It may be waiting to enshittify, but as it is still DRM free, that’s not a huge deal breaker (as long as they don’t change this policy). Plus, they’re still doing Bandcamp fridays, so it’s still the best way to financially support a musician at the moment.

I want it banned. Then I want to see all the MPs who have continued to use it these past years figure out where they’re going to get their “engagement” from now.

I’ve only watched the first episode, I don’t know if I’ll watch the rest. I think I’ve hit on the key problem that this episode has: Interesting ideas, that it just doesn’t do anything interesting with. There are three key areas the episode could have focused on:

• Translation. You have to be incredibly arrogant to assume you could instantly translate a language you’ve never spoken before. We get some hints of this but they never lead anywhere because the whole scene is cut off by the emergency alert and the cut to the news montage. The mistranslation we briefly see never has a chance to set in with any major down-the-line consequences. Even the reference to misgendering is a throwaway because there was never any danger of it leading to offence, and it comes across virtue signally more than having meaning. And I am very confused why the scene is directed as if this is the first time they’ve shared a dialogue, when there is loads of dialogue, equipment, and prior process to suggest they’ve already done this before.
• Diplomacy. Similar to translation, we never get a chance for any misunderstandings, cultural shocks, subterfuge, political bargaining. We get a generic british diplomat who has to leave before we even get a chance to know him and his mindset. We get some obvious low hanging fruit about pollution, but without any serious discussion. I suspect this may come in later episodes, but this first one fails to make a big impression on this.
• Gerry Anderson rube goldberg machines. The big tank forms a huge set piece. We get a very quick tease of a disaster scene, but it doesn’t lead anywhere. It fails to grip me with drama because there’s a sudden fear things are going to go wrong, only for the problem to immediately resolve without UNIT’s intervention itself when unnamed scaffold worker #3 tightens a bolt and fixes everything. If they wanted to play this up, they failed.

Other gripes:

• It starts with a dodgy CGI jumpscare, the soil liquefaction scene was honestly more terrifying, as something that can actually really happen in certain circumstances like earthquakes, but that only takes place about 10 minutes in. The liquefaction murder would have been a far more terrifying cold open that jumping in to a fishing boat monster. The story is being told from Barclay’s perspective, so I don’t think we should have seen any of the monster until the first time Barclay sees it in person.
• The voices of many of the cast were far to mumbly, I needed subtitles early on. No nonsense army captain has a particularly low monotone voice.
• The reference to the doctor didn’t need to be there, it didn’t contribute to the plot in any way. A spinoff needs to be able to stand on its own two feet. We already have UNIT, Kate, etc as the “hand over” characters, and I didn’t even see the whoniverse logo at the start, so I don’t know what the ultimate goal is there.
• Another admin security failure from UNIT. They keep doing this. They’re supposed to be the toughest top level security force on the planet, and they can’t get a basic HR form right. I can suspend my disbelief for sea monsters and instant translation tech, but ‘I’m here by accident’ is just to much. The hand wavy “ah, but you’re the civilian we need here” doesn’t fix it.
• Various minor writing issues. They “put the body far away from the village”? It’s literally in one of the houses next door. “I’m here by accident”, to which army guy immediately replies “So you’re saying you’re here by accident”. Why the deck chairs just to watch a loudspeaker blast some sound waves? Why is a helicopter carrying steel beams across london?

are you complaining that smaller devs get a bigger cut than larger devs? That’s certainly an interesting gripe…

Smaller devs have to pay 30% of their revenues to steam. If a game sells well enough, their revenue share increases and steam takes a smaller cut, 25 or even 20%. This greatly benefits publishers of big games and unfairly punishes smaller developers. I think that’s a perfectly fair gripe.

Forgot about steam’s forced DRM on purchases. Forgot about their inconsistent policing of content in games they sell. Forgot about steam not wanting accounts to be inherited when you pass away. Forgot about their 30% cut for small devs while bigger devs get a smaller cut. Forgot about a lot of things.

Sugars and additives are in nearly all foods, maybe we should stop asking manufacturers to disclose it on the ingredients list.

Going purely by the illustration, pass it to the next person because they have a track with no-one on it

The War Between The Land And The Sea comes to BBC One and iPlayer from 7 December, and Disney+ in 2026.

For a “very 2025” show, I see they’re keeping up the age old tradition of delaying international release for no good reason. I don’t care, I’m in the UK, but just… why?

A website generator built by a human still gave a human the chance to make some choices, feel useful, validate it worked right, possibly even an income.

This is just RTD being RTD, and I should ignore it. But it sent me on a wikipedia rabbit hole,

If we’re being pendantic that wouldn’t be “racist”, it would be “speciesist”,as race in biology refers to subspecies differences, not species-level, which is what the aqua/sapiens distinction means.

Also, if we’re being inclusive implying that homo aqua are not “sapient”, i.e. intelligent, seems about as insulting as calling them devils.

Totally unrelated, but I learned that from the latin genus name, you can refer to the chimpanzee tribe as “Panini”, which is fun.

it took me far too long to parse this sentence. I kept trying to figure out why the grandparents calling their grandson on the phone was relevant to the story

If there are no dangerous predators, then there is no problem voting third party

I take issue with this comment from the article:

A Doctor Who source says the show suffered because Gatwa never fully embraced the role. “There is more to that role than performing,” this person says. “You have got to be an ambassador for the brand and embrace being that generation’s Doctor. Matt Smith and David Tennant fully understood the responsibility it carried.”

What nonsense. An actors job is to act, and Gatwa acted well. He had gravitas, he had presence, he was entertaining to watch. And much like with Eccleston’s run (who was there even less time than Gatwa by the way), the problems I saw had nothing to do with an actor failing to be a “brand ambassador”. If there are problems with branding, that’s the broadcast executive team’s fault, not the cast and crew.

I first read this as MPEG and thought they were talking about the video encoding.

I wish they were talking about the video encoding.

soi-sante deez nuts

I love that “Lonely Mountains: Downhill” isn’t woke, even though it gives fine grained control over your characters design, like a “feminine” body with facial hair.

“Envisioned as an important connecting vein that will one day see trains running from Helsinki, Finland, to Palermo, Sicily,”

Surely the important connecting vein here is a link to Finland, on the other side of Europe and across the sea from Italy, but then I’m not a rail engineer so what do I know.

I\ don\'t\ know\ what\ you\ mean,\ I\'ve\ never\ encountered\ any\ annoyances.

Labour were voted in on a mandate of “change” specifically. Literally, their one word slogan used during campaigning. Now, obviously they’re the single transferable party, so nothing was actually going to change, but I do want to make sure no-one forgets that was their one promise.

Pike got his “that’s rough buddy” moment.

I am very glad we got to revisit this storyline. There was a lot left to explain in that dimensional prison, and using it as a finale to neatly wrap a lot of different plot threads was great. I was really interested in that guardian figure from the earlier episode, knowing now that it ended up being Batel in a kind of asymptotic time loop is pretty crazy, but it is a very poetic ending. She can’t really live a life with Pike, and this is an ending that gives her meaning.

When Batel’s hands started glowing for a moment I genuinely thought she was going to regenerate à la time lord. And in the end I guess she kind of did! I half expected her to start babbling about some cosmic koala when she had stars in her eyes, I’m glad she didn’t. The ending took a serious tone, and that worked very well.

This episode uses what is effectively a dream sequence and those you have to be careful with. It works well here because the concept of time, cause, and effect have already been established as in play here so even if it never turned out as the actual in-universe outcome, it still feels like it has meaning. I note that the show giving us Pike’s alternate future had he not (will he have had not? tenses are hard with time travel) got in the accident for me cements the fact that he really is going to end up as his future vision told him. There’s no avoiding it now.

I am not sure I really followed a lot of the treknobabble in this one. I don’t get how the entity managed to reconstruct itself, nor why there was a whole debate about phasers being complementary instead of additive. But as a plot device to get things moving it was serviceable. Also, just a note, if you’re firing a stream of ANTI protons into the atmosphere, one would expect the antimatter to annihilate on impact with the upper atmosphere. I did find it hilarious that there’s two massive red lasers with the same power as a star beaming in through the balcony and none of the natives there were bothered by it enough to get out of their seats!

The planet design was really cool, the big floating churchey architecture was giving me Halo vibes. It’s interesting that the planet has no warp travel but still makes contact with alien races. I wonder if then the Feds would bother to help them out in the aftermath, or if they just left them to it. They kind of should take responsibility, given it was them that unleashed the evil in the first place. Even if it’s just to loan them that eye regeneration thing for a few hours.

Overall, this was a nice finale, and given it didn’t end on a pointless cliffhanger, and wrapped up most of the threads well, one of the better ones as TV dramas go.