Netflix's short stint with FMV / chooe-your-own adventure games highlights a perfect case of difficult preservation - all the runtimes are closed source apps, all the data is streamed from a server, and all the logic is held on the server.

In theory (big caveat) with enough time, effort, and determination you could reverse engineer your way around even the worst Denuvo has to throw. For simple streamed content like images and sound you can always analog-hole your way around preserving content.

But for anything where the key thing you want to preserve, like logic, that depends entirely on a server somewhere existing, that's a problem.

Honestly, "country of origin" will have straight lines drawn on a map that are so far removed from where the people who lived there originally considered their borders even that's probably not pinning it down well enough.

I agree about the gelth - initially they seem able to inhabit dead bodies on their own, but then they need a conduit to come through, but then they aren't able to stay in the bodies when there's gas around them, which is a bit inconsistent.

I missed the first couple of episodes of this rewatch, so joining in here.

Compared to the newer episodes a lot of the direction in this one feels more like the classic series - more like a stage play than a typical TV drama, which fits the theme of the story well.

There's lots of jokes sprinkled throughout this story, and it really works well with Christopher Eccleston. I missed that mad grin he does.

Acting - In the theatre, I did notice some of the bg extras not really running quite as fast from the ghost as they should have been, which was amusing. And the actors playing the reanimated dead bodies was really cheesy, felt less like an entity controlling them and more like they were playing stereotypical zombies. I did enjoy the portrayal of dickens as the sceptical and haunted artist.

The gelth needing the dead bodies because they've lost their own reminds me a bit of that voyager episode where the aliens take dead bodies to reuse them. It set up a nice conflict between Doctor and Rose - but after the tense conversation it doesn't go anywhere, and an exploration of what it could mean is undermined by the twist that they're evil. I didn't really like the cgi, even considering it's a couple decades old.

It's not the best episode, but certainly not the worst. I think this might actually be the first time I've rewatched this episode since I saw it live when it aired.

Random bit I noticed at the end - they look at dickens through a viewscreen monitor on the Tardis console just before they leave. The Tardis often has futuristic looking interfaces in modern series, seeing a plain cctv camera view is very retro (and dare I say it seems more useful than a semi transparent screen with a bunch of circles for no good reason ;) )

I was mildly confused, as I suspect a lot of fans were, I don't know if that quite constitutes "backlash". Are there people really getting that militant about this?

This is why you keep a several hundred megabytes history file set to remember "forever"

This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.

If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they're shouting, that's not adding realism, they're doing bad acting.

If the sound engineers can't get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that's not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they're bad at mixing.

If the director can't keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that's not artistic choice, they've made a bad film.

There's something I'm really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the "Digital euro" idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that's new?

Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it's just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what's actually new when we're talking about digital currency like this post?

There must be something I'm missing here.

Absolutely all foreigners - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly67j35y99o

You can't misgender a brand. You can't deadname a brand. You can't befriend a brand.

Answer wrong. The more of us humans that answer wrong, the less accurate we need to be to get past these stupid things. If google want me to do work for them, they can pay me.

French and Portuguese at the convention, their arms open.