8 dreams

Today I dreamt I was dancing with the 8th Doctor in a ballroom on the moon.
The lunar gravity let us glide around like floating, everything easy.
And there was kissing, but not grabby kissing with expectations, just kissing that really likes kissing, as enthusiastic as he is with every other form of communication.

There was a plot too, and Missy was there with her Doctor, and possibly some Daleks, but things started getting mysterious around when the Daleks disappeared. Like, obviously your first thought is, yaay no Daleks I get to live, but then you have to wonder, how on moon did anything manage to make no Daleks when Daleks had insisted on taking over? And whatever we did to investigate I had to be just a teensy worried that Missy would decide I was more use dead, which was more worrying personally, if not professionally. But I wasn't going to let it waste my time with 8.

There was spinning and dancing and music that's all "on days like these de dum de dum when skies are blue"
which is funny, because we're underground on the moon, and nothing is blue anywhere
and I haven't actually dreamed the dancing dream with blue skies. It's usually all stations under spin gravity with the stars wheeling around us.

I woke up in the most delightful mood.

I am quite disinclined to go check the internet, it might take the bubbles out of this mood.

But in the dream we had to figure things out, only everywhere we went we found only empty corridors and empty rooms. Still preferable to actual death by Dalek, but puzzling. And there were two clues. And one of them was the ballroom. There was artificial gravity everywhere else, and while low g made for lovely artistic choices, there was a bar in the corner with open glasses, and nobody chooses to drink in lower gravity than they're used to. So somehow the floor was broken without being broken. And we couldn't get down below to see the workings because there were no stairs. Or lifts. Which was peculiar. Because how did people get in and out at all?

So I wondered if we were looking at the wrong scale. A lift is just a room that moves. There were plenty of rooms about. What if they'd needed to move something very much bigger than us?

But the Doctor, the grey one, pointed out we'd been in almost every room already...

... except the airlocks. Only one door on them, pressure supporting airlock style, but you don't mess with airlocks until you have to. And if we wanted to go anywhere new, we had to. But we couldn't find pressure suits. So if the doors opened somewhere unexpected, we wouldn't just end up in the car park...



So I don't know where the locks went, but there was another dream earlier, and in that one humans had been excavating on the moon and finding complexly stratified black rock, in sections that looked very much artificial. But so does the giant's causeway, so they weren't that concerned... until they found the airlock.

And it turned out they'd been lifting off damaged pieces from the tiniest, tiniest corner.

And when they reactivated the thing, having scraped away the lunar regolith and exposed what they thought was a building, it lit up, started doing things to gravity, and lifted up
and up
and up
until a whole moonlet had shrugged off grey dust and lifted itself free.



Which was a surprise, as you can imagine.



It turned out to be still functional as a self contained world, with artificial gravity throughout, and room after room after room. It had enough area in its volume to function as a whole spare planet, and go a long way to getting breathing room for the billions of Earth.

But first we either have to understand precisely what it was even doing here, or I suppose choose population to inhabit it that we wouldn't mind finding out the hard way...



And if the two dreams were one dream, from other perspectives, we also have to worry what the Daleks wanted to do with it.

Experience suggests probably fly it around like a really big spaceship.

But you have to worry what could power something like that...

Legends of Tomorrow

Pondering the emotional beats on Legends of Tomorrow
I can see how the writers are dragging us around by the feels
but I don't quite see why.

Maybe it'll make more sense after the finale.

But I just vaguely thought it also makes sense if they think their bad guys are bad guys, no matter what they do. ( Read more... )

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I think I am spending too much time on the internet
specifically tumblr
which is a weirdly repetitive time sink that can take as much of your life as you give it.

I mean I like having a fandom and associated discussion again
but I'm not so keen on waiting on slow computer to reload yet another screen of reblogs that don't add anything
some of them of random shit from last year or more.

Tumblr is a terrible platform for most things, is what I'm saying.

Is there a fandom newsletter culture I just failed to find?
somewhere that aggregates the interesting comments so you don't have to follow all dozen people in your corner and hope?
following tags sure doesn't work well enough for that.

I'm going to have to unfollow a bunch of stuff just to reclaim some of my day.
the vlogs full of pretty pictures will be a good start, but pretty pictures are all tumblr as a technology is really actually good at.

and yet, dreamwidth, difficult to find new content. people quiet. lots of going away. don't know if newer fandoms are here at all.

don't know why that happened.

must find places to look.

current balance not very good.

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I finished reading Asimov's.

Final tally was two skipped, one I kind of wish I skipped, and the last story, Tau Zero, I don't know what it was doing but it didn't do it successfully from where I'm sitting.

It left me grumpy and thinking I didn't get much out of the magazine.

But, I liked Number Thirty-Nine Skink
The Ones Who Know Where They Are Going was strong idea stuff
A Singular Event In The Fourth Dimension had a nice robot child
After The Atrocity did interesting stuff about self and how choice and experience shapes us, quite compactly.

So that's some story.

Just in a sea of stuff I either actively disliked or it didn't do much for me.

Being left grumpy is annoying. But you never know what next issue looks like.

How to make The Doctor

I was reading a string of Moffat quotes on the topic of recasting the Doctor as a woman. He maintains that you never cast just A Woman, because you never cast A Man, you'd only do it if you had someone specific in mind. Which I maintain is how we get more straight white men everyone has seen before, and never enough of the rest of us, so it's dangerous bollocks.

But. His other point was to wonder if we, the audience, are ready yet. His question is Would the viewer accept her as The Doctor?

And, wrong.

That is the wrong question.

The question is, How do we make them accept her as The Doctor? Better yet, how do we make them love the Doctor?

And the answer to that is the same as every other time.

You have them walk on and Be The Doctor.

Twelve climbing out the window because 'Me', listening to a dinosaur, being so so sorry, caring so much, and being brilliant. Eleven rolling up all faster than light travel with two diagrams and a joke, whoever I am I'm a genius. Is this world protected? (Ten has declared it so.) I'm the Doctor. Basically, run. (Run for your life, says Nine to Rose.) And every other time we meet him for the first, eighth, seventh, so on and so forth times, though I think Eleven did it with the most style.

Every single time, every single episode, every time you meet you've got to sell two things: This is The Doctor, the definite article, and the Doctor is the most amazing being you will ever meet.

So you bring on the new cast, sure, and to sell the transition you have someone who already knows him, and to sell the Doctor you have someone falling for him for the very first time. Not romantically, at least not until recently and I don't consider it an improvement. That feeling that this is the single most interesting person in any room, and you could follow them anywhere. All of time and space, yeah, but it's who you travel it with who matters.

So there's the new Doctor and the old Companion and the new audience identification figure companion the second, bewildered but bewitched.

And there's not one word of that that changes if you change her gender. Not one line.

I'm the Doctor, I'm a genius, and this is defended.

If you can't sell that you've no business writing Doctor Who.

... and we had Clara selling that, which was interesting. But you don't get the structural shift in center until you move the white man out of it, so, it has to be the Doctor.

Soon.



And the thing is, every writer, every fanfic writer, but novels and audios and episodes too, has to sell us the same thing every single time. Or else fail to convey why this is Doctor Who and not some other thing with the serial numbers swapped.

And funnily enough they do it pretty frequently.



So I just don't see the argument. I don't give a monkeys if you think the audience won't swallow it cold. Cook the blooming banquet and serve it to them at such a pace they're asking for it by the time it gets to table. Make us feel it, and we'll believe. That's what writing is about.

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I went to dancing lessons again. Today there were Many of people so I couldn't stand in my usual spot and ended up in front of the reflecting surfaces so I could see me dancing. I do not look like I think I look. And I do not like watching me dancing, then I'm watching and not dancing. But I did the dances more or less correctly, so that part was nice.

Then there was shopping, but in reverse order because the A47 was closed so we had to go the back way past ASDA. I don't know how long it usually takes to do all the things but today it took 3.5 hours, which was at least half an hour more than I wanted to be awake.

I woke up at midnight and have had only a couple hours sleep before the dancing. Not optimal.




I was thinking about Legends of Tomorrow, and in order for the writers to payoff the story they've set up, the saving the world at the end of the season has to
be Mick
being trusted
by the team
and by his partner, who he talks to and communicates with like he said before
and hopefully talks around into something approaching heroism
so they do Mick's plan that he thought of with his brain.

Whether or not he survives it rather depends on the writers attitudes to heroism and happy endings, so I am a teensy bit tense.

If they resolve it without those ingredients we will be grumpy. Because we will have had all these feels for Mick set up and then not paid off.

But that might happen, because you never know whose story writers think it is.



I'm also not optimistic on people getting their loved ones back, because while it is a time travel show kicked off by Rip wanting his loved ones back, it seems to be more about embracing time's arrow and moving on. Like with the Flash, bringing people back is not the desirable goal, being okay without them is instead.

But it's comics so plenty of people come back eventually, so I want my favourites, obviously.



Shall see really soon now.