The GardenDespatches from The Satyrs’ Forest

Page 3

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXVII

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A WIP map of the world in 2099
I feel a little bad for posting so many link roundups effectively in a row, so here’s a preview of things to come…

List of actors to have played Doctor Who

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Author’s note: I first wrote up this wee bit of allohistorical silliness in March of this year, posting it a few places online, but never actually bothered on my own website until now. Enjoy.

  • Doctor Who?, on CBS
    • 1963–1966: Vincent Price (Doctor Who)
      First episode: “The Girl from Another World”
      Last episode: “Planet of the Daleks”
    • 1966–1967: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
      First episode: “Planet of the Daleks”
  • Doctor Who and the Daleks, on CBS
    • 1967–1972: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
      Last episode: “The Paradox Web”
  • Doctor Who: Alien Agent, on CBS
    • 1973–1975: David McCallum (Agent John Smith / Doctor Who, Theta Tau)
      First episode: “The Mannequin Men”
      Last episode: “Doctor Who’s Mind”
  • Doctor Who and the Cyber-Man, produced by New World Pictures
    • 1980: Clu Gulager (Doctor Who / “That existed?”)
  • Doctor Who, on UPN
    • 1986–1989: Kyle MacLachlan (The Doctor)
      First episode: “Pilot”
      Last episode: “The Deadly Assassin (Part 1)”
    • 1990–1993: Bruce Campbell (The Second Doctor)
      First episode: “The Deadly Assassin (Part 2)”
      Last episode: “The Edge of Time”
    • 1994–1998: John Rhys-Davies (The Third Doctor / The Professor)
      First episode: “For Want of a Nail”
      Last episode: “Seta (Part 2)”
    • 1999–2002: Kate Mulgrew (The Fourth Doctor)
      First episode: “Changes”
      Last episode: “Hourglass”
  • Doctor Who, on NBC
    • 2005–2011: Neil Patrick Harris (The Fifth Doctor)
      First episode: “The Interstellar Interruption”
      Last episode: “Paradise Lost”
    • 2012–2013: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
      First episode: “…We Have a Problem”
  • Doctor Who, on Blockbuster
    • 2014–2015: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
      Last episode: “The Three Doctors”
    • 2015–2019: Nathan Fillion (The Seventh Doctor)
      First episode: “The Three Doctors”
      Last episode: “World Enough and Time (Part 5)”
    • 2019–2023: Daniel Dae Kim (The Eighth Doctor)
      First episode: “Grandfather Clock”
      Last episode: “1963”

Season 26 of Doctor Who is slated for a release in the late summer of 2024, starring Matt Smith of TCM’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

Actors who played the Master include…

  • James Shigeta as “the Celestial Master”, a one-shot villain from the Price era who would reoccur as a trickster figure in army fatigues in Doctor Who and the Daleks
  • Robert Z’Dar as “the Master of Time”, a larger-than-life egomaniac who forced MacLachlan’s Doctor’s regeneration and would regularly clash with him in the “actionised” Campbell years
  • John Anderson as “Mr. Seta”, a master (heh) of disguise who was written as a throwback to the Alien Agent era
  • Christopher Walken as “Professor Tannhauser”, who, in the far future, devises an equation proving humanity can escape the end of the universe — a plan that NPH’s Fifth Doctor gladly assists in, until one of them realises just who the other is…
  • Lady Gaga as “Claire Oswald”, a companion throughout the first season of the Fillion era who always seems to know a bit more than she lets on

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXVI

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Alien: Romulus is awesome

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A young white woman fires a gun in a retrofuturistic space station, a young black man cowering behind her
Super props to the trailer people, honestly — if it wasn’t for seeing that chilling first trailer in cinemas, i’d never have even considered watching the seventh film in a franchise i didn’t particularly care for.

I watched Fede Álvarez’s turn at the Alien franchise’s helm with, i sense, the ideal amount of knowledge. Online reviews are split — and the more Alien films the reviewer’s seen, the less they like it. Me? I’d sat down for the first and second, once, a while ago, and that was it. No slogging through assembly cuts or failed comebacks or stealth prequels or anything of the sort. Where they saw the gasping regurgitations of a dying and overexerted setting, i saw a darn good film.

The opening credits start rolling and we’re immediately in the future. Yesterday’s future. Everything’s clicks and clacks and yellowing walls, just as James Cameron left it when he turned off the lights. What they’ve done is turn what could be an embarrassing anachronism — haha, look at what those quaint twentieth-century fools thought today would look like — into a believable path that, with a nudge and a push, technology might have otherwise taken. Certainly, the bulky CRTs and Vectrex video games aren’t better than the technology of even ten years ago IRL… but they’re cheaper, exactly the sort of thing a fledgling colony would use to save money, and one gets the sense that the predilection for tactile tools and fuzzy screens is the result of æsthetics cycling back to where they were a hundred years ago, not everyone collectively forgetting how to make a liquid-crystal display.

Two sci-fi pet peeves of mine are nicely resolved, too. In the role of the astronomer-aggravating “““asteroid field””” we instead have the ring of an icy planet; the ship’s artificial gravity system is no mere cost-saving cop-out, but a structual Jenga block in the film’s action scenes, which mine the flip between 0 and 1 g for all it’s worth. Objectively speaking, Alien: Romulus just wouldn’t work on a hard sci-fi rotating spaceship, which is a rare thing!

Seven films into a franchise, it would be easy to bog oneself down in continuity and lock out any viewers who haven’t melted into their couch for a twelve-hour marathon. (This is the predicament which Marvel films have found themselves in as of late.) Equally, it would be easy to go too far in the quest to “breathe new life”™ into the world and leave us wondering why they put the Alien name on it at all. Romulus finds a sensible middle path. Its connection with the Alien brand is chiefly a matter of economy. We know, for example, that xenomorphs are bad, that they have acid blood, and that they get you boypreggers. We know Weyland-Yutani is an unscrupulous corporation in the business of space colonisation that wants to use xenomorph DNA for its own gain. We know that androids are made of milk for some reason. And so Mr Álvarez needn’t waste any time explaining that to us. Equally, nobody ever says the name “Ellen Ripley”. There’s no mention of the ancient progenitors of mankind or whatever those prequel films were about. Our story is set in the world of Alien, not the wiki.* (Please ignore that Asterisk of Doom. I’m sure it’s fine.)

*The Asterisk of Doom, or, the dead CG elephant in the room

This was an exceedingly minor thing to my overall enjoyment and i didn’t want to give it more space than it deserved, so i’m shunting it down here where noöne will see it. So. That, uh… that Ian Holm deepfake, huh?

There has always been spirited debate over the ethical quandaries of reviving old actors with effects, even before the current wave of machine learning — Crispin Glover sued Universal for flipping his character upside down in Back to the Future: Part II, remember! I actually don’t mind it, particularly when the character themself, like Ian Holm’s Ash/Rook, is meant to be artificial. (And as before, the same way we already know xenomorphs are bad news, we already know Mr Holm’s face won’t belong to someone with our crew’s best interests at heart.)

My annoyance is strictly technical. To understand the problem, let’s flash back fourteen years to Tron: Legacy, the first blockbuster to bring back an old face with the power of the computer:

© Disney, 2010. I’m using this clip for the purpose of criticism, as is my right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Bastids.

Here Joseph Kosinski’s legasequel flashes back to the original film’s time period, so faces the task of bringing back Jeff Bridges as he looked in 1982. It starts with just his voice. Perfect: faces and bodies change drastically in one’s life, but at worst, a voice will get a little huskier.

Then, as we pan into his son’s room, we see him first from the back, then a side profile, in the dark. Again, perfect. Hiding shoddy CGI in the dark has been a go-to in the filmmaker’s bag of tricks since Spielberg did it in Jurassic Park. This is going great. We have a believable fake Jeff Bridges. We’re hitting our audience right in the nostalgia zone, which, as we all know, is the most profitable zone of the body. And then… oh. Ohhh no. Ohhh no no no.

Mr Bridges’s doppelganger turns around directly into the bright light and opens his mouth. Every weakness in early-tens computer graphics comes out at once. The plastic skin. The dead eyes. The mouth that never moves the same way as the rest of the face. This is not Jeff Bridges. This is a changeling who has stolen his name and skydived into the uncanny valley. The illusion is shattered, because the filmmakers couldn’t help themselves from giving the game away.

I bring this example up because Alien: Romulus has the exact opposite problem. The crew, exploring a dank, dark ship, finds Rook face down on the messy ground, having barely survived a close encounter of the third kind. They plug him in, and… a heretofore unknown bright light turns to shine directly onto his face, on which not a jot of blood or waste is to be found. (It’s harder to deepfake someone if there’s muck in the facial area, you understand.) This is everything you’re not meant to do, and though technology has advanced tremendously in the fourteen years since Rubbery Bridges Syndrome, a cluster of neurons in the back of your head knows that something is deeply wrong. There is no light in his eyes. I kept looking at his eyebrows, wondering if the problem was there, but no. Every bit of his face looks perfect — but all put together in motion… one shudders at the sight.

But the further the film goes on, the smarter it gets. After our scavengers leave the lab where they found him, they interact with him chiefly through fuzzy CRT screens, smoothing out the imperfections. Unable to move, assorted gunk and alien goo piles up on his increasingly ravaged face, and when we do properly cut back to him, he’s shot in a side profile with chiaroscuro alarm lights. I kept thinking: why the fuck are you only doing this now‽ You don’t put the bad effects first, for Gods’ sakes!

Anyway, the rubbery robot face didn’t actually bother me that much — we’ve come to the point where we’re closer to the top of the uncanny valley than the bottom. I just needed some time to explain.

Particularly i’d like to single out the cast, none of whom i had heard of before barring a passing recollection of the name Cailee Spaeny, but all of whom do great jobs. Mr Álvarez has aged down the cast from the series’ usual monster fodder, not burnt-out truckers but wide-eyed twentysomething pirates looking to steal some cryo pods to blast off after a better life. (Outside the lead two they’re pretty thin, but hey, it’s a monster movie.) Our lead is the orphaned Rain Carradine, a serviceable Sigourneyalike played by Ms Spaeny, who reluctantly goes with the scavengers after she finds out she’s been assigned another six years on a black-skied mining colony… and because they require the services of her android guardian Andy (heh), the only one who can interface with the systems on the derelict space station they have their eyes on. David Jonsson, who plays Andy, would deserve an “and introducing” had he not been in Rye Lane just last year, but this alone already proves he’s going on to do even greater things. He’s given the task, without spoilers, of playing what amounts to two different (but similar!) characters in the same body, and shows off his naturalistic chops in every little micro-movement.

A certain scene with his character early on will be etched in my brain forever. It’s the big reveal of the Alien™, facehuggers jumping out from every corner in a room flooded by molten ice and red lights… and he stands there, rebooting, the same pose he was two minutes ago, his arms wide, as if nothing happens. Two seconds later, he takes total command of the situation, going from timid to Terminator in five seconds flat. If anything from this film is passed into the annals of pop culture (other than the Asterisk) it’ll either be that scene or the insane body-horror third act that i daren’t even mention for fear of ruining the experience. (Annihilation would be proud.)

I’ll be straight with you: it’s not as good as Alien. It’s not as good as Aliens. But nothing ever will be. Don’t go in with sky-high expectations — go in for a rollicking sci-fi-action-horror, xenomorph or no xenomorph, and you’ll have a great time.

Stuff i watched recently, August ’24

¡ Tagged as films, monthly recaps, Doctor Who ¡ Leave a comment
A montage of the undermentioned works
  • First up is Enemy (2013), a movie somebody peed on. Summarising the plot it sounds a bit thin — Jake Gyllenhaal meets his evil twin Jake Evyllenhaal and not much else happens — but Denis Villeneuve does a fantastic job of building up tension and dread around a slow-burning premise which, in itself, isn’t necessarily the scariest thing. 6/10.
  • Took a trip to the cinema to see Longlegs (2024), starring the greatest living actor himself, Nic Cage. I say “starring”; he’s not in it so much, as it’s more about the internal tensions of our mildly psychic, mildly autistic Clarice Starling stand-in, played wonderfully by Maika Monroe. Again, the plot’s a bit thin, falling apart with a whimper in the third act, but the style and execution more than makes up for it. There are so many looming shots of doors and windows just at the edge of frame, snippets of interspersed terror, ominous rumbling soundscapes… pretty good! 7/10.
  • Green Room (2015) is a solid little low-budget thriller where a punk band get trapped in a nazi bar. Not much to say other than 6/10.
  • Watched Schindler’s List (1993) for the first time. Cue several hours of inelegant blubbering from me. (“I could have got more…”) I would like to apologise for calling John Williams a hack. I was not familiar with your game, sir. 10/10, but it feels wrong to give it a numbered score in the first place.
  • In Bruges (2008)! The online hype for this is ravenous and i’m not quite sure it lives up, but i was suitably entertained. Colin Farrell has very kind eyes. 6½/10.
  • The Olympics were as uplifting as always. A Discord friend of mine put it best: “The Olympics makes me feel patriotic for the human race”. For a few glorious weeks, it doesn’t matter that the IOC is the third most corrupt organisation on the planet behind Fifa and the Mafia. It doesn’t matter that there are wars raging across the old world. All that matters is that the most fit people on the planet have come to show what the human body can really do when pushed to its limits.
  • After years of putting it off, i finally got around to The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), all 3½ hours of it. It’s hard to review just the first part of the trilogy, but if the rest is as good as this, it’s on track for an easy 9.
  • I’ve been getting into the Eighth Doctor audio dramas recently and “The Chimes of Midnight” might be among the best things to come out of Doctor Who. Very dark. Very weird. It builds up this offputting atmosphere perfectly, Paul McGann and India Fisher making you wish they’d gotten a proper series, with the traditional timey-wimey twist. 9/10.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXV

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A map of the Near East and Balkans with a focus on travel destinations and such
Š Zhaoxu Sui

It can’t happen here

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Feeling really quite glum over the news of far-right riots near here yesterday. I just keep coming back to the question… why Sunderland, of all places?

Not that it would be okay in any situation, but it’s not Leicester, where you have sectarian tensions flaring up. It’s not Southport, where you just had a mass stabbing. It’s not even somewhere with a properly substantial Muslim or immigrant population, like a Birmingham or a Boston. It’s Sunderland. Why here, in what is, pardon my bluntness, the White British1 working-class capital of the UK?

I don’t know. I guess i thought it couldn’t happen here. That we were nicer up north. Or that the scenery was too nice for people to get angry. Or that we were too left-wing even though Reform beat the Tories in every constituency. Or maybe that we were too deprived, and that we didn’t have anyone to scapegoat, because we knew it’d be shit no matter what.

Ach. History will trundle on as always, and in due time i’m sure the internet shit-stirrers and fundie imams will be joining hands and complaining about all those filthy undersea neo-post-Bahá’í immigrants from Atlantis taking our jobs. Maybe we can set up a football rivalry for everyone to redirect their hate into like they did in Glasgow. Who knows.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXXIV

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Ἄρα νομίζῃ μὲν σὲ πεσεῖν ἐκ κοκοφοίνικος; Εἶ δὲ κατὰ τὰ πράγματα παντὸς οὗ ζῇς χἄ σοι ἥγηται. (— Κάμαλα Ἁρρίδου, ψʹ.βʹ)

Diplodocus is the best dinosaur

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Image macro reading "When you grow uup people stop asking you what your favourite dinosaur is. They don't even care"

Well, i care about what my favourite dinosaur is, and it’s Diplodocus, that lumbering old fool. Allow me to be possessed by the spirit of my nine-year-old self for a little bit.

Reason number one why the diplodocus is the best dinosaur is because it is called a diplodocus. This is a very fun name to say and does not strike the same terror into the hearts of men as, say, 🤘🤘🤘 Ty­ran­no­sau­rus Rex!!! 🤘🤘🤘 or 🔥🔥🔥 Ve­lo­ci­rap­tor!!! 🔥🔥🔥. I like to think this is because they are, themselves, gentle creatures, being peaceable herbivores and all that. (My favourite dinosaur could beat up your favourite dinosaur, but chooses not to because it is a conscientious objector. I’m sure this taunt would have gone down great on the playground.)

Diplodocus skeleton captioned "REALLY QUITE LONG"
Original photo by Heather Cowper

Another reason diplodoci are great is how long they are, getting up to thirty metres from tip of the snout to top of the tail. Part of me thinks it would be fun to be that long, but the other part likes being able to turn around corners. There’s other dinosaurs that we think were longer, but most of them don’t have a complete skeleton to back them up, which is a skill issue if i’ve ever heard one. If my species was about to be wiped out i would simply do the smart thing and die in an area that would preserve my fossil better. Suck it, Ma­raa­pu­ni­saurus.

That long neck isn’t just for show, either. This is the kind of thing that causes massive arguments among pa­lĂŚ­on­to­log­ists, but a study in the Journal of Vertebrate Pa­lĂŚ­on­to­logy (yes i’m backing up my dinosaur preferences with a source) suggests that, because their centre of mass would lie so close to their hip socket, they could assume a bipedal stance without much effort, lifting them high up into the canopy into the land of only the most gourmet leaves. Then, when a foodie diplodocus was done with its land-based course, it could dip its neck into the riverbank and feast on some fine vegan seafood.

One last thing. After PangĂŚa broke up, the land where the diplodoci reigned shifted and drifted until its reached its present place, in the American southwest. The implication is clear:

A diplodocus sporting a poorly drawn cowboy hat
Original drawing by Dmitry Bogdanov

Diplodoci are cowboys.

One hundred questions

¡ Tagged as random, questions ¡ 2 comments

Alright, why not? These questions are adapted from Cidoku and ergo Burypink. I have told the truth everywhere except where i have lied.

1. Time and date you started this?

2024, July the sixteenth. Twenty-two hours, seven minutes, two seconds.

2. ASL?

Early twenties/It’s complicated/It’s complicated.

3. Opinions on musicals?

Never been a theatre person, but Little Shop of Horrors is a favourite film of mine. 🎵 Son, be a dentist! People will pay you to be inhumane… 🎵

4. Favorite snack?

Squashies.

5. Have you ever been in love?

Not yet.

6. Favourite PokĂŠmon?

Eevee — my favourite evolution of which is Sylveon, obviously.

7. Mario Kart main?

Donkey Kong. Monke always wins.

8. Team Fortress 2 main?

Don’t play it.

9. Do you laugh at Youtube Poops?

Well, obviously. That shit’s hilarious.

10. Are you listening to music right now?

Almost always — currently “Starlings”, the opening from Elbow’s The Seldom Seen Kid. I’ll always have a soft spot for them; they’re my mum’s favourite band, so they’re tied in with a lot of emotional moments growing up.

11. Favourite shape?

A trefoil knot:

A knot with three points

12. Do you believe in astrology?

I find the pop-culture “OMG, that’s such a Gemini thing to do” thing lacking as much in novelty as it is in substance, but i do, at the very least, think there are auspicious and inauspicious days. No further comment, since it’s not a particular focus of mine.

13. Do you believe in the occult?

Are you aware of what website this is? ;-)

14. Opinions on vocaloid?

Not my thing, but i can respect the art of forcing computers to make human noises.

15. Would you ever want to be a rock star?

It seems at once liberating and terrifying — a great big audience for your work and to provoke as you wish, but also…

16. Do you easily get stressed?

Welcome to Fluoxetine: The Blog.

17. What is/was your favorite class in high school?

Further Maths, baby! I’ve gussied this place up but in my heart of hearts i am the biggest stemlord in history. Mathematics, i think, is the highest beauty among the sciences; none of the tangled messes of diagrams of biology or headaches of physics, just three axioms and the truth.

18. What pokemon type would you be? Dual types are allowed, LOL

Water/Fairy.

19. Rei or Asuka?

Who are you and how did you get into my house?

20. Favorite HTML tag?

<details>.

21. Are you religious?

Pagan, albeit not very good at it.

22. Opinions on nightcore?

I instinctively want to be dismissive, but i’m not going to pretend that i don’t regularly load up songs into Audacity and slow them down for the vibe…

23. Did you go through any major phase? (emo, goth, weeaboo, &c.)

Not really — i had a very cheugy adolescence.

24. Are you good at drawing?

No, but i like to think i’m better than i was a month ago.

25. Do you crack your joints?

No.

26. Do you read visual novels?

No.

27. Can you sew?

No, but now you mention it, that is something to add to the “maybe some time” pile…

28. Can you cook?

I make a mean honey and pork stir fry.

29. Most expensive thing you’ve bought?

My new computer tots up to just over a thousand pounds in total and it’s been worth every penny.

30. Opinions on cosplay?

Seems fun, although not my thing.

31. What's your most hated band/musician?

I don’t have it in me to ha…… Maroon 5.

32. Are you a dramatic person?

Cripes, who has the energy for that?

33. What emoticon do you use most?

A winky ;-) face in ascii, a thinky 🤔️ face in emoji.

34. Can a miracle certainly occur?

I don’t understand the question.

35. Would you let a vampire suck your blood?

Nah. The vampire life sounds like it sucks. Now, would i let a werewolf bite me, on the other hand…

36. Do you have a celebrity crush?

Dev Patel, full name Sexiest Man Alive Dev Patel, is the sexiest man alive (Dev Patel).

37. Do you like snow?

Yes, rare as it comes these days… every year winter turns more and more into all the drawbacks without the benefits.

38. Were you really into Greek mythology as a kid?

You get three guesses.

39. What are some things you could competently deliver a speech on?

Esperanto. My mildly schizophrenic interpretation of Synecdoche, New York. The finer places on the internet.

40. Are you good at spelling?

I like to think so! English orthography is one of the tongue’s great beauties; every word hides its origins within itself.

41. which touhou wud u fuk?

It’s time to log off.

42. Do you think there's going to be a robot takeover?

Nah. The singularity is overhyped, in my view — just because robots think faster than us doesn’t mean they’re smarter.

43. Has science gone too far??!?!??!?!

Not far enough. Nowhere near far enough.

44. Would you be an angel or devil?

Devil, because then you get cute little hooves and horns. (I am eternally about two bad bonks on the head from unironically calling myself satyrkin.)

45. Sine, cosine, or tangent?

Tangent.

46. Do you like licorice?

It freaks my English friends out, but absolutely!

47. What’s thing you cant stand that everyone else loves?

Star Wars, also known as The Adventures of Luke Cardboardeater and His Annoying Friends, is complete and utter tripe and i will never understand the obsession. Every character is either boring or awful, every film is just ninety minutes of Harrison Ford running around rickety sets, the score is caterwauling overemotive tripe, and the whole franchise is so utterly uninterested in the star part of the name that it makes me wonder why they even bothered setting it in space.

48. What books did you like as a kid?

A deep cut here, but there’s this series of Dutch kids’ books called Dolfje Weerwolfje about a little kid who gets turned into a werewolf, and i suspect it may have turned me into a furry.

49. Can you play any instruments?

Alas, not yet.

50. What song would you want to play at your wedding?

“One Day Like This”, by Elbow, although that choice may just be because it’s playing right now as i write.

51. Do you believe in reincarnation?

It’s the only option that makes sense. An eternity in heaven is stupefying, and blinking out of existence terrifying; the only thing i can be certain of in life is that there is something experiencing the state of being me, and that something will keep experiencing being me after i’m gone — probably being shunted into the body of the next birth in the queue.

52. Finish the sentence: I’m just a guy who ______

poasts on the internet

53. Have you been to another continent?

No, but it’s arguable! I went to the Anatolian side of Turkey, which most would think of Asia, but i personally include most of the country (as well as the Caucasus) in Europe.

54. What’s your worst habit?

Well i’m not going to tell you, am i‽

55. Favourite vegetable?

Carrots.

56. What’s something stupid that scared the shit outta you as a kid?

When i was five i accidentally locked myself in the toilet at the Holle Bolle Boom. This is Deep Xanthe Lore.

57. What’s one of your guilty pleasures?

Middling immature pop punk. Every part of me knows it’s not good, but come on…

58. Would you rather be a ghost or a vampire?

A vampire, since in that case i can at least interact with the world twelve hours a day instead of zero.

59. What do you fear most?

Dementia. Generally, my policy is that i would like to live as long as possible, but if i ever succumb to that, my family has my full permission to shoot me there and then. I refuse to go through it, losing my sense of self bit by agonising, confusing, terrifying bit.

60. Do you sleep with any plushies?

I don’t sleep with them, but i do keep two plush otters as companions.

61. What hobby do you just not understand?

There’s a subreddit for enthusiasts of electric torches and i just… guys… it’s a torch. They’re all torches. They all do the exact same thing. What are we doing here?

62. Do you like the taste of alcohol?

It’s an acquired taste1, but i find the fruitier, the better. I love a good liqueur or framboise.

63. Are you a hopeless romantic?

In the artistic sense, at least, i think romanticism was where the fine arts peaked. We had finally shed the awkward masses of flesh of the baroque times, but not yet gone down the slippery slope of abstraction that the modern era would lead us to.

64. Which deadly sin best fits you?

Gluttony.

65. Which of your physical features do you like the most?

I have lovely long blonde hair that refracts into golds and browns in the sunlight.

66. Are your ears pierced?

Not yet.

67. Have you ever been in a physical fight?

Thankfully not!

68. Where do you buy your clothes?

Are you an ad tracking script or something?

69. Where would you live if you could live anywhere?

Hold on, let me get the quote out…

A large, secluded home, out in the countryside, but not so far out that it becomes a pain to visit the big city. Probably England, rather than the Netherlands, if only for the sheer diversity of scenery.

70. Do you believe in magic? Or is it all a trick?

Magick is real, and without the somewhat provocative terminology for what is, ultimately, prayer with attitude, i think this statement would be uncontroversial among most religious people.

71. Have you read Umineko When They Cry? You should!

No, and you can’t make me, because you’re a line of text in a blog post.

72. What is the worst chore to do?

It’s nowhere near the hardest or even most inconvenient, but there’s something distinctly humiliating about the ritual of walking your dishes down to their automatic dish-washing throne. We’ve automated the washing part away, but here i still am, taking time out of my life to stick a dirty plate in between other dirty plates, trying not to get any residue on me.

73. What did your parents almost name you?

I’ve thankfully been told alternate choices for both sexes, so this isn’t going to get me to reveal what’s in my pants — i could have ended up a Fred or an Amélie.

74. What would you want your name to be if you were not your current gender?

Xanthe Tynehorne, seeing as it’s not my real name.2

75. What were your first words?

“Lion”. Or “jaja”, i guess. It all evens out.

76. What do you want your last words to be?

Ideally i wouldn’t have any, but if i am going to die, then i can hardly go out on anything other than “Do not go gentle into that good night”.

77. When did you first regularly start going online?

I literally don’t remember! The internet has ruined my soul.

78. What year do you miss the most?

2012 was the peak of human civilisation. Maybe it’s just because i was a dumb kid, but man — they had smartphones, but they hadn’t yet completely taken over; social media still seemed like a fun place to be rather than an endless bath of vitriol, and, of course, “Call Me Maybe” came out.

79. Are you psychic?

I predict the answer is “no”.

80. Would you fuck a clone of yourself? You’re not allowed to kill yourself.

Yes, obviously! I’m bisexual, so it’s not like i have any reason not to. I am a bit worried about what happens to the clone afterwards, though… do they just go off into the woods, never to be seen again?

81. What do you use to listen to music?

Back when i used Windows i was a big fan of MusicBee… now, much as it pains me to say, i stick to streaming and sometimes BBC Sounds. I’ve had a hand-coded music player on the back-burner for a while now, but there’s so many fiddly ruddy edge cases to deal with, and nothing ever imports formatted as nicely as i want it to!

82. Whats the biggest city you’ve been to?

London.

83. Favourite animal?

Otters!!!!!!

Three otters resting on a log

84. What web browser do you use?

Firefox — i’ve found it Just Works™.

85. Are you allergic to kitty cats???????????

No. My family used to foster them, actually!

86. Do you like energy drinks?

No.

87. Would you ever spend money on TF2 unusuals/CS:GO skins/gacha pulls/&c.

No, because i may be a shmuck, but i’m not a complete shmuck.

88. When do you usually go to bed?

Too late for comfort.

89. How often do you wash your hair?

Once a day, in the shower.

90. Would you download a car?

Me? Download a car? I would never… [looks nervously at my computer’s three-hundred-gigabyte film folder]

91. What was your favorite show as a kid?

I cannot stress enough how much Phineas and Ferb was the absolute shit.

92. What’s the silliest hat you own?

I… my word, i don’t know.

93. What album/song do you listen to when you’re feeling angsty?

“Me”, by The 1975. “Oh, i was thinking ’bout killing myself; don’t you mind…”

94. Do you make OCs?

Do fursonĂŚ count?

95. What’s the goofiest thing you do when completely alone?

Make random mouth noises to myself.

96. Do you like fireworks?

When i was six i slept through the new years’ fireworks and got so sad/angry i demanded my mama and papa call everyone in Hoorn and make them do it again.

97. Favourite painter?

Maxfield Parrish has such a command of light and colour. I’m always blown away when i see his work.

98. Favourite numbers?

One-hundred-and-thirty-seven. I think one, three, and seven are all particularly special — one is, well, one; three has been associated with so much for so long that it’s a waste to sum it up, and seven is particularly interesting to me because six is the highest number of things we can instinctively see without counting. It’s the first number we have to properly think about to understand — the first number that leaps out of the domain of nature and into that of humans! So the fact that, when you put them next to each other, they wind up the inexplicable reciprocal of a fundamental physical constant is incredible.

99. What genre of vidya gaems are you really good at? (FPS, fightan, danmaku, racing, whatever)

I don’t know if i can give an answer, because if there’s a pattern in my favourite games, it’s that they’re ones where you don’t have to be good at them. I just love a good wide open sandbox to muck about in.

100. time and date you finished this?

2024, July the sixteenth. Twenty-three hours, fifteen minutes, fifty seconds.