Miguel Sanchez

Dostoyevsky on hearing the news he's apparently been cancelled by the Italians

womp womp

Is Flux a shorter series because of Covid, low viewing figures, because it was always supposed to be or some mixture of these?

Which reminds me that I didn't post what I thought about Whittaker's second series... Lower lows than the first series and on the whole a more middling rest of the time. Orphan 55 and Praxeus were both genuinely insulting. The other Doctor appearing felt at the time like someone trying to be shocking and having no idea where to go with it, and I get the feeling she's going to quietly disappear without a real explanation. Good. Spyfall was great and more in line with what was so enjoyable about earlier series, with the sense of something genuinely affecting the whole world and with real consequences if it didn't go right. Lenny Henry was good. The new Master's teeth are too big and there's something about him that seems a bit too fanservicey - like the speccy woman from UNIT who wears a scarf, only rather than obviously being written as an fan insertion he's just over-acted to the point of absurdity. John Simm was unhinged but always in control of what he was doing, Missy was something different and a perfect opposition to Capaldi's Doctor, the new guy comes off as a spoiled child in an extended tantrum. The closing of the series and the Cybermen/Time Lord combo was shite as well. The Doctor's backstory and Lore is about the most engaging part of the character for me but the only time it's had any significance is when Timothy Dalton was making David Tennant visibly scared for the first time in his incarnation. Turning up on a burnt out Galifrey with what, ten? fancy engraved robots doesn't have the same impact. Of the other episodes I remember, the one with the Shelleys was good aside from looking like it was filmed during a power cut and the one set in Aleppo looked like a good concept wasted because they wanted to do an episode about a place in the Middle East that's currently getting bombed and so the Doctor could say "Muslim doctors in the 13th century were actually really good at treating mental illness!" After feeling like three companions were there to compensate for Whittaker's Doctor not having a personality there was some improvement. Bradley Walsh continued to be the highlight and Ryan also had some agency about him. Yaz got even blander and it's probably not a good thing that she's stayed and the other two have gone. Replacing Bradley Walsh's Sheffield with John Bishop's Liverpool is tantamount to a war crime, and I'm glad he got kidnapped by a talking dog. Hopefully he gets fired into a black hole before I need to see him go back home. All of this comes back to the fact that I still don't think Whittaker is a good Doctor. I've never seen her in anything else so I don't know how much of this is her and how much of it is the part, but there seems to be a constant conflict about what sort of character the Doctor is supposed to be. Her outfit is daft and it staying the same for two series has a whiff of staleness about it for me, and I think this is reflected in her character not really evolving from the first series either. She seems to flit between know it all child on a school trip, harassed parent on a school trip and petulant middle class teacher on a school trip dealing with a local who isn't doing what she wants. None of this is helped by the filming which, as I've said before, is the biggest problem I have with it since Capaldi started. There's a tweet thread from Limmy that I'll be buggered if I can find but he complains about the same thing - a programme filled with shots that are obviously meant to be serious and thoughtful, with the camera sort of above where the character on screen is, them slightly off-centre, looking at something to the side while they're talking. A picture that's more ceiling than subject. I couldn't take to the His Dark Materials series for the same reason, it feels like it's supposed to look cinematic and high quality but to me it ends up looking like it's all filmed in the same place as everything else on the BBC. I know @Shandon Par has posted about this before so forgive me for tagging you - what is it you have against the way BBC dramas are filmed and why do they all look shite? The Tardis interior is shite as well. It looks like a cave.

Had a dream last night Motherwell signed a goalkeeper who was a known neo-Nazi. His first game was away to Livingston and they got beat 6-0. He was so raging his shaved head looked like a giant cherry tomato with a barbed wire tattoo on his neck. Reaction to the affair was understandably poor, with Kevin Thomson in tears discussing it on Sportscene.

Ah, of course.

Wasn't that The King?

After 17 minutes of Flux I have decided that when I come to power, Liverpool will be bombed.

Just had my first experience of the news since this all started and got to hear some of the pronunciations I didn't realise the entire country had been saying Roman Abramovich wrong for the past twenty years but we all must have been!

I am begging you to figure out how to embed tweets

Uh... no

Playing Red Dead Online for the first time. Is it more or fewer hours of this than the single player before you feel as if you know what you're supposed to be doing?

Week 9 update Remember last week when I was worried about Liz croaking? Now we've got the imminent thread of global nuclear annihilation. Great stuff. No deaths for anyone.

I wonder if @Mon Dieu or @LiamDFC could make Scottish football-themed wojaks.

I want a shot

Can only assume this will lead to steve never posting every stupid and instantly debunked conspiracy he finds on P&B ever again and reconsidering his life's purpose

I was trying to think of small countries where nothing really happens and that was the best I could come up with. Greenland and Turkmenistan, perhaps.

Does CNN have a twitter account for news about every country in the world? Must be a ballache to keep on top of, although I suppose places like Fiji and Tonga wouldn't have that much going on so it would balance out.

That's okay, I didn't actually realise what thisal was asking for so it's good you could fill in.

I know you'd be better at running this than I am but cutting me out of these standings is a bit poor

With the best will in the world, I'd take the rest of the night off from the internet if I were you. If you want to convince yourself the world's about to end there's plenty of evidence for it, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen. If it's genuinely distressing you probably best to just leave it.

It's probably difficult to get a picture of Putin where he actually had testicles hanging from his chin.

topical!

If you're ever top ten I'd take a screenshot tbh