Well this makes me smile and possibly dance a bit…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbkruyjOx9Y

#StarTrek

Ok. Had a nap, calmed down a bit.

Overall, an excellent episode. Not keen on how they did Omega, (the “dusty CGI” idea gave me Sutekh vibes, even if it looked a bit different), but the idea and a nice ironic “death” for The Rani worked well. While still leaving one escaping so her inevitable return won’t be as unexplained as several of The Master’s.

Ruby yet again proving why she’s good enough to be a Companion by giving Conrad a compassionate ending (instead of what I suspect most of us would have done).

I loved the return of Anita! Having some random ass-pull trick to get The Doctor out of an inevitable death would be very on brand, but actually bringing back something we’d seen before was much more fulfilling.

Project Indigo was another example of that. Sure, UNIT could just have “found” a teleport, but having already explained how they built it was a nice treat for long-time fans.

I think the tease of Rogue and (especially) Susan last week was disappointingly not paid off. But as I mentioned in another toot, RTD seems to be playing the long game with seeding ideas, so assuming they don’t just cancel the whole thing, I’m assuming he has a Plan for that.

I’m sad about the whole Poppy thing just ending up as a gimmick to write out Varada Sethu. Neither she nor Millie Gibson really had enough time in the role (hell, Ncuti Gatwa didn’t really have enough time in the role!!), although as I mentioned for the first Conrad episode, Gibson came back with enough presence to believe she was still a companion. We’ve not had that with Sethu, and now I doubt we will.

I do miss the way Companions used to carry over and had to re-acclimatise to a new Doctor. From memory, only Rose and Clara have had this in New Who.

Now. The regeneration.

It hurt. This is the first time I’ve ever watched Doctor Who and not known that it was coming. Is this how non-Brits feel the first time they watched Eccleston regenerate into Tennant in The Parting Of The Ways?

I’m still in my usual post-regeneration grief phase. I’ll work through it. It’ll help if they announce a Christmas special or that they’re filming the next season though…

It was fantastic to see Whittaker again 😀. All too brief, but, like Jo Martin, it’s nice that she’s prepared to come back just for one-off scenes.

And now… Billie Piper is back. Conspicuously, I’ve not seen anything actually referring to her as “The Doctor”. I am fascinated to see where they’re going with that. I have no reason to believe RTD is just doing a stunt casting and hasn’t planned it out.

Still. Must look to the future. And I’m very keen to see where we go from here!

#DoctorWho #NcutiGatwa #VaradaSethu #MillieGibson

Oh my god. I just spent like an hour trying to work out why my #LetsEncrypt SSL cert not only wasn't working on my #PiHole but why when I manually copied the cert into the PiHole directory, it actually stopped the FTL webserver service from even running.

After fixing it (I was only copying the full cert chain, forgetting to cat the private key into the cert in the Pihole directory), I thought "oh, let's write this down so I will remember it in 3 months when this happens again.

So what did I find when I went to create a text document about it...?

You got it. One from last time I did this. Three lines that if I'd just pasted into the terminal would have had everything working in 5 seconds*.

URGH.

*Yes, I should have the whole process scripted, but I have CertBot running as it's own user and can't be bothered to figure out the way to get that to run as it's user, then copy the cert to the PiHole directory and change the permissions to the PiHole user. I'll get there one day...

Say what you like about #TheGorge (I don’t actually know what the reviews are) but that is a masterclass on how to do a trailer.

It gives you a vague tease on what the concept of the film is while giving away absolutely nothing about what actually happens in it.

I’ll preface this by saying that I do not and never have watched Eurovision so I wasn’t expecting this to be anything special.

Boy, was I wrong.

The episode itself was fine. I liked that they actually to the time to come up with a reason why everyone didn’t immediately die in space. I liked Belinda having a little freak out when she thought she was stuck in space without the Doctor, then getting over it and started looking for solutions to the situation. I liked The Doctor too far although Belinda should really have taken him to task far more than she did for it.
I liked the ideas behind the plot (“cool motive, still murder”), but despite Cora coming out and singing a song in front off everyone at the end, did anything actually happen because of it? At best it seems they’d have ended up with a “sure, you’re one of the good ones, but they’re generally still terrorists”, right? Or maybe that was the depressing point…

I’m intrigued to see where they’re going with the Susan thing, but damn it’s good to see Carole Ann Ford back!

Not sure how I feel about Mrs Flood bigenerating (a thing so rare it has previously only happened once and been mentioned as previously theoretical) and now The Rani is back. Yay? I don’t think that makes all the fourth wall breaking better…?

But it’s good to have a Time Lord (Lady, if you’re old fashioned 😉) antagonist who isn’t The Master.

And potentially that means there’s at least three Time Lords still around. So that’s nice. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Romana come back in another season or two.