JBB: An Artblog!
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Not today Justin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
styofa doing anything
dirt enthusiast
AnasAbdin
shark vs the universe
h
Today's Document
noise dept.
cherry valley forever
YOU ARE THE REASON
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Janaina Medeiros
Kaledo Art
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
if i look back, i am lost
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@larasramblings
And so we finally end 1998 after thirty-two books and God only knows how many hundreds of thousands of words. But will it be a bang, or a whimper? One thing's for certain, nothing will ever be quite the same.
It's Where Angels Fear.
This is the end. Or, at the very least, the beginning of it. With Where Angels Fear, the New Adventures have well and truly entered their en
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Every time I see a news headline of Tom Baker I get a mini heat attack because since he's really old I usually assume he's died/dying 😭
I mean I don't blame you. I've noticed a lot more publications writing headlines about noted old people that seem to almost purposefully cut off at the exact right moment to make you wonder if it's a death announcement.
"Noted composer John Williams, age 94..." Oh my God what happened? Oh, he composed a concerto for piano? Good for him I guess.
No see the really funny part is that my planned hiatus anti-project was going to be reading through the Faction Paradox books again from the beginning.
Which is great and all but uh... I only just finished The Book of the War, which means that the next book is... This Town Will Never Let Us Go... so if I do that in my current state, well, I'm mildly afraid that I might do something drastic and I don't really *feel* like having a self-harm relapse at the moment, funnily enough...
(I realise that this is an extraordinarily silly reaction to be having, but also... look this is basically my job. This does necessarily change my relationship to how I view my job, and I'm also at a period in the history where I'd have to contemplate writing about a whole lot of fandom's squandered hopes and crushed dreams, along with a ton of really ugly negative emotions with all the Lawrence Miles drama and shit, and it's just... I dunno, I spent most of today and a good chunk of yesterday in a depressive fug.)
"Let the show be cancelled so we can have a second Wilderness Years!" You mfs couldn't even handle the Gatwa Era...
Joking bitchiness aside, and a year on from The Reality War, I really do believe that, while sometimes imperfect, the Gatwa Era was consistently doing interesting things with Doctor Who that made for television that I actually looked forward to watching every week, which was a feeling that Doctor Who hadn't reliably given me since 2017.
And all of that's without even touching upon the unlikeliness that, in the current ecosystem of modern franchise/fandom media, the BBC would realistically allow something as weird and singular as the New/Eighth Doctor Adventures (or, heaven forfend, Faction Paradox, though I guess that's a point that's rather undermined by the continued persistence of that series at Obverse). Speaking as someone who's written a properly mentally ill number of words on the Wilderness Years, they were, as a textual object, the product of a very specific set of circumstances that the past thirty odd years have seen companies become increasingly disincentivised to let happen. And I think a lot of people lose sight of that in the calls to bring back the Wilderness Years. If we do bring it back, it'll probably be tripe on the level of the absolute worst and blandest of the EDAs; you'll be getting so many Janus Conjunctions you won't even know what to do with them.
Oh yeah I still stand by every word of this. Have fun with a million mediocre Big Finish box sets by Matt Fitton, ig. All you're gettin' now!
"On hiatus" mfs when every other coping mechanism besides writing feels like it's suddenly been sapped of all joy and also they realise midway through writing this sentence that they forgot to take their meds this morning so that's probably got more to do with it than the British sci-fi show getting cancelled.
I think I *really* need a break from writing about Doctor Who now, because the absolutely hateful glee with which people are bashing an era that I quite enjoyed, even in spite of its flaws, is actually starting to hurt quite badly.
Well done, you won, the show is dead. You miserable bastards. Hope you have fun in the Second Wilderness Years, which I still guarantee you are going to be much less interesting than the first ones. I'll be back when I can actually muster up enough of a shit to give about *checks notes* Simon Messingham's The Face-Eater.
Won't that be a joy.
(This is basically me talking myself down from answering an ask about my thoughts on the recent cancellation because it was simply becoming a long embittered rant against the parts of the fandom that piss me off and like... maybe it'd be cathartic in the moment but I just don't want to keep fostering the negativity.)
I think I *really* need a break from writing about Doctor Who now, because the absolutely hateful glee with which people are bashing an era that I quite enjoyed, even in spite of its flaws, is actually starting to hurt quite badly.
Well done, you won, the show is dead. You miserable bastards. Hope you have fun in the Second Wilderness Years, which I still guarantee you are going to be much less interesting than the first ones. I'll be back when I can actually muster up enough of a shit to give about *checks notes* Simon Messingham's The Face-Eater.
Won't that be a joy.
So as the last question might have been a bit much, what was your favourite story from each RTD2 series (counting the 2023 specials as one) and why? And which did you think was the best series and best story overall!
As far as the sixtieth anniversary specials go, while I liked them all, Wild Blue Yonder is a pretty clear winner for me, in that it was the episode that was most free to just kind of luxuriate in the pleasure of seeing Tennant and Tate together again, and a very good piece in terms of showing to the public "This is what Doctor Who has traditionally been very good at, would you care for some more?"
The best episode of Series 14, for me, vacillates between my base allegiance to Moffat and Boom and my appreciation, as the kind of girl who watches shows like Twin Peaks and Millennium for fun, for the weirder, darker, more uncanny kind of vibe on display in 73 Yards. In any case, I really can't come up with a convincing argument, personally, for there being another three episode stretch this side of Face the Raven/Heaven Sent/Hell Bent that can stand toe to toe with Boom/73 Yards/Dot and Bubble.
And yes there's a valid point to be made about reduced episode counts, but like... the upshot of that is that a three episode run of hits of that magnitude basically comprises a sixth of Ncuti's overall tenure, so the argument that it represents a failed era as far as quality goes has always been strained to me. You (as usual, this is the royal, collective "you") can say it represents a failed era as far as the show's pop cultural footprint is concerned, but unless that's just an opening salvo into a larger essay about how Seasons 25 and 26 are actually complete ass and not manifestly two of the strongest post-Hinchcliffe seasons, that doesn't hold much sway with me either.
Series 15 is a bit less undecided for me, in that I'd probably have to go with Lux just for the sheer, relentless cleverness of it, although second place is a pretty closely fought thing between The Well and The Story and the Engine. I know the latter is understandably divisive for the intensely theatrical vibe it gives off (and the former was basically asking for negative comparisons to its original source material by setting itself up as a sequel to such a beloved episode, not helped by the leaks giving everyone months' worth of time in which to pre-emptively decide that it sucked), but I for one love it.
As for the question of the best series, that's a bit trickier. I can't realistically give it to the specials, not because their quality isn't such that they deserve it, but more because, while I'm happy to grant the "counting the specials as a season in their own right," three celebratory episodes featuring the return of one of the most beloved regular casts in the show's history are, by necessity, a different beast than Series 14/15.
But what *of* Series 14 and 15? The latter certainly lacks anything on the level of Space Babies/The Devil's Chord (and while I still maintain that those episodes, representing the Second Davies Era on its off day, are nonetheless more interesting and ambitious than the Chibnall Era on most of its best days, the fact of the matter is that they are deeply flawed pieces of television that are going to sadly provide a huge stumbling block for people coming to Gatwa fresh) - no, not even The Reality War - but the flip-side of that is that it doesn't *really* have anything quite as good as that three-episode stretch in the middle.
So you're dealing with a question of raw quality vs. consistency, because on the whole Series 15 is a lot more consistent, for better or worse, and again, even allowing for Wish World/The Reality War (which I still maintain has interesting ideas at its core). In truth I don't know that I have a ready-made answer to which one I personally prefer, and it probably depends on the day you ask me.
I probably want to give my thoughts on each of the episodes in another setting further down the track, so apologies if this is a tad on the brief side in terms of digging into my reasoning.
Sorry if this sounds inappropriate to ask but you know you to be more fair-minded on RTD than a lot of people. What are your thoughts on the controversy I'm seeing from people in the fandom regarding RTD and his gender-critical friends?
It's... I mean, I can't lie, it's disappointing. Full disclosure, I knew nothing about any of this before receiving this Ask, so I'm kind of stabbing blindly in the dark here.
I wish I could say it's surprising, or that I was able to work up much of a fuss about it, but in truth, I suppose it isn't, and I'm not. Perhaps part of me is just... I'm so weary of expecting celebrities or artists to have the Right Take on everything. That's not to say that I think that people shouldn't hold them to account, but increasingly I find that when an artist I respect has a lukewarm or wince-inducing take on an important social issue my feeling is more along the lines of a resigned "Well of course." The fact of the matter is that I think it should have become increasingly clear over the past ten years or so that expecting publicly visible celebrities to be our unproblematic saviours is not a fruitful line of thought.
And perhaps some might say that that's me giving into apathy, but like... I'm going to be real, I think it's mostly me giving into entropy. I physically do not have the fire and fury of youth in me a lot of days, and at a certain point you do have to pick your battles.
I love the work of Nick Cave even if I think his takes on issues like cancel culture and the Israel-Palestine conflict are severely lacking in a proper appraisal of the contextual factors at play. I'm sure if I really wanted to I could get up in arms about PJ Harvey speaking in support of fox hunting. But in both cases I still like their stuff, while still recognising that, ultimately, they're human, with all the blindspots and foibles that that implies.
Frankly, I don't think that I've ever heard a great reason that makes me think that we *should* be turning to 68-year-old white Australian men for their takes on cancel culture or the horrifically aggressive and genocidal state of Israeli foreign policy, nor a then-29-year-old white British woman raised on a farm in Dorset interviewed for a piece in NME nearly thirty years ago. And if Harvey turned around and clubbed a baby seal on the press tour for every new album after that point or something, then yeah, I don't think This Is Love being a banger would really be sufficient for me to feel comfortable giving her money, just like I'd feel a lot more irked (to put it mildly) by Cave if he were posting selfies with Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir.
And look, the fact of the matter is that Davies is a sixty-three year old white British gay man. The chances that you're going to have friends who are a bit on the TERFy side under those circumstances are, frankly, not zero. I do think that sometimes there can be a tendency in leftist spaces to reduce the totality of an artist's being to a tally of "good person"/"bad person" points, and Lord knows I'm not above letting that kind of thinking influence my perception of authors like Gareth Roberts or Trevor Baxendale, but again we're inadvertently bridging the gulf from "people with TERFy friends" to "people who are actively espousing transphobic rhetoric on their public platforms," which, say whatever you like about Davies, he *isn't* doing.
Should the bar probably be higher than "isn't actively funding the genocide of people like me"? I mean, shit man, yeah, undoubtedly. But like, that's the bar we're working with, because the other big international children's/family fiction success story of the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s is busy chomping on cigars and spreading libelous bullshit about female athletes. TERF Island fucking sucks, and I don't even have to live there; and at the end of the day, Davies was willing to turn the huge media event of reuniting David Tennant and Catherine Tate into an excuse to give the latter's character a trans daughter. However clunky it may have been, it is fundamentally well-intentioned, and to me, the basic good of that *still* isn't undone by the man's unwillingness to drop friendships that have likely lasted for decades.
Humans are complex, multi-faceted creatures. And yes, even Doctor Who showrunners count as humans.
"Let the show be cancelled so we can have a second Wilderness Years!" You mfs couldn't even handle the Gatwa Era...
Joking bitchiness aside, and a year on from The Reality War, I really do believe that, while sometimes imperfect, the Gatwa Era was consistently doing interesting things with Doctor Who that made for television that I actually looked forward to watching every week, which was a feeling that Doctor Who hadn't reliably given me since 2017.
And all of that's without even touching upon the unlikeliness that, in the current ecosystem of modern franchise/fandom media, the BBC would realistically allow something as weird and singular as the New/Eighth Doctor Adventures (or, heaven forfend, Faction Paradox, though I guess that's a point that's rather undermined by the continued persistence of that series at Obverse). Speaking as someone who's written a properly mentally ill number of words on the Wilderness Years, they were, as a textual object, the product of a very specific set of circumstances that the past thirty odd years have seen companies become increasingly disincentivised to let happen. And I think a lot of people lose sight of that in the calls to bring back the Wilderness Years. If we do bring it back, it'll probably be tripe on the level of the absolute worst and blandest of the EDAs; you'll be getting so many Janus Conjunctions you won't even know what to do with them.
"Let the show be cancelled so we can have a second Wilderness Years!" You mfs couldn't even handle the Gatwa Era...
i just came to the horrible realisation that if there was a twin peaks and x files crossover it’d have to account for the fact homer simpson watched twin peaks on tv but did an x files investigation with mulder and scully…
This is not as big of an issue as you might think! The X-Files manages to do a crossover episode with Millennium despite there being an episode of the latter in which a character can clearly be heard watching the fifth season episode Kill Switch on their television, and despite that gag coming at the point at which it was already demonstrated that the two shows co-existed with the crossover of Jose Chung from From Outer Space to Doomsday Defence.
(And then, just to add a further confusing layer, the seventh season two-parter Sein und Zeit/Closure features characters watching the recently-cancelled Ten Thirteen Productions show Harsh Realm.)
anyway i kind of hate how sometimes you see posts like "cameron: canonically has an ed/implied ed" because, once again, why are we taking things random people say to insult her as canon facts. why is it always cameron
I can't speak to the specifics of House but it always fascinates me how fandoms often have such a low understanding of the very basic fact that sometimes characters in a show or movie will say things that are not straightforwardly, literally true, whether because they're being sarcastic, or they're misinformed, or biased.
The gold standard is probably the enshrinement within Star Trek fandom of the "fact" that Tellarite culture is entirely based around the practice of argument, which eventually got itself "canonised" in the portrayal of the species on later shows like Enterprise and Prodigy.
The textual evidence for the claim is Sarek's line in Journey to Babel, "Tellarites do not argue for reasons. They simply argue." Of course, as originally written by D. C. Fontana, it's pretty clear within the larger context of the script that it's supposed to just be an indication that Sarek is a bit of an elitist and mildly racist ass. Because really, think about it, if the US ambassador were to say that kind of shit about, I dunno, Japanese people, would anyone who isn't racist take that as anything other than a narrow-minded, blinkered comment?
But because we're talking about a fictional species of alien it's immediately taken as gospel. It's all part of a larger problem within fan culture where the original shows or texts are treated as something to be boiled down to a quick paragraph for addition to the wiki as a certified "fact."
Let me be clear right off the bat, fuck BetterHelp to hell and back, don't get it twisted.
But it's also just fascinating to me that, like, *this* specific sponsor is the one that always gets people riled up without fail. There are plenty of YouTube sponsors that a lot of people will (rightly!) call out for being unethical or shitty or dishonest, but none of them seem to ever attract the level of venom that someone doing a BetterHelp spot gets.
Like we've got a fucking law firm out here sponsoring YouTubers for some Godforsaken reason and I've never seen people bring a tenth of the anger and bewilderment to how bizarre a spectacle that is as they do to BetterHelp.
Again, this is not me trying to claim that BetterHelp are a wholly (or even remotely) virtuous company, I just find it fascinating.
Working on a longer-form expansion of these feelings for the blog proper to serve as an Interlude before I go on hiatus (although actually on reflection, this may have winded up long enough), but for now I just want to say... thank you all so much for everything.
Writing this blog, I mean... people say certain artistic projects changed their lives, and before I started Lara's Ramblings I think part of me always felt that was at least a bit overexaggerated. But for a long time now I've known that it isn't, not one little bit.
I am fundamentally not the same person I was when I started half-heartedly jotting down some babbling, inane, gratuitously profanity-laden thoughts on the X-Files episodes that I was watching while recovering from a suicidal bout of depression.
This blog changed me, and has gotten me through some of the darkest times of my life. Realising that I had been sexually abused for years, coming to grips with being trans and the lingering feeling of not being "trans enough," or in the right ways, and of course, the knowledge that at just twenty years old I have effectively lost any chance of living an able-bodied life. While still having to clear stupid bureaucratic hurdles that want to insist that long COVID is not a disability.
And if I want to say that I'm grateful, I also want to package that with an acknowledgment that I'm sorry. Because underneath it all, I think no small part of my burnout has been rooted in the feeling that nobody cares about anything I do, and as base and grubby as it feels to acknowledge it that feeling really does all come down to a monetary question. And it shouldn't, because it is, at its heart, an inherently silly framing. I know, logically, that people *do* care a great deal about the things I've written, and that money shouldn't be a part of the equation.
Of course, it ultimately is. The only reason I've cared at all about money, despite it never really even being a consideration for most of the blog's existence, is that I *am* sick.
I'm lucky enough to be in a position of relative financial security, but I have never had a job, and in all likelihood, I never will. This world already makes it hellish enough to try and be remotely creative and also fit that creativity into a framework where you are judged deserving to live. Try adding disability to that equation, and usually the cold amoral calculus will come out with some flowery variation on "Well actually you don't deserve it. To live, that is."
None of that is my followers' fault, unless Jeff Bezos is actively lurking on an alt account and just keeping it on the down low, in which case, ew. But I can't lie, the relentless fucking exhaustion of being disabled has occasionally made me feel way more angry and resentful than I really should. I always knew it to be wrong and not grounded in actual material reality, buuuuut that only makes the scrupulosity OCD of "Well I'm actually a piece of shit for even *thinking* this" all the worse. Either way, I'm sorry.
I'm also sorry that I haven't been as active in responding to all the wonderful things that people have said about my blog as I would like to be. Please know that I see it all, and again, I am eternally grateful. Sometimes you just really don't have the spoons to write one more word, and you put it off until tomorrow, and then all of a sudden it's ten months later and you can hardly reply to that comment *now*.
For now, I'm focusing on getting my disability pay. I really should have done that sooner rather than wait a full three years from my initial illness, but hey, I don't always make the smartest decisions. I'm hoping that once I actually have a reliable flow of income, I should feel less pressure to... well no, let's just leave it at "I should feel less pressure." I think that about covers it.
And in turn, I'm hoping that once that happens I will feel better able to take joy in what I'm writing again, rather than the ugly, unclean feelings that are way more prevalent than they should be for me at the moment.
Marvel history is so funny because if I was writing a novel and I named the male homophobe in a position of power in the United States "Jim Shooter" I'm p sure my editor would say "Hey that's a bit on the nose" and yet!
YouTube grifter who's loudly opposed to Heated Rivalry not because of homophobia but because he just really really doesn't like hockey.
