More than three million people have stopped watching Doctor Who. How many of those remaining are newly-minted anti-fans, we don’t know, but the BBC will find out when they get the merchandising and DVD sales figures.

I managed to make it through the season ender, but it wasn’t easy. Or particularly entertaining. It’s another “cosmic fly-swatter” story, where they’ve invented something new that’s orders of magnitude more powerful than necessary to explain its impact on the story. And since they blew the effects budget earlier in the season, the phenomenal cosmic power looks like it was actually copied directly from a Seventies DW episode.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to find a mop to clean up the stupid that leaked out of my television onto the floor.

[Update: whoops! forgot the link]

If you like melons…

and you like kitties…

more...

As this will be one of the few images to survive the coming Tumblr purge, we’d better get to work…

(via)

While it’s kind of sad that a cheesy zombie idol anime is ten times more fun to watch than Doctor Who, it’s even sadder that it’s got more of a plot.

…which thickens in this episode, with a slap and a bang. Will they play it straight next episode, or go for the mind-fuck? Excuse me, braaiiiiins-fuck.

In other news, as the ratings for DW continue to drop, the rumor mill has Chibnall and Whittaker both leaving, either after one more season or as soon as the New Years special airs. The other rumors have the BBC just killing the show off completely. Either way, they’ll blame fans for being cisracistsexisthatinggarbage, which their shills are already doing in between bouts of ratings denial.

It started with an apparently-failing keyboard, a common problem with modern Apple Laptops. Painfully for a Unix guy, it was the “|” key, either doubling or skipping.

For a first test, I just wanted to power-cycle the machine rather than drive 40 minutes to an Apple store, but since there was a security update and a Safari update, I made sure my backups were up to date, installed those, and after it came back up to the login prompt, powered off.

When I powered it back on, the screen flashed red during boot, and then came up to a screen complaining that the OS installation was incomplete, with boilerplate making it sound like I had nothing useful on the disk at all.

My external backup drive took forever to boot from (FFS, Apple, your OS has gotten that slow on spinning disks now?!?), but when it came up, it showed the perfectly-intact internal drive.

It also tried to start syncing with cloud services and kick off a Time Machine backup, which I managed to cancel despite the incredibly poor performance.

I made Yet Another bootable backup, just in case, which took a few hours, and then tried to bring it back up. Same error. Booted in Safe Mode and it came up, so I fscked the disks and rebooted again.

Same error. I manually selected the startup disk, told it to restart, and (without resetting the progress bar) it booted successfully.

Checked installed updates, and the most recent security update isn’t on the list, and isn’t available, either. Power-cycled again, and all seems to be well.

Immediately kicked off Time Machine, followed by one of the bootable external backups…

Oh, and my “|” key? None of this changed anything, but some vigorous testing seems to have destroyed whatever tiny bit of dust crept into Apple’s fragile design.

Update

Three hours later, it’s offering me the security update again…

…and Time Machine is doing a full sync of 300+ GB, joy.

Dec 17: Tumblr removes adult content.

Dec 24: Tumblr shuts down completely.

Seriously: “photos, videos or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples” is about 95% of their content. The rest is emo kids and SJWs, who aren’t going to provide much ad revenue.

FYI, quick-cooking oats and quick-cooking oatmeal are different products. Only one is suitable for cookies.

The same applies to hiring writers and directors for science-fiction television shows. If you know what I mean and I think you do.

This week’s Doctor Who seems to have been constructed by scribbling down the ending, then drunk-browsing TV Tropes pages until they found somewhere they could call a start, throwing in everything they found along the way. I feel pretty safe in saying that, since the credited writer has exactly two previous credits on IMDB. For a teen drama. Seven years ago.

With three episodes left to go, I have a feeling they’re not going to explain the madness, just keep running with it.

(via)