Erudite Waffling (3/11/23)
The featured image for this post is the weather outside my office window yesterday afternoon as I got ready to queue this up, and is as good a statement of mood as any.
What I’m Up To
Well I suppose the biggest headline is the first new TARDIS Eruditorum in… months? Almost a year? Not even sure, but my coverage of Juno Dawson’s The Good Doctor is up on my Patreon. Things are quieter on the Britain a Prophecy Patreon, but we’ve got a scene out with Nechama for coloring, which means we should have some writer/artists notes soon, and there’s only two scenes left on issue 5. That Patreon has gotten a little lower than I’d like, so there may be some sort of fancy sale coming in soon where we offer catch-ups on our physical editions or a copy of our re-covered and reprinted #1 to all Patrons who have backed before issue 5 is done or something. We’ll see! Whatever it is, if you back now we’ll be sure you get it. I’ll probably get a LWIA out this weekend, and then it’s Brooklyn again. (So we’ll see if there’s one of these next week.)
If You Post Vacation Photos I Will Let Myself Shrink to Zero Points In A Typographical Hunger Strike
Do we need to get you some help, Centyjust? Like, your pathological aversion to vacation photos and repeated threats of self harm are actually slightly unsettling, and I genuinely worry for you.
No, No, I’m Fine, I’m Just Being Melodramatic and Should Probably Go Listen to Some Nice Angry and Depressive Music To Better Regulate My Own Emotions
Well, good news on that front.
Halo 2: Pretty Hate Machine.
Listening to it, especially if you put it right next to Ministry or Skinny Puppy, the thing that stands out most clearly is that Trent Reznor has obscenely good pop instincts, taking what those bands are doing and making it slap in an immediately catchy way. We can talk about the lead single next time, and “Something I Can Never Have”’s swirling maelstrom of despair is one of those “everyone already knows how good this is” songs, but damn if “Kinda I Want To,” “Terrible Lie,” and “Sanctified” don’t all slap. And “That’s What I Get” at least deserves credit for the most impressively bad lyrics of Reznor’s career. Notably better than I remember it being. 7/9 Inches
Tumblr Asks
As always, my asks remain open and I’m pretty reliable about answering them. (I think I’ve got one sitting that I need to go back to.)
What’s the best NiN version of I’m Afraid of Americans?
You really can’t beat the classic V1 Mix.
Do you think it was a good or a bad thing that the Post-2005 Who showrunners haven’t hired any classic-era writers? I know RTD only wanted Robert Holmes from that group (impossible for obvious reasons), and there are some out there who bemoan that Terrence Dicks never got the chance to write another episode before his death.
I can’t say I think Dicks would have been a natural choice for coming back to television, what, twenty years after his last gig? We got Tenth Doctor novels by him. What more do you want, y’know?
We did of course get Rona Munroe, which was quietly delightful. And we got PJ Hammond on Torchwood, which is close. Both are lovely gems in the history, but I also think they show some of the limitations of that kind of backwards gaze.
Are you going to bother to do the DWM 60th Poll this year?
I did the First Doctor when the link crossed my dash because why not, but I’ve not been actively keeping up to do subsequent ones.
With the the scale of the Last War, is there any interest in generated epubs of the Books already completed?
Not especially. I put a pretty high quality bar on my book releases. It seems like the point of releasing a pay version of something that I’ve already put out for free. So a for-pay version that’s just got all the typos and first draft energy of the original feels like it, god this is a dispiriting way to talk, dilutes the brand.
How to combine research and paper writing with ADHD?
I really don’t like to position myself as a font of ADHD advice—I’m stubbornly unmedicated despite quite severe ADHD, and, like, that works for me but I’m really reluctant to try to universalize it in the face of all the people I know for whom ADHD meds are essential to functioning.
I mostly handle it by selecting projects that can engage my hyperfocus. Which is often a problem, both academically when I had a crap paper topic and career wise where, like, Neil Gaiman and the Chibnall era both aren’t doing that right now and I’m really struggling to get work done. When it works it’s amazing, but I really don’t want to undersell the life infrastructure required to do it.
Can you recommend media (books, TV, movies, comics, etc) about utopias? What do you like? What’s unchallenging but well-made? What’s critically interesting?
The Culture series is the obvious choice here. Past that I can’t say it’s a theme I’ve particularly explored in my media consumption.
Another question : what do you make of Ewing’s role in the Last War ? I think in some ways he is highly reminiscent of Moore because a) he is bloody good and b) he is always going back to mystical and occult ideas throughout his work and his newsletter appears at times to suggest at least a passing interest in stuff like synchronicity – in that regard, he seems much more of a magician figure than, say, Gillen, who is a materialist by his own admission.
While I’m being obnoxious and since I’m enjoying Sins of Sinister : any thoughts on the Ewing-Gillen-Spurrier trio in relation to the British Invasion of yore ?
I mean, the mystical/occult ideas while also being really rooted in superheroes sounds like someone other than Moore to me…
As for the Ewing-Gillen-Spurrier trio—and like, I should stress that I’m at least casually friends with all three of these people at this point and so this is a very different sort of critical assessment, but you’ve got to feel like the British comics tradition is in pretty good hands.
(Also, nothing obnoxious here. The asks are open for a reason)
If you could go back in time and kick someone in the nuts (someone who was dead before you were born) who would it be and why?
My great grandfather, because I want to know how paradoxes actually work.
Rewatching Some Doctor Who
So here’s something funny. Lexi, despite being, y’know, British, has basically never seen Doctor Who. Was too young for the classic series and too old for the new one, and just never got into it. Which is wild, because she’s absolutely the sort of person who will excitedly talk about Penda’s Fen and Children of the Stones and has opinions about early electronic music and a profound love for 60s and 70s cinema. Equally, however, she’s someone with an aggressive disinterest in fandom. So obviously I’m prepping a run of six classic stories to watch with her over the next few months, and I’ll certainly be reporting on how they go over. But for now the list, which if nothing else is a delightful window into Lexi and what she’s going to be into.
- The Web Planet
- The Mind Robber
- The Dæmons
- The Brain of Morbius
- City of Death
- Ghost Light
The Part Where She Leaves You With a Song
Let’s just grab one from my “one like equals one song I love” thread on the bad site.
March 11, 2023 @ 7:56 pm
I live in Ireland so I’ve seen Marxman CDs in second hand shops fairly often. Maybe I’ll buy one