Character played by Tom Baker in Doctor Who. It was established in the story The Brain of Morbius that the Doctor was in his twelfth life, and in The Deadly Assassin that a Time Lord only has thirteen lives in total. The first of these was later retconned in The Five Doctors.
A character introduced in the 1980/81 series of Doctor Who, played by Matthew Waterhouse. His name is an anagram of Dirac, after P.A.M. Dirac, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Originally intended as an ‘artful Dodger’ figure, he was quickly reconceived as an audience-identification figure.
As such, he was portrayed as a sullen, anti-social teenager, with flat affect, who was terrified and resentful of women, thought fascism wasn’t as bad an idea as people made out, had no social skills whatsoever and spent much of his time boasting about how good he was at mathematics in a desperate attempt to make people like him. We will see in future essays if this assessment of Doctor Who fandom in the 1980s was an accurate one.
Strangely, Doctor Who fandom didn’t take to the character, and he was killed off halfway through series 19.
The belief that the world can be represented in a symbolic form, and that by manipulating those symbols, while following a strict set of rules, one can both understand and manipulate the world itself.
What Christopher Bidmead wanted to reintroduce to Doctor Who. Judging from the script to Logopolis, hard science consists of millions of chanting monks in a city made to look like a brain, chanting block transfer mathematics codes in order to counteract entropy, while the ghost of someone’s future self tells him the future in order to cause it.
The belief that the world can be represented in a symbolic form, and that by manipulating those symbols, while following a strict set of rules, one can both understand and manipulate the world itself.
The belief that the world can be represented in a symbolic form, and that by manipulating those symbols, while following a strict set of rules, one can both understand and manipulate the world itself.
Recursion, in mathematics or computer programming, is a process which has a function be part of its own definition. A simple form of recursion would be when a function takes its own output as a new input — thus the Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13… takes the last two numbers of the sequence and adds them together to create the next number.
Another example of this would be pointing a camera at a monitor to which it is connected, to get a ‘howlround’ visual, or a future incarnation of a character going back in time and instigating the events which caused that character to exist.
q.v. recursion
A sometimes-wonderful, sometimes-infuriating blog about Doctor Who. I mention it here because that blog’s essay on Logopolis
makes this one look staid and normal in comparison.A future incarnation of the Doctor, from between his twelfth and final regeneration.
“Canon”, in the sense by which it is used by geeks, is a theological joke. Father Ronald Knox, a Catholic theologian, wrote a joke essay in which he attempted to reconcile discrepancies in the Sherlock Holmes stories by assuming that they were accounts of real events, as accurately described by Doctor Watson. This essay was a parody of modern theology and Biblical scholarship, and in particular of attempts to search for a description of a “historical Jesus” in the New Testament.
Geeks didn’t get the joke.
This has resulted in more, and more vicious, arguments than pretty much any joke in history, as fans of Star Trek, Star Wars and the Evil Renegade have argued over which made-up stories are more real than which other made-up stories.
Wikis devoted to the Evil Renegade and Faction Paradox have gone so far as to each declare the other “non-canon”, despite both being deliberately contradictory, open, texts which reference each other. Intertextuality and context are as nothing to the geek mind.
To quote from someone who should know:
On one side there’s a group of… I was going to say ‘people’, but in one sense they’re something closer to what you’d get if you crossed the Greek gods with the mathematics department at Cambridge University, while in another they’re more like laws of nature but with very slightly more personality. Imagine if gravity had a condescending sneer and you’ve got the basic idea. They call themselves the Great Houses and they are, more or less, in charge of everything.
The Great Houses are the architects of History. They didn’t create time, but they did create the rules which history follows, the basic rules of cause and effect, in a massive event they called the Anchoring of the Thread.
Since that time, they have mostly chosen to observe history from within their Homeworld, though occasionally some will venture forth in their Timeships.
History is not the same thing as time. Or, rather, it is and it isn’t. History is a matter of perception, and the Great Houses have effectively imposed their own perceptions on the universe, eliminating all alternatives. They have created a canon, and non-canonical material has been excluded from the universe…or so they thought, until the Enemy appeared…
According to the Evil Renegade story All-Consuming Fire, Sherlock Holmes was a real person, but the stories of his adventures were fictionalised to change his name and some background details.
According to the Bernice Summerfield story The Adventures Of The Diogenes Damsel, which heavily references The Book Of The War and is a sequel to All-Consuming Fire, Sherlock Holmes was a real person, and that was his real name.
According to Erasing Sherlock, a Faction Paradox novel by one of the co-authors of The Book Of The War, Sherlock Holmes was a real person, who was entrapped in a plot by Faction Paradox.
According to Of The City Of The Saved…, a Faction Paradox novel by one of the co-authors of The Book Of The War, Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character.
According to The Homeworld Chronicles, an Evil Renegade novel by Lance Parkin, whose essays for The Book Of The War were deleted before publication, but who later wrote a Faction Paradox novel:
See canon.
The planet on which the Great Houses first existed, although thanks to the Caldera this is now so linked in with history that one can hardly call it a planet any more.
There are currently nine Homeworlds. We must assume that the one to which we are paying attention really is the real Homeworld, and that nothing of interest is going on on the eight fakes, which are definitely fake. One must also assume that the story in The Ancestor Cell about the Homeworld being destroyed by the Evil Renegade is apocryphal, as even the Evil Renegade wouldn’t go so far as to destroy a planet and wipe a whole civilisation out.
One of the key ideas in the Faction Paradox books is that narratives matter. One’s biodata, for example, for all that it is described as “time DNA”, is actually a history of the past of its host. Conceptual entities are purely narrative-based creations, existing only as ideas, but able to work themselves into texts through the reader’s perception.
In the Faction Paradox universe, ideas have power. People can be erased from history while retaining a physical existence — the universe simply stops noticing them. And conversely, many of the most powerful entities (the conceptual entities in the Celestis, Grandfather Paradox) have destroyed all trace of their own physical existence in the universe, but have a memetic existence.
Whoever controls the narrative, controls the universe.
A character from the Evil Renegade novels, who has also had her own series of books and audio adventures. Mostly notable in this context because the story The Adventures Of The Diogenes Damsel, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche in which she appears, ties in with many of the concepts from The Book Of The War, and even mentions one of its authors, Simon Bucher-Jones, while a story in Bernice Summerfield And The Vampire Curse, by Phil Purser-Hallard, another co-author of The Book Of The War, provides background information for a character who later appears in Faction Paradox stories.
According to Evil Renegade fans, these stories are canon, but the Faction Paradox stories are not.
The War has no beginning and no end. Some call it the War In Heaven. Others call it the Time War. Some claim that the Homeworld was destroyed at the end of it, others that the Homeworld is eternal. Some claim that the Enemy are a bunch of defective screaming mutants in metal shells, other that the Enemy has no existence at all. The War is eternal and has lasted fifty years.
So either that's a declaration of authorial intent to set in stone something deliberately ambiguous, or someone at the BBC responsible for uploading things fucked up.
Also, ugh that's really dull. Fuck that.
edited 21st Sep '14 1:59:15 PM by unnoun
I liked the multi-coloured corridors. And the fast pace. And Kabraxas. She was interesting. Saibra and Psi would've been better if what they wanted wasn't wholly rooted in their abilities, but I still liked them.
@emeriin: DB has egomaniac needy gameplayer, they both fall for the vanity trap, she leads the Paternoster Gang and tries to use the sonic to excape. It D, she does the button pressing, 'a clever thing'. Ro S, 'interrogation, that's where I always turn the tables'. Listen, as you said, and flying the TARDIS.
edited 21st Sep '14 3:39:34 PM by Laura
He's the Doctor. He could be anywhere in time and space.
My question: Who puts their valuables in a bank that might randomly execute them one day when they try to take them out because they feel guilty about something, and the bank assumed it was about robbing them? Or where you might get instantly incinerated if there's any glitch in the system where they don't recognize your credentials?
Good filler-ish episode overall. I look forward to next week where, hopefully, the Danny Pink stuff will actually pay off.
You'll do it if they're really valuable.
And they don't turn everyone with a bit of guilt to soup. They already knew something was up and then they found the person with the loudest guilty conscience in the room.
Fresh-eyed movie blog
Happy New Year!
Wouldn't the bank safe feel a teensy bit guilty that they've been liquidating people's brains?
hashtagsarestupid
People who work in high finance are incapable of feeling guilt. Well known fact.
Song of the Sirens
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I don't think I would. My life is still a bit more valuable. And if it was something worth more than my life, I'd want to put it some place where the security focuses more on being good than it does being lethal.
Not as angry as the name would suggest.
Well then, you're obviously not the type of customer that this bank is looking for.
edited 21st Sep '14 6:15:17 PM by KarkatTheDalek
Oh God! Natural light!
Guess what came in the mail today!
edited 22nd Sep '14 9:14:43 AM by Wackd
Maybe you'd be less disappointed if you stopped expecting things to be Carmen Sandiego movies.
Not as angry as the name would suggest.
That might be my new favorite quote.
Funny but not helpful
Quick, copy chunks out of other genocides!
Forever liveblogging the Avengers
"Quiet, you."
edited 22nd Sep '14 9:52:33 AM by Wackd
Maybe you'd be less disappointed if you stopped expecting things to be Carmen Sandiego movies.
Mad Scientist Wannabe
Mayhaps they mean dressed like something out of ''Necronomicon''? Like so?
◊
...
Why is that Xenomorph piloting a submarine?
...
Mad Scientist Wannabe
I don't think that's an Alien, and sure, "piloting", let's go with that.
Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great
Rollin' rollin' rollin'
It does look like one. But then it's made by the same guy, so.
"We're home, Chewie."
Funny but not helpful
Do you expect them to swim everywhere?
Even Xenomorphs like to get off their feet.
Forever liveblogging the Avengers
The Mirror is running an article asking if Doctor Who is "too scary and on too late for younger viewers", if it's "gotten unsuitable for children".
Mary Whitehouse, Editor-in-Chief?
Fresh-eyed movie blog
Yay! 
I am also having that feeling.
No more.
edited 22nd Sep '14 3:27:33 PM by unnoun
So I got Warring States and Erasing Sherlock through Amazon Kindle today. Along with 600+ other Doctor Who ebooks procured through...other means. I'm pretty much set for all my Who reading needs for now
...I mean. I don't think I'd recommend Erasing Sherlock.
It kinda has a lot of rape in it.
So The Book of the War is doing the thing again. Where it turns out that the superstitions of oppressed cultures all have actual magic properties for realsies and the reason they lost their various revolutions and things was because the magic went away, or was imperceptible, or something.
I kinda bitch about the Faction's ethics sometimes, but all that crap is deliberately meant to mark them as anti-heroes and it's more an issue of "this sort of thing doesn't work for me." But this is two of three works I've read from them now where the authors are being kinda terrible.
And of course there's the matter of, well, I don't actually know enough about these cultures to know if the white British guys writing about them are getting junk right. (Which is in fact part of why I'm taking a course this semester centered around this sort of thing.) So I get this constant sense that, if I was more knowledgeable, I'd feel even more uncomfortable than I already do.
edited 22nd Sep '14 3:40:05 PM by Wackd
Maybe you'd be less disappointed if you stopped expecting things to be Carmen Sandiego movies.
Aww. Probably should have asked you first about this, huh.
edited 22nd Sep '14 3:40:45 PM by ZeroPotential
absalom daak that is all
with that and the eighth doctor companion mentions last year let the eu cascade begin!
" I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end." "In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."