People are sometimes surprised when I mention that the unproduced story I regret the most isn't any of the many cancelled FP projects but Steven Hall's Fifty-Fifty, which would have wrapped up some of Big Finish's best character arcs with a conflict between the Seventh and Eighth Doctors at "the moment where 7 went bad".

It would have been the retroactive pinnacle of Wilderness Years, taking its two Doctors with such different characterizations and pitting them against each other. It also … doesn't make a ton of sense. Even taking into account the timey-wimey memory effects of a multi-Doctor event, how could such a dramatic character arc for the Seventh Doctor possibly come and go without the Eighth Doctor – his future self – having any idea?

This question keeps coming up in Doctor Who, and every time the answer feels contrived. Steven Hall would have solved it for Fifty-Fifty by introducing a "Temporal Wish" that allows parts of history to be rewritten without timeline damage. Elsewhere, Big Finish has resorted to hand-waving: every story where characters meet out-of-order has to involve an ad hoc disguise, a memory wipe, or a promise from one of the characters that next time they'll pretend not to have met (🥴). And don't even get me started on "season 6b"!

In what Ingiga cleverly calls Doctor Who: The Return, RTD faced the same question. What if we had more Tenth Doctor stories, not squeezed into any of the well-trodden gaps in his timeline but set after The End of Time – genuinely new stories, taking the character places that it never would've made sense for him to go (such as therapy)?

RTD answered this question twice. Once the regular way, the ad hoc way: David Tennant's contrived return at the end of The Power of the Doctor. And then, emboldened by the Power of the Showrunner, he solved it again – and he solved it for every story, now and forever.

I think down the timeline, they all separated. They all went like that. All the Doctors came back to life with their individual TARDISes. The gift of the Toymaker. And they're all out there traveling around in what I'm calling the Doctorverse. It's the Doctorverse. And I want to create a future in which Sylvester McCoy, he can survive and have an adventure. Because one of the things about The Star Beast is, to get you back and Catherine, we had to jump through so many hoops. Which is great story, but it's like, why can't you just arrive and step out the TARDIS? […] Because this is exactly what Big Finish does. It's exactly what everyone does in their imagination. […] It's time to just kind of open it up and say, they're all out there now.

Or as he put it a different time,

Doctors galore, with infinite possibilities. All Doctors exist. All stories are true.

Gig's latest piece rightly dismisses the "Flowchart" theory of bigeneration, but frankly, I think the fiddly stuff about "fix" vs "fixed" etc. is a red herring. The simple fact is that if Fourteen's post-Giggle memories flow backwards into Fifteen – if Seven's post-TV Movie memories flow backwards into Eight – bigeneration wouldn't solve the Fifty-Fifty problem.

Yes, RTD tries to have his cake and eat it too. In the dream logic of The Giggle, "emotional healing" is a mysterious essence that can be transferred through time independently of memories, just as incinerated roads can magically heal themselves in The Star Beast. But in terms of what RTD's trying to accomplish, in terms of what bigeneration is, I think it's okay to take him at his word.

Speaking of words, the leak called it "bi-regeneration", and even after the episode aired, much of the internet followed suit. But that's not what it's called. It's just bigeneration: not a type of regeneration, an alternative. And indeed, now we have this option – now we have Fourteen, not just Ten – why would we ever go back to playing the timeline-squeezing game? If Big Finish officially untethered itself from the past Doctors' timelines and, say, freed Eight from his interminable death march – would anyone miss it?

Lawrence Miles certainly didn't think so when he advocated a similar untethering 24 years ago.

When you watched Doctor Who as a kid, it kind of lost some of its edge from the start, because you knew for a fact how things were going to turn out. […] I've always felt that the Missing Adventures… or PDAs, or whatever you want to call them… have got a similar problem. The Doctor can't die [or go to therapy – n8.] We know the future, it's not even an issue. That was why I did what I did in Interference. Even if they don't like it, I hope people realize there's a purpose behind it all. It's suppose to justify the existence of the PDAs. From that point on, you can never be sure what the outcome's going to be.

Nobody picked up his suggestion back then, but then again, Miles lacked the Power of the Showrunner. If Tales of the TARDIS' therapeutic dreamscapes are any indication, it won't be long before other writers adopt RTD's in-vision musings as gospel.

So what will happen when Fourteen dies? Will he regenerate? Will he dissolve into sparkles, his ✨emotional healing✨ shooting back in time to become Fifteen? Or like the prior iteration of the "Tenth Doctor happy ending offshoot" idea, is he simply mortal now? The frank answer is that we'll probably never find out: that's simply not the kind of story that bigeneration is meant to tell.

Or maybe RTD's already told us. The quote earlier about "Doctors galore" came from the note accompanying his "Doctor Who and the Time War". That story shows us an Eighth Doctor who survived to the very last days of the Time War, with no War Doctor to be found; it's easy to imagine a bigeneration on Karn not unlike RTD's speculation that "Peter Davison once was left behind on the surface of Androzani and woke up and there was a TARDIS and he carried on having those adventures."

And in the story – released almost seven years after The Night of the Doctor showed us the birth of the War Doctor – Eight struggles, and he succumbs, and he regenerates … into Christopher Eccleston's Nine. Now there's a flowchart that I could get behind.

Steven Hall might have the most heartbreaking portrayal of Grantaire I’ve ever seen. It was such a complex portrayal of the character that felt so much more alive and like an actual person than just someone playing a character in a theatre.

He started off in red and black with the most drunken behaviour ever. He was constantly falling of chairs and climbing on peoples laps. Poor Marius was sat on like five times, it was almost amusing especially on the line “Grantaire put the bottle down” when he was snuggling into marius’ shoulder while sitting across his lap and hugging his wine bottle. He also climbed on the tables and made it everyone’s problems, yet still maintained the feeling that he didn’t quite fit in with his friends even though they were laughing. He constantly stood off to the side and collapsed against the wall. Alongside this, he was almost always with Gavroche and acted like a big brother (all though he did make Gav take a shot of alcohol at one point). He also conveyed the enjoyment of annoying Enjolras and kept giving him shiteating grins and almost pouty expressions. Enjolras, as well as being annoyed with Grantaire also maintain the feeling that he enjoyed Grantaire’s presence throughout the whole show which towards the end evolved into concern and worry for him. Grantaire’s connection with Marius was also really interesting, it felt like they were more friends (which I thought was better) than Enjolras and Marius.

At the start of the Barricade scenes he still maintain the drunken confidence that mirrored his friends actual confidence, with lines like “let’s give them a screwing they’ll never forget” that were delivered in cheerful drunken agression. That confidence quickly changed when he realised the reality of the situation and that they were all going to die. Enjolras and him exited the stage after the first load of fighting but Grantaire came back before Enjolras, who someone went and got when Eponine was dying. The horror at seeing Eponine’s death (which I think he was the first one to properly realise after Marius) felt so real, he looked like his mind was driving him insane but he was unable to move, instead frozen to the spot. It planted a seed in my mind that kept making me think “this is so unfair, why do people have to die so they do not suffer?”.

For the rest of the barricade he radiated pain. There were times when he looked almost wild with this unfathomable desperation from the fact he couldn’t stop/control what was happening around him. He acted like it was almost too painful to even watch what was happening at the barricade, almost as if he didn’t want to be a part of the Revolution because he didn’t want his friends to die and be left alone.

Steven Hall’s acting was phenomenal, the emotions in facial expressions conveyed were masterful (by far the best acting performance of anyone that night). During drink with me, he tried to shove Marius out of frustration on the lines “will the world remember you when you fall?” and Enjolras had to hold him to stop him from hurting Marius. He then sang the lines “Could it be your death means nothing at all? Is your life just one more lie?” directly at Enjolras and tapped Es chest on “nothing at all?” with a transfer from aggression to mournful frustration.

During the second attack, after drink with me, he clutched Gavroche like the world was literally crumbling around him. It came across as both fear and mental exhaustion, everyone else was fighting on the barricade and Grantaire was breaking down and Gavroche was holding him up off to the side.

I have never seen such raw emotion on stage, which was present across his whole performance. The way he shouted Gavroche’s name when he realised he had gone was gut wrenching. And when Gavroche fell into Enjolras’ arms after he was shot, Enjolras look so pained by it and concerned for Grantaire as he passed Gavs body to him. By this point I was properly crying, and Grantaire looked so lost, like he had been through so much emotional and mental pain and he’d finally reached the point of numbness as he held Gavs body.

Just before the climax of the final attack, Enjolras mouthed to Grantaire “are you okay? Your going to be okay.” as he was slumped against the wall. During the final attack, R stood in the middle of the fighting as everything happened around him. When Marius fell after getting hurt, R was immediately there and then the normal Enjoltaire hug happened which was heart breaking, before Enjolras returned to the barricade. Grantaire died last after running to get to the place Enjolras fell from the barricade.

Throughout the show he also had such amazing intricate body language. A few examples were when Eponine was dying his hands where fidgeting like he didn’t know what to do with them and digging his fingers into his palms like he was trying to physicalise the pain. He also was playing with his cuffs throughout the barricade scenes. Even in red and black he was moving his hands. They never stopped moving. Every part of his body language and posture were immaculate, where other people were standing completely still (which I’m not criticising) Grantaire felt more realistic and had an unrest-less energy about him - but only if you paid attention to him - which furthered his disconnect from the rest of the amis as no one noticed except maybe Feuilly [the actor (Harry Chandler) who is cover Enjolras. He radiate Enjolras energy without even being him so now I’m going to have to try and see him as Enjolras cause his vocals were also amazing] at the beginning and Enjolras at the end.

There was never a moment when Grantaire wasn’t wild with emotion whether drunken rowdiness or heart wrenching desperation. There was also a sensitivity to Grantaire that felt so young but not naive, that was just perfection. I think it’s safe to say that Steven Hall has mastered the character of R and is insanely talented at acting. While other actors have also nailed the character of Grantaire, I’ve never come across a portrayal who had so much underlying jittery energy and was so mentally taxed by the end.

Also, shout out to Noah Morgan as Gavroche. The kid was so extremely talent and was the definition of Gavroche throughout.

Les Misérables Uk Tour Norwich 09/09/22

[Grantaire - Steven Hall, Enjolras - Samuel Wyn-Morris, Feuilly - Harry Chandler, Gavroche - Noah Morgan]

Sad news: Steven Hall has now left the uk tour cast. However, I look forward to seeing how Raymond Walsh plays Grantaire as the new member of the national tour.

The Raw Shark Texts (Steven Hall) "Eric Sanderson wakes up with no memory of who he is or any past experiences. He is told by a psychologist that he has a dissociative condition known as fugue but a trail of written clues purporting to be from his pre-amnesiac self describe a more fantastic and sinister explanation for his lack of memories. According to these, he has activated a conceptual shark called a Ludovician which "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self" and is relentlessly pursuing him and will eventually erase his personality completely.

Also at one point there's about 30 pages of an ASCII shark moving towards the reader. Could easily be interpreted as the Ludovician actually approaching the reader in a Leitner-ized version. (Spoilers under the cut)"

The Helmet of Horror (Victor Pelevin) "Eight people find themselves in eight different rooms with a labyrinth behind them and a computer in front of them. They try to communicate via the computer that allows them to chat with one another, but has nicknames set for them(IsoldA, UGLI 666, Ariane…) and blocks their personal information. They(and us) can't know if they are lying. When two of them try to see each other by visiting a spot in the labyrinths that should be the same they each then recount a completely different experience and accuse each other of lying. Another character claims they all must be figments of his imagination, he must be very drunk. And they're all afraid of the minotaur. It is a book where no one, even the reader knows what's real, everyone is afraid of what might appear if they turn a corner and no one knows what's going on."

[SPOILERS] "When the Ludovician attacks Eric, he decides to go in search of a doctor named Trey Fidorous, identified by the letters from his previous self, in the hope he may be able to help to explain what happened to him and how to defeat the shark. Eric travels through Britain in search of clues and is contacted by a mysterious figure called Mr. Nobody, who is part of a megalomaniac network intelligence called Mycroft Ward. Mr. Nobody attempts to subdue and control Eric but Eric manages to escape with the help of an associate of Fidorous named Scout. Scout takes Eric to meet Fidorous, travelling through un-space (an underground network of empty warehouses and unused cellars). They begin a romantic relationship during the journey but Eric feels betrayed when he discovers that Scout has brought him to Fidorous to use him as bait for the shark in the hope of destroying Ward.

With their help Fidorous builds a conceptual shark-hunting boat and they sail out on a conceptual ocean. After a battle with the shark they throw a laptop hooked up to the Mycroft Ward database into its mouth, destroying both Ward and the shark. Eric and Scout remain in the conceptual universe while Eric's dead body is discovered back in the real world."

Boy's Own (issue ?) YEAR: 1989 CREATED BY: Terry Farley, Andrew Weatherall, Cymon Eckel and Steven Hall LOCATION: London SIZE: A4 WHAT'S INSIDE.... A zine from the last month of the last year of the 1980s.... By this time a gazillion fanzines had been published in the UK since the start of the punk rock explosion, covering a multitude of musical styles that had emerged in its wake. Football fanzines had also established themselves as an integral part of our national game. Boy's Own was started in 1986 by a group of young clubbers who were friends with DJ Paul Oakenfold and right where they needed to be as acid house began to take off in the UK. One of their inspirations was Liverpool fanzine The End, which irreverently mixed up music, football, poetry, fashion, humour, booze, drugs and politics (some of the zine's writers also ended up in indie-dance band The Farm). Each issue of Boy's Own contained a list of "uppers and downers", just like The End's list of "ins and outs". After sampling the club scene in Ibiza and discovering a new euphoria-enhancing drug called ecstasy, the Boy's Own crew became associated with London's first acid house clubs. Andrew Weatherall DJed at Danny Rampling's Shoom, and Terry Farley DJed at Paul Oakenfold's Future night at Heaven. They soon began hosting their own outdoor raves, helping to start a movement that would inspire any number of "Shock! Horror!" headlines in the tabloid press. They eventually formed their own record label and (if I remember correctly) also invented the phrase "it's all gone Pete Tong".... And in a similar way to the first punk zines, Boy's Own reflected the enormous changes in Britain's youth culture and fashion that were driven by house music and ecstasy in the late 1980s. This issue of the zine even includes the acid house equivalent of one of the most iconic expressions of the punk ethos (a picture of some badly drawn guitar chord charts accompanied by the words “THIS IS A CHORD - THIS IS ANOTHER - THIS IS A THIRD - NOW FORM A BAND”) that appeared in the first issue of Sideburns fanzine in January 1977 (although the Boy’s Own crew wrongly attribute it to Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue). The acid house/ecstasy/rave scene was every bit as seismic as punk had been a decade earlier and also inspired a new generation of bands who were influenced by dance music (something that New Order had already pioneered since the early 1980s), the best of which were based in and around Manchester - which became known as Madchester at the time - and was also home to the Hacienda night club, which many people regarded as the epicentre of acid house. Some existing indie bands decided to completely change their sound and join the smiley/baggy/indie-dance revolution - most notably, Primal Scream. Andrew Weatherall's production work on their album "Screamadelica" helped the band to create an influential blend of rock and rave music, especially on the iconic "Higher Than The Sun" - a track that perfectly captured the mood of the era. This issue of Boy's Own features Flowered Up, a London band who managed to make a couple of half decent records while attempting to be the southern equivalent of Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses. Looking through the records in the Boy's Own charts, most of them would sound a bit lame today, with the notable exception of "The Sun Rising" by The Beloved. New releases include "Madchester Rave On - The Remixes" by Happy Mondays, which features a remix of "Hallelujah" by Paul Oakenfold and Andy Weatherall, and a remix of "Rave On" by Paul Oakenfold and Terry Farley. There's also cartoons, readers' letters, lifestyle tips, bouncer horror stories, girl's own nightmares, moody flyers, Viz comic, the Kray twins and much more. It's often true that the pioneers of a scene end up getting pissed off when it goes mainstream, and in an article titled "Paradise Lost", the Boy's Own crew also reminisce about the halcyon days of clubbing before the riff raff started jumping on the bandwagon. Click on the title above to see scans of all the zine's pages.... Andrew Weatherall was one of the greatest DJs of all time, and after his death in 2020, a group of fans created The Weatherdrive: a Google Drive folder containing hundreds of hours of his studio mixes, live recordings and radio shows. The complete collection of Boy's Own fanzines was published in a book called "Boy's Own, The Complete Fanzines 1986-92: Acid House Scrapes And Capers" but it's been out of print for years and I'm not prepared to fork out a fortune for a second hand copy.... my box of 1980s fanzines flickr

yknow as happy as i am about raytaire returning i’m also absolutely devastated that we got like zero steven hall R content?? like half the time i was wondering if he’d left already and i missed it T-T where are the photos. WHERE

Consigli di lettura per gli amanti di Casa di Foglie

🔶 Se ti è piaciuto Casa di Foglie di Danielewski allora poterbbero piacerti anche: 🔹 La biblioteca di Babele - Borges (racconto contenuto nel libro Finzioni) 🔹 La vita: Istruzioni per l'uso - Perec (labirinto) 🔹 Il processo - Kafka 🔹 Film notturno - Marisha Pessl (thriller) 🔹 Il Magus - Fowles 🔹 La paziente silenziosa - Michaelides (thriller, bellissimo) 🔹 Strangers - Yamada (storia di fantasmi, giapponese) 🔹 Utsubora (vol. 1 e 2)- Nakamura (mystery thriller; graphic novel in due volumi) 🔹 La troga - Rugarli 🔹 Le venti giorante di Torino - De Maria (un bel horror, molto ansiolitico) 🔹 Rabbits - Terry Miles (molto particolare; non mi è piaciuto moltissimo, ma mi ha dato certi incubi D:) 🔹 Trilogia della città di K. - Agota Kristof 🔹 L'etá inquieta - Starobinec (super weird, bellissimo!) 🔹 One Bloody Thing After Another - Joey Comeau (horror, bellissimo!) 🔹 The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 - Thomas Ott (graphic novel senza testo) 🔹 Il demone di Maxwell + The Raw Shark Texts (in italiano: I pensieri dello squalo) - Steven Hall 🔶 Questi invece mi sono stati consigliati, ma devo ancora leggerli: 🔹 The Way Through Doors - Jesse Ball

"We only see starlight because all of the stars are bleeding."

The Raw Shark Texts

i lied abt only posting abt this situation once, i just saw this lovely person’s comment!! passing it on to tumblr 🫡

edit: SOMEONEE changed the password and ruined it for everybody :/ pls try this version instead!!

edit 2: WATCHER POSTED AN UPDATE

A death request

I dont really have comfort characters but the prompt fits so well

Just saw the uk les mis tour and it was one of the best performances of les Mis I’ve ever seen.

Grantaire was the most emotionally deep and heartbreaking portrayal ever. Eponine was full of anger and determination that you so rarely see. They were both phenomenal.

The person who played Joly was the most Joly Joly to ever Joly.

Enjolras was as close to perfect as I’ve seen (I don’t think anyone will ever fully master him, so basically he was perfect).

The ensemble was just incredible.

I’ll go into more detail in another post when I’m not tired.

The Raw Shark Texts (Steven Hall) "Eric Sanderson wakes up with no memory of who he is or any past experiences. He is told by a psychologist that he has a dissociative condition known as fugue but a trail of written clues purporting to be from his pre-amnesiac self describe a more fantastic and sinister explanation for his lack of memories. According to these, he has activated a conceptual shark called a Ludovician which "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self" and is relentlessly pursuing him and will eventually erase his personality completely.

Also at one point there's about 30 pages of an ASCII shark moving towards the reader. Could easily be interpreted as the Ludovician actually approaching the reader in a Leitner-ized version. (Spoilers under the cut)"

Finnegans Wake (James Joyce) "Finnegan's Wake is one of the most experimental novels of the twentieth century. Rather than write using conventions of novels--or of the English language--Joyce structured his book on language itself. The result is surreal, dense, and famously difficult. To get a sense of just how strange and dreamlike the whole thing is, even its Wikipedia page compares it to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" before pointing out the the book begins with the second half of a sentence, which it gives the first half of at its end. Tl;dr Finnegan's Wake is so unsettlingly experimental that Joyce had to break the English language down to its components to get his vision down on the page."

Steven Patrick Morrissey of ‘The Smiths’ on stage at De Montfort Hall (1984)

gosh he’s so pretty

First look at ‘GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE’