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

[theora]

One thing that brings me back to conversations on Facebook are the notifications. With so much content coming at me from all sides (not to mention real-life commitments), realistically I will not remember to revisit an interesting post to make a comment I couldn't initially make or check for new comments unless there's something to remind me. So I use the Turn On Notifications function on FB a lot. I know a similar function is available on DW, but it was never part of my DW/LJ flow. I'm now trying to use it more (after a period away from DW). You could perhaps highlight the feature in the Salon intros so anyone who's interested can turn it on and get those little remindery pings to come back and read new comments or add forgotten ones.

[senmut]

I think my problem is that I tend to forget to come back and look at other comments and interact? I'm always proverbially running around, but since I waste time on tumblr, you'd think I'd track a post and watch it here?

Query for you? Which Classic Who stories clicked well for you? No need to list all, just some highlights?

[jenett]

Oh, that's a good idea, thank you!

My own practice is to hit notification on anything I want to keep an eye out for comments. I discovered when I hit the notification limit a few months back (I have a paid premium account for Reasons, which include liking feeding D's cats) that it's very easy to disable them or delete them en masse, unlike the LJ version last time I looked at it. I'd put off cleaning them up for ages because of that, so it was a pleasant surprise.

[alexseanchai]

+1

[alexseanchai]

:)

[jenett]

I will be adding a "Hey, you may want to track this post" to future ones, so we'll try that.

And ooh. Good question. I am going at this from 'specific serials I just liked or found interesting', not a 'these are the highlights anyone else should watch' or anything conclusive about the series.

Structurally, I've found I tend to prefer the shorter lengths (so New Who, which runs about 45 minutes, or the 2-3 parters in Classic Who. Four parters were okay, but a lot of the six parters felt like they dragged a lot, because of a certain amount of repetition due to the original airing timing. (And I don't blame them for that, but it made them a bit tedious to rewatch in a binge.) I'm also a little tired of both Daleks and Cybermen.

I like a lot of Hartnell in all his crotchety glory, and I liked seeing the development of how they structured stories (and how they played around with things) in that era - the historicals like The Aztecs or The Gunfighters compared to the much more SFnal Planet of Giants or the quest structure of Keys of Marinus.

In general, I liked Troughton a lot more than I remembered doing in earlier watches (which in his case might have been just once, actually). I didn't dislike him based on that, but I just liked his approach. (Also, I pretty much always would like more Jamie. Jamie is fun.)

I particularly liked The Enemy of the World both because it's set in 2017 (so that was a fun comparison!) and because Troughton plays both the Doctor and a look alike evil dictator. And then The Web of Fear which introduces Lethbridge-Stewart, who I've always had a fondness for. (I mean, he has his moments where you want to throw things at the TV, but.)

I like Pertwee's approach to being stuck on Earth, and his insistence on being reasonable and figuring out what the other parties want, in as much as that's feasible (which, Doctor Who being Doctor Who, sometimes it isn't. You just can't reason with Autons.)

I also found some of the 'let us look at this society' fascinating, even if they were often more minimally developed than might be ideal - the two Peladon serials, or Carnival of Monsters.

And on the rewatch, I found The Daemons hilarious on a 'let me geek the ritual theory and magical folklore applied to this episode' front.

For Tom Baker, I have a lasting fondness for Pyramids of Mars - on my trip to London a couple of years ago, I got to go to a lecture at the Petrie for its 40th anniversary by a grad student at University College London who analysed how accurate the Egyptology was (short version: really quite good for when it was made, with bonus references to "If you look at that case there in the break, you can see an example of X item that is not a prop.")

I also really liked The Masque of Mandragora (If you have noticed a "I have a soft spot for people doing ritual magic" serials, you would not be wrong. Either I find them theoretically intriguing and like geeking where the details came from, or I find them hilarious. Often both.)

I am also generally a fan of anything that involves Sarah Jane or Romana.

Davison remains one of my most fav Doctors, for a variety of reasons. I still love Black Orchid for the awesome concentrated Gothic horror aspect of it. I'd remembered not liking Turlough and the serials he was in much, but liked them a lot more this time around.

I have a fondness for The Awakening, and it's also one of the only serials I watched from the canonical position of 'behind my grandmother's sofa because it was terrifying'. (We would not have been visiting her in England when it first aired, so it must have been a repeat later that summer, but I hadn't seen it in the US yet.)

For Colin Baker, I found Trial of a Time Lord structurally really interesting, and The Two Doctors was just a lot of fun if utterly ridiculous in places.

For McCoy, I really like Delta and the Bannermen for the 1950s holiday camp setting and the bees! Plot-important bees! And Ghost Light was just as creepy as I remembered.

[anne]

I've been spending a lot less time online in general. I can read or stream while I spin, but I haven't figured out how to type while spinning yet. Alas!

I also spent six weeks flat on my back with no functioning brain cells...I never had a fever, so it can't have been the flu, but I felt hit by a truck anyway. Mono? I don't know. So I got back in the habit of reading a book or two a day, which has been very nice. My mother had never read any Heyer at all! So we've been doing that. Bless the BPL and its enormous collection.

My booklog posts have become very terse for some reason, but if anybody wants to read them, there they are.

[alexseanchai]

I am not sure I recommend this, mind you (says someone who has the thing because hand pain making it sometimes impossible to type), but: dictation software?

[anne]

Hm! It's something to think about. I'm about to get very busy at work, so I won't do it soon...but the longer I wait the better the tech will be.

[alexseanchai]

:)

[jazzyjj]

I like the idea of a little reminder for people to turn on tracking for these entries. I personally don't do it but I've tried out the feature and it works great. I just joined and subscribed to a politics forum on Dw, so I have made it a habit of coming here daily and checking my Reading page. Even if I don't post something I check. Long live DW!





As for what I've been up to, a lot of reading for pleasure and a lot of socializing w/the neighbors. I've also been working out once a week at the local YMCA, and it feels so good. Believe it or not, I haven't read any of the Dr. Who series. But my high school had a Dr. Who Club. I'm not sure if they still do though. The guy who was in charge of it at the time was a teacher of mine.

[redbird]

I think I missed one because I was out of the country, and another because I was trying to rest my hands.

Other than that, I've been spending a lot of time and energy on PT for my hips. It's helping, but it's time-consuming, and seems to be using up spoons as well.

[senmut]

You highlighted a LOT of great serials. I'm still trying to get my ducks in a row to subscribe to BritBox so I can start watching Classic!Who for the first time in ages.

[jenett]

Yay! I am glad to discuss when you get there.

I found watching with the Wiki open for that serial really rewarding, since it sometimes gave useful background. (There are some spoilers for future things, so if that bothers you, it might be frustrating. But also references to stuff in the audio and books that I am not going to be completist about.)

[jenett]

I am liking your booklog posts!

(And I am glad the flat on your back at least allowed for reading, and also was not in your busy season.)

[mindways]

I like the discussion when I have time, but I'm critical-path on my work project, and winter has been playing merry havoc with the sitting which normally gets me work hours. (Snowstorms and illness, mostly.) I've been mostly just skimming DW.

Also, I did not realize until reading this entry that you could turn on per-post whole-post comment notifications!

[adafrog]

Am I a bad person if I say that if the individual posts are too long, then it kind of chases me away? My deer is teal. lol

Doctor Who! Wow, you watched all the old who? I need to do that again.
I wasn't so keen on Clara, so I've skipped a few episodes with her and Matt. I'm hoping with the new doctor and the new show runner it'll be better.

[rosefox]

I think that if your topics encourage people to ask questions, rather than to respond to your question, then you might see a lot more of people answering one another's questions and getting into back-and-forth discussions.

[st_aurafina]

I'm on the other side of the world, so by the time I get to the post, there's usually a few threads in action, and I don't really know where/how to talk there, if you know what I mean. Socially awkward for me usually means standing back and being quiet, which isn't much help to you for keeping the posts going. I do appreciate and enjoy them.

Is there an etiquette for joining threaded conversations? For example, I would have like to have popped in where you're talking to Asp about your favourite Classic Who serials.

[redrose]

I read, but I am shy about commenting. Ummm... Leela was my favorite companion, probably because I live in my head so much that "stab your problem til it's dead" combined with she is one of the best hunters of her tribe hit some sweet spots for me.

[jenett]

Yay for learning new things!

(And I totally understand that individual people will get swamped with stuff - it was when we went from a good conversation to about three people that I peered at it and went "This is not optimal for the intended goal.")

[jenett]

It is totally totally awesome to jump into conversations, even later! We've had that happen a few times, and I love it, even a couple of days later.

I will also make that more explicit in the welcome stuff.

[jenett]

Leela is also awesome, and I agree, I really like her 'there is a way to solve this problem and it is mine'.

[jenett]

I did! Britbox has almost all of them streaming (well, the ones that survived). I started last August, and finished in late February.

I'd seen pretty close to all of them growing up, but it was a really different experience watching them in sequnce (since I'd seen a lot of Baker and Davison and some of Pertwee, and then scattered stuff as the local PBS station decided to air it otherwise.)

[jenett]

I've tried the encouraging people to ask questions in the past, and it hasn't necessarily turned into commenting and inter-discussion, interestingly. (Not that it's not worth poking at reframing, but.)

[jenett]

I have not read most of the Doctor Who books, but my TV watching growing up (well, permitted) was PBS and James Bond movies, so I grew up watching Doctor Who, a fair range of British comedy, and a large swath of Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery!. So they're very much 'this is a thing I remember doing with my father, and loved' above and beyond enjoying SF.

And it's a fascinating thing because you can see changes in approaches to storytelling and structure, over time, since the series has been going so long, without necessarily getting stuck in the same mode (because different actors as the Doctor, screenwriters, and show-runners.) There are definitely things I don't like in each era of the show, but there are also a lot of things I do like.

[jenett]

It seems like the kind of thing that would be using spoons!

[alexseanchai]

wheeeeee PT

definitely a spoon-suck :(

[alexseanchai]

re comments: come on in, the water's fine :)

[senmut]

I should get a Leela icon. She was my fave until Ace.

[anne]

I'm having fun with them! Sometimes people comment!

(Ugh. Yes. It could have been worse...and I didn't lose my voice this time. I ALWAYS lose my voice. I think getting a voice therapist was a good move.)

[anne]

That's how I made a lot of friends, back in the LJ glory days. But it mostly feels rude to do that on Twitter, which is where I tend to hang out now. My online time is fragmented, so bite-size little chunks of the firehose feel more possible.

[anne]

My PBS station quit airing new (at the time) Who after Six and went back to 4 ad nauseam. So I still haven't seen any 7 at all! I should fix that.

[jenett]

I suspect you'd find a lot of 7 interesting - they went to a decidedly creepy place for several of them (Ghost Light, and the Greatest Show in the Galaxy), but playing with some of it in interesting ways.

[anne]

I like creepy, if it isn't Blink, and I keep hearing things that make me think I'd really like Ace. Companions who aren't overly impressed with the Doctor are my favorites--I like Leela, Sarah Jane, Liz Shaw, Romana I...

[jenett]

It's not the same kind of creepy as Blink? Ghost Light is very Victorian Creepy, and Greatest Show is circus creepy, with some bonus other stuff?

But yes, I think you'd like Ace. She's younger than the others (sixteenish when she shows up) but she is decidedly opinionated about how things ought to go. Also the power of explosives.

[adafrog]

Finding them before the britbox took a lot of searching and flying monkeys.
I don't know that I would want to pay $6.99 a month on top of what else I pay for cable and Netflix, but they do have a lot of interesting shows.

[jenett]

I don't do cable, and do Netflix plus Hulu when there are new things I want (The Good Place, mostly, at the moment) and Britbox while I was doing the Doctor Who rewatch.

(I have cancelled for the moment, and will probably resubscribe for a few months in six months or so, depending on what else turns up.)

[adafrog]

I was thinking about that. Although I still need to do that with CBS to watch Star Trek Disco.

[redrose]

I've never seen any of the Ace episodes. We watched on broadcadt tv on the 80s, and there were mostly Three, Four, and Five episodes.

[anne]

Both of those are kinds of creepy I enjoy! I'll make an effort to find them.

[witchchild]

I'm still failing hard at lj and dw stuff, but still trying to work on it.

Will you be at Paganicon?

[jenett]

Not this year, alas.

(Being a fiscally responsible adult is tedious, sometimes, though it also turns out that being gone for enough time this month would have been tricky for other reasons, so I suppose it works out.)

[haptalaon]

Do you watch the Classic Who as a single unit (all 6 episodes at once) - or as aired?

I definitely made the mistake of consuming serials as a single complete movie. Some of the Pertwee especially is intolerable watched that way. Now, I try and watch them as originally aired - 20 minutes, and then a break of at least one day. It helps you understand the context in which they were watched, and most of them feel a lot less repetitive and a lot better structured viewed as they were designed to be.

Have you seen Enlightenment? That's my favourite. Very spooky.

[haptalaon]

The Ace episodes are v much the beginning of modern Who.

The modern episodes are all about feelings, characters, interpersonal drama - it's the modern way of making compelling television. Even though these things are also there in older episodes, it's usually there accidentally - because these exceptional actors have taken the material and given it an inner emotional life, not because it was the scriptwriter's focus.

Whereas the Ace episodes are the first time where episodes really begin to focus on the companion-Doctor relationship, on the companion as a character in her own right, and on the emotional impact of the Doctor's life and choices. You also see them making "modern" choices, like going out of their way to cast actors of colour, and writing queer subplots.

They're definitely worth watching when you get the chance :)

[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.)

[silveradept]

Would like to hear your thoughts on the new Who series, now that you've done the classics - I joined in at Doctor Nine and have been enjoying things, for the most part. Although not necessarily for sophisticated reasons other than "the companions regularly outshine the Doctor with clever, spirit, and heart."