Salon post: March 9

[jenett]

I mentioned in a lock post, there was no post last week because I was still getting over being miserably sick.

Welcome to this week's salon post!

Topic of the week
Getting conversations going is something that I think about a lot, between online spaces like this, being staff on a Pagan forum, and just generally.

I've mentioned in a locked post that I've noticed a significant drop off in comments on the salon posts, and I'm wondering if there are things I (or other people who were interested) could do to help.

Is it timing? Starting discussions a bit differently? Something else?

What I've been up to:
Having finished the Classic Doctor Who rewatch, I am now a season into New Who. (With a bit of skipping episodes, since I've seen the first couple of seasons several times in the not too distant past.)


House rules:
This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.

* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.

* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[jenett]

I did, mostly because of how I watch. (It's the thing on while I'm doing online stuff at home which is not writing) - if I only did an episode a day or every other day, it would have taken me forever to get through, and I'd have interwoven a bunch of other things, which is not great for my brain.

(One of the lasting things of the major health crash I had in 2010-2011 is that managing huge complex plot lines/casts of characters is still a lot of work for me sometimes, a lot more than it used to be. One of the good things about the Who rewatch was that I could pull up the relevant wiki page and get a "Wait, what happened last episode with that again?" if I needed. But putting too much space there can often make it more work than pleasure, which is not the point. It's a lot easier for me to manage stuff that's in recent memory, or that I've got good notes for.)

Enlightenment is great fun! I'd meant to mention that as one of the Turlough era ones I'd particularly liked, since the secondary characters are rather better developed (while still being very alien) than many.

[haptalaon]

Fair enough :) I'm mostly thinking of how much I loathed Planet of the Spiders, which I watched without realising how long it was - have never forgiven it.

Enlightenment is the only Classic Who episode to both be written and directed by women - which is to say, it's something special. Not because women are inherently better or worse at the things, but to make it in the 80s you had to be the best you were at what you did (and then some) to overcome the hiring bias of the day. For a long time, it was the only episode of any Who to be so - but I think a couple of episodes now have that distinction. I definitely think that's why it stands out so much, as being something unusual and different, and putting a lot more thought into how it explores the world than most episodes.

Are you a Blake's 7 person? Fiona Cumming directs all the best episodes of that show too. She's a real hero of mine, capable of taking all sorts of lousy scripts and cheap shows to another level of excellence.

[jenett]

I have not gotten into Blake's 7, though I've heard enough commentary that I eye it periodically. (But am not likely to do so any time soon, either, so.)