Castle Magus

(EDIT 6) Infinite Craft. Because I forgot to actually include the link until now. (/EDIT 6)

Apparently, I am the first person to discover "The Battle of Wolf 359."

I may update this more if I get more "first discovery" things.

(EDIT)

Okay. I got "Question" somehow. When I combined that with "Captain Kirk," I got "Who" as a result, for some reason. When I combined "Who" with "Time Travel" I got "Doctor." But then... "Doctor" and "Who" is apparently an invalid combination? Lame.

(/EDIT)

(EDIT 2) "Captain" and "America" doesn't give "Captain America." However, for whatever reason, "America" and "Superman" gives "Captain America." Go figure. (/EDIT 2)

(EDIT 3)

I'm not going to make a whole lot more edits to this, but I'll just say this: if you ever get "Paradox" or "Question," they're really helpful to getting a bunch of other weird shit when combined with other things. Also, "Good" and "Evil" are good for getting the opposite of things. I'm kind of trying to see if I can actually get "Opposite" as a thing, though I haven't yet.

(/EDIT 3)

(EDIT 4)

Okay, one more and then I'm done for now: I manged to get "Politician." When I combined it with "Villain" (which I got a while back, while messing around with the superhero stuff above), the result was "Trump," and the image associated with "Trump" was 💩 (i.e. the poop emoji). It's going to be hard to top that.

Some additional stuff with that...

• "Trump" and "Paradox" gives "Reality" as a result.
• "Trump" and "Evil" just gives "Trump" again. (A lot of combinations seem to do that, so it may not mean anything.)
• "Trump" and "Question" gives "Fake News."
• "Trump" and "Hell" gives "President." (I got "Trump" somehow before I got "President," since that was a new one.)
• "Trump" and "White House" gives "Prison."
• "Trump" and "Food" gives "McDonalds" (another new one for me).
• "Trump" and "Doctor" gives "Quack."

And... fuck I already lost it, but I combined "Trump" with something I already forgot, because I was just trying random shit, and it gave me "Vlad." I quickly went to combine "Vlad" with "President" (that's how I forgot what had given "Vlad" in the first place) which gave me "Putin" (and I would've been disappointed if it hadn't). And combining "Trump" and "Putin" gave "Bromance" as a result. Yeah... whoever made this thing knows what's what, that's for sure.

I just wish I remembered what I combined with "Trump" to get "Vlad"... hold on... I thought it was near the top so it shouldn't take too long... let's see... and fuck it, I'll list any new or particularly funny combinations as I go.

( Huge bunch of bullshit )

AH! THERE IT IS! "Trump" and "Dracula" gives "Vlad." I guess it wasn't near the top, after all. Okay, mystery solved. (May have more to do with "Dracula" than "Trump," I guess?)

Anyway, I'm gonna keep going, with the rest, including all the new shit above I unlocked with "Trump" combinations.

( More bullshit )

And... I'm down to the bottom of all the ones I've unlocked so far, including all the shit that was unlocked by combining with "Trump."

...

...

...

...Yeah, I'm done for now.

(/EDIT 4)

(EDIT 5)

I somehow managed to unlock "💩 Donald Trump" (as opposed to just "💩 Trump") which raises a load more possibilities. For example, I unlocked "Stormy Daniels" by combining "Donald Trump" and "Adultery," and I unlocked "Incest" by combining "Donald Trump" with "Ivanka." ¬_¬ (Combining just "Trump" with "Ivanka" only gives [wrongly] "President.") And using "Incest" on "Donald Trump" unlocks "Ivanka Trump" (as opposed to just "Ivanka.")

Oh, and I also got "first discovery" on "Who is Donald Trump?"

Okay, that's enough for tonight. If I post about this Infinite Craft thing anymore, it will be in a new post.

(/EDIT 5)

"Marco Polo" is the first of the lost serials. All I had available to "watch" was the audio track, accompanied by still images and stage directions and descriptions scrolling by as text on the screen. Not an ideal way to experience it, but better than not having it at all.

I'm not going to go on a blow by blow description of the plot, but it was a good one. Probably the best story so far, I think. This was the longest story so far, at least in terms of how long the Doctor and his companions were involved, given that they were with Marco Polo for quite a span of time in their journey across ChinaCathay.

At first Marco Polo himself seems to be the villain, given that he claims the TARDIS for Kublai Khan and refuses to let the Doctor have access to it (though they try many times to do so over the course of the serial, with varying degrees of almost-success). His reasons for doing so is because Kublai Khan refuses to allow Marco to go home to Venice, and he hopes the gift of the "magical flying caravan" will convince Kublai to allow him to go home. On the whole, Marco is portrayed as conflicted, but ultimately a nice guy.

The real villain is Tegana, the warlord serving Nogai Khan who is also traveling with Marco Polo, ostensibly, to broker a peace deal between Kublai and Nogai. He's really a scheming asshole, though. I'd say he's probably the most effective villain seen on the show so far, except that he's actually not very effective. All of his ploys are foiled in some way, and it's only thanks to his own persuasive abilities, combined with the severe obliviousness and gullibility of Marco Polo that Tegana lasts as long as he does, especially since the TARDIS travelers are pretty much wise to Tegana from the start and try several times to convince Marco of what a conniving shitheel he is.

Long story short, they reach Kublai Khan in the final two episodes, who immediately bonds with the Doctor almost entirely on the basis that both of them are old and infirm. Kublai Khan is sort of portrayed as a comic figure, which seems at odds with his reputation (which, I'm sure, was the intent). He's a lot nicer than you'd probably expect a feared Mongol warlord to be. At one point, the Doctor has won half of ChinaCathay through playing backgammon with Kublai, but then loses it all again when he tries to wager that back in an attempt to get the TARDIS. In the end, Tegana finally makes his move to assassinate Kublai, is stopped by Marco Polo, which restores Kublai's trust in Marco, and the Doctor and his companions get in the TARDIS and leave.

There was a subplot involving a young girl named Ping Cho who was meant to wed some old 70-something geezer when they reached Kublai Khan, against her wishes. She befriends Susan and the other companions and tries to help them in their attempts to get the TARDIS back from Marco. The whole issue of her unwanted marriage is neatly cleared up when her intended husband dies suddenly, for stupid reasons, off screen, without ever being seen, and then Kublai Khan allows her to remain as a courtier. So everyone has a happy ending. Except for Tegana. And the unseen would-be husband. And some mooks. And, I suppose, Nogai Khan and his army, who are mentioned but never shown on screen, either.

All in all, I liked this one the best of the serials so far. The Doctor and his companions finally all seem to be on the same page, as opposed to being antagonistic towards each other as they had been up to this point, in the previous serials. The Doctor himself, while still snarky and sarcastic, is far less of an asshole than he was in the previous stories. (He's almost entirely absent from the second episode, but this was because of William Hartnell's real life health issues.)

It's sad that "Marco Polo" is lost, but at least the story is still able to be experienced, and it's not a half-bad way to do so, even so. My only quibble with it was that all of the Chinese characters except for Ping Cho were played by non-Asian, British actors. Yellowface and all that. Ah... the 60s.

Just finished the second Doctor Who serial, "The Daleks."

Okay, so far, I'm liking the show well enough overall, for what it is, though there are some issues. Lots of zeerust, but that's to be expected. Lots of... hmm... shall we say... outdated gender roles, but I suppose that, too, is to be expected, given that it was created in the 60s.

The Doctor himself is actually kind of an asshole. A curmudgeonly old asshole. At least when he's not being a bumbling fool. And, every once in a while, he rises to the occasion and shows a glimmer of the heroism that is fairly standard of the Doctor in (what I've seen of) the modern version of the show.

The Daleks were... not very threatening at all. Yes, they had their little blasters and killed a few dudes, and, yes, they were planning to radiate their planet and kill everyone but themselves (because the Daleks apparently require radiation to live, which seems to be something they only just found out, after trying to take some anti-radiation medicine, despite them having lived there on that planet for hundreds of years). But... one Dalek was taken out with mud on his visual sensor and being pushed onto a static-inhibiting cloth (because their suits were powered by static electricity in the floor). Other Daleks were taken out by dudes armed with clubs and knives jumping on them and wrestling with the little extended pieces sticking out of them. And then they all died at the end. Not too impressive a showing. I mean, I was pretty much expecting that, given that this was their first appearance in this "new" Doctor Who show, but, hell, even the cavemen in the first serial seemed more of a threat than the Daleks did here. I know other Daleks come back later and they become much more of a threat, but... yeah.

I've always heard the early Doctor Who described as a "kids' show," but there was some pretty dark shit going on, at times, all the same. Dudes being eaten by freakish looking swamp monsters (though, admittedly, off camera, even if that made it almost worse, in a way) and another dude committing suicide by sacrificing himself so that the main male companion could survive. Grim stuff like that, especially for a 60s show.

Well, like I said, I still liked what I've seen so far, so I'll keep going, and I'm sure it will get better as it goes along, on the whole. It's certainly different from the modern show, though, that's for sure.

Maybe I'm just weird, but a Star Trek/Green Lantern crossover just doesn't interest me all that much. Maybe because it's the reboot Trek universe with Pine-Kirk rather than the Prime universe with Shatner-Kirk? I don't really have a problem with the reboot movies, aside from them being way too action-y for my tastes, but still... Or maybe it's the fact that out of all the big DC superheroes, the Green Lantern Corps are among the least interesting to me? I don't know. In any case, this just doesn't appeal to me all that much, despite the fact that I'm usually a huge sucker for crossover stuff like this.

Then again, I still haven't even gotten around to reading the Star Trek TNG/Doctor Who crossover comic yet either, which I have far more interest in (for some reason, despite having never seen even a single full episode of any season of Doctor Who as of yet... I really, really need to get my hands on that stuff and watch it someday).