Yeah, my view of this comes largely from reading Iain M Banks' novels. It just feels obvious that it's your business and you should be allowed to do it if you want, possibly multiple times in your life. Of course, the Culture's seamless biotech would help a lot with that.

Just watched the Deep Space Nine episode where Jake realises that he shouldn't write about stuff he hasn't experienced. A realisation put into his mouth while he's helping fly a solar-sail spaceship, by a science fiction scriptwriter.

One thing you will never think after reading a great book or listening to a great album or seeing a great piece of art is, “I’m really glad this person remained cautious while they were making this and guarded against being perceived as weird.”

Seconding the fact that @andrewhickey.500songs.com can write very, very well about topics other than music!

I don't usually have an issue with the noise from the sporty pub near our house. It's not somewhere I'd ever go, but that's fine. But letting it stay open till 0500 on a work night so that football fans can shout that much later than usual feels like an unusually gratuitous way to piss me off.

Looking like Bradford for me. Not sure that's actually that interesting to anyone else, though.

This line from widow's bay can be used in so many circumstances.

Ugh. Just the phrasing of this ("conscience" = homophobia, ergo if you're not a bigot you don't have a conscience and are shocked when people do) should disqualify her from any political office ever.

Hey Bayeux Tapestry fans have I made the platform game for you? I’m sure someone else will have done this before but well now I have too… bayeuxgo.live

Maybe the real Frankenstein was the friends we made along the way.

Apropos my Black Archive on The Ark, where I said we don't see Monoid children at any point? @stuartdouglas.com has just pointed out this 10-second scene just under 15 minutes into "The Steel Sky", where all the Monoids are, at least, very much shorter than we see at any other point in the story.

Data centres, foot-the-ball Algae at the national mall, Pope to bishops: "on your bike" Minions didn't serve the Reich WE DIDN'T START THE FIRE

Justin Richards midwifed some amazing work as editor of the Doctor Who books.

Story idea: A glorious alternative Britain whose Empire never fell invades and annexes our pathetic mess of a failed post-EU state. Who resists? Who collaborates? What, if anything, changes?

I've no idea what "tensegrity" actually means, but I like to imagine it's a synonym for "grimdark".

I do not understand the "fairness in sports" thing, in part because it isn't a thing, but also "fair to who" is always the question. People who are taller have an advantage in basketball. Does that mean we ban tall people? Why would THAT be fair?

I've no idea what "tensegrity" actually means, but I like to imagine it's a synonym for "grimdark".

Every time they turn up the racism dial, the audience they're looking to for approval is the American right. Bizarrely, they're trying to write British people out of their own nationalism.

We live in a country where a former refugee can be DOCTOR WHO. That make me proud to be British.

Matt Godwin is a failure who needs to leave my city the fuck alone. Failed candidate. Failed academic. Failed commentator. Failed intellectual. A massive ego wrapped around a shrivelled and scared intellect, poisoned by bile and subconcious awareness of his own inadequacy.

Foodify a Doctor Who title. The Daleks' Pasta Plan

Amusing moment in an episode of Elementary where the American cop says a British national is "some kind of old money" and Sherlock replies that the guy's ancestors got rich building the railways between London and Manchester.

It's really difficult to focus on what an excellent actor Natalie Dormer is, because of how distractingly sexy she also is.

Oxford drinkers may finally be able to swear in the Three Goats’ Heads after the death of Humphrey Smith, the irascible owner of Sam Smiths Brewery, at the age of 81. The pub chain enforced strict bans on swearing and mobile phone use. Smith was described in a Facebook pubs group as “an absolute tit

Like "lubricator" and "lubricant", innit. Only French.

Hope it leads to a spinoff called ‘The Waugh Between The Land And The Sea’.

Also, both Gemma Chan as the Doctor (which is something I've suggested for a while) and Benedict Wong as the Master (which was new). I think either would be genuinely brilliant, but both in combination, now I'm awake, feels a touch racist -- Time Lords as inscrutable wizard people, etc.

Dreamed I had to come up with the outline for a new season of Doctor Who in a hurry, on scraps of paper, with people shouting at me. It included a two-part celebrity historical about Evelyn Waugh, the episodes to be titled The Waugh Machines and The Waugh Games.

I was prematurely facetious here. Blue Lights is actually very good.

Sad to read that Doctor Who writer Justin Richards has passed away - his work was always very good indeed.

Justin Richards was one of the key figures of the Wilderness Years, as a prolific and reliable writer and by curating what might be the high point of Doctor Who literature with the mid to late EDAs. All that while being a total gentleman you never heard a bad word about. A genuine loss to Who.

Risky Gervais.

There are a couple of half decent moments in the second half of The Doctor's Daughter, but the rest is absolute knickers. The most convincing thing in it is the sexual chemistry between David Tennant and Georgia Moffat, and that... really shouldn't be there.

Sometimes life is a fat old man on a pedal bike, wheezing his way up a hill while his headphones play songs from his youth about riding a motorbike very fast.

I think work is extremely important both for yourself and for others; I just don't think that *jobs* are the only - or even, often, a particularly useful - form of work.

Too late Aled

Doctor Who: 1,001 Nights in Time & Space by Steve Cole and Paul Magrs. A lovely collection of (mostly) retellings of Doctor Who stories in the style of folk tale, fairy tale and children's bedtime story, with a connecting narrative set during the events of Empire of Death.

Fertile ground for a conspiracy theory here, especially if the people you're talking to don't know much about BBC retention policies in the early 70s.

I've just seen the temperatures they're predicting the week after next are up close to 30° again. Cryogenic preservation's looking like the best option. Wake me next time there's an ice age.

"Invoked certain feelings" here meaning "made British 13-year-olds snigger".

PARTY LIKE IT'S 1998 briefly back in stock in paperback after I found a box in my mother-in-law's attic, Ice-Warriors-in-a-cupboard style. obversebooks.co.uk/product/part...

3,000 words of the thing today. I may have got to the good bit.

Today we're predicted the sort of day that makes you say, "Phew, bit hot today" rather than the punishing heat of the past few days. Unfortunately the house will take at least a couple of days to cool down to a bearable temperature. A nuclear winter's looking increasingly attractive, to be honest.

Yeah that's a pretty easy choice

Quite entertained by how tetchy this weather is making my compatriots when faced with blithely ignorant Americansplaining. We're usually a lot more polite.

imagining a grizzled hardboiled detective saying this while gripping some guy's lapels at a shady bar

Inevitably, I have some thoughts about what I'd do, creatively speaking, if I was pitching to make Doctor Who. Caveat: I am not a TV professional and am not, in fact, pitching to make Doctor Who. If some of this is impractical, that will be why.

Graphic design is my passion.