(no subject)

Newspapers make me *facepalm* often.
Articles that use the phrase "common sense dictates" as rebuttal to actual research are deeply stupid, because all common sense is made of is ideology you've forgotten you learned.
And asking if the playground is full of drunks - has she looked lately? Because I clearly recall classmates having ambulance level drink binges when *I* was in school, and subsequent research has shown the problem getting worse. And maybe they're not in the playground, but in my day it was only because they were in the pub across the street, so fuck knows why she thinks it's a good indicator. The answer is "yes, the drunks and the drug addicts and the pregnant teens and the mentally ill you're asking rhetorical questions about are there and your 'common sense' keeps your eyes closed to them". The report they're letting 'common sense' dictate to was meant to open their eyes. Surely when data meets 'common sense' it's *data* that should win?

This is why Sunnydale denial and its Torchwood equivalent seem to me both plausible, depressing, and actually important - because this shit goes on all the time but some people with a comfortable mind-world set up just ignore what doesn't fit.


This is also why Fortean is an important philosophical position.
Rocks fall from the sky! It just happened! Deal!

time bungee bunny

Just had a plot bunny that on first version doesn't have very much to do with Team Torchwood. Something weird happens to a perfectly ordinary person, Team Torchwood notice, and then they can't do anything about his tragic and inevitable death.

I can't really see the point of writing up that bunny.

Second version: same weird thing happens, but it happens to one of Team Torchwood. This is actually far easier to arrange. Trouble is, it still leads to tragic and inevitable death. I could do it to Owen - it's always fun blowing up Owen - but then the characters that would get emotional about it do not overlap with the characters I want to write. Or I could do it to Ianto. And obviously then it becomes the angst bunny from hell.

Can't do it to Jack because as a Time Agent he's the one that recognises the tech.

Time travel device, early and unstable version. Short range time travel that's more of a time bungee. You go forwards, but then you get yanked back. Device is very rare, because there's a teensy tiny problem with the basic mechanism: massive build up of energy, bigger the longer you've stayed away, released when you reach point of departure again, like time snapping back on itself, or when the elastic pings your hand. Only rather a lot worse. Basically, you blow yourself up.

Which is why the aliens dropped the damn thing in a rift in the first place.

But it means whoever used it is a time bomb.



Bunny in my head started as a bit of a ghost story / precognition thing. Someone falls asleep on a train, wakes up at the station at the end of their journey, carries on home. Finds out the train they were on went boom. Everyone thinks they're dead. And they start getting flashbacks, even though they don't think they were actually there. Long drawn out screech of metal, clashing clacking impacts getting closer as the train carriages hit each other, and finally fire... and then they wake up back in the moment. They think it's a psych problem, but really it's that they're only half there. Half of them is still in the moment when they left, holding a faulty time projector, waiting for the inevitable rebound.


I think it's a nifty image, in a dark depressing no hope sort of way.

But I can't think of anyone I really want to blow up like that.


Also can't think why I'd want to stick Torchwood into that kind of no outs situation.


If I think of an answer to either, I'll have a reason to write it up.

Context is for the weak - GA-GL 102 p12

Green Arrow thinking: "My romance is a smoking ruin... I haven't heard from the Lantern in weeks"

... yes, they're *supposed* to be two seperate thoughts, but ...

PS

I find it very reassuring to tell me things I already know. I rewatch episodes in my head a lot. I sit there explaining things to Jack and the Doctor and the Brigadier and whoever else turns up. It makes the world very tidy. Plus I get to control the ending and make it a beginning instead if I want.

Yeah, I spend a lot of time trying to get to sleep.

But the pictures in my head are nice company.