Last August, Vivian took me to see the film How to Have Sex, which was screening at the Astor as part of the MIFF. What Viv did not warn me of adequately before we saw the film was that it’s about an eighteen-year-old girl who gets much too drunk and loses her virginity in a sexual encounter that was fundamentally not consensual but also difficult to describe as “rape”, and as …
This is a sweet article about the huge impact Doctor Who has had in Australia over the decades. I’m a bit younger than the people interviewed (luminaries like Kate Orman and Pete McTighe) but I also got into the show thanks to the ABC’s voluminous repeats (the 2003-2006 run in my case) and I think it’s important to acknowledge the special relationship the ABC always had with the BBC and this show specifically 😊
Of course the article doesn’t get into the BBC’s decision to sever that relationship and grant the rights to Disney. I doubt the Australian market is soooo critical to the Mouse that their funding offer would’ve been slashed much if we’d been allowed to keep our pre-existing arrangement. But I guess that discussion doesn’t fit the feel-good vibe of this article.
An audio drama set in the Buffyverse (or, well, a parallel universe to the one of the main show, with a number of my fave characters from it) is coming out, co-written by Amber Benson (Tara) and Christopher Golden (a guy who’s written multiple Buffyverse novels). Hey, if Big Finish can do it for Doctor Who, why not these guys! From the interview here it sounds good.
Viv and I watched “An Adventure in Time and Space” last night. At the end, they play the Doctor’s short speech to Susan when he leaves her on 22nd century Earth, and I turned to Viv and went, “You know, when I first watched that scene when I was eleven, I CRIED.” Viv laughed at me. Then he had a second thought, looked the scene up on YouTube to watch it again… and then HE CRIED. Vindication at last.
Haven’t been posting much about my Doctor Who watch-through lately, even though I’ve been keepin’ on going with it, but today it was the turn of “Arachnids in the UK” and just between you and me I really enjoyed it. Like, obviously the ending was fumbled pretty bad, but it was better than the time the moon was an egg which hatched into a dragon that immediately laid another moon-egg, and in this case the episode leading up to the terrible ending was way better.
A neat piece about the allure of the “universal translator”, often seen in science fiction and sometimes fantasy, being that the audience stand-in characters can understand totally foreign people without having to expend any extra effort (e.g. to understand cultural differences).
This week I listened to a Doctor Who Big Finish audio for the first time – specifically, the Ninth Doctor three-parter “Ravagers”. Pretty much had no idea what to expect going in, but I really enjoyed it. Eccleston totally recaptured the magic of his TV performance, the one-off companion (Nova) and the antagonist (Audrey) were both really interesting characters, and even though the plot got pretty convoluted, I’d say I followed about 95% of it and it was fun anyway 😛 On the basis of this I’ll totally listen to more.
Imagine if there was a linguist (or just linguistics geek) companion in Doctor Who.
The Doctor: With my TARDIS, we can travel through all of time!
Companion: omg! I’m gonna do fieldwork on every single proto-language. And extinct languages. I’m gonna find out which language was the ancestor of Albanian. Where Japanese comes from. I’m gonna try and classify all the currently un-classified languages. I’m gonna find out whether every language is ultimately related, or if language evolved independently in different groups of early humans!!
The Doctor: The TARDIS translates everything automatically into English.
Companion: Nooooooooooo
Interesting article talking about why movie dialogue has got harder and harder to understand over time. The biggest one seems to be disrespect on the part of filmmakers and crew for the job that the sound team has to do (at least, the part of it where they record the dialogue at the moment it’s spoken). But other factors include modern actors mumbling/breathing their lines way more than they used to, so they speak less clearly to begin with, and also sound systems (particularly at home but even in cinemas!) not being set up very well.
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.