HeavyMetalSunshineSister

It's about as close as you get to a movie with Doctor Who*, and seeing as each part of it was an hour long, it's close enough to me. *Excluding things that screwed things up badly enough to barely count as Doctor Who.

Rassilon appeared in The End of Time, which I count as a movie. He was only credited as the "Lord President," but the Doctor refers to him as Rassilon. And yeah, the original Cybermen had a bit more depth than the Cybusmen.

Hans Gruber was a very interesting, clever villain. What was cool about him was that he wasn't some simplistic raging psychopath, he was a fairly normal guy who just happened to be a clever thief with a cavalier attitude towards murder.

I listen to what I consider a decent variety of music, including Irish and Scottish folk music (especially instrumental), Indian classical music, Baroque, some Classical (most of it seems too formulaic to me), stuff from the Romantic era (Stravinsky is, in case you've been living under a rock, really, really awesome), Progressive Rock (Jethro Tull in the early 70s), Folk Rock (Jethro Tull in the late 70s), Blues/Jazz (Jethro Tull in 1968), the rest of Jethro Tull, metal in which the vocals aren't too harsh (grating vocals generally get an instant negative reaction from me), and pretty much any rock that features clever instrumental work and doesn't have vocals that irritate me. Some voices, like Lou Reed's, just annoy me for, as far as I can tell, no particular reason.

Personally, I thought Eccleston was brilliant. There are things I like better about Tennant and Smith, sure, but Eccleston as the Doctor had an interesting, funny, somewhat abrasive style. I've finally gotten to watching Season 5, and I have to say, I was a little unsure of Matt Smith until Flesh and Stone. The interaction with Angel Bob was what convinced me that he's the right actor for the Eleventh Doctor.

-The Master, perhaps the greatest recurring villain in the history of Doctor Who. What clinches it for me, apart from his sense of humor, is that he isn't a simple-minded stock villain. Other Who villains - Davros, the Cybermen - were pure evil, bent on some variation of "Destroy everything". The Master was much more complex, and, really, a bit sad. He was driven mad by a signal sent by Rassilon (I'll get back to that later), and the constant sound of drums he heard after that had a strong negative effect on his personality, making him a nigh-unpredictable madman. The end of his story really sums it all up, with the final descent into madness and, at the end, some degree of clarity when he finds out who to blame. -Lord President Rassilon. Really a complicated character who, under the pressure to survive, snapped and nearly destroyed the universe - not out of pure malice, like Davros, but because it was the only way he could see to save the Time Lords from certain death. The best thing about Rassilon as a villain is that you can sympathise with him, with the desperate situation he was put in. It's easy to see him as the villain - he murdered a member of his cabinet for disagreeing with him, was the root cause behind the Master's insanity, and tried to destroy every other living thing - but, at the end of the day, you have to wonder whether you'd be any better than him in his position. -Scar, from the Lion King. Sure, he's a stand-in for Claudius from Hamlet, but he's still one of the most amusing villains ever. Speaking of which... -Claudius, from the 1996 version of Hamlet (directed by Kenneth Branagh). Pretty much exemplifies the character Shakespeare was aiming for - a ruthless, irresponsible, gluttonous man-child with a stolen crown on his head. His death at the end of the movie is also pretty awesome.

This. It's a picture taken in Tribal Stage of Spore of the Chieftain of a rival tribe. Species by the name of "Squick". Made them myself, and I'm rather fond of them.

The college I'm at puts on various small concerts all the time. Admission is usually either $3 or free for me, depending on how stingy they feel like being. Latest one was a flute recital (with piano accompaniment), which, to be honest, was terrible. Loud piccolo and overly simplistic piano are not among my favorite things. There's a nice little brass quintet coming up that should be good, though. Professional members of the school's music department, so you would hope that it would be difficult for them to screw up a brass quintet (whereas it is so very easy to screw up a flute recital, especially if the composers you picked are eight different kinds of awful).

Eh, CoT has its elements of crazy, certainly, but it also has some pretty cool stuff. The trick is knowing how to wade through the people that are exactly the wrong shade of silly in order to find the topics that are actually any good.

I've got nothing against the forums I've never been to - almost fond of them, actually. It's the ones I visited once and ran screaming from that get me. Therefore, Comedies and Comics. I've seen a couple of good things in there, and metric bleeding tons of awful things. It's predictable, actually - low-quality works require less time, therefore they're easier to be mass-produced. It's why things like rage-comics and cats with poor grammar are so wide-spread on the internet.

Oh, wow. Quite apart from the odd spammers that completely ruined movies starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones for me, I've taken part in some strange conversations - at the height of my COTRPG days, actually. I think the very best ones were the pages and pages of technical/tactical discussions with KotV. From an outside perspective, we probably would have seemed at least slightly mad, but those conversations were great. Well, great, and occasionally peppered with me messing with him by posting a link to the Jethro Tull song "Sealion Pt. 2". Turns out Jeffrey Hammond has an insanely creepy voice. Gave the poor fellow nightmares.

Frankly, rationality really is irrelevant. The 1980s happened, and people were completely fine with it. We have the capacity for higher-level thought, but it is time-consuming, energy-consuming, and uncomfortable. Far easier is taking a popular idea and running with it, whether it's loving something, hating something, or pretending to be devoutly uninterested in something. This sort of group mentality can lead to disastrous things in some cases, and, in others, merely silly things (seriously, the 1980s. Look them up.). We do not, in fact, use a logical thought pattern to make every decision. Many things are based purely on familiarity, emotional response, and the few instinctive behaviors we have. And, as bad as irrationality sounds at face-value, it's completely fine. Sure, it gives us pervasive memes and people who don't know when to drop said memes, but take a moment and really think of where humanity would be if we were purely rational. It's not a pretty idea. Given the choice between memes and fanbases or civilization-by-numbers, I think I'll go with the goofy, grating, oddly lovable occasionally rabid fans.

It's a group mentality, really. People like seeing similarity between themselves and others. In social media, this means that jokes get repeated ad nauseum, resulting in memes, and people who like or dislike things feel the need to be very vocal about them. For a while, the cool thing to make your stance known about was Twilight, now that's mostly died down and people are talking about ponies instead. Eventually, that will stop being the hot topic for love/hate discussion, and people will move on to something else. What's important to remember is that rationality is irrelevant. We, as social creatures, don't care what makes sense, we care what makes people like us. To the uninterested, third-party observer, this makes an interesting situation, in which at least one side in any argument (usually both) feels the need to be very aggressive about their point of view. In any discussion, this leads to a balance of annoyance, in which the arguments used by the sides involved end up relatively fixed with their relative capacity for annoyance. With Twilight, it was a 1:1 ratio - both sides were equally obnoxious. With other issues, though - the obvious one being MLP - one side tends to be much more aggressive (and therefore irritating) than the other.

I called it the "Vast Expanse of Free Time for More Important Hobbies." Pretty cool things happened during that time, and I'd like to think I learned a thing or two about time-management during it.

1/5. Never seen you before in my life. I went with one of my longer-running old names, so it'll be interesting to see whether that's remembered.

I'm actually rather fond of the new layout. It's much sleeker. Of course, the tiny detail that every other click doesn't result in an error message now is, you know, kind of a plus. Tap-dancing on the F5 key to view a page might have been good exercise, but it wasn't exactly good for my mental health.

1. I'm constantly changing. Minor variations that build up over time. Think of it like plate tectonics.2. More confident as a composer, for one thing. A bit more moderate in my political views and much, much calmer.3. I only just returned today. I haven't observed enough of the people I knew back then to say.4. African or European?

To be honest, I would do nothing. I finished with Lego as a whole years ago, and I don't really see any chance of me being pulled back into it.

I drifted away from Bionicle fairly slowly. I never really had the money to collect sets in the first place, and money got tighter as time wore on. Over time, I found things to do that didn't require me to buy - and keep buying - a product. If it weren't for the community inhabiting COT, I probably would have drifted out of BZP at the same rate, instead of sticking with the old forums right up until they went offline, and returning to the new forums. As far as what I do that replaced Bionicle, I listen to music, write music, play a Moroccan flute, and, hmmm... There's gotta be something I'm forgetting... Something that takes up massive amounts of time... Oh, right. College. Spoiler alert for the young'ns: college replaces so many things once you get there.

I started watching from the Ninth Doctor onwards, and I've currently just finished with seeing Davros bite the dust on the Crucible. The classic series isn't presently available to me, unfortunately, though I am, regardless, rather partial to the Fourth Doctor. As far as favorites go, well, at this point I really only have two Doctors to choose from, and they've both got their specific merits. Eccleston was very good, even if his run as the Doctor was a bit brief. So far, I'm rather fond of Tennant, partly because his speeches as the Doctor are absolutely brilliant. I'm hoping to get to the Eleventh Doctor before the end of the month, and knowing the rate at which I watch Doctor Who, I'll almost certainly succeed. Once I've watched everything that's out so far for Doctor Who, I'll switch over to Torchwood and get caught up on that.