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I reread some of my old LMS reviews and 1) wow they sucked poo poo huh and 2) for all its faults at least DW isn't that.
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Jul 24, 2017 05:42
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why were you reviewing Lick! My! Scrotum!
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Jul 24, 2017 05:45
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Jerusalem posted:Due to the time constraints, plus how late the idea of the Vardy developing an emotional depth/sense of self comes in, I get the sense that we're meant to think of the Vardy as robots run amok at first. By that I mean I always thought the idea was that the Vardy becoming murderous was meant to be seen as a result of a (very human) blindspot in their programming as opposed to any malicious intent, and it's only at the end that we get the sense that they started killing people because they were starting to develop consciousness, albeit an "alien" one that doesn't grasp why killing people is a bad thing. See, I think what they actually did ended up feeling a bit muddled and confusing. Sticking with programmer error all the way through is just a stronger story that requires less time to tell. Jerusalem posted:The Doctor's mindwipe is meant to be seen as a good thing, I think the idea is that their core programming was restricting their growth as a species in its own right. This is the part that gets me. These robots aren't really a species in their own right, per se. They're purpose-built machines with a flaw, and the Doctor just burned their poo poo to the ground instead of narrowly addressing that flaw. Keep in mind that an AI is, fundamentally, a creature of software. Erasing its memory and rewriting its programming is, in any sense that matters, completely killing that being and replacing it with a totally different one. It'd be like yanking someone's brain out, pureeing it, and then putting together a new brain using the same atoms and shoving it back into the skull. The Doctor wasn't freeing a species, he was creating a fundamentally new one by committing genocide on the one that was already there. Of course, I recognize that this is my perspective as a computer dude. I actually wasn't surprised that we got this from Frank "In the Forest of the Night" Cottrell-Boyce, because there's an underlying similarity there: in both cases, we're dealing with a story where the moral is some fundamentally anti-modern sentiment. Modern society, we have it so easy, what with our robotic servants and drugs to help people with mental illness and general use of science to try to improve life for people. It's kind of a weird sentiment to see coming out of the Doctor, who is usually pretty happy with any human cleverness that isn't related to weaponry. Oh, I forgot to mention: I think the story is also a lot more solid if you take out the early scene on the colony where we see (part of) the robot massacre firsthand. People who make television always want to show you everything, but I think it'd work a lot better if you were in the same emotional place as the Doctor and Bill as they wandered around the colony trying to figure out what was up. As it is, we get a bit of tension they don't have as we wait for one of them to get sad, which is nice, but the impact of the skull pile is somewhat lost because we already knew they were all dead right from the start.
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Jul 24, 2017 06:05
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Yeah, if we'd had no clue that the planet had already had a crew on it, and only grasped at the same time as the Doctor and Bill that the crew had been there and gotten murdered, it would have worked a lot better. The reveal of the bones in the fertilizer tank is still good, but it would have hit a lot harder if we hadn't seen right at the start of the episode the Vardy murdering the colonists.
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Jul 24, 2017 06:29
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That opening scene is like the deleted Hadley's Hope scenes from Aliens. It really doesn't need to be there and diminishes the impact of the protagonists discovering what's happened.
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Jul 24, 2017 09:52
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Jerusalem posted:Interesting stuff idonotlikepeas! Just a couple of thoughts I got coming out of that: It's probably covered by the phrase "poorly conveyed" but I did not get that part out of it at all. It came across to me as if the humans that made the Vardy just accidentally solved the hard problem of consciousness without realising it, programmed themselves up some robots that were Actually Conscious & Worthy of Moral/Political Rights, and (at least in The Doctor's eyes) re-invented slavery. I never got anything about the Vardy needing, wanting, or being able to grow at all. I still don't get how exactly they are going to live with the humans. The end gag makes it seem like the Vardy were an oppressed slave class which now happily gets to be rentiers of the planet. What could they possibly do? Sit around being a city all the time and driving the human-interface robots? What could they possibly want? Maintenance that they can't provide for themselves? What stops them from thinking 'let's just strip these humans and their ship down to elements just in case we need the parts'?
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Jul 24, 2017 15:12
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Reminder that Moffat is a gigantic piece of poo poo https://twitter.com/vulture/status/889239546457722881
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Jul 24, 2017 17:12
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He's made that joke a couple of times now, referring to the difficulty of talking about a character who's been male and female before. Not sure why it's appalling this time.
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Jul 24, 2017 17:53
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Yeah, it's a common complaint about how English is a bullshit language that has no good gender-neutral pronouns for talking about people.
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Jul 24, 2017 18:00
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Gaz-L posted:Yeah, it's a common complaint about how English is a bullshit language that has no good gender-neutral pronouns for talking about people. Yeah this. In English, the only gender-neutral pronoun is "it", which ties personhood to gender in a way that's fairly loving tiresome for trans/genderfluid/etc. folks, and, to a much lesser degree, people who write professionally about Time Lords. The Moff's said some unsavory things before, but this isn't one of them.
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Jul 24, 2017 18:09
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I mean he's very clearly being like "can't bloody say anything these days!!!!!" instead of whatever you guys are claiming?
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Jul 24, 2017 18:52
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No he isn't, and what does this have to do with Oxx's reviews of this season of Doctor Who?
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Jul 24, 2017 18:59
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it's not that different than what Oxx posted here in this week's review:Lick! The! Whisk! posted:Random Thoughts: He was laughing about how, after he slipped up and said the wrong one, that we should just get rid of gender pronouns. He wasn't saying, "Can't say anything these days", he was joking, "I can't talk because I keep loving it up, let's just all agree to use the same thing for everyone."
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Jul 24, 2017 19:05
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Oops there was a video here of Steven Moffat saying the words in the above tweet verbatim in reference to talking about the Master, but it also includes spoilers for a later episode so I've removed it. Have a civilised day.
2house2fly fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Jul 25, 2017 |
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Jul 24, 2017 19:13
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Escobarbarian posted:I mean he's very clearly being like "can't bloody say anything these days!!!!!" instead of whatever you guys are claiming? "let's repeal gender pronouns" is not a bad thing to say. In fact, it is arguably a good thing to say.
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Jul 24, 2017 21:23
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Oxx was the other one, you guys.
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Jul 24, 2017 22:44
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Escobarbarian posted:Oxx was the other one, you guys. Nah, Oxx is Toxx and also Lick! Escobarbarian posted:Reminder that Moffat is a gigantic piece of poo poo When in doubt, always interpret Moffat in the least charitable way possible. 
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Jul 24, 2017 23:13
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hey Escobarbarian I have spent the last couple hours really frustrated with the exact kind of malicious misquoting w/r/t Moffat you're spreading here and LET ME TELL YOU, you fuckin suck for perpetuating that poo poo.
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Jul 24, 2017 23:17
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And More posted:When in doubt, always interpret Moffat in the least charitable way possible. I mean....yes, obviously.
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Jul 24, 2017 23:35
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No! NOT obviously! That's called intellectual dishonesty!
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Jul 24, 2017 23:46
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Stabbatical posted:It's probably covered by the phrase "poorly conveyed" but I did not get that part out of it at all. It came across to me as if the humans that made the Vardy just accidentally solved the hard problem of consciousness without realising it, programmed themselves up some robots that were Actually Conscious & Worthy of Moral/Political Rights, and (at least in The Doctor's eyes) re-invented slavery. I never got anything about the Vardy needing, wanting, or being able to grow at all. I think the idea (and again, this is all my interpretation, based on that very brief bit of info we get so incredibly late in the episode) is that they built these things and then basically left them to run while the ship traveled through space with the crew in suspended animation. Once they landed on the planet and pulled a few support crew out, the Vardy had been running so long that they'd started to develop at least the basic germ of consciousness - complicated learning machines running in concert together in isolation/being exposed to stimuli for long enough that something started happening. But then the support crew are there and the Vardy don't quite grasp how to reconcile their core programming/how to understand how humans work differently to themselves. Which, again, is why I think it would make more sense for the Vardy to have grasped the concept of grief and realized for themselves the mistake they'd made, as opposed to the Doctor seeing them demonstrating emotions outside of their limited reflection of the humans around them and then wiping their memories to reset the field. Stabbatical posted:I still don't get how exactly they are going to live with the humans. The end gag makes it seem like the Vardy were an oppressed slave class which now happily gets to be rentiers of the planet. What could they possibly do? Sit around being a city all the time and driving the human-interface robots? What could they possibly want? Maintenance that they can't provide for themselves? What stops them from thinking 'let's just strip these humans and their ship down to elements just in case we need the parts'? It's part of why the ending is so disappointing to me (and tanks the episode for Lick, I guess), because it doesn't flow naturally out of the setup and ends up raising a lot more questions than it answers.
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Jul 24, 2017 23:52
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DoctorWhat posted:No! NOT obviously! That's called intellectual dishonesty! The thing is that we all know the "there's a tremendous lack of respect for anything male"/"you are loving BANISHED from doctor who" Moffat is the real one, so why give him the benefit of the doubt?
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Jul 24, 2017 23:58
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Hey guys, there's a general Who discussion thread for this type of stuff, please.
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Jul 24, 2017 23:59
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If Moffat was speaking in context as a writer, which it sounds like he was, then he's 100% right. As someone else noted, it sounds like its basically my complaint, just soundbited to be as misleadingly offensive as possible. The English language sucks for third person gender neutral pronouns; speaking as someone who has written a lot, and thought about this even more, they/their reads as repetitive and ugly on the page. It makes the prose you're writing weaker and more flavorless. He and she are strong pronouns that also fade into the background (the mark of a good pronoun is how well it flows in prose, which is why stuff like "whom" has faded in usage. Grammar has even expanded the coverage of "who" to the point where "who" can more or less be substituted in the place of "whom" in most circumstances, and its largely due to the fact that modern language views whom as an outdated and unnaturally pretentious word. If you use the word in your writing, even correctly, it often makes the writing feel full of itself or elitist. And that's just one example. They/their are definitionally vague words, so it makes your writing feel obtuse and unclear, and when used repeatedly can make prose come across as super weak. The gendered personal pronouns don't have this problem; he/she, his/her, etc are very direct and express thoughts simply and clearly. I'm already sorta dreading writing about Thirteen, because I write about The Doctor a ton. I write about The Doctor's mythos, or his quirks, or his history, and often contrast his belief systems and approaches in general to that specific incarnation's. Look at how many gendered pronouns I just used when writing about The Doctor in a two sentence paragraph. Blow that out over a three thousand or more word review, and there's just no easy solution. They and their read as ugly, boring, samey, and vague. "His/her" is possibly the worst solution the English language has come up with, it is one of the most awkwardly constructed phrases ever. Switching between he and she is a good idea in theory that fails because it obfuscates large sections of text and makes it unclear who the writer is writing about, defeating...the entire purpose of using a pronoun. Using proper names/titles can make writing come across as choppy, ugly, repetitive, or unintelligent. Gender neutral pronouns (like Xe and Xer) have not caught on to general use and can make your text feel like its trying to make a specific point, sorta like what Los Feliz Daycare parodies on twitter. I am not using the word "it" to refer to another human being, I don't care what nonbinary people on Tumblr prefer, the word has insanely bad negative connotations in regards to trans people and it's basically a slur. So yeah, there's just no easy out, and I totally share Moffat's frustrations. I'll probably switch to they and their next season, but I won't like it and I already know it'll make my writing read worse. It's pretty loving annoying. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Jul 25, 2017 |
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Jul 25, 2017 00:12
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Jerusalem posted:Hey guys, there's a general Who discussion thread for this type of stuff, please. gently caress you dad But yeah you're right, I just wanted to get my grievances with how much the English language sucks vis a vis pronouns off my chest.
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Jul 25, 2017 00:14
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"they" works fine for the doctor since the doctor is a series of actors/regenerations rather than a single person anyway. bringing this into the general thread is a good idea, as if you have a beef with moffat about pronouns there's already a related discussion about Peter Davison who, while praising Jody, has had some of his other opinions and sentences taken out of context. The Vardy topic: You have to think that someone in the writer's room could've thought of teaching the robots what grief is instead of this, and I just wonder why they thought that was either impossible or that this is the more clever ending. It would explain a lot to know because the ending to me feels poorly thought out but in a way a lot of other episodes are.
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Jul 25, 2017 00:22
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Escobarbarian posted:The thing is that we all know the "there's a tremendous lack of respect for anything male"/"you are loving BANISHED from doctor who" Moffat is the real one, so why give him the benefit of the doubt? Because a dubious quote from 12 years ago and a rumor in Private Eye are up against nearly a decade of capable, three-dimensional female characters, including multiple starring action roles for older actresses, a leading gay character portrayed by a woman of color, along with four+ years of bricklaying in anticipation of a female Doctor. You have to be willfully, maliciously dense to pretend that poo poo doesn't count!
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Jul 25, 2017 00:27
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It's weird because the Doctor's realisation that they're sentient is caused by their reaction to one of them being destroyed. I wonder if there was an earlier draft where they tried to have that result in the Vardy realising what they'd done and had to cut it down for whatever reason
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Jul 25, 2017 00:29
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Moffat wasn't talking as a writer (he was complaining after getting corrected for misusing a pronoun during a panel) but I get your point about how there isn't a good way to refer to people who don't conform to either gender (even if I would argue that's not the point he was making in that quote). I don't really share your hatred for they/their though
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Jul 25, 2017 00:29
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DoctorWhat posted:nearly a decade of capable, three-dimensional female characters  you ok dude?
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Jul 25, 2017 00:33
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Coming to think, they probably wanted to end on the settler/native analogy they had in mind and teaching the robots grief might put too much guilt on the robots side or something? Like basically they wanted an analogy and wanted the robots to be sympathetic, and telling them what they did wrong directly might not work into that... but the thing is if they were pushing for an analogy they sacrificed a lot of the story making sense to do it. Still the theory I'm going to go for.
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Jul 25, 2017 00:34
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2house2fly posted:It's weird because the Doctor's realisation that they're sentient is caused by their reaction to one of them being destroyed. I wonder if there was an earlier draft where they tried to have that result in the Vardy realising what they'd done and had to cut it down for whatever reason It makes me wonder if there was initially something deeper planned for the boy beyond,"BOY IN DANGER SO HUMANS ATTACK ROBOTS" - he feels so oddly detached from everything going on around him.
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Jul 25, 2017 00:34
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Escobarbarian posted:Moffat wasn't talking as a writer (he was complaining after getting corrected for misusing a pronoun during a panel) but I get your point about how there isn't a good way to refer to people who don't conform to either gender (even if I would argue that's not the point he was making in that quote). HE WAS NOT CORRECTED FOR MISUSING A PRONOUN He didn't misgender ANYBODY! That NEVER HAPPENED!
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Jul 25, 2017 00:34
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Escobarbarian posted:
With only one more Steven Moffat episode to go, I know I'm not  E: Bown just post the video or transcript or whatever so we can move on
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Jul 25, 2017 00:35
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DoctorWhat posted:HE WAS NOT CORRECTED FOR MISUSING A PRONOUN I'm just goin' off that tweet, dude. Doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone covering a live panel would make up for laughs.
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Jul 25, 2017 00:37
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Escobarbarian posted:I'm just goin' off that tweet, dude. Doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone covering a live panel would make up for laughs. It's called context, you boob. Someone else slipped up about pronouns for Time Lords who have changed gender and Moffat made that remark in response. You're "just goin off that tweet" which is exactly the loving problem. Develop some goddamn rigor.
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Jul 25, 2017 00:38
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This is unquestionably the best thread in TVIV
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Jul 25, 2017 00:40
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Are you posting here in the interests of balance, then?
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Jul 25, 2017 00:54
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I dunno, why would we treat Thirteen any different than we did Missy? I can't find a single instance of our referring to Missy as "they", nor did the reviews (here or elsewhere) seem particularly hurt by the fact that there were so many Masters before we got to the Mistress. Hell, "Doctor" is a gender neutral title, even. We're already in the habit of referring to the incarnations of the Doctor as distinct entities, especially in the multi-Doctor events, so if you want to refer to Four or Ten you say "he", if you refer to Thirteen you say "she", just as Missy is "she" while the Delgado or Simms Masters are "he". Seems simple enough to me. 
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Jul 25, 2017 01:19
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| # ? Apr 16, 2024 17:23 |
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Technically in the Latin the gender neutral term is doctrum which means that a female Doctor could be called a Doctrix! 
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Jul 25, 2017 01:32
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