Monthly Archives: October 2006

Cultivating Fear

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “How to Make Fear“.

With Halloween at hand, surely there must be some way to warp the festive energy to our own analytical ends. Just see what happens when you invite us to a party! Don’t fret, though – though full of long words, our museum of terror takes the well-oiled form of a top ten list. We know how you like your information, and it’s in bite-sized individually wrapped treats. Please… be our guest.

Cybus Mk II

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Am I missing something, or has Sci-Fi not edited the show so far this series? We’ve just seen, I believe, the longest episode of the run — so long it didn’t even have a “Next Time” trailer at the end — and I didn’t notice any missing footage. This is as compared to last spring, where if an episode ran even a few seconds over 42:00, whole scenes were snipped — usually anything that dealt with Rose and the Doctor’s relationship.

Another note: the ad breaks were generally quite well-placed in “Rise of the Cyberman”. If anything, I think the added pauses helped the episode along by adding tension in the right places and generally letting the interesting moments sink in. That cut after “Back ‘er up” was rather genius, I thought.

Still felt more like an episode of Sliders than Doctor Who. Probably the most I’ve enjoyed it, though.

I also realized for the first time that Rose’s weakness and pissiness in this episode — which I previously interpreted as being terribly out of character — might be at least partially explained by the Doctor’s recent behavior, re: Mme. Pompadour and horses and windows. Perhaps the Doctor is losing some hold on her here, especially in the face of her own flavor of temptation. Later, of course, all the other men in her life abandon her, leaving her with just the Doctor — almost like a sign, or punishment for doubting him. I guess in this light I can see where the Doctor might try to take her to see Elvis.

It’s also here, I imagine — as she realizes there’s nothing left in her life but the Doctor — that Rose latches onto him hardcore, setting up the final couple of episodes. The season’s starting to make a little more sense to me.

EDIT: Oh, they cut the “In the Jungle” scene? No wonder the episode seemed so much better than usual! It is, of course, the favorite scene of nearly every hardcore Who fan (often cited “the only good scene”). I’ve always felt it dragged the episode down, though I never realized how much. That its omission was so invisible seems to suggest, almost by definition, how gratuitous it was.

A quote

  • Reading time:1 mins read

“Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable.” – Edward Gorey

opinions

  • Reading time:1 mins read

He has the right to voice an opinion. Your response was unnecessarily rude. Please refrain from such “snarkasm” in future, ok?

Thing is, simply voicing an opinion isn’t terribly constructive either. It’s not an issue of whether this person has the right to or not; it’s an issue of whether doing so adds to the discussion.

Okay, so it’s “naff”. Fair enough. Point is, simply declaring it so doesn’t say anything particularly meaningful. Now if this assertion were paired with an explanation for why it’s naff (whether insightful or bizarre), then hey — there’s a point for discussion. Someone here might have a chance of learning something, or having an interesting thought, however trivial.

On its own, though, raw opinion is pretty rude itself. It takes up space, demands attention to itself, and gives nothing in return. It is a vacuum of communication, crying “I” at the heart of the world. Beyond that, it’s uncomfortably prevalent around here. Thus the snippy response; it gets tiresome. Perhaps unwarranted in this circumstance, of course; I’m just slowly getting irritated.

Draining Away

  • Reading time:1 mins read

What was the first game to implement a life bar (compared with hit points or other measures of non-one-hit kills)?

It’s alive!

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So I’m reading about Gothic architecture — and for all its ornamentation, it actually is pretty logical in its development.

The main ingredient in all Gothic architecture is the pointed arch — a construction that, besides its visual appeal, has some practical aspects in that it allows for a bunch more weight than would normally be bearable, by directing much of the above force outward to its vertical elements. This allows for the very tall, narrow, usually rectangular open spaces typical of Gothic structures. Of course, since the walls are bearing so much weight, chopping such great holes in them for the giant windows typical of the period (and indeed necessary to light such massive structures) — pointed-arch windowframes or not — requires extra support, to keep the structures from crumpling. Thus, the flying buttress — those weird sinewy diagonal bits that you often see outside great Gothic halls, propping them up from the outside.

To keep the buttresses tied up, and weigh down the end that isn’t directly supporting something, they are often capped with a pinnacle — thus all the weird pointy peaks, to accentuate the pointy arches (and therefore pointy roofs) and the sinewy buttresses and the huge windows. The odd, skeletal, sort of grim feeling that this architecture gives off is mostly a side effect of an organic sequence of ideas, that all work together to form a solid, workable structure of a certain interior dimension within certain real estate limitations.

As for Neo-Gothicism… well, that was just the Romantics being all breathless and sentimental. As a result, it’s not always so practical.