Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!

I’ll be keeping my eyes open for further news.

Bafflegab’s Baker’s End series and Radio Static’s Minister of Chance are two excellent Doctor Who adjacent shows. The BBC podcast The Whisperer in Darkness is a great Lovecraft adaptation.

There isn’t a lot of today left here in the UK, but I’ll be getting bed early and listening to an audio drama shortly.

Tomorrow, I have some shelves to put up, and there may be some clearing up in the garden after the winds today.

From an outsider’s perspective it would be the places that I work - which I am not going to reveal in any detail to avoid doxing myself, but include nationally and internationally important historical and archaeological sites.

From my perspective, although they are certainly interesting and I love working at them, it doesn’t play a particularly prominent role in what I do day-to-day, so it would be the wide range of problem solving involved: I lead a team dealing with maintenance, compliance and health & safety for a national charity.

Most recently finished: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher - an enjoyable, but not exceptional, folk horror.

Currently in the middle of: Finnegans Wake, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Flashman and Madison’s War by Robert Brightwell, and a collection of Para Handy tales by Neil Munro.

It was when the third or fourth thing ended up persistently broken after an update and the whole system became too much of a pain to use. I honestly don’t recall if it was XP or Win 7.

I had used a couple of Linux flavours before for a short periods and originally planned to dual boot, but this time, just never got around to putting a new Win partition on and found that I had no need for it anyway.

Total drive space is probably something like 40 to 50 TB.

Around three quarters of that is in use, mostly my Plex libraries: film, TV, music, spoken word.

I am pleasantly surprised that it got through. However, I think that the devil is in the detail:

Immediately, politicians started voting on more than 100 amendments to make the plan more flexible.

We’ll have to wait and see how much value is left following this teeth-pulling exercise.

Any interest that I have in this is entirely due to Paul King and his work on the Paddington films. It could be good as a result.

Meanwhile, of course, The Great Glass Elevator is sitting resentfully in the lobby, tapping it toe.

It was a Sinclair ZX81, which I built from a kit with my brother. I was astonished when it actually worked.

It came with a tape which included about 6 games in BASIC - all extremely simple since they had to fit in 1k of memory, of course. I can’t actually recall what they were exactly though.

My dad would frequently trot out “You’ll eat a peck o’ dirt before you die.” - where peck would be the UK version of the volumetric measure: a little over 9 ltrs.

He had a very laid back approach to contamination due to his old-school farming background. I had a rather more strict approach when young but, with age, I have become much more relaxed and do use the phrase myself at times.

The entire cast begins to chant “You can’t dream if you don’t fall asleep” over and over again.

It’s “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” surely?

And that has a very different meaning.

Personally, I saw the film - and a good deal of the rest of Anderson’s work as a study of the nature of authenticity: the contrast between authentic commitment to the path one has chosen in life (which most of the character demonstrate) and the existentialist authenticity that comes from the realisation that one could make completely different choices at each and every moment - which the compressed, expressionless delivery of most of the lines throws into sharp relief: it becomes so easy to see these characters as being trapped within their chosen roles.

Of course, I am saying “chosen” here, when it seems clear that to Anderson, there is little choice: his characters and worlds are dominated by an external locus of control: they accept their roles - but authentically? Or in an abdication of authenticity?

Werewolf of London (1935) - a solid werewolf movie for the period, but with no surprises in the plot - and without a lot of the ‘standard’ lore that developed around the time.

Chiefly notable, I thought though, in showing a surprisingly independent woman in a failing marriage (failing due to her husband being a werewolf…) and in portraying a drunken upper-middle class woman (and contrasting that with fairly stereotypical drunken working class women). Warner Oland features in one of his many bizarre yellow-face roles too.

Just prior to that I went to a 50th anniversary screening of The Wicker Man (1973), which was as great as ever.