The first question is about the show’s angle.  Lee describes the nature of the show, and here’s an excerpt:

So it looks like stand-up, and sounds like stand-up, but it’s actually a kind of character piece about a desperate person who’s frightened and trying to organise the world in a way that puts them in control. And I guess you could argue that’s what a lot of stand-ups are doing anyway. Ricky Gervais to me looks like a very frightened man. He’s frightened of transgender people coming after him, the act is a defensive wall.

Fun!  This is a Ricky Gervais hate blog, so it’s nice to see a sudden, unexpected attack in an unrelated promotional interview.

Lee mentions Gervais again in response to question four.

Sometimes I become bitter and think ‘I get all this good press, why can’t I get 10 million quid for a TV special like Ricky Gervais?’ But on the other hand, I wouldn’t want that audience, it wouldn’t allow me to be better.

And then again to question eight, where Lee explains why he spends six months running new shows in the relatively small Leicester Square Theatre (as opposed to arena comics who might do 10 warmup shows followed by 60 tour dates).

You can still run it like a club gig, you can interact with people in real time. Also, you wouldn’t get better at the show because you wouldn’t have done it as many times. You can see this with an act like Gervais. Those shows have not been run in, they’re not fluid, they’re a succession of inflexible statements that would snap like twigs if the pressure of an unforeseen event was applied to them.

The journalist finally addresses this head on.  It really is worth reading the entire article - there’s a lot more than I’m quoting, including an interesting story about Sean Lock:

But here are my favourite bits:

[Gervais] still kind of copies me though, which is the weird thing. There’s still a lot of cadences of what I do but they’re used in the service of evil. In Star Wars, he’s Darth Vader and he’s taken the force, which is me, and used it for evil purposes. He was a fanboy, he was actually the booker at University of London and used to book me and Sean Lock all the time. And when he became famous for the Office, he wrote an hour-long act that was so indebted to us it was awkward. [...] If he’d come up through the circuit that would have been rubbed off him because you find your own voice doing club gigs. It took me two years of gigging five nights a week to come through the mesh of things I liked. But he didn’t have that experience in the same way. [...] Funnily enough, in his first show there were bits I’d never recorded that he’d do almost verbatim. He’d clearly remembered them. I went to see him at the Bloomsbury – on his invitation actually – with my then girlfriend and she was very concerned for me. I’d given up at that point due to lack of interest, and she was concerned for what it felt like to see my act being done to hundreds of people, it was quite weird. On the other hand, that sort of did make me think I don’t want it to be consumed into someone else’s vocabulary. And also, I think because he had a residual sense of guilt, he would always credit me in interviews as being an influence – that helped me in 2004 to get the audience back.

This is, to my knowledge, the first time Lee’s ever claimed that Gervais stole his material.  He’s certainly talked about Gervais clearly taking influence from him (though in the past, he downplayed this compared to the account given in this interview).

It’s a pretty big thing to accuse a comic of stealing material.  That’s a big taboo.  I reckon this is partly because Lee wants to discourage fans of Gervais from coming to the show.

Anyway, let’s finish by quoting the end of the interview:

It must be strange to have that level of financial remuneration and those audience figures but not really a single good review. And I expect what that does for you is create a cognitive dissonance where you have to manufacture a worldview by which the whole world is wrong and you’re right. Which can’t necessarily be very good for your mental health, although I expect the money’s nice.

#stewart lee #ricky gervais #tagging my hate

[terastalungrad]

I just learned yesterday that Pikachu, my favorite Pokemon, was originally designed not by Ken Sugimori (he only finalized the design), but by a female graphic designer named Atsuko Nishida. 

Also after googling her, I found out that she’s also designed Sylveon–another favorite PKMN of mine. She’s also illustrated some very pretty Pokemon cards!!

Thank you Ms. Nishida! :-) May you get more credit and love for your contribution to the Pokemon franchise.

[terastalungrad]

"How are you feeling, Commissioner?"

"Enough of this small talk!"

Iconic behaviour, zero notes.

[terastalungrad]

Important update:

I have a new favourite superhero movie, and it's Madam Web.

#madame web

[terastalungrad]

When I really want to insult a Dr Who fan, I accuse them of not being very familiar with the show.

Anyway, the BBC responded to the complaints about The Star Beast.

"As *regular viewers* will be aware". Hehehe.

#doctor who

[terastalungrad]

What do you mean you hatched an egg you bought at the SUPER MARKET

Ohohoho

So there's this company in the UK, right. They brand themselves on producing fancy free range eggs and as part of that they have breed information written on the carton.

I did some snooping and found that every miracle news story of a supermarket egg hatching in the UK traced back to duck eggs, specifically the Braddock White duck eggs produced by this one company for the supermarket Waitrose.

And one day my mum brings them home and says "I bought these to eat but aren't they the ones that hatch?"

And it's spring and I'm hatching a ton this year so in they went.

On candling we had three fertile eggs! That's a fertility of 50% - the same as shipped eggs from a breeder!

Hatch day comes and we get 2 ducklings, Curie and Becquerel. Sadly, Curie contracts duck septicaemia from an infected navel and doesn't make it, but Becquerel is a healthy bird and growing like a weed.

I had put 4 breeder eggs in a week after them in case just one hatched, so Becque now has two Khaki Campbell cross friends called Tsuki and Hoshi so she isn't lonely.

And as of today's 7am Quacking - Becque is a female! Which means she's capable of laying eggs and therefore I have pirated a duck.

#ducks #i really love ducks

[terastalungrad]

is he?

#doctor who #kinda

[terastalungrad]

I drive

#pokemon

[terastalungrad]

Bottle episodes! That's another concept that doesn't work the way you'd expect in Doctor Who.

Wild Blue Yonder feels like a bottle episode, right? It's almost entirely set on a single spaceship. It has barely any additional cast members other than the two leads. If this was an episode of Star Trek, it would be a bottle episode for sure.

And yet!

The key thing about bottle episodes is that they save money by minimising the need for extra resources. This means using the sets you've got, rather than building new ones.

Wild Blue Yonder's spaceship required loads of new sets to be built. It may be only one spaceship, but it's a LOT of different rooms.

I'm being pedantic here, of course. I wouldn't correct anyone who said "this is such a great bottle episode" because I know what they mean. It does feel like a bottle episode, even if it technically isn't one.

Where I do feel people get it wrong is when they assume the episode's cheap. This was clearly a very expensive episode - it really wouldn't have saved much money.

It's hard for Doctor Who to save money, because it doesn't have many standing sets. Star Trek has its spaceships. Buffy had the Summers' house. Doctor Who has ... the Tardis. And when we've had episodes set entirely in the Tardis, we've had loads of new rooms built for it.

The closest Doctor Who gets to bottle episodes, then, are stories that minimise the guest cast AND locations. Such as one of my favourite Jodie Whittaker episodes, Eve of the Daleks. Set entirely in a warehouse, with only two major guest characters.

More mind-blowing is this:

In 2008, we had the episodes Midnight and Turn Left back-to-back. One of these was designed to save money, the other was very expensive. Can you guess which is which?

The cheap one's the episode that reuses loads of existing CGI, and has very few guest characters appear in more than one or two scenes each.

Midnight feels like a bottle episode, but had a big cast required for the entire shoot.

#doctor who

[terastalungrad]

The biggest thing Doctor Who fandom gets wrong is the assumption that Doctor Who works the same as Star Trek, or Star Wars, or Marvel comics.

You see this when people ask whether something's "canon", or when they refer to the Doctor Who "extended universe".

But the show's too old and too strange to work in this way.

By now, Doctor Who's spinoff media are more similar to other big franchises. But until the show's 2005 return, the spinoffs carried greater weight in a lot of ways.

From the late 70s, the writers and artists working on Doctor Who comics were more prestigious in their fields than the writers and directors working on the TV show. Even before this year's adaptation, The Star Beast was already a stronger influence on the Russell T Davies version of the show than anything shown on TV the same year.

Before the mid-80s, Doctor Who wasn't available on VHS. And since the UK didn't syndicate the show like the US did for Star Trek, most of the show was unavailable in the present day.

For most people, then, the definitive versions of Doctor Who stories were novelisations. The books are a stronger influence on the Moffat era than the TV serials were.

When the show ended in 1989, the books continued - now telling original stories (known as the New Adventures). Writers from the show moved into this medium. Unrestrained by the limitations of the TV show, these novels became hugely influential.

This can be counterintuitive for a Star Wars fan, where the films take precedence over novels, or for a superehero comics fan, used to a strictly-defined canon that determines what "counts".

#doctor who

[terastalungrad]

Malware takes many forms.

(Wolverine #36)

#i have read an outrageous number of benjamin percy comics #so now i love jeff bannister and talia warroad #sincerely excited to see them together #wolverine #ghost rider

[terastalungrad]

Maybe this was obvious to others, but it's only just dawned on me:

The Doctor spills salt at the edge of nothing. This invites the Toymaker into the universe.

This is what the Doctor says before he swings that mallet:

DOCTOR Yeah, but bi-generation has never happened before. What if, what if - what if the Toymaker's domain is still lingering? Just for a few seconds more, we're in a state of play.

The suggestion here is that bi-generation is possible because of the Toymaker's domain. And what that means is to be in a state of play.

Maybe regeneration is about rules - linear, limited. But bi-generation is play - nonlinear, unlimited.

And let's look again at the new Doctor's introduction:

DOCTOR Bi-generation. I have bi-generated! There's no such thing. Bi-generation is supposed to be a myth, but… look at me.

He doesn't say "I thought bi-generation was a myth". He says it's "supposed to be a myth". So in the Toymaker's domain, myths become possible.

#doctor who

[terastalungrad]

In 2014, TV ratings started tracking 28-day figures.

Until then, ratings tracked overnights (i.e. how many people watched this TV show on the night it aired?) and 7-day figures (i.e. how many people watched within a week of its airing?)

TV habits are changing, and measuring success isn't just about the people who watch a show live.

Anyway, it's good to hear that The Star Beast - which hasn't actually hit the 28-day mark yet - is already doing better than every Peter Capaldi episode, and all Jodie Whittaker episodes since Rosa.

#doctor who