Eye-catching advertisement

I did not expect online advertising to suggest, turn your pet into a pillow. I assumed that it was post-mortem taxidermy rather than a punishment but it turns out to be neither, at a glance it seems as if they print the pet's image from a digital photograph onto the material. I wonder if the ambiguity occurred to them, maybe everybody else guesses correctly the first time.

Left behind by progressive messaging

One thing that often annoys me is organizations arguing for good things but appearing to go incredibly far in how they do it. Perhaps I am becoming a blindly entrenched part of the problem but I commonly start thinking, that would be good progress, and end up thinking, I don't want to touch you wild-eyed people even with a bargepole.

Unions sometimes say things that go too far for me. ( Employees should not be wholly immune from consequences. Using 'Defund the Police' as a slogan is another example. )

The latest example that reminds me of all this comes from the Cornish Greens. Stuff like, No-one gets into a rubber dinghy to cross the English Channel in November unless they are truly desperate … By closing down safe routes to asylum, Patel and her government have played into the hands of the criminal gangs who exploit people's desperation to reach a place of safety.

( Government immigration policy does need to be kinder. )

However, ( the refugees did not have to flee mainland Europe. )

The Green Party's brazenly excluding the middle makes me wonder if that kind of rhetoric wins more sympathizers than it has readers dismissing them as loons. There is a compelling story on how those who need to be afforded asylum should be treated far better and that Greece and Italy should have their burden shared, we also still have a long way to go on how the US treats refugees despite the change in administration, but that story is persuasive only if it seems to be true. ( Whatever they were thinking, )

the Greens' press release would not have changed my mind, it just seems to play into right-wing talking points.

Older and newer Doctor Who

Around when BBC America started the new Flux storyline of Doctor Who (2005) they also showed the animated The Evil of the Daleks from Doctor Who (1963). For me, this contrast confirmed a strong suspicion. In recent times, the show has often not made much sense nor much explored science fiction in any interesting way. Spectacle and large consequences have overshadowed the natural, plausible progression of narrative. In the Flux story, a fair fraction of the top-five adversaries have been wheeled out and the fate of the whole of creation appears to be at stake. In modern times, even a single Dalek is a great threat.

In the older story, a Dalek seems to be destroyed by, broadly, a couple of guys pushing it into a fireplace. Not all the plot elements make sense and some even make fans laugh. The core premise of the experiment and its value seems a bit weak. Yet, honestly, I found the story far more engaging. It feels real because it appears to work within rules that make some kind of sense. Despite being less powerful, the Daleks still manage to be menacing, also interesting and cunning. We engage in actual science fiction rather than surprise technofixes. I put the difference squarely on the quality of the scripts. The first episode of the new story involved some unlikely luck and bravery. By the third episode, which was … well, let's not look for adjectives … I noticed that Jodie was doing the best acting possible with the material she'd been given, it all just seemed to have been pulled out of nothing more coherent than somebody's posterior.