Waffle

In the year since I became a Doctor Who fan I've developed some strong preferences. I've come to regard Jon Pertwee's foppish Doctor as a low point in the series' history, and persuading me to watch another Colin Baker-era episode will take some work. I love Tom Baker's Doctor and the quality of the writing and direction that most of that period's work has. I never want to see Davros again and I don't see the big deal about the Master. Daleks can work if done well but when done badly, they're absolutely crap. Cybermen, on the other hand, have been consistently crap in every episode I've seen that they appeared in. Some of these have been fine despite the appearance of blokes in silver suits; Tomb of the Cybermen is very enjoyable for its playing-off of the characters and Earthshock is made worthwhile by the steadfast heroism of Peter Davison's Doctor, the least quirky incarnation but the most righteous one. But even in those episodes, believing that the wooden actors in silver suits were some sort of great menace to anyone took not just willing suspension of disbelief but an active effort of the imagination to pretend that what the acting, costumes and special effects technology couldn't deliver was in fact there on the screen.
So are the new Cybermen any better?
First off, and this is something that continuity enthusiasts and those who do like the original Cybermen will be relieved to hear, the paralell-Earth Cybermen are not the originals. "It's happening again" says the Doctor, as if Cybermen are an idea that turns up in every universe or on every world some time. A repeated meme. But for the purposes of writing and conceptualising them, a fresh start.
Ironically, "Rise of the Cybermen" has more of an old-Who feel to it than any episode of the new series so far. It's slower than the previous few episodes. It's tense, relying on horrors unseen for effect. It's directed by Who veteran Graeme Harper. There's a classic-style crippled, megalomaniac villain (but in keeping with the theme of the new series, he is a man who plays God with human life and intends to extend his own natural life-span by unethical means). And it's the first half of a two-parter. Only in the last five minutes are the tin blokes fully revealed. That means there were 40 minutes that were designed to be rubbish-free, and it shows. In those 40 minutes, we get a fair amount of exposition setting up a rather complex parallel-universe situation, and a good look at a large cast of characters including the members of an underground resistance cell, parellel versions of Rose's parents, a second Mickey and the President of Great Britain, who looked a bit like Colin Powell.
The greater length and slower pace help a lot. Recent episodes have been criticised for going too fast and lacking breathing room. Happily, this one did not have that problem. Nor was the breathing room filled with needless exposition. Everything we needed to know was presented in dramatically meaningful sequences. I am now sold on the idea that, as long as they're given good scripts, two-parters should occur more often.
I'm not yet sold on the tin dudes I've been avoiding talking about in the previous two paragraphs. They look sort of slick and there's a menace to their stomping, military gait, but they're, well, it always boils down to zombies in this series doesn't it? Zombies, zombies, zombies, is all I hear. These are even after brains. They're soulless drones that exist to turn others into drones just like themselves, with no initiative or will of their own. Not even a proper hive-mind like Star Trek's Borg (themselves very derivative of the original Cybermen, but, at least in their original form, better-executed. Why did everything in Trek have to get watered down and wimped out, by the way?). But after only five minutes of screen time, it's too early to tell.
Rise of the Cybermen has at least left me wanting to see more. But with a script, direction and special effects like this one, the Cybermen themselves could be made of Playmobil for all I care.

I just read on the Xepher forums that PHP/MySQL on the server had been down for several hours while I was sleeping. This means that in all likelihood, the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic wasn't working, although it may actually have reverted temporarily to the Movable Type-based version, which builds an index.html file. Apologies for the downtime, if you noticed any.

Update: It looks like the changes to the database settings have caused the titles and possibly all the typed text within episodes to be presented as ASCII characters instead of the Unicode encoding they need to be. I've alerted Xepher to this.
Now's as good a time as any to link to an article Pete Ashton linked to a while ago: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). If you're a software developer, learn this. If you're the customer of a software developer, have someone carve this into a baseball or cricket bat, the better to bludgeon your developer with if they get it wrong. Please.

I have now killed more babies than King Herod. Just about all my pet set pieces from the original are gone, crushed under the heels of plot and characterisation. This is, on the whole, a good thing, and new set piece scenes will grow organically out of the plot and the characters.
Adam Cuerden, of this blog and the webcomic Dangerous and Fluffy is now well-established as the guy who gets to proofread every word of script even in its rawest versions. Since he is currently demolishing the execrable Hogwarts Exposed Harry Potter fanfic on the fan community The HMS STFU (and has already dealt with the far worse Rose Potter series), he knows how to deal with leg-gnawingly awful stuff and should be able to handle the worst that I can throw at him.
I have progressed to the bit where the Rogues are in the dungeon - a variant of that sequence was in the original but just about every detail has been changed including the specific groupings of who has and hasn't been jailed. I have tried to give all sequences more of a sense of location as I've been trying to do since 2002 with the web-era storylines. In doing so, I have cannibalised the abbey setting from the unpublished story Beards which I no longer have any intention of putting online.
I've hit upon the first bit where some offline research was necessary. Rather than recycle my old ideas about inns, I've been trying to find some information on what medieval inns were actually like. Google and Wikipedia were unhelpful, so I went to the library and scanned the history section for social histories of travel and hospitality. I found little, but there was one book with a good chapter on inns in the Early Modern Era which I can sort of extrapolate from. The writer made the point that inns should not look third-worldish - that while the appearance of backwardness creeps in quickly in manufacturing once one goes back beyond the Industrial Revolution (and by the way, I know quite a few people who would disagree with that), the service industry in historical times would be similar to that in our own time. This basically means that while there may be lower standards of food, hygiene and service, or not, depending on the exact time and location, there would be the recognition that food, hygiene and service distinguish good inns from bad ones. No comical "everyone sleeps in the same bed and swills dinner from a trough" then. Suits me quite well, actually.

One of the best things about running is going out in the fields and having the core part of your training somewhere where horses graze. Horses, while not exactly bright, are very interested in what goes on around them, so they'll have a look and then when they see running going on, they'll also start running. It's a fantastic thing to look at, very different from watching them run while they have riders. They always look like they're having a great time with it, and their movements are graceful and effortless, unlike those of most human runners.
Lambs will also get in on the fun and games. Fully-grown sheep always look like they haaaaate being sheep, but the ones that are only a few days old know how to have a good time. So you'll get horses running gracefully in one field, lambs dashing to and fro in little groups in another, mature sheep looking at the lambs worrying if they'll catch scrapie, maybe a few frogs croaking in the ditches - perfect. Absolutely perfect.

When the new season started, reviews on Behind the Sofa were mixed, skewing towards the negative. Now, after The Girl In The Fireplace, the Who-related Livejournals have got in on the backlash as well.

I for one thought Stephen Moffat and Euros Lyn delivered the goods. Yes, there were dodgy moments - it's Doctor Who! The aliens are going to have the weapons that are most likely to stop them right in the middle of their control center. No, it wasn't up there with the very best of the previous season. Most of the previous season wasn't up there with the very best of the previous season. But we got another tightly-directed, no-filler episode with suspense, humour and great visuals, most of which made narrative sense.

A lot of the criticism focused on the Doctor's apparent decision to leave the companions behind to save the Madame de Pompadour. I think it's been established by now, as part of the new character, that the 10th Doctor's ethical compass is broken*), but even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't be him abandoning his friends to save one person, it would be him sacrificing his own life and that of the companions, who know the risk involved, to maintain the integrity of all of Earth's timeline past the 1720s. It's at the very least defensible, and the Doctor would be in a position to weigh the consequences better than anyone else.
It's probably in the nature of fan communities to turn against that which they are fans of. But if it goes on I'll just leave those communities behind.

*) In The Christmas Invasion, the Prime Minister's decision to blow up the aliens is, given what we know about them, the best course of action for Earth and for any of the worlds these barbarians might visit next. It's a decision the PM doesn't take lightly and it's likely to be a blight on her soul for the rest of her life, but the Doctor's reaction doesn't make sense. Even Mahatma Gandhi would have pushed the red button on those guys. In New Earth the Doctor happens to be in the right, but only because the entire scenario is skewed in favour of him being right. Without the clones turning out to be sentient after all, the entire ethical basis for his position collapses under his feet. In both cases, the Doctor takes his visceral disgust with the actions of other people for sound moral judgment.

Ever since I first saw the Finnish group Värttinä live at a local festival in 1994-ish, I've had these periodic outbursts of listening to Finnish and other Scandinavian music. I've got several compilations of the stuff as well as albums by Värttinä, Hedningarna, Annbjørg Lien and my long-term favorite of the bunch, Gjallarhorn. *)
Looks like I'll be in for another burst of Scando-mania, because one band that I was familiar with from the Northside compilations (which are a good starting point as they are, in their own words, cheaper than food), Loituma, have recently gone viral. Everyone and their dog is linking to either the live performance of "Levan Polkaa" or the Loop from the song used in an animation of an anime character twirling a leek. It makes about as much sense as the O RLY owl, but at least it has a very catchy tune.
Can't find any Loituma on iTunes, alas. They're pretty good. Note the bass voice in the leek-twirling version going "Pol-ka, pol-ka" throughout. I prefer looking at the singers at work, though.

*) I also like a range of Scandinavian rock and metal groups. There are more of those around than ever and they're often a lot more interesting than their Anglo-American counterparts. I'd ask what they put in the water up there if I didn't already know that the answer was "vodka".

I've been running in a club setting for three months straight now, and I continue to be amazed at the ways it affects me. Initially, I would veg out after a training, unable to do much of anything at all. After a few weeks, I started giving myself simple chores to do, such as taking out the trash. Slowly, I started doing more stuff in the hours between training and bedtime.
Last Monday, I wasn't exhausted from the training at all. This was only partly due to my progress as a runner; there had been an event the Saturday before so the training was a bit lighter than usual. There was also a new trainer being shown the ropes. In any case, when Sidsel suggested going to Vera to see The New Pornographers, I checked out a song sample on their website, and agreed to go.
Little did I know that I was not only not exhausted — I was high! Throughout the show, I was flying. The New Pornographers, at least in concert, have a high-octane, driving rock rhythm section with a very strong classic rock feel, so it was right up my alley. The poppy tunes, with vocal leads being shared by a guy whose stage persona looked vaguely like Bryan Adams in his good days - before hogging the charts for months on end with the schmaltzy Everything I Do I Do It For You - and a (new) girl with a cute, high voice and matching stage persona, made it even better. I bought their latest CD, Twin Cinema but haven't sat down to listen to it from beginning to end; I just plunked the whole lot onto my hard drive to be played in random rotation with the rest of my collection. What I've heard indicates that they're a lot less rocky on disc — isn't that always the way? Some bands just need to put out live albums.
I still don't know how much my judgement of the concert was affected by the runner's high, but I do know that lately I've been a lot more positive about things, and better able to enjoy myself. I may feel like shit on the day after a training, and Tuesday was no exception, but the overall trend is up. Plus, people are beginning to notice that I look different.
One thing's for sure, that buzz I got on Monday beat all drugs I've tried, ever. Not that I have that much experience in that area, but getting drunk or (bleagh) stoned just doesn't compare.

I'm now getting into the meat and the guts of the rewrite of the final unpublished Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story. The rewrite involves the following:

• Figure out the major and minor internal plot points (the external plot points are very simple to do: The political status quo is resolved, Duke Henry and Duchess Guðrún know and trust the Rogues, and Jodoque has met Kel and joined the gang). I now want to go back in time to slap the 1996 version of me around for allowing all the interesting plot points to happen off-stage.
• Get rid of pointless goings-on to make more space for the interesting events to happen on-stage. This is easy; there are about six pages in the middle that can be scrapped entirely - that's over two weeks worth of updates at the current schedule, not that I intend to stick to that schedule.
• Replace most of the actual mechanism for the resolution of the story, reducing complexity and reliance on magic. This may involve killing several of my darlings from the story, including, for those of you who have read it, the Object-Oriented Magic bit and the transformations.
• Add stronger motivation for the villains' actions, and add suspense by putting more at stake for the Rogues.
• Write some extra scenes in which we actually get to see Jodoque as a jester. Because he's been doing bugger-all of that since joining the gang, and yet the readers are to believe that he is a jester. This Will Not Do.

It's going pretty fast now, but writing actual scenes will take a couple more days. Once I get to that, I expect it will be very easy.