time and relative dimension in space

Fantastic!

( Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor Adventures #1 Ravagers )

I'm so tired of job applications. I just filled out a ~personality assessment~ that made no sense. Why are you asking me whether I'm more of a team player or more happy to work in fast-paced environments? Those two choices are not only not mutually exclusive they basically have nothing to do with each other. After about ten questions like that it starts to feel like "when did you stop beating your wife".

I've officially started reading the Past Doctor Adventures and am two books in. I haven't figured out how I want to blog about them, yet -- after every book seems excessive because I don't think I'll have that much to say, but there don't seem to be natural stopping points like with, say, the Target novelizations. (No, I haven't gotten the new Target novelizations yet. Still waiting for my preordered copies.) For now I suppose I'll figure it out as I go.

( Doctor Who PDA 01 The Devil Goblins Of Neptune )

( Doctor Who PDA 02 The Murder Game )

So 50% success rate so far, which is not bad! We'll see how it goes going forward...

Is it perfect? No. Do I care? No.

( Doctor Who 13x00 Revolution of the Daleks )

Happy new year! 2020 is dead. May it stay that way.

I know time is a social construct but it's nice to get to bury 2020.

I'm mostly just waiting for new Doctor Who so I figured I'd take the opportunity to do my yearly media roundup post and also take the opportunity to shoutout Yuletide -- I both wrote and received in the same fandom, the teenage love trilogy from Taylor Swift's folklore album; soupytwist wrote me the absolutely gorgeous the hope of it all taking on the story from the perspective of the narrator of august, and giving her so much room to grow and breathe and connect, and everyone should read it; I got to write I Don't Know Anything (But I Know I Miss You) for hernameinthesky exploring things from James's side and indulging in my feelings a bit.


Every year I do this media roundup of stuff I've read/listened to/watched the last year. Why? I don't know. It interests me. I like patterns.

In 2020 I read 173 books, exceeding my Goodreads goal of 150 books.

( my year in books )


In music news, last.fm informs me that I listened to 6547 scrobbles in 2019.

( my year in music )

According to trakt.tv I watched 776 hours of TV this year! They don't give me any other stats and that may not be accurate because I don't pay for their app, but it's good enough!

( my year in TV )


I have literally no idea how many movies I watched this year. The only ones that stand out are the ones I watched most recently. Go watch Wolfwalkers (available on Apple TV), it's amazing and Cartoon Saloon needs the support. I liked the Prom (available on Netflix), but if you're not super into musicals you probably won't be into it. I finally got the chance to see The Band's Visit after loving the musical adaptation; the original movie is just as gorgeous. Oh, and I saw Hamilton! Like everyone else.


As far as live theatre goes, before Covid19 shut everything down, I did see the national tours of Waitress and The Play The Goes Wrong at the very beginning of the year. (I was scheduled to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well. Tickets were rescheduled, and then cancelled. Can't say I was surprised or particularly that that was the last show of my season tickets.) I loved both shows, but probably loved The Play That Goes Wrong slightly more. The way the set is used? *chef's kiss*

One day there will be widespread live theatre again. I'm sure.


Happy new year, and may we all survive to see it through to another one!

Dear Yuletide Writer:

( cut to spare flists )

I started my Target readthrough with Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child, completed on February 9, 2017.

I've completed it tonight, with Doctor Who: Survival, on September 19, 2020.

It's been a journey.

( the Seventh Doctor in novelizations )

. . . okay, so technically there's also the Target adaptations of the lost stories and the novelization of the movie when I can track that down and there's three new series adaptations supposed to be coming out next year that I'm looking forward to so I'm not actually done, but shhh. This is where I'm drawing my line in the sand. I'm done for now and I'm moving on to other parts of the DW bookverse. I'll circle back to Target.

This has been a three-and-a-half-year-long readthrough, with highs and lows, and honestly I'm really glad I did it. Even the most lackluster adaptation offered a new way of looking at a serial and the best of them are good Who in their own right.

As I mentioned up post, I'm going to be clearing out my TBR list of some one-off Doctor Who books before tackling any of the other lines, but then I think I've decided I'll be trying the Past Doctor Adventures. This is subject to change, but that's where I think I'm headed next.

It's very possible that I've spent a good chunk of this weekend wandering YouTube listening to French punk bands and that I just bought a bunch of Guerilla Poubelle albums on Bandcamp.

Can I pretend this was productive behavior if I say it's foreign language practice?

Note to self: I should also upgrade my series 8 DVDs to Blu-Ray at some point. When I can justify the cost.

Also the Death In Heaven cold open is ICONIC. "Clara Oswald has never existed!" Still lands like a fist to the face. The whole two-parter is epic, really. I love series eight so much.

Oh, hey, it's a list of mostly-unrelated things. Haven't done one of those in a bit.

- I update my LJ once in a blue moon and mostly post about Doctor Who, using the same two or three icons. Therefore I obviously took advantage of LJ's birthday sale to buy a userpic package for the next year and expand my userpic storage to 393. OBVIOUSLY. . . . I maybe have an impulse-control problem.

- Working from home is going . . . well, it's going. I don't enjoy my job but working from home isn't any worse than working out of the office and in these current times it's a lot safer.

- Shortly before all of this this-ness happened, I started making arrangements for my first-ever trip to New York City to spend a long weekend seeing Broadway shows. It was going to be awesome, I was going to go with teh Niki, we were going to see four shows, we got amazing seats to Hamilton and Hadestown and very-slightly-less-amazing-but-still-very-good seats to Sing Street and Beetlejuice, I was holding off on posting about it here until we finalized the last couple of details about the trip and then all of the pandemic shit started happening and obviously it was not going to happen and it was just a matter of playing the waiting game until it was officially cancelled. I got the cancellation emails for all four shows last week. In light of everything else that's going on this is a very small thing, and one day there will be live theatre again and other trips to arrange, but I will admit to being disappointed nevertheless.

- So instead I used one of the vacation days I was going to use towards that trip and took most of today off work. Declan Bennett had a livestream concert for The Theatre Cafe/Leave A Light On and I got to catch it; he's one of my favorite musicians and he played some of my favorites of his songs, it was lovely.

- There is so much Doctor Who content coming out right now, it's incredible. I have not been able to participate in the watchalongs because they've mostly been arranged for times when I've been working, but I've read the tweetalongs afterwards and they're fab, and the videos and short stories and things being produced are amazing. Some favorites, if you haven't seen them yet, are Rory's Story, an introduction to The Doctor's Wife written by Neil Gaiman and filmed by Arthur Darvill; The Terror Of The Umpty Ums, a short story featuring the Thirteenth Doctor (...sort of) written by Steven Moffat; and Incoming Message From The Doctor, a short webcast starring Jodie Whittaker and written by Chris Chibnall. But all the ones I've seen have been wonderful. Also the suggestion that Neil Gaiman write a series for Big Finish starring the Corsair is perfect. Please do so.

- On my own I've also been rewatching New Who from Nine onwards via my collection of Blurays and DVDs, and including all special features. Which has been a bit of an education in how many special features I just never got around to seeing. I'm into series 6 now and a bit disappointed that I have it as 6A and 6B instead of the complete series 6, because the special features, comparatively, are rubbish.

- I've been pretty much all abut the comfort watches/reads, really. Doctor Who, obviously. But also I've been rewatching Derry Girls and Red Dwarf and So Weird and reading the Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels and the Iron Druid Chronicles and basically avoiding anything that is not escapist-y enough right now. New Amsterdam came out and said "We decided not to air an episode because it was about a flu pandemic and nobody needs that in their fiction right now" and you know what I am your target audience, New Amsterdam. I'm not rereading Doomsday Book anytime soon and that's usually one of my go-to rereads.

- I hope you are all staying safe and staying inside.

WELL THEN.

( Doctor Who 12x10 Ascension of the Cybermen )