#Jim Halliday

[fractualized]

I present a collection of normie Jokers (aka how Joker might look if he never fell into the vat), with the following parameters:

no masks/prosthetics

all adults grown into Joker face

limited rehashing of TKJ (only including versions I felt had different vibes)

1) Joker as Arthur Wilde — Joker (1975) #5, Irv Novick

2) Unnamed former lab assistant and struggling comedian — The Killing Joke, Brian Bolland

3) Joker disguised during "Death in the Family" — Batman (1940) #427, Jim Aparo

4) Joseph Kerr in the "Going Sane" storyline — Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (1989) #66, Joe Staton

5) Unnamed TKJ-esque husband — JLA (1997) #35, Mark Pajarillo

6) Unnamed worker drone/comedian — Batman: It's Joker Time #3, Bob Hall

7) Jack the criminal in "Lovers and Madmen" — Batman Confidential #7, Denys Cowan

8) Unnamed mobster (at times known as Jackie, Sonny, or Hap) in "Case Study" — Batman: Black & White (Vol 2), Alex Ross

9) Unnamed criminal in Joker's own mind — The Brave and the Bold (2007) #31, Chad Hardin

10) Eric Border, Arkham Asylum orderly — Batman (2011) Annual #2, Wes Craig Batman (2011) #36, Greg Capullo

11) Alby, corrupt businessman — Detective Comics (2011) #27, Bryan Hitch

12) Unnamed amnesiac from the "Superheavy" storyline — Batman (2011) #48, Greg Capullo

13) Jack Napier in the White Knight series — Batman: White Knight #2, Sean Murphy

14) Unnamed comedian — Batman: Gotham Nights (2020) #9, Neil Edwards

15) Jack Oswald White — Flashpoint Beyond #5, Xermanico

16) Darwin Halliday, chemist and head of Halliday Industries in "The Bat-Man of Gotham" — Batman (2016) #134, Mike Hawthorne Batman (2016) #135, Jorge Jiménez

(Once again, thanks to @distort-opia for assistance!)

[fruityyamenrunner]

Preface

The Angry Young Men and the satire movement of the 1950s. Why the Angry Young Men aroused hostility in the critics. ‘Class barriers’. Why my second book was panned. Rousseau’s ‘Man is born free’. Why Rousseau is central to this book. The New Héloïse and The Social Contract. For Rousseau, sexual revolution came before social revolution. ‘Sexual underprivilege’. Why the British were unworried about the French Revolution. Lord Russell throws a Frenchman’s shoes out of the window. Ireland and India. Osborne’s Jimmy Porter on his in-laws. My girlfriend’s parents and the ‘horsewhipping incident’. Look Back in Anger and The Outsider arrive in the same month in 1956. Osborne is chased down the Charing Cross Road.

1 Getting Launched

London in 1951. Where was the postwar literary generation? The British Museum Reading Room. London landladies. Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After. Marriage breakdown. Laura Del Rivo and Bill Hopkins. ‘You are a man of genius – welcome to our ranks.’ Paris. George Plimpton and the Café Tournon. Merlin and Samuel Beckett. Watt. Christopher Logue and Alex Trocchi. Bill Hopkins in Paris. Paris and existentialism. Dostoevsky and the firing squad. Girodias and dirty books. A Christmas job in Leicester. Joy Stewart. Flax Halliday. The Christmas show. Joy agrees to come to London. I decide to sleep outdoors to save rent. Writing in the British Museum. Meeting Angus Wilson. Wain, Amis and Larkin. Alfred Reynolds and Bridge. Stuart Holroyd. Working in the Coffee House. Writing The Outsider. Suicide and the romantics. Victor Gollancz expresses interest. My mother’s illness. Notting Hill. My first literary party. Iris Murdoch. Meeting John Wain. First publicity interview. The Outsider becomes a bestseller. Non-stop publicity. The Angry Young Man label. Kenneth Tynan launches Look Back in Anger.

2 He That Plays the King

Tynan at Oxford. ‘Have a care for that box, my man – it is freighted with golden shirts.’ His taste for masturbation and female posteriors. He begins to write theatre reviews. His pornography collection. ‘Just a thong at twilight.’ He marries Elaine Dundy. She objects to being flogged. His career as a director stalls. He That Plays the King makes his reputation. His London debut in Hamlet. A bad review lands him a job. He pans Vivien Leigh. The Broadway scene. Sacked from the Evening Standard. The Observer under Astor. Tynan as a ‘Right Man’. Campaigns against Loamshire and the Lord Chamberlain. The Royal Court opens. Angus Wilson’s The Mulberry Bush. Look Back in Anger opens to poor reviews. Tynan saves the day. I take Joy to see it and hate it. A press officer invents the Angry Young Men. Tynan attacks The Outsider.

3 The First Wave

‘Kingsley Amis tries to push me off a roof’. Amis’s schooling. He meets Larkin at Oxford. Their devotion to masturbation. Larkin’s scathing intellectual judgements. They collaborate on soft porn. Amis is called up. His seductions. Larkin’s Jill. Monica Jones: Amis ���didn’t know who he was’. Larkin becomes a librarian. He seduces Ruth Bowman. Amis fails his doctorate. A Girl in Winter. Amis seduces Hilly Bardwell and makes her pregnant. Larkin in Belfast. Patsy Strang reads his masturbation diaries. Amis writes Lucky Jim. John Wain broadcasts an extract on the BBC. Success. Wain’s Hurry on Down. Amis’s infidelity to Hilly. The cultural saboteur. Amis’s review of The Outsider. My letter to Amis causes lifelong paranoia. Meeting Amis. That Uncertain Feeling. Hilly writes ‘I FUCK ANYTHING’ on Amis’s back. Wain’s second novel a failure. Wain’s persistent touch of bitterness. Larkin applies for librarianship at University of Hull.

4 Court Intrigues

Devine asks me to write a play. Nigel Dennis. Failure of Cards of Identity. My plunge from ‘intellectual stardom’. The horsewhipping scandal. Pursued by the press to Ireland. Gollancz advises me to get out of London. We move to Cornwall. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The Entertainer. The Death of God. Devine’s rejection note. Ronald Duncan describes my play as ‘a child’s TV serial’. In spite of which, he and I become friends. ‘A natural bigamist’. Success of This Way to the Tomb. Fame and sexual temptation. Duncan’s affairs with Petra and Antonia. Smashing crystal vases with high-heeled shoes. Ronnie persuades Rose Marie she is lesbian. ‘But I don’t like it.’ Devine engineers the failure of Duncan’s Don Juan. Influence of Tynan on Devine’s politics. Tynan and Christopher Logue form an alliance.

5 The Paris Input

Tynan invites Logue to see Look Back in Anger. I meet Logue at an Encounter party. Alexander Trocchi in London. He tells Logue he is going to New York to take heroin. Trocchi’s childhood and youth. Paris on a travelling scholarship. Jane Lougee. His wife moves to Madrid. He launches Merlin. Logue’s suicide attempt. Pornographic books for Maurice Girodias. Publication of The Story of O. Trocchi decides to research domination and submission. He joins Situation Internationale. The Society of the Spectacle. Debord orders him to break all contact with former friends. He abandons Merlin. London. He impregnates a schoolteacher. An abortion party. He leaves for America. The Beat Generation in Paris. Ginsberg reads Howl. Seized by US customs. Ginsberg persuades Girodias to publish The Naked Lunch. William Burroughs shoots his wife. Maurice Girodias and The Ginger Man. Donleavy takes Girodias to court. John de St Jorre’s Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyages of Olympia Press. Robert Pitman and Donleavy. Nabokov and Lolita. Graham Greene launches Nabokov to fame. Lolita and sexual underprivilege. How sexual advertisements reached twentieth-century London. ‘It is not a woman I want – it is all women.’ The Paris Vice Squad raids Girodias. The French minister of justice lifts the ban on Lolita and The Story of O.

6 ‘As for Living …’

Terry Southern’s Candy. Southern’s New York agent breaks with Girodias. Candy is sold to Putnam’s. Lancet’s pirated edition. Girodias goes bankrupt. Donleavy buys Olympia Press. The Hollywood lifestyle destroys Southern’s talent. Trocchi in New York. Heroin addiction. Cain’s Book. ‘As for living, our servants can do that for us.’ Romanticism and lassitude. Girodias publishes the Beckett trilogy. Beckett’s laziness. Bellacqua ‘the most indolent man who ever lived’. Beckett in Dublin and futility syndrome. The war years. Revelation on Dunlaoghaire Pier. ‘It was like resolving to go naked.’ Decides to write a play. Waiting for Godot rejected five times before Roger Blin accepts it. It makes Beckett famous. ‘The play where nothing happens, twice.’ Writes The Unnameable to establish his credentials as nihilist. The nadir of romanticism. Beckett versus Proust. Girodias publishes The Naked Lunch and makes Burroughs famous. ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. My Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme judged obscene in Boston. My return to London. The Outsider. Cornwall and hostile reception of Religion and the Rebel.

7 Joe for King

Room at the Top. ‘Remember the name, John Braine …’ Joe’s interest in sex. The defeat premise in modern literature. Joy and I meet Braine. How Room at the Top came to be written. The colonel’s daughter. Failure of bid to become a writer. Braine and I share a pied-à-terre. The ménage at 25 Chepstow Road. Tom Greenwell and Stuart Holroyd. Emergence from Chaos is panned. The brawl outside the Court. The Vodi. Film version of Room at the Top. Braine and John O’Hara. John Osborne and Tony Richardson and the film of Look Back in Anger. The World of Paul Slickey flops. Osborne flees with Jocelyn Rickards. Robert Pitman introduces me to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: ‘Very trying Communist propaganda’. The Death of William Posters. A Tree on Fire. The Flame of Life. Arnold Wesker. The Kitchen. Chicken Soup with Barley. Devine commissions Roots. Wesker’s disillusionment with Communism. I’m Talking about Jerusalem. Chips with Everything. The concept of ‘Promotion’. Wesker is appointed director of Centre 42. An attempt backed by the TUC to bring art direct to the people. Their Very Own and Golden City.

8 Declaration

Braine’s depression; he begins to drink too much. The Ibsen syndrome. Amis’s self-image problem. I Like It Here. Updating Clarissa. ‘The only reason that I like girls is I want to fuck them.’ The Egyptologists. Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hilly Leaves Amis. Bill Hopkins suggests Declaration. Bill’s The Divine and the Decay. Its unprecedentedly hostile reception. Bill and I in Hamburg. La Mettrie: The human race will never be happy until we accept that we are machines pure and simple. Maine de Biran. The launching party for Declaration. Bill Hopkin’s ‘Ways Without a Precedent’. Belief in the heroic. Stuart Holroyd’s ‘A Sense of Crisis’. My ‘Beyond the Outsider’. H G Wells compares man to the earliest amphibians. Amis declines to contribute to Declaration. Wain’s ‘Along the Tightrope’. The writer’s task is to ‘humanise the environment’. Osborne’s ‘They Call it Cricket’: I want to make people feel not think. Tynan’s ‘Theatre and Living’. ‘A society where people care more for what you have learned than from where you learned it.’ Lindsay Anderson: ‘Get Out and Push’. His part in the British film revival. Doris Lessing: from Rhodesia to London. The Grass is Singing. The Children of Violence series. ‘A small personal voice’. The Golden Notebook. The Four-Gated City. Surviving nuclear catastrophe.

9 Downhill

Osborne and Jocelyn Rickards flee to Capri. ‘He had talent for fucking up other people’s lives, and his own.’ Robert Shaw in New York. Osborne’s affair with Penelope Gilliatt. Osborne, Tony Richardson and Jocelyn Rickards take a villa in the South of France. George Devine’s nervous breakdown. Osborne’s ‘I hate you England’ letter. Osborne goes to Venice to meet Gilliatt. ‘I’m going to behave badly again, my darling’. Osborne and Gilliatt flee to Hellingly Mill, pursued by the press. Osborne, Richardson and Devine work together on the film of Tom Jones. Plays for England. The success of Luther. Tom Jones. The Blood of the Bambergs. Under Plain Cover. A Patriot for Me. Inadmissible Evidence. Devine collapses on stage. Osborne leaves Penelope Gilliatt for Jill Bennett. A Bond Honoured commissioned by Tynan. Its failure. Tynan’s decline. Success of The Dud Avocado. Tynan flees on pornography charges. Elaine starts a divorce case. Tynan as ‘Right Man’. ‘If you ever write another book, I’ll divorce you.’ Tynan’s become theatre critic of New Yorker. ‘Social game-hunting’. Tynan in Cuba. Tenessee Williams and Hemingway. Elaine instructed to call Hemingway ‘Papa’. Tynan upsets Hemingway. ‘I’ve been apologised to by a Nobel Prizewinner.’ Elaine goes off with a Scottish laird. Tynan breaks her nose. Tynan and Mary McCarthy. His mother dies insane. Tynan has a mental breakdown. The National Theatre: Olivier: ‘How shall we slaughter the little bastard?’ Literary manager. Hamlet with Peter O’Toole. Clashes with the board. His marriage to Kathleen Gates. He says ‘fuck’ on television. Oh Calcutta! Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers. The board rejects it. A libel suit. Resigns from the National Theatre. Emphysema. A new affair: Nicole.

9 Iris Murdoch and the Gospel of Promiscuity

Origins of existence-philosophy: Kirkegaard, Sartre and Camus. Iris on The Outsider. Under the Net. Pierrot Mon Ami. Canetti forbids Iris to sleep with John Bayley. Canetti’s egoism. Flight from the Enchanter. Rudolf Nassauer and The Hooligan. Auto da Fé. Crowds and Power. My trip to St Anne’s. Pub crawl in the Edgware Road. Magical realism in The Sandcastle. Success of The Bell worries Iris. A Severed Head. She and Priestley turn it into a play. Iris’s obsession with promiscuity. Parallel with D H Lawrence. Frieda Lawrence’s affair with Otto Gross. Lawrence accepts ‘the gospel of promiscuity’. Mr Noon. The religious approach to sex. The Plumed Serpent. Lawrence and William Blake. Why Mrs Blake Cried. The Moravian Chapel in Fetter Lane. ‘Religious ecstasy through sexual means’. Blake’s advocacy of promiscuity. An all-night orgy. Beyond existentialism.

11 ‘Now That My Ladder’s Gone …’

A trip to Leningrad with John Braine. John’s alcoholism. He arrives back home unexpectedly. John Wain on the boat to England. Life at the Top. John quarrels with Bill Hopkins. Launching Penthouse. The Jealous God. John moves to Woking. The Crying Game. Stay With Me Till Morning. Braine’s death. His last books. Amis’s marriage to Jane begins to sour. The Green Man. Amis’s alcoholism. Girl 20. The Alteration. Amis becomes impotent. Jake’s Thing. Amis becomes aware that he never liked women. Jane walks out. Getting his own back. Stanley and the Women. Amis’s final novels. The Biographer’s Moustache. The Garrick Club. Amis’s death. Why Amis and Wain quarrelled. Wain is elected professor of poetry at Oxford. A Winter in the Hills. The final trilogy. ‘I was a pretty selfish sod.’ Philip Larkin’s last years. His affair with Maeve Brennan. He sleeps with his secretary. Increasing fame. The Whitsun Weddings. The Monitor programme. Alvarez attacks him. ‘Books are a load of crap.’ ‘Now that my ladder’s gone.’ Larkin’s fear of death. Cancer of the oesophagus. Amis attends his funeral.

12 Watch It Come Down

One of the most spectacular declines in the history of British theatre. Osborne’s bitterness about Jill Bennett. Her weekend in Cornwall. The break up of the marriage. He drives on to a traffic island. The Hotel in Amsterdam. Time Present. The Charge of the Light Brigade. West of Suez. ‘They’ve shot the fox.’ A Sense of Detachment. ‘This must surely be an end to his career in the theatre.’ ‘You’ve really fucked up your life, haven’t you?’ The End of Me Old Cigar. Watch It Come Down. ‘Money back!’ Osborne leaves Jill Bennett. The curious affair of The Entertainer revival. A £100,000 overdraft. The move to Clun. Jill Bennett commits suicide. Osborne adds a vindictive chapter to Almost a Gentleman. Writing a sequel to Look Back in Anger. Déjàvu is rejected. He is found to be diabetic. ‘John Osborne, ex-playwright’. The Writers’ Guild award for Lifetime Achievement. Osborne is booed. He dies of pernicious anaemia on Christmas Eve 1994. Tynan in California. He spanks a black girl. Forced to jump from a balcony. ‘Bankruptcy, emphysema, paralysis of the will – and now this!’ The trip to Spain with Nicole. The count and countess spank a dishonest maid. ‘It is fairly comic and slightly nasty but it is shaking me like an infection …’ ‘A diabolical dream’. The disastrous summer. Burst blood vessel in penis. Wallet stolen twice. ‘Life itself is my enemy’. His death at 53. Alex Trocchi’s attitude to Tynan. He becomes a celebrity in Greenwich Village. ‘Miss Hicks of Hicksville’. Gives himself a fix on television. Lyn is arrested. Trocchi flees back to England. Lyn joins him in London. A twelve grains-a-day habit. Guy Debord excommunicates him. The International Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh. Trocchi tries to kick heroin in Herne Bay. Lyn dies in Guy’s Hospital. His son Mark contracts cancer of the throat. Trocchi opens a market book stall. The final trip with Jane Lougee. A successful operation for lung cancer. He dies of lobal pneumonia. His ashes are stolen from his mantelpiece.

Epilogue

Romanticism and optimism. Rousseau and nature. Wordsworth: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’. The new pessimism. The tragic generation. The case of Iris Murdoch. The Time of the Angels. Seduction and incest. The decline of fall of existentialism. The non-existence of God. Philosophy as a search for meaning. Bertrand Russell: ‘The vastness and fearful passionlessforce of non-human things’. Heidegger’s ‘forgetfulness of being’. Sartre’s failure to understand Husserl’s intentionality. Intentionality without the transcendental ego. Sartre as depressive. Peer Gynt’s onion. La Mettrie’s Man the Machine. Cabanis: ‘The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile’. Rousseau and Locke. There is no ‘real you’. Maine de Biran’s objection. The robot. French philosophy continues to be mechanistic. The ‘young Turks’ who displaced Sartre. Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard. Postmodernism. The British novel after the war. The disappearance of the religious sense. The ‘moral vacuum’ in Martin Amis. ‘An intense and fascinated disgust’. What if Maine de Biran had been taken seriously? His realisation that we do not recognise our freedom. Bergson: The rational mind is a blundering incompetent. How long does twelve o’clock last? Sartre’s admiration for Bergson. He decides: ‘We are as free as you like, but helpless.’ Two kinds of freedom. ‘To be free is nothing; to become free is heavenly.’ Sartre’s physical problems. His daily intake of poisons. Sartre dies of a stroke. Beckett influences Foucault. The coming of structuralism. The influence of Saussure. Lévi-Strauss: ‘Who says man says language, and who says language says society’. Derrida’s rejection of metaphysics. The bleak landscape of structuralism. The nature of the will. ‘I seem to be a verb.’ Jung and the need for evolutionary purpose. William James’s ‘The Energies of Men’. ‘The habit of inferiority to our full self’. Dr Johnson: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ St Preux and Julie. Why Rousseau’s philosophy led to materialism. Dr Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. ‘Man surely has some latent sense … which must be satisfied before he can be happy.’ Gurdjieff: ‘Normal consciousness is a form of sleep’. Inducing a sense of crisis. Ikkyu: ‘Attention means attention’. My Sheepwash experience. The discovery of concentrated attention. The mind has gears. I’m Talking About Jerusalem. Wells’s ‘amphibians’. The meaning of romanticism.

[coinhaber]

Versal Network: Sınır Ötesi Kripto Ödemeler

Versal Network, Merkezi Olmayan Ödeme Hizmetine Başladı

Versal network PayPal'ın eski teknoloji liderleri Jim Nguyen ve Nas Kavian tarafından kurulan bir şirkettir. Bu şirket açık Sui blok zinciri üzerinde hizmet vermeye başladı. Bu merkezi olmayan küresel ödeme ağı, dünya genelindeki işletmelere sınır ötesi işlemleri kolaylaştırmayı hedefliyor. Six Clovers'ın kripto ödeme sistemlerini kullanarak, kullanıcılar artık küresel ölçekte dijital para birimi işlemleri gerçekleştirebilecekler. Versal Network, Sui blok zinciri üzerine inşa edilmiş olup merkezi olmayan bir yapıya sahiptir. Nitekim geleneksel finansın inovatif bir birleşimini temsil etmektedir.

Versal Network, Six Clovers ve Sui Blok Zinciri İşbirliği

Six Clovers'ın CEO'su Jim Nguyen konuyla ilgili şunları söyledi: "Sui ile bir sonraki milyar kullanıcı için zincir üstü dijital varlıkların gücünü ortaya çıkarma vizyonumuz gerçekleşiyor. Bunu yapmanın yolu, blok zincirini soyutlayarak ve müşteriler için altyapıyı görünmez hale getirerek yerleşik e-ticaret ile Web3 ticareti arasındaki boşluğu kapatmaktır." Six Clovers API'nın sunduğu sorunsuz entegrasyon sayesinde işletmeler, Versal Network'ün gücünden yararlanarak stablecoin'ler ve Merkez Bankası Dijital Para Birimleri kullanarak gerçek zamanlı ödemeleri kolaylıkla gerçekleştirebilecekler. Sui blok zinciri ekosistemi, Versal Network'ün yanı sıra diğer önemli bileşenleri de içermektedir. Bunlardan biri, itibari para kullanarak SUI jetonlarının satın alınmasını kolaylaştıran bir platform olan Transak'tır. Ayrıca, eski Meta Platforms çalışanları tarafından kurulan bir katman 1 blok zinciri olan Halliday HQ, başarılı bir finansman turunun ardından Eylül ayında 2 milyar dolarlık bir değerlemeye ulaştı.

SUI Blockchain: Kesintisiz Sınır Ötesi İşlemler için Mükemmel Ekosistem

Six Clovers, yeni bir ağ olan SUI Blockchain'i duyurdu. Bu ağ, sınır ötesi kripto ödemeleri için tasarlanmış bir ekosistem sunuyor. SUI Blockchain, Mayıs 2023'te başlatıldı. Son 30 gün içinde saniyede 1.007 işlem gerçekleştirecek şekilde üst noktaya ulaştı. SUI Blockchain, Rust programlama diline dayanan Move programlama dilini kullanarak hızlı işlemler yapıyor. Bununla beraber anında işleme ve ölçeklenebilirlik özellikleri var. Ayrıca SUI'ye sahip bir Layer 1 blok zinciri olarak kendini öne çıkarıyor. SUI Blockchain, proof of stake mekanizması kullanıyor. Maksimum 10 milyar SUI token arzına sahip. Bu tokenlerin 'ü yatırımcılar tarafından satın alınabiliyor. SUI'nin 24 saatlik işlem hacmi 2,53 milyon dolar. Ayrıca 7 günlük işlem hacmi 17,76 milyon dolar olan 11,65 milyon dolarlık TVL var. Binance borsası, SUI'yı Launchpool aracılığıyla kullanıma sunarak onun ilgisini çekti. Tron'un kurucusu Justin Sun, Binance CEO'su Changpeng Zhao'yu cevap vermeye teşvik ederek Binance'e 56 milyon dolarlık TrueUSD istikrarlı para yatırdı. Daha sonra Sun, Binance'e geri ödeme yaparak SUI tokenlarını TUSD likidite havuzuna yeniden tahsis etti.

Kripto Sınır Ötesi Ödemeler ve Havaleler

Kripto para birimleri, havale ve sınır ötesi ödemelerde gelecekte büyük bir rol oynayacak. Küresel havale piyasası 2026 yılına kadar 930 milyar dolara ulaşacak. Ayrıca kripto para birimlerinin benimsenmesi için büyük bir fırsat. Geçtiğimiz yıl Uluslararası Ödemeler Bankası ve Uluslararası Para Fonu gibi kuruluşlar, merkez bankası dijital para birimlerini (CBDC'ler) içeren sınır ötesi işlemler üzerinde deneyler yapmışlardır. CBDC'lerin gelecek on yıl içinde dünya çapında 213 milyar doları aşması bekliyoruz ve bu da sınır ötesi ödemeleri önemli ölçüde artıracak. CBDC'ler, sınır ötesi ödemeleri artırmak için potansiyele sahip gelişmeler arasında yer alıyor. Bu dijital para birimleri, merkez bankaları tarafından oluşturulup veriliyor. Kripto para birimleri ile benzerlik gösteriyor.       Read the full article

[il3x]

#jim halliday

OH wait that's the guy from rp1 right?

i don't really have any analysis on this but. parallels :)

[larryland]

REVIEW: "Ragtime" at the Mac-Haydn Theatre

REVIEW: “Ragtime” at the Mac-Haydn Theatre

[veryslowreader]

The Great Stink of London by Stephen Halliday 

Another Year

[mymanylives]

black and white: The Newsroom

[ofhouseadama]

this is for the ones who stand, for the ones who try again for the ones who need a hand, for the ones who think they can

[lovehurried]

TAG DROP  •  Sloan Sabbith (2/3)

SLOAN SABBITH  &  mackenzie  ‘ mac ’  mchale. SLOAN SABBITH  &  charlie skinner. SLOAN SABBITH  &  james  ‘ jim ’  harper. SLOAN SABBITH  &  margaret  ‘ maggie ’  jordan. SLOAN SABBITH  &  neal sampat. SLOAN SABBITH  &  leona lansing. SLOAN SABBITH  &  kendra james. SLOAN SABBITH  &  gary cooper. SLOAN SABBITH  &  reese lansing. SLOAN SABBITH  &  elliot hirsch. SLOAN SABBITH  &  wyatt geary. SLOAN SABBITH  &  rebecca halliday. SLOAN SABBITH  *  verse 000.  ( undetermined ) SLOAN SABBITH  *  verse 001.  ( childhood )

[sophie-e-b]

Here she is! The brand new video for Hypnotized. Shot in the iconic Barrowland in Glasgow with 100 dancers helping me articulate my feelings through the medium of dance. Ever was it thus. Shot by the ever-brilliant Sophie Muller, make up and hair by lisalaudat1, styling by Tamara Cincik Work and I’m wearing a fabulous latex creation by Atsuko Kudo.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor “Hypnotized” 

Director: Sophie Muller 

DOP: Robbie Ryan 

Production Company: PRETTYBIRD 

Co-Founder / Exec Producer: Juliette Larthe 

Head of Production: Fiona Bamford-Phillips 

Head of Music Videos/ Exec Producer: Chris Murdoch 

Service Company: LS Productions 

Producer: Sam Barber 

Production Manager: Jack Cowhig 

1st AD: Remo Catani 

3rd AD: Luke Keogh 

Runner/Driver: Graeme King 

Runner: Imogen Bristow 

Work Experience Runner: Ralph Owen 

Work Experience Runner: Lily Owen 

Camera Assistant: Florence Gilbertson 

Lighting Desk Op: Gary Edby 

Lighting Tech: Adam Thayers 

Lighting Tech: Alastair Lees 

Lighting Tech: Ricky Smith 

Grip: Davey Logan 

Grip Trainee: Theo Logan 

On-site Rigger: Jim Stinson 

Choreographers: Frankie Mulholland & Kirstin Halliday 

Hair & Makeup Artist: Lisa Laudat 

Photographer: Kevin J Thompson 

Lead Dancers: Mhari Burley, Kieran Burns, Sgaire Wood, Yasmin Singh, Oliza Howieson, Kathryn Fraser, Samatha María, Connor Totten, Peter Clark, Liam McGrath 

Edit & Grade: Sophie Muller 

Artist Management:  Kat Rullach & Derek Mackillop @ Wallace Productions 

Record Label: Cooking Vinyl

[fractualized]

Zdarsky’s run on Batman ends soon, thoughts? 🎤

lmao I feel like I could either toss out a dismissive one-liner or rant for like a dozen paragraphs. Guess I'll go with the latter.

We'll, I'm certainly not going to miss him at the helm. I read Batman: The Knight, and even though I agree with the criticism of the end, it showed competent storytelling with a good emotional core, which is the most basic of standards, but let's be real, this is comics, I'll take competent any day. And when his Batman run started, I had caught up on Snyder-King-Tynion Batman and was excited to follow a run in real time.

I'd say I stopped having a good time when Bruce got sent to the alternate universe. Penguin faking his death was fun. Bruce being pursued by a dramatic robot version of himself was fun. Bruce again fretting about protecting the family was… par for the course. Calling back to Zur-En-Arrh didn't bug me because I hadn't read that full storyline yet, so it felt like a gateway to digging back into lore. Bruce surviving a fall through the Earth's atmosphere was too fucking ridiculous but the kind I can look past. (Imagine you're a DC writer. You have the idea: lol what if Batman got out of this by surviving a fall from the moon. You have opened that door in your mind. Do you have the will close it or would you be like FUCK IT LET'S DO IT?)

The Red Mask universe, however, dragged any momentum at that point to a stop, and I honestly don't care enough to dig deep into all the reasons why, which I guess gets at the core of what was wrong with the Red Mask universe. (Skeleton Jim Gordon was the most interesting thing but he was just a temporary side effect or something? Whatever.)

But, of course, since I'm a Joker fan, Darwin Halliday was a major sticking point as the most boring Joker to never joke. Nearly everything Zdarsky did with Joker was a major sticking point.

It still drives me crazy that from Snyder to the Zdarsky run, we had a Joker who tried to force Bruce both away from the batfam and Selina and back to basics multiple times, so their battle could be one-on-one again. We had a Joker who, after Bruce left him to die, was notably depressed and suicidal at the end of Joker 2021. He is still that way at the start of The Man Who Stopped Laughing.

And you could follow from that with the basic beats of what Zdarsky did. You could say Joker is disillusioned with his relationship with Batman, and that's why he turns to Zur-En-Arrh, a real Batman. But no, everything has to be too fucking complicated. We have do yet another retcon of so much other stuff and say that Joker always was looking for Zur. And we have to a weird take on Three Jokers because people were really biting at the bit to get a real answer within canon like a decade after Johns wrote that nonsense?? I don't know, I don't do marketing research, but I'm pretty sure if they just quietly never addressed it, it would be fine.

And the freaking Captio stuff. Ugh. UGH. I really just. I feel like this is a product of overthinking. "Well, Batman is so thoroughly trained, it only makes sense that Joker had at least some of the same training to beat him." No. Fuck that. We don't need that. Joker rivals Batman out of sheer audacity. I like that it doesn't really make sense that a clown pushes him to the limit. I like the juxtaposition of Bruce having to do so much training and learning to survive, but Joker is a cockroach revived by the narrative. I like Joker being a plague and a mystery that Batman cannot resolve. I like Joker being essentially absurd. No, it doesn't make sense, but he's here to stab you out of love and you better know how to dodge.

So much of Batman comics now are not about telling a fun Batman story. They're stories about Batman stories, just circling back and cannibalizing each other into a total fucking mess, and putting the city on the brink of destruction so much that those stakes no longer have meaning. There has to be a writer out there who wants to get back to just telling a smaller action/detective story that makes the reader give a shit about what's happening instead of feeling like maybe they're just not getting it, like they missed homework.

And I say that as someone who started reading Morrison's full run when Zdarsky's started so I could have the Zur background. I had to pause when Morrison's writing got to be too much (for the bad reasons!). I intended to jump back in again, but then Zdarsky's run nosedived and the effort no longer seemed worth it.

Especially when everything paused for Gotham War. Jesus Christ. The only good thing to come out of that was Rosenberg's second Red Hood issue. But speaking of Gotham War, I do wonder if there'll be an article years from now that will reveal Zdarsky had to deal with too much editorial fiat. He had to interrupt his Zur story not only with the badly executed Catwoman plot and the Knight Terrors, but cram in a Three Jokers explanation.

And speaking of Rosenberg, I can't end without mentioning that because he started TMWSL around the same time Zdarsky started on Batman, and they both had their protagonists dealing with other versions of themselves, man, there was such potential for a crossover event. Me and my pals had lots of fun theories about how these series would converge, because the idea that they wouldn't seemed ridiculous. There were two Jokers in TMWSL, and at the same time in Batman #131, Halliday seemed to have created three of them. I didn't like Halliday, but still, what did that mean? It would be ridiculous for those developments to be unrelated, right? RIGHT?

Joke's on us, as usual. 🤪

[clampart]

Photographs from the Collection of Steven Gelston

January 9 – February 29, 2020

Opening reception: Thursday, January 9, 2020 6:00 – 8:00 pm

ClampArt is pleased to present “Photographs from the Collection of Steven Gelston,” an exhibition of exclusively black-and-white prints of nearly all male figurative imagery collected over the past thirty-five years.

Steven Gelston grew up surrounded by art. His parents were intelligent and curious collectors of art who purchased works by largely living artists of their own generation still within attainable means. The collection came to include pieces by artists such as Josef Albers, Red Grooms, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Claes Oldenburg, and Larry Rivers, among many others. Gelston’s parents possessed strong aesthetic tastes and enjoyed researching the artists who caught their attention. Gelston’s mother led art tours for other women in the community through the museums and galleries of Manhattan. She also organized the annual art show in her town, which included works by often very well-established figures. Eventually she pursued her master’s degree in art education at New York University and went on to teach elementary school art classes. After retiring, she worked as a docent at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Gelston’s family’s appreciation for art and artists rubbed off, and his first purchase of art for himself was an impressive, signed, limited-edition Claes Oldenberg print which he acquired while still an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The sophisticated and playful conceptual print graced the walls of his dormitory room.

Eventually Gelston began collecting WWI and WWII posters (combing his love for history), but his first acquisition of a photograph would not be until 1985 during a trip to Key West, Florida. There he acquired two prints by an artist named Chuck Pearson, and it was then that his passion was unleashed. Slowly and thoughtfully, Gelston began researching and buying photographs of primarily male subjects by living artists of the day. Not at all a trophy hunter going after the biggest and most recognizable names, Gelston instead followed his eye and purchased works to which he responded personally.

After years of assembling his collection of photographs, a friend pointed out the fact that the faces of all of the models were cropped out, turned away, or otherwise obscured. After that time with this in mind, Gelston knowingly acquired a photograph titled “Ivan Ivankov, Gymnast, Belarus” by the then up-and-coming artistic duo Anderson & Low, which pictures a shirtless athlete looking up at the lens of the artists’ camera with his arm reaching across just the lower half of his face.

Amusingly, Steven Gelston likely will cringe at all of the attention paid to him, but ClampArt’s exhibition is meant to honor his true appreciation of art and his ongoing support of young, developing artists who rely on such generous patronage.

Gelston is passing on the baton of custodianship for these wonderful works of art, and it is now an opportunity for others to live with and care for the photographs he lovingly singled out for his own enjoyment over the course of many years.

The exhibition includes prints by now well-known photo-graphers such as Anderson & Low, Bill Costa, Wouter Deruytter, Jim French, David Halliday, Annie Leibovitz, Harriet Leibowitz, Blake Little, Dianora Niccolini, Len Prince, Karin Rosenthal, and Joe Ziolkowski, in addition to younger practitioners including John Kenny and Sebastian Perinotti.

© Chuck Pearson, Man with Snake, n.d., Gelatin silver print (Edition of 5), 10 x 10 inches

© Annie Leibovitz, Tribute to Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Company [Chanterelle Menu], 2007, Gelatin silver print, 11 x 13.5 inches

© Blake Little, Three Elbows, 1992, Toned gelatin silver print (Edition of 25), 16 x 20 inches

© Anderson & Low, Ivan Ivankov, Gymnast, Belarus, n.d., Toned gelatin silver print (Edition of 25), 20 x 16 inches

[leslea]

Ready Player Two: The Mysognist’s Love Song

This is a review. Spoilers & typos to follow:

I enjoyed Ready Player One (RP1). It was quirky and fun. The dystopian setting was disturbing, especially as the kid who served as the story’s protagonist didn’t actually do much to make the world a better place, once he became its newest prince. We’re told from the git-go that the world is spiraling downhill, and what does Wade/Parzival do at the end? The bare minimum. He lets the debtors go. He shares his riches with his friends. Well, he was literally just a teenager, and most assuredly a feral one, at that, so you could excuse his lack of vision. Certainly there would be a Ready Player Two (RP2) that would redeem our child champion?

Haha, no.

RP2 is the story of what happens to a neglected impoverished child when he lucks into immense privilege, but lacks the heart, charm, or charisma to be anything other than a hermit and an incel. Where Harry Potter could arguably be said to have started from a similar circumstance, yet grew into an actual savior role in his fight against Voldemort & the Death Eaters, Wade Watts’ character in RP2 is unabashedly a less-loveable version of Donald Trump in a world where he is, in all practicality, king. 

As RP2 begins, Wade owns everything. Not just the Oasis, but a futuristic tech that allows one to record their own visceral experience of being alive. This tech, called ONI, goes even more viral than the Oasis, and makes Wade rich beyond the human mind’s ability to calculate. He has power--so much power, he can control anything. He is literally the richest man in the world, and most assuredly its most envied/hated. Nothing is out of reach for him--and though his friends from RP1′s ‘Gunting days are portrayed focusing on developing real relationships (marriages, babies, etc.), working on improving their environments, and delivering aid to their communities, our dear Wade simply pines for the one thing that eludes him: Samantha, aka Artemis, his fierce and determined love interest from RP1.

He brags about the one week he spent in seclusion with Samantha in a bedroom. He talks way too often of his other sexual exploits via ONI, allowing him to experience sex from the POV of other men, women, transpeople, and non-binary folks. He has done the deed every which way but loose, and author Ernest Cline is as eager to share those details with the reader as he is the spout off acronyms and descriptions of fictional technology. Whereas the latter will have you yawning in boredom, the former will simply turn your stomach. Raise your hands if you were hoping for more cybersex in RP2. Anyone? Anyone? Right. 

Before I delve too deeply in how important it is for even blockbuster authors like Cline to CONSENT TO QUALITY EDITORIAL INPUT, I need to outline some important problems with this story beyond “What’s wrong with Wade, items 1-999.”

Samantha is justly described to have turned her back on Wade over some important issues. She is a woman of integrity, and for years Wade stalks her virtually, even though in all reality he grows a smaller and smaller figure from her past. Think about any woman you know who moves on and gets things done in life: they do not sit around pining for a dickhead ex who they slept with once, years prior. They just don’t. Samantha, however, despite all her success, integrity, and morals...just can’t help but fall back in love with Wade.

All powerful Wade. Involuntarily celibate (in the “Earl,” as Cline calls “in real life,” [IRL]), plugged into the internet from his spinal column or brain stem or whatever, 12 hours per day Wade. Childish destroyer of dissenting user accounts Wade. Stalker Wade.

Although Samantha refuses to make eye contact with him for years, the moment he needs her help...poof. She’s back on his jock like static cling, if I may borrow Cline’s penchant for quoting nostalgia in lieu of creating new content.

While Samantha’s inexplicable change of heart is problematic enough, it is only foreshadowing for a bigger problem with the story. Wade, as owner of the Oasis and all that digital shit, ends up on a quest to restore the Siren’s Soul. This is the “egg hunt” of RP2. Instead of eggs, this time he’s hunting shards, which is fitting, really, because Cline left me feeling sharted on by earlier than midway through the text. 

Where were we? The shards. Right.

The singular essence of Kira Underwood, constantly referred to as “Og’s wife,” has been divided into seven shards and hidden around the Oasis--that is, until the end of the story when Cline mercifully hid the last two together. I might have wept if the story had gone on one chapter longer than necessary. When the shards are collected and merged, they will...? What? Oh, they will coalesce into the actual soul of the departed woman. They will bring her back, digitally.

Now, not only is it creepy on many levels that Wade--let’s call him Parzincel--is repeatedly referred to as Kira’s owner, but his idol before him, James Halliday, is characterized has having created this ONI technology for the main purpose of bringing Kira back, so that a digital version of himself could finally possess her. While “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” is certainly a handy commandment, “thou shalt treat women as FUCKING PEOPLE WITH THEIR OWN INHERENT RIGHTS” would perhaps be a better placard to engrave and set on the desk of Halliday--to then be passed down to Wade. It never seems to dawn on Parzincel that he has no right to possess Kira, or any other ONI user. 

The in-game avatar of Halliday eventually explains that Kira’s “siren” avatar was able to explain to him that possessing her, manipulating her, etc. was wrong--but ONLY after Halliday hooks himself up the ONI and lives some of Kira’s experiences. Cline plays Halliday off in both books as an Aspergian genius, someone very high functioning on the Autism Spectrum, but as the mother of a young man with autism, I am beyond disgusted at the idea that you would have to hook one living being up to another human being’s synapses for them to have ANY understanding that the other person is a free, competent human being with agency of her own. Kira is repeatedly characterized as an artistic genius with a great heart. She, like Samantha, is demonstrated to be loving and kind. Generous. And yet both Kira and Samantha are primarily belongings for men to possess, control, pursue, and lose. Oh, if only they did lose them...because of course, they don’t. In Parzincel’s dream future, the best thing he can do is create a double of himself, so that he can experience the inexplicable love of Samantha in the “Earl” as well as in an ONI paradise. 

Kira, as the “first stable AI,” is never once shown having any sort of existential crisis. She simply loves being a pretty plaything for Wade and Jim and Og, digitally--and naturally she is “still in love with Og.” Okay, whatever. By this point in the story, Og and Kira are nothing more than paper dolls set up to somehow replace Wade’s missing mother/father figures. You can almost see the author sitting spraddle leg on the floor of his study, pushing dolls around. “You are the mommy now, and you are the daddy...and Wade is the baby! Now kiss!”

In a world as technologically advanced as that of RP2, there would be nuances to digital characters, right? If only there were nuances in the humans who created them, I suppose.

Cline’s Parzincel has a weird weird weird way of looking at women. So does Halliday. Even the benevolent Og only barely registers as showing any interest in Kira’s consent, and then, only when he is, himself, close to death. It’s like Cline knew the only decent human being in this story was Ogden Morrow--and possibly Kira. We don’t really get to spend enough time with the Kira character to know. 

But why would we? We are just readers, and she is, after all, Og’s wife.

I won’t get started on the Lo-Five or what he did to Aech. I’ll let Tim take over for that bit.

[aion-rsa]

Doctor Who: What Makes a Great One-Off Character?

https://ift.tt/2ZLI4i2

Some Doctor Who characters are intended for greatness; some are intended to be killed off at the end of their first episode. Writers have a lot more control over the second than the first. What remains true for all characters, is the tension that exists between their function in the story and their potential to affect it. Even a guard who simply runs into a room to get shot could have dragged the story in another direction, should they be allowed (this stock background character was the inspiration for Terry Pratchett’s City Watch novels).

Successful one-off characters aren’t necessarily those who break away from their function, (or even those who aren’t strictly required, for example Binro the Heretic in ‘The Ribos Operation’), but those who make a story soar to another level entirely. More often, what makes them work is when their function in the story is disguised. There are plenty of ways to do this and most of them intersect: casting, costume, dialogue, performance…

Let’s first address the latter. Does the actor need to get under the skin of the character to create a nuanced and layered take that resonates utterly with the audience?

Nope. Doctor Who frequently embraces camp. Sometimes camp holds Doctor Who at gunpoint and sings piano ballads at it. The results vary. Richard Briers’ possessed Chief Caretaker in ‘Paradise Towers’ undermines the production (while not a production striving for kitchen sink realism, Briers’ parody-like performance still cuts against its Brechtian leanings) whereas Graham Crowden’s Soldeed is heightened and ridiculous among similar performances.

Other great examples of this stock character, which I am calling Ham-Err Horror without apology, include Professor Zaroff in ‘The Underwater Menace’ (intended to be driven mad by the death of his family, only for this to be cut from the script, rendering the character inexplicably inexplicable) and John Lumic from ‘Rise of the Cybermen’ (inspired to create the Cybermen by a fear of death, with actor Roger Lloyd-Pack citing Dick Cheney as an inspiration for the performance, but remembered mainly for the ripe delivery of lines such as ‘And how will you do that from beyond the grave?’).

Sometimes you don’t even need dialogue. Christopher Bowen, as Mordred in ‘Battlefield’, commits to a maniacal laugh so long that there’s a cut to another scene in the middle of it.

And yet there are places where camp or over-the-top villains work unironically, and some of the most hospitable are the Tom Baker stories of 1975-1977. Harrison Chase, Magnus Greel, Morbius, the Master… these characters fit into the Grand Guignol tradition of heightened and melodramatic performances (Just because something is dark and morbid doesn’t stop it being ludicrously tragic). As the tone of these stories is pitched at gothic melodrama though, the characters and setting cohere.

Returning to ‘Battlefield’, while there are some great individual performances from one-off characters, they’re not quite pulling in the same direction (Jean Marsh as Morgaine is playing an inter-dimensional sorceress as if it’s real, Marcus Gilbert as Ancelyn is saying ‘This is ridiculous, and that’s great’ and pulling along Angela Bruce’s Bambera in that direction too). ‘Battlefield’ is fun, but also disjointed.

Read more

TV

Doctor Who: Ranking Every Single Companion Departure

By Andrew Blair

TV

It’s a Sin’s Doctor Who Crossover Pays Tribute to Remembrance of the Daleks Actor

By Louisa Mellor

Some characters get by on the strength of costume or make-up, such as the Destroyer (also from ‘Battlefield’) or the Zygons. Broton, the latter’s leader, is a successful character who operates purely as a function rather than an individual. Played with haughty relish by John Woodnutt, Broton is a visual triumph, with the costume a collaboration between costume designer Jim Acheson, visual effects designer John Friedlander and director Douglas Camfield. At its best, ‘Terror of the Zygons’ oozes with tension and atmosphere, with some fantastic design work and enjoyable pulp runaround. This all distracts the viewer from Broton being a colossal idiot. Indulging in clichés such as explaining his entire plot, putting characters in easily escapable situations and assuming the Doctor is dead without proof, Broton has to do these for the story to unfold according to Doctor Who’s format. Fortunately few people watch ‘Terror of the Zygons’ for Broton’s unique take on planetary subjugation.

Some clichés exist specifically because that character has worked well in previous stories. Frequently in Doctor Who somebody would sacrifice themselves to save the day, someone else would comment on this, and everybody would look solemn for a few seconds before immediately moving on with their lives. ‘The Ark in Space’ features two people sacrificing themselves to save humanity, one with a quip about his union and the other fighting possession, and in 1975, a single line noting these acts was enough.

In 2005, TV had changed, and so Doctor Who threw more weight behind these deaths (boosted by Russell T. Davies’ seemingly effortless ability to generate a whole human life by adding three adjectives per character to the scripts). Jabe in ‘The End of the World’, Gwyneth in ‘An Unquiet Dead’, Pete Tyler in ‘Father’s Day’… these sacrifices were dwelt on, their weight became cumulative. From this, a subgenre of Almost Companions emerged with Lynda in ‘The Parting of the Ways’, Astrid in ‘Voyage of the Damned’ and Rita in ‘The God Complex’: all too doomed to step on board. Eventually the show acknowledged this with the Eleventh Doctor standing over the body of Lorna Bucket and observing “They’re always brave.”

Doctor Who was commentating on itself as early as its second series (in ‘The Rescue’ David Whittaker created Koquillion, a monster in a rubber suit that turned out to actually be a man in a rubber monster costume). In the 1980s, Doctor Who had become increasingly continuity-heavy, but what its final few series managed successfully was to comment on Doctor Who without making the stories’ success dependent on this. Characters such as Captain Cook offer up twisted reflections of the Doctor, with the Chief Clown, Josiah Samuel Smith and Commander Millington all tapping into the historical influences on the show, but crucially the stories still work if you’re not familiar with all this.

‘Ghostlight’, the most densely packed version of this approach,is still entertaining even if you don’t know what is going on. It’s played with such conviction and unity, with each character managing to feel both heavily symbolic but with a sense of inner-life. This is generally true of the Seventh Doctor’s era supporting characters, especially the guy who snaps “I can’t do anything without my list now can I?” in ‘The Happiness Patrol’.

But as we’ve seen, a standout character doesn’t have to be multi-faceted. Not every henchman can be Packer from ‘The Invasion’ (he’s not only sadistic and cruel, but Peter Halliday really commits to the undignified flapping when things go wrong), but most stock characters in Doctor Who work by being given ‘a bit’.

Usually this stems from their plot function. Harrison Chase, in ‘The Seeds of Doom’ is a plant collector and obsessive because the story is based around aggressive plant-creatures, and needs a simple way to bring the main human antagonist into the adventure. Here though it’s more than that. Lesser examples of this trick can be seen with Tarun Capel in ‘Robots of Death’, where his obsession with robots isn’t as unsettling as Chase’s obsession with plants (and then further down the line we have Magnus Greel in ‘Talons of Weng-Chieng’, who is evil because the story needs a bad guy). In ‘Seeds of Doom’, time is devoted to the idea of a man who considers plant life superior to humanity, and the script and actor Tony Beckley really commit to the comedy and horror of this idea. That’s his ‘bit’.

Perhaps the finest example of turning a character’s basic function into pure entertainment is Duggan in ‘City of Death’. Douglas Adams and Graham Williams, rewriting David Fisher’s scripts about aliens in Monte Carlo, took a Bulldog Drummond-inspired detective character and realised his primary function in the script was to be the muscle for the Doctor and Romana.

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There are other elements of of ‘City of Death’ that poke fun at television’s contrivances (The guard’s throwaway line saying Captain Tancredi will “be here instantly” just before the door opens, for example) and Duggan’s repeatedly punching people unconscious to move the plot along is not only revealed to be an example of Chekhov’s Gun, whereby it’s the solution to the whole story, but also the source of the best sight gag in Doctor Who when Duggan opens a wine bottle by simply smashing it open off the bar. Without providing him with much in the way of depth or backstory, by leaning into the character’s story function to almost absurd levels, ‘City of Death’ creates one of the most memorable supporting characters in Doctor Who history.

The post Doctor Who: What Makes a Great One-Off Character? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[kalluun-patangaroa]

NME, 19-26 December 1992

This is Suede’s second NME front cover, with Brett posing as Sid Vicious. Their first NME front cover (of 5 September 1992) and the accompanying interview were scanned and posted on tumblr years ago, so I won’t be doing it all over again. It can be found in my archive, reblogged on 4 Jan. 2019, if anyone’s interested.

Anyway, here we have Brett with Toni Halliday of The Curve and Jim Bob of Carter USM discussing 1992′s single releases from The Levellers, PJ Harvey, Sinead O’Connor, Madonna, Manic Street Preachers, The Orb, The Shamen, Morrissey, Happy Mondays, and a handful of other acts hardly anyone remembers nowadays...