Maius Intra Qua Extra

Nope, didn't get to actually sit down and write anything about "The Story and the Engine" last week, so I have to bundle it with "The Interstellar Song Contest". I just have no idea where my time is going nowadays.

( The Story and the Engine )

( The Interstellar Song Contest )

( Aw crap )

I have to run off to an all-day band thing, so we watched the episode early in the morning and I only have a couple minutes to say a few things.

Warning: VERY spoiler-y. Avoid until you've seen the episode.

( Read more... )

I'm finally sitting down to get my thoughts about the new season and these two episodes, so here goes.

( The Robot Revolution )


( Lux )

I made a thing! This is inspired by a conversation with romanajo, about a Facebook response she'd seen in which the person hijacked a perfectly normal BF announcement about a Sarah Jane and Harry audio to complain about how terrible the modern series has been ever since "The Stolen Earth". (Which seems an odd choice to me, since it's neither DT's nor RTD's exit. Or even CT's. Also, I guess the guy thought "Journey's End" was terrible? Because most people either refer to both parts of a two-parter or usually target "Journey's End" as the more significant of the two parts.)

Yes, someone asked what in the world did his rant have to do with BF or the audio in question. And yes, he failed entirely to answer that question.

Click to expand.

My husband found this floating around Imgur. I really love this take on the Master's perspective. And of course the tag had me on the floor.

I only just realized that it's less than a week before Christmas, and that means it's less than a week before the BBC broadcasts the Doctor Who Prom from back in August. So, I figured I should write up my visit to the Proms before that happens. I've been meaning to write up my Europe trip but just haven't got around to it.

Of course, if you're going to actually watch the broadcast, don't read this. :)

( Read more... )

I've been meaning to make a post about the cosplays I have created in Guild Wars 2 (which I posted about a couple of times years ago), but have been too lazy to take screenshots.

Yesterday, someone posted their Tenth Doctor cosplay to the GW2 subreddit. I have opinions. :)

Actually, it's not a bad cosplay, once you realize that they were cosplaying Ten from "The Day of the Doctor". He's got the awful hair and the light blue shirt (the Doctor always wore a white shirt with the brown suit through series 2-4). The scepter that the character is carrying is a great sonic. But, as you probably already guessed, I don't think DotD!Ten is a great look to model.

The poster asked for suggestions, so I replied with images of my Ten/Fourteen cosplays - you can see them in the thread, and I might edit this post to add the image here later (I'm on the wrong computer for it right now). Mine are based on series 2-4 Ten, with better hair (and actual sideburns).

The reason the Ten cosplays are coming out now is that GW2 just released an armor set called the Dapper Suit, which is a pinstripe suit (jacket/shirt and trous) with oxfords. Up until now, my Ten has been wearing a long coat over a blue solid jacket with no tie and solid trousers (see the Fourteen cosplay - that's exactly it, except colored differently). With the new armor set, I was able to change Ten's trousers to blue with red pinstripes, though I still can't change the top if I want to keep the coat. And then I have an alternate outfit with just the Dapper Suit, colored brown with teal pinstripes.

GW2 does have a feature called "equipment templates" which allows you to store looks and switch between them with a button press, so I can switch between coat!Ten, brown!Ten, and Fourteen any time I want. :D

Back to the original post, someone suggested that they use a specific item to make it look like it's raining, and the OP responded that they do, but they had removed it for the screenshots. So apparently, the OP patterns his cosplay after "The Day of the Doctor" (so the character doesn't look like he did in any of his other episodes), titles the post with a quote from "Doomsday", and adds a specific item to look like a single scene from "Journey's End". What a strange mish-mash.

As I noted in my response to the OP, I have a bunch of other DW cosplays, and I'll post them here sometime soon.

Title: "Perhaps Once More"
Fandom(s): Doctor Who
Characters: Fourteenth Doctor, Just This Once Tiff
Pairing(s): None
Rating: G
Genre: General
Word Count: 4049

Tiff is busy. She's got too much to do during a workday, so much so that she even takes the work home. So why is she here on the doorstep of the eccentric bloke who'd tried to buy the house from her with three twenty-pound notes?

Read it on AO3.

Author's Notes:

Ya know, I thought that writing a story about an episode character who had no lines and didn't show his face was as obscure as I could get. I was wrong. This is a story about a novelization character who appeared on two pages and also had no lines.

But that's how I roll. Tiff fascinated me immediately and I just needed to write this story. And I love seeing how long it takes for the hit count to reach double digits - I'm predicting a week; it'd be a month or more if I only had Tiff in the tags, but the Fourteenth Doctor will draw in a few gawkers.

I'm just going to say now, even if you know who the character is, this story probably isn't worth your time. :)

Title: "Back 'Round Again"
Fandom(s): Doctor Who
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Martha Jones
Pairing(s): None
Rating: G
Genre: General
Word Count: 3009

What's the point of having a time machine if you don't use it to view important historical events?

Read it on AO3.

So it's Thursday already. I really wanted to post a review of "The Legend of Ruby Sunday", but I never got around to it and the second half comes out tomorrow, so I figured, why bother now? Also, it was going to be "just a few comments, but not a full review because I don't want to really say anything until we get the full story", so no loss there.

I will say that I really enjoyed the episode, and that I'm not sure it that it didn't open up more questions than it managed to answer. Omg, what is up with Mrs Flood? And I loved the listing of the pantheon! The Mara! Can't wait to meet Reprobate. Yes, I have theories, but it's not worth the time to discuss them now, when we'll have real answers in about eighteen hours.

As soon as the episode was over, we popped in "Pyramids of Mars", and that was enjoyable, too. I remember watching it very early on in my nascent obsession with DW and not finding it particularly interesting or good, but now, after many years and a lot more DW education, I really enjoyed it. And now I'm prepared for the new episode tomorrow.

But the real reason things have been a mess this week is because we got thrown another curveball at work. Without going into detail here, the client company, after finally revealing their new plan which cut their only productive division (the one we mostly work for) in half and causing us to lay off nearly half our people, decided not a month later to pivot again and cut the division entirely. They're shutting down the division's product - the only product they've created in over two years that actually works and is complete - and dismissing the workers. They're keeping the division that spent those two years squabbling with itself and failing to produce anything workable.

I highly suspect this is a political move, that the directors of the other division, who have more political clout and need to preserve their own jobs, convinced the C-level people that they could re-create our division's product cheaply and quickly, and using the tech that C-level people favor (which happens to be older, less powerful tech as well). Time will tell if that's the case, and if it is, it's not likely to succeed. After all, they were unable to produce their own working software; why should we expect them to be able to produce something that they have no knowledge about? And they're not even going to build on what already exists. They're actually getting rid of all the people who know how to do what they want to do.

But, this does mean that our company is in trouble. At this point, our C-levels are trying to find ways to occupy people so that we don't have to lay people off. They said that they're not laying people off immediately, that it'll be something like three months before that will have to happen, and they have some leads, so they're optimistic at least for some people.

It's very likely that I'll be first on the chopping block, since I'm not a dev, no one wants QA as the first people on a project, and there are other project managers that would be more qualified to manage any projects that come in (my husband being one of them). But I'm really not bovvered. I'm back to the state of "whatever happens happens, and I'll be glad to have some time to devote to my own life".