It's ages since I've read a Joan Aiken book, but I loved both her short stories and her Wolves of Willoughby Chase series (and maybe even more Midnight Is A Place, with the fluff-pickers under the looming threat of the carpet press). This will probably be her last book of short stories, collecting some from her early publications in Argosy, some unpublished ones from the same period, and some from much later, close to her death in 2004. Both the early and the later ones are recognisably by the same person, but the later ones are a bit thinner, sticking closer to a single idea, though with no less reduced punch for all that (and I suspect nwhyte would anyway greatly enjoy the title story, with its paintings smuggled over the border between Kikl and Soubctavia and the Soubs and the Dobrindjans at each others throats, if only for the names).

There's something about her lightly-stepping folk stories that feels like it should be easy enough to imitate to have started an entire subgenre. Maybe it has and I haven't come across it. Even if it hasn't, her 500 stories are enough to be a subgenre all of their own: they have the air of stories your mother heard from her mother, but with modern day fixings and fittings ("He had a little helicopter from which he used to clean the top windows with a long-handled mop") and characters who range from unflappable to uncalmable, all with their fixations and blind spots. The stories almost always end up in a different place from your expectations, but never with a cheap or obvious twist; they reveal a secret you didn't even know was a secret, or direct you so strongly to the obvious twist that the different, tiny, surprises at the end are all the more effective, and something about the last few lines almost always leaves a slight catch in your breath. Perhaps the best examples of these are the two more or less straight horror stories, Hair and The Helper; perhaps the weakest is the title story; perhaps the most outrageous is Red-Hot Favourite, which also features one of my favourite bits of comedy writing in the book:

"Do I look like a sucker?"
"They do call you crazy Mr Kellaway in the village because you always look so puzzled," said Phil. He chuckled.
"I'm not puzzled," said Robert angrily. "I'm shortsighted, that's all. And now those spivs have broken my new pair of glasses. It's all very well for you to laugh, you wretched boy--"
"Say that again," interrupted Phil. Robert patiently repeated what he had said.
"Oh -- oh well, of course if you're shortsighted that explains a lot," said Phil.

Argosy eventually worked out they had a valuable asset: she made the front cover of the September 1960 issue (but was squeezed off the January 1959 one by stupid Agatha Christie). Personally, I feel a big reread coming on.

And what have any of them done to deserve [their good fortune]?
Not a thing.
No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.

I've found it helps with the recons if I watch two recons of the same episode simultaneously. Everything's less static, there are more things to do with your eyes, and it's interesting to spot the differences. Here's YouTube user chadmoore36's second part of Power of the Daleks episode 2 (with its fantastic cliffhanger); Loose Cannon's recon of the whole story is here, though you can probably work out a way to get hold of it electronically.

The only downside is this limits me to rewatching on my computer rather than my phone. First world problems.

Weirdly, the soundtrack on the Loose Cannon one runs slightly faster than chadmoore36's, by maybe a second per minute. Even so, pausing the LC every few minutes isn't too big a burden.

My response to the Top-Posting FAQ. Seriously, guys, horses for courses.

Q1: Why is bottom posting bad?

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Q1: Why is bottom posting bad?
A1: Because it forces you to look down a mail to find the new contribution to the discussion, instead of having it conveniently in front of you at the start of the mail.

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Q1: Why is bottom posting bad?
A1: Because it forces you to look down a mail to find the new contribution to the discussion, instead of having it conveniently in front of you at the start of the mail.

Q2: Are there other drawbacks to it?

Sig1
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Q1: Why is bottom posting bad?
A1: Because it forces you to look down a mail to find the new contribution to the discussion, instead of having it conveniently in front of you at the start of the mail.

Q2: Are there other drawbacks to it?
A2: Yes -- the new contribution isn't even guaranteed to be at the bottom, because of signature cruft, and inconsistent indenting between mail clients can make the original point replied to almost unreadable.

Sig2

Sig1

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Q1: Why is bottom posting bad?
A1: Because it forces you to look down a mail to find the new contribution to the discussion, instead of having it conveniently in front of you at the start of the mail.

Q2: Are there other drawbacks to it?
A2: Yes -- the new contribution isn't even guaranteed to be at the bottom, because of signature cruft, and inconsistent indenting between mail clients can make the original point replied to almost unreadable.

Q3: Is that all?

Sig2

Sig1

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Q1: Why is bottom posting bad?
A1: Because it forces you to look down a mail to find the new contribution to the discussion, instead of having it conveniently in front of you at the start of the mail.

> indenting between mail clients can make the original point replied to almost unreadable.

Q3: Is that all?
A3: No -- it means that people coming late to the discussion have difficulty catching up, because bits of the mail that were thought to be non-relevant have been cut out, to try to get around the inevitable problems with readability that bottom-posting causes.

Sig2

Sig1

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Q1: Why is bottom posting bad?
A1: Because it forces you to look down a mail to find the new contribution to the discussion, instead of having it conveniently in front of you at the start of the mail.

> indenting between mail clients can make the original point replied to almost unreadable.

Q3: Is that all?
A3: No -- it means that people coming late to the discussion have difficulty catching up, because bits of the mail that were thought to be non-relevant have been cut out, to try to get around the inevitable problems with readability that bottom-posting causes.

Q4: Is there a way of contributing to email conversations that allows you to make your contribution easy to find for people who've been following the discussion, while preserving the entire thread for the benefit of people who are new to it?

Sig2

Sig1

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Q1: Why is bottom posting bad?
A1: Because it forces you to look down a mail to find the new contribution to the discussion, instead of having it conveniently in front of you at the start of the mail.

> indenting between mail clients can make the original point replied to almost unreadable.

Q3: Is that all?
A3: No -- it means that people coming late to the discussion have difficulty catching up, because bits of the mail that were thought to be non-relevant have been cut out, to try to get around the inevitable problems with readability that bottom-posting causes.

Q4: Is there a way of contributing to email conversations that allows you to make your contribution easy to find for people who've been following the discussion, while preserving the entire thread for the benefit of people who are new to it?
A4: Yes, but APPARENTLY IT'S BAD.

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Sig1

From the cryptography mailing list:

A3: Please.
Q3: Should I avoid top posting on this mailing list?

A2: Because, by reversing the order of a conversation, it leaves the
reader without much context, and makes them read a message in an
unnatural order.
Q2: Why is top posting irritating?

A1: It is the practice of putting your reply to a message before the
quoted message, instead of after the (trimmed) message.
Q1: What is top posting?

Top Posting FAQ:

EM and I have been playing this version of Ticket to Ride, a version that works well for a kid and dad and has the advantage that it's very easy for the dad to choose moves such that the kid is always only just winning:

1. Both take a ticket to start. You can start from either of the towns on the ticket.
   
2. Turn three tickets faceup by the board.
   
3. On your turn, place one segment of track, which has to join on to your current track.
   
   
   • Score one point for each train you placed.
     
   • If you reach a town on a face-up ticket, take the ticket and score another 5 points. If the town is on more than one ticket, take them all and score five for each. You only score for towns that aren't already connected
   
   
4. If tickets were taken, bring the number of face-up tickets back to three. If you turn up a ticket where both towns are already connected, put it out of play and draw another one.
   
5. First to 100 wins!
   

Compared to, say Sorry!, the kid needs more help, but it's easy to give her enough information to let her make her own decisions and it has a nice flavour of a grown-up game.

"No-one on the team has a clutch gene", Anne and Eddie both said independently to Dave McArdle as I struggled to an inexplicable 5-3 loss to Clyde in the tiebreak.

"Thorne at first did not seem to realise the magnitude of his mistake; Davis played like a man released from prison."

( Read more... )

JO: Don't kill the Doctor, he's fantastic! Kill me instead!
AZAL: Good point. I was just realizing how stupid it would be to kill the Doctor. (KILLS JO).
DOCTOR: Tut tut.
AZAL: I'm the last of my kind, you know.
DOCTOR: Really?

TIME LOARDS: We shall do something bad to you, Doctor. Put you on the moon or something. In velvet.
JAMIE: But the Doctor's really nice!
ZOE: And he's the last of his kind!
DOCTOR: I don't like to talk about it, but I am, you know.
TIME LOARDS 1: So am I actually.
TIME LOARDS 2: Me too.
TIME LOARDS 3: Maybe we'd better back off. Sorry Doctor.
DOCTOR: No problem.

DALEKS: We shall invent a time machine to destruct time and we shall travel through time and wherever we find spare time or time that is not full of DALEKS we shall destruct it.
DOCTOR: But! If you travel through time, you will find lots of books about ME! And how I am fantastic. And you will give up. So you should give up now instead. Because of TIME.
DALEKS: No. We will travel through time and destroy all the books we would have read about you. Then we will destroy all of us who have heard about the book. For the sake of morale. We will destroy all of ourselves so we may continue. There will be one harmless Dalek left who knows nothing. And travels through time.
DOCTOR: I don't know if this counts as winning or losing.
DALEKS: With a companion.

SARAH: You mustn't destroy the Daleks, Doctor! They're just like you! I learned by studying you being you!
DOCTOR: But I must destroy them!
SARAH: No! They're just like you! They are sustained by a machine thing! And they have one or more eyes! And they bear their young... underwater.
DOCTOR: I nearly made a bad mistake there!
DALEKS: We have a troubled relationship with our mother.
DOCTOR: Sorry to hear it.