So I'm landlocked at home while I wait for a parcel to arrive, and I have nothing better to do than think about the most recent episode of Doctor Who. It's a dirty job, but I'm up for it!

I'd say upon a rewatch my first impression still stands — this episode being a sequel to "Midnight" is tenuous at best. But since it's spelled out in dialogue that this is the same planet and entity, let me one-up that a bit.

1. "The well" is a double sequel.

Between my first and second watches of this one, I went back and rewatched "Midnight", but also "Listen". I still think there are more elements from the latter in "The well":

CLARA: You know, sometimes we think there's something behind us. And the space under your bed is what's behind you at night. Simple as that. There's nothing to be afraid of.

(The bed creaks as someone sits on it. It sags to within inches of Clara's nose. Rupert starts breathing quickly.)

CLAR

According to the VUE website, the final episode of Doctor Who Season Two, The Reality War, will be shown in UK movie theatres on 30 May 2025.

The scheduled transmission date for The Reality War is 31 May 2025 so UK theatre audiences will have the opportunity to see the Doctor Who finale a day early.

UNIT are back and facing a deadly new threat - The Shreek!

This is a bit of the usual media package fluff that talks more about how lovely everybody else was on set, avoiding any substantial plot reveals. But we do get insights into the background of Ruby's boyfriend, and the dynamics at UNIT. And of course the name of this week's monster, "the Shreek".

For the writer and director's part, there seem to be some deliberate callbacks to classic Who stories "The five Doctors" and "The dæmons", so that's promising!

This being the rote standard interview form, everybody is asked where they'd go in the TARDIS given the chance. Speaking of classic episodes, I rather like writer Pete McTighe's response:

I would park myself on a comfy sofa in cold November 1963, and spend the next six years watching (and recording, to share with you guys) all the missing episodes of Doctor Who!

Yes please! Just beam "Marco Polo" into my living room already 🙂

Season 15 of Doctor Who saw a substantial bounce in the overnight ratings for the third episode, rebounding from last week’s series low.

The Well aired on BBC One at 6.50pm on Saturday 26th April and received an overnight rating of 1.9 million viewers.

That’s a huge bump from last week’s episode Lux, which drew only 1.58 million viewers, marking the lowest overnight viewership ratings in the show's history.

Once again, those are only over-the-air numbers from Saturday, and pretty much confirm that word of mouth about the previous episode has made viewers return for the "appointment TV" broadcast.

This will pretty surely also bolster the streaming views of episodes 1 and 2 as people catch up on iPlayer. Simultaneously, this whole race to follow the instant and 7 day viewing numbers — and the #RIPDoctorWho prognoses often derived from them — appear more and more irrelevant as the media landscape sprints away from such

This is actually hilarious. Some reality defying mental acrobatics on current Doctor Who are picked up from fan forums and passed on by IGN:

Doctor Who's latest episode just called out its own leaks, despite being film two years ago. Is showrunner Russell T Davies seeding spoilers to mess with fans, or is this all part of a grand plan?

The second episode of Doctor Who's 15th season suffered a fairly substantial drop in ratings – with just 1.58 million viewers tuning in to watch Lux on BBC One last night (Saturday 19th April).

That's down from the 2 million who watched last week's season premiere The Robot Revolution and marks the lowest overnight viewership ratings in the show's history, the first time ever that the figures have dipped below 2 million.

Of course, it's worth noting that these figures don't tell the whole story, given the figure doesn't take into account anyone who watched the episode on BBC iPlayer, where it debuted at 8am on Saturday prior to its BBC One broadcast.

The consolidated ratings, which include iPlayer, devices and catch-up, will be released at a later date.

Excerpts from a speech and interview given by Mark Strickson, who played companion Vislor Turlough in the '80s:

The problem with Doctor Who is that it isn't real acting. It does get very boring actually, because by necessity it is two-dimensional acting. You can't have a depth of character because it's a comic strip. […]

When American science fiction fans watch it, they roar with laughter. I suppose it is a comedy. If you try to look logically at Doctor Who you have to look very hard.

I pick these parts out because they line up pretty well (although superficially) with the most recent episode where the Doctor is actually turned into an animated character, but particularly the last sentence feels like a harder jab at the mindset of Who fandom than the depiction of fans in "Lux".

To be fair, Strickson offers suggestions to add more character depth, following the

I admit it, I still browse Doctor Who reddit — using safer frontends, mind — but mostly there is no great reason to crosspost here. People going nuts over leaks or revisiting their distinct lack of enjoyment of one series or another.

This I couldn't resist reposting, though. Somebody made a rather involved defense of the show adapting to the times, including this curiosity:

During 2nd's run, and perhaps also in Hartnell's, I noticed something interesting. Rarely they'd use a sort of opera singing common in "space operas" of the day - a nod to the audience that understood this genre convention meant that they'd be watching high drama, now an obsolete thematic device.

That's... not what is meant by "space opera" at all. Try looking up "soap opera" instead 😂

I'm 85% sure this is a GPT output, with margin for it being some clueless kid instead. There are a couple other tells in the wall of text, but this was pure hallucination.

Funny thing is, nobody calls OP out for th

Let's get this out of the way – the second episode of this season of Doctor Who, "Lux," is already the best episode of the Disney+ era. Disney has never done anything like this before, and neither has the BBC.

— Bleeding cool

You’ll be so impressed watching “Lux” flit between the real and cartoon world, reality and fiction, that you’ll hardly care about the missing cinemagoers or the dodgy American accents. It’s silly but in a way that is incredibly watchable.

— That hashtag show

'Lux' initially feels like a traditional Doctor Who story, but is anything but. Mr Ring-A-Ding is a great villain, but it's the ambitious script and Ncuti Gatwa's layered performance that make this such a winner.

— [Games radar](https://www.gamesradar.com/entertainment/sci-fi-shows/doctor-who-season-2-episode

Pardon in advance if this is the wrong community for support questions. I'm happy to move my thread elsewhere if need be.

I have a trusty old RPi4B, it's run LibreElec since day one and continues to do so without problem.

I have a 5Tb USB drive that houses all my media files connected to one of the USB3 ports, but it needs replacing as my collection has grown. So I bought two 5Tb replacement drives to split up the collections and have one for movies, one for TV.

Both my USB2 ports are occupied, one by a Bluetooth keyboard receiver, the other by a flash drive for added storage. I have no plans to move or get rid of those.

When I connected my replacement drives via USB3 the other day, they didn't mount or register in the LibreElec device list; one made an ongoing clicking sound like it failed to read. More worrying, I got on-screen messages that the USB2 connected flash drive got unmounted and re-mounted in a loop.

So there are a couple of problems here:

1. **The new USB

Originally posted to X, saved you a visit to IRL Finetime 👍

These episode descriptions all look like they're written by RTD or based off an interview with him, so ignore all "awesomest ever", "most thrillingly amazeballs" hype.

Riffing off the high concept nature of the show, Davies mentions (with my emphasis):

a cartoon’s come to life, or we’re visiting the 803rd Interstellar Song Contest, or Boom Beasts have taken over London

Wait, what? The first two are previously announced episode briefs, but... "Boom Beasts"?

Did he just come up with that last bit on the spot or did I miss it in any of the advance promo copy?

Edited to add: Apparently they're Bone Beasts! (Spoiler warning)

RTD also praises the new writers this season:

Inua Ellams just to pick an example, set his episode in Lagos. He’s created a whole history of friendships for the Doctor around a whole new mythology. There’s that lack of fear. There’s not a second of worrying, of him thinking, ’Have they done this before? Did they do this in 1985?’ Although he’s always watched the show, he was completely free of its shackles. What you get is a

So, what are you guys watching tonight?

Found this via Aurynn Shaw:

When following someone on a different server on the Fediverse, the remote server decides whether you are allowed to do so. This enables features like private accounts. Due to an implementation mistake, Pixelfed ignores this and allows anyone to follow even private accounts on other servers. When a legitimate user from a Pixelfed instance follows you on your locked fediverse account, anyone on that Pixelfed instance can read your private posts. You don’t need to be a Pixelfed user to be affected.

Pixelfed admins should update to v1.12.5 ASAP, but upgrading can be a major hurdle.

Importantly, your Mastodon or GoToSocial instance isn’t handing your private posts to any random server, just because it asks. The problem only becomes apparent when you have at least one legit accepted follower from a Pixelfed server. Now that server is allowed to fetch all your private posts. And when

WHAT IS THIS?

It's my status page where I plunk down random thoughts.

[edit: obviously it should be "challenge" in the title 🤦 Too late to change it now]

Recently, I've been met with error messages trying to listen to bandcamp songs and playlists. At least once a day I see a notice about a captcha that needs solving, with the options "Solve/Retry/Open in browser".

The first throws a "webpage not found" error; the second just hits the same brick wall; and for some reason the third option gives a system popup that "No apps can perform this action"...

Any known workarounds?

I'm not kidding, it doesn't feel like we had a years-long pandemic in between...

Fingers crossed Jo Martin will be back on screen before another five years pass!

✅ LineageOS
❎ Google Apps
✅ F-droid
✅ Antennapod
✅ Voice
✅ Fossify apps
✅ Kvaesitso launcher

I'm not gonna lie, this "dumb phone" is awkwardly close to how my daily driver has looked for the better part of a decade.

Sorry if this is off topic, I don't mean to stir a shitstorm. I just seem to hear barbs about Pixelfed developer dansup's online behaviour every now and then, but no one ever comes out and make clear what the trouble is.

I guess it's a legitimate complaint that he holds out on open sourcing projects, and keeps them close to his chest rather than distributing workloads. Given he's currently developing Pixelfed and Loops and a messenger called Sup, I can understand the worry that he'll hit a figurative wall and take all projects down with him...

So I found this open letter just now as I were trying to get to the bottom of it, and I genuinely can't tell if this is what people have been growling about?

The above link is to the "appendix" where the anonymous authors appear to show receipts for the behaviour they flag. In shorter form, from the letter itself:

dansup, the maintainer of Pixelfed, Loops (which NLnet helps fund), and FediDB, among others, is a dangerous force in th

If you start the third episode of "Nightmare in Eden" at 23 minutes to midnight on New Year's Eve, the clock on the screen changes from 20:24 to 20:25, and Romana presses a button on the spaceship's dashboard to set the midnight bells tolling.