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First Doctor: Edward Everett Horton
This guy was one of Hollywood's greatest ever comic actors. While early Who was still edutainment (at the absolute utmost levels of edutaining), getting a bit of a laugh out of it all kinda works in the show's favour. Also, he was old as balls at the time, which fits with the character. Hey, it worked for Hartnell, right? =]

Second Doctor: Dabbs Greer
So he's a very different actor to Horton. So what? He feels like the Second Doctor to me. Different staging and acting directions, more a mischievous pixie than a cunning imp, but the spirit is there.

Third Doctor: Bill Bixby
A really interesting character actor with form in sci-fi TV; he'd been in Who's ratings rival My Favourite Martian for much of Horton's Doctorial tenure. He's good, he's dedicated, he's got a Third Doctor feel to him.

Fourth Doctor: Roger Smith
Smith's been asked to play someone else's character before, and he has form in genre comedy TV due to his stint as eight (count 'em!) characters in Dark Shadows. The TV show, not the festival of garbage with trash boy Johnny Depp.

Fifth Doctor: Lee Majors
The Six Million Dollar Time Lord. I rest my case, m'lud.

Sixth Doctor: Leslie Nielsen
The Sixth Doctor gets a hell of a bad rap, but with the episodes that exist - and the later audio adventures - this is the absolute perfect American for the role. Trial Of A Time Lord with Leslie Nielsen. Need I say more.

Seventh Doctor: Ricardo Montalban
You know his name. You know why this is here. You. Know.

Eighth Doctor: Robin Williams
Funny story - due to some budget reasons and it kinda being partially funded by the BBC, there were originally plans to cast a British actor as the Doctor! How weird is that? Hell, that's also why the Master is played by Pete Postlethwaite in this incarnation.

Ninth Doctor: Timothy Olyphant
He's done a lot of drama work, fitting the rather darker tone the series went in.

Tenth Doctor: Jay Mohr
Same as above, but skewing a little younger.

Eleventh Doctor: Josh Dallas
See above, skewing even youngererer. The fangirls are just as present and, in rather fewer cases, just as in need of a mop.

Twelfth Doctor: John Slattery
Rewatch early Mad Men back when it didn't suck as much.

Thirteenth Doctor: Christina Hendricks
Okay these last ones have been kinda short because my train is pulling in soon but you should definitely think on this choice. I know I am. Bonus points for thinking about Karen David as Tax being asked if she and Thirteen are dating. Send help.

Gene Wilder as Doctor Who.

Can this be real?

So, One in the early 60s, Eight a single film in the late 90s, Nine a revival in 2005?

If so, I'd say Mal Castle Fillion fits perfectly as Ten; he even comes with a similar taste in coats, and it's right between those two series. He was doing... voice work and appearances on Lost in that timeframe, so I'm sure he'd be up for it. :)

hS

...if you were going to make a North American version of the show (maybe as a 2nd or 5th Doctor?).

If you want to keep it on the UK side of the pond, you probably couldn't have him as more than a one episode ally.

So here's a thought. Remake the lineup of Doctors with North American actors, instead. Who do you pick for which Doctor?

-Phobos

Have one of my own shed feathers and a complimentary kit of Spikes!

I'd just need a Discord link closer to the time, is all. ;)

Not sure who I would play but even if I dont get a part I'd like to be a part of things.

Nathan Fillion is Canadian-American, and they wouldn’t cast a non-Brit in the BBC’s flagship show.

...should be Nathan Fillion. No seriously. I mean, imagine him doing Mal Reynolds in a TARDIS, and you have the next Doctor. Thoughts?

I can make it, and I'm looking forward to it!

When I was a young (okay, younger) lad, I tuned in regularly to the assorted musings of John and Hank Green. Judging by their subscriber count, I probably wasn't the only one, and like anything you do as a child, it definitely had an influence on me. Hank's fumblings on the guitar introduced me to the filk, and Crash Course World History with John Green was my introduction to a more nuanced view of the world around me.

None of that has anything to do with this post. What does is a video that John Green posted on June 18, 2007, where he walked through the streets of New York City for one of the very last times before he moved to Indianapolis, as a song that was like nothing I heard before in a way I still can't quite quantify played in the background.

That song was called "Love, Love, Love," and it was my introduction to The Mountain Goats. It came from an album called The Sunset Tree, which was about lead singer John Darnielle's childhood and his fraught relationship with his abusive stepfather.

Now, 12 years after John Green's departure from New York City, and at least five after I first heard the song, I have finally listened to the album as a whole.

Let just skip to the end here: if you're okay with beautiful music telling you dark and terrible things, if you're not averse to sensitive subjects, you should listen to this album. Because it is great. It sounds lovely, and the lyrics are absolutely outstanding. John Darnielle (the lead singer and songwriter of the band and only constant member) is a writer and a poet and it shows because these lyrics are dense and thick with just the right words and I love it.

Soo... songs.

The album opens with "You or your Memory" which is... an appropriate mix of nostalgic, uncomfortable, and nervous. It sets the tone for the rest of the album well as John sings about a night in a cheap hotel against a background of "Saint Joseph's Baby Asprin, Bartles and James, and you or your memory."

The next track, Broom People, is ostensibly about a girl, I think, but serves to set the scene for the rest of the album as it paints a richly detailed picture of what is presumably John's childhood home.

But the album really hits the ground running, for me at least, with "This Year", an immediately catchy tune about a day spent drinking with a girl as an escape from a hellish home against the background of an anthem of determination that is no doubt truly universal: "I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me."

"Dilaudid" may just be about the same girl, but there's no proof. It's a suitably anxious song set in a car about teenage sexuality... I think? There may also be drugs involved. The dark tone certainly doesn't make seem good.

And that dark tone is a contrast to the forced happiness of our next song, "Dance Music," as John sings about escaping from the realities of his home ("...throws a glass at her head and I run up the stairs to take cover") with the aid of his record player ("so this is what the volume knob's for") and... well, guess. The song then jumps back to what is presumably the aftermath of "Dilaudid" as John sits in a car listening to the same dance music "when the police come and get me."

"Dinu Lippati's Bones" is as beautiful as anything else on this album and seems to be a love song. But this is the point where the album gets a lot harder to interpret. I still think it's about finding refuge in music, but... I can't really prove anything. Or be sure of anything either.

"Up The Wolves" is equally undecipherable but a lot catchier. It's probably one of my favorite tracks. Whatever it means, it sure has some great lines. "There's bound to be ghost at the back of your closet, no matter where you live..."

And "Lion's Teeth" jumps back into a fraught, nervous depiction of John's struggle with his stepfather, in this case in a far less literal and more violent manner. It's a deliberately ugly, confrontational song. "There's no good way to end this. Anyone can see. There's just great big you and little old me."

"Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod" addresses more of the same conflict, but from a different, less imagined angle. It also has some of the best lyrics of the album. "And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face, hoping you don't break my stereo, because it's the one thing I couldn't live without, so I think about that and then I sort of black out."

Don't ask me what "Magpie" is about. I don't know. Same for the song after it.

"Love Love Love" was, as I said, the first Mountain Goats song I heard. And it's still fantastic. Poetic, beautiful, and contemplative, it's about what we do for love. Good and ill. "Snakes in the grass beneath our feet, rain in the clouds above, some moments last forever, but some flare out with love love love."

And finally, "Pale Green Things." A perfect ending to the album, reflecting on what has come before as it closes the circle's with John's receiving the message from his sister that his stepfather has died. "I turned it over in my mind like a living Chinese finger trap. Seaweed and Indiana sawgrass, pale green things, pale green things."

It feels... almost wrong to be reviewing this album. It's clearly deeply personal, sometimes uncomfortably so, something that was probably recorded more for the benefit of the artist than the listener. But at the same time that just adds to the mix of clever language and raw emotion that gives this album its strength and power. It is beautiful. And it's absolutely worth listening to.

It looks like a lot of folks will be available then. If this time doesn't work for somebody who really wants in, please let me know.

This start time is equivalent to:
- 1 PM Central time
- 2 PM Eastern time
- 6 PM UTC
- 7 PM British time
- 8 PM Central European time

This all gives us a good several hours before someone has to fall asleep.

We'd be in the Discord voip, as typical

- Tomash

I saw a Good Omens rec list going around and read some of them.

I particularly " One Golden Glance (it's a kind of magic)", which features Crowley getting summoned somewhere (more would be spoilers), and " So You Need To Get Into A.Z. Fell & Co.; Now What? (A Guide For Unfortunate Bookworms)" (the title should be self explanatory).

Feel free to add more recs!

- Tomash

I wrote a sequel to Green Devil's Keep! I thrive on compliments. :P

As fun as the last one was? I'd be thrilled to participate. I'd say it'd be good to add to my acting portfolio, but somehow I don't think My Immortal is going to be a selling point for anyone halfway respectable.

But what it will be is a good time. :)

--Aegis

((Hopefully no-one minds me stealing another turn, but I had Ideas and they wouldn't let me go...))

A Time Lord and a Doctor walk into a cafe. Stop me if you've heard this before...

"It was always funny," Martha said, sipping at her latte. "There's me, an actual doctor, travelling the universe with someone who's just called 'The Doctor'. There was this one time..." She shook her head, quietly added another packet of sugar to her drink. "'Is there a doctor on board?' - you never expect to actually hear it, you know? Especially not ten thousand years in the future while riding a half-alive sky-submarine. So I'm halfway to my feet, but he's already out of his seat, bounding over like the Easter Bunny on a chocolate high."

(Over the road, in the high-end clothing store, a woman impatiently tapped the shoulder of the man standing in the aisle. He turned slowly, revealing that beneath his bowler hat he had no face at all - simply blank skin.)

(Her shriek turned heads across the store, but was lost in the roar of the traffic.)

Martha chuckled, staring down at her coffee. "And you know the worst thing? He was right. The patient was this... apparently the name isn't even pronouncable by humans, the Doctor did this weird whistle." She did her best to imitate it, a curious warbling. "I think some of xir anatomy was energy-based. I would have been completely lost, but of course he not only saved the patient, he also found the poisoner and saved the day."

(The faceless man disappeared as the woman backed away, but moments later his place was taken by a huge dog, its eyes burning red beneath vivid orange eyebrows. A young man in a black coat staggered away from it before it, too, vanished.)

"I'm sorry," Martha said, smiling ruefully at the Reader. "I know I'm rambling, but it's so rare I get to talk about any of this. With Torchwood gone, and the cuts at UNIT, it's basically just me and Mickey. You know -" She laughed again, and dropped a pair of air quotes. "'Defending the Earth'."

(Across the road a fire suddenly sprang up, ripping through the clothing racks, sending the customers fleeing. The sprinklers came on automatically, dousing the flames - which vanished as suddenly as they had came, leaving the drenched customers looking around in bewilderment.)

"I'd heard about that," the Reader said, taking a swig of her fruity coffee (not actually on the standard menu, but the server had found her inexplicably hard to say no to). She was doing her best to keep quiet - her knowledge of the Whoniverse stopped some five years before Martha's present, and she dreaded to think what kind of paradox she might set up if she said the wrong thing. "Isn't it a bit... dangerous?"

(As the clothing store staff ushered their erstwhile customers out of the door, one happened to glance into a full-length mirror close at hand. The air seemed to flicker, shadowy refractions slicing through the shop, and then at a dozen places across the shop floor gruesome, lurching zombies shambled out of thin air. They shimmered in the still-falling sprinkler water, took a step towards the terrified crowd - then faded out, shattering into nothingness.)

"The universe is dangerous," Martha said, leaning forward seriously. "The first time I met the Doctor, my entire hospital got snatched away to the moon - the actual moon! - because an alien tried to hide there. If we know that, and do nothing to keep it a little safer, how can we live with ourselves?"

(The front window of the empty clothing store flickered, the reflections of the pedestrians outside briefly taking on inhuman, non-euclidean shapes. One of the passers-by saw them, gasped and turned pale.)

"I can... understand that," the Reader said carefully - all this talk of protecting worlds was a conversational minefield. "But surely the Doctor...?"

(Up and down the long glass frontage, semi-transparent figures rippled in and out of existence, as if something was trying to figure out the physics of window-glass.)

Martha grimaced into her nearly-empty mug. "The Doctor is... we're not entirely sure. Mickey runs this website, has for years, keeping track of sightings." She smiled fondly, distantly. "It's hardest for him... I can tell everyone I'm a doctor, that's respectable, but Mickey doesn't have a job apart from this Work of ours." She looked slightly sheepish over the capitalised Work, but the Reader nodded encouragingly. "Well, the Doctor sometimes... that is, his appearance..." She trailed off, looking at the Reader's t-shirt. "How much do you know about him?" she asked warily.

(Rivulets of slime oozed from along the length of the window, coalescing into a huge green blob. Horrified walkers backed away from it, stumbling into the road, setting brakes screeching and horns honking - but not enough to be obviously unusual for Soho. When it vanished, it left glistening streaks on the pavement for a few moments before they, too, faded.)

The Reader drained the last of her coffee contemplatively. "You're talking about regeneration," she said at last.

(The air flickered again, angles forming where angles shouldn't be, and for a moment the whole street seemed to splinter like a dropped wineglass. Up and down the road, car wingmirrors flashed with unearthly colours. The moment seemed to hang in the air, gathering like a storm.)

"Right," Martha agreed. "So it's like a detective story - he shows up with a new face in the present, and then Mickey tracks down other appearances throughout history. Only, for the past few years, the Doctor has been... missing." She swirled her mug, took another sip. "Well. Maybe. There's reports of a woman up north who certainly sounds like the Doctor, but... I don't know." She nodded at the Reader. "That's why I wondered if you might be him... her. Do you think that's possible?"

(The clothing shop window exploded, sending ripples through the fabric of reality. Fractures of light cascaded along the street, and a hundred hundred monsters leapt out of nowhere and launched themselves at the populace.)

The Reader wished fervently she still had coffee to drink and cover her concern. It was always possible that Martha might reappear in the series, and telling her something that she might not know in that appearance was exactly the sort of paradox she was supposed to avoid. But how rude would it be to ignore a direct question like...?

The screaming interrupted her thought process. As she turned to the window, the Reader was irrationally grateful.

"Is that a Dalek? ... wearing clown makeup?"

The two women exchanged a look and then charged out of the coffee shop. Martha knelt down next to a woman who had fallen on the pavement, while the Reader whipped out her penlight and aimed it at the Dalek. "Not today, monster!" she yelled, flicking the sonic to its highest setting.

The Dalek shattered into a thousand shards of energy. Behind it, the wingmirror of a parked car exploded into dust - and in a chain reaction, every mirror on the entire street burst in turn.

The Reader turned to Martha, her eyes wide. "'Watch the mirrors'," she said. "The mirrors..."

"Gosh, that was awful," said the woman Martha had gone to. "Thanks ever so much for the rescue." She picked herself up off the pavement, brushing off her rather outdated jacket. "Sarah Jane Smith," she said, holding out her hand to the Reader, who shook it on a kind of stunned autopilot. "Love the sonic, by the way - very stylish. The man I'm travelling with has one just like it." She looked up and down the street, taking in the shocked Londoners and glass everywhere. "You haven't seen him, have you? Huge scarf, funny hat - he's called the Doctor. You can't really miss him."

---

((So we may not be looking at different time-frames; they could just be in different parts of Soho. Hopefully we'll see when someone else picks up the pen.))

((And yeah: clowns and Daleks, Sarah Jane's big fears.))

hS

If everyone who's interested could fill out their provisional availability over the next few weekends at the following when2meet, that'd be great for scheduling.

The default timezone might be Seattle time (add 2 hours for Central, 3 for the east coast of the US, 8 for Britain, and 9 for most of Europe), but if I understand the UI right you would be able to see your options in your native timezone.

- Tomash

Fundamentally, I really liked Because Internet (I found it hard to put down and would've stayed up way too late reading it last night if I hadn't decided to be responsible) and I think other people here will like it too.

This is a book about the the science and history of language on the internet. It also mentions many general points about how language works (and its history) and some of the science people have been able to do using the internet that wasn't possible before.

The content of the book is presented in an way that's interesting, not particularly technical, and frequently even funny (the author is good at footnotes, for one). You will learn a bunch of things from this book, and, if you're like me, have a good time doing it. It also is very much not a "kids these days" thinkpiece, but instead is a rather exceted look at all the shiny things people are doing with words these days.

Now, on to some of the things I thought were cool (aka, the spoilers, to the extent you can spoil something like this):

- The internet means that studying informal writing is now a thing people can actually do (it's not like museums have bit collections of sticky notes people left on the fridge), and is actually making informal writing a much more widely-done thing.
- It turns out you can get really accurate maps of regional dialects using Twitter data (because folks write more informally and sometimes have their location on) (previous methods included literally having people go around a country trying to collect data by interviewing people - in an early case, someone biked around all of France)
- How there're significant differences in how people interact with the internet (and talk on it) based on when they were first exposed to the place and what they did there
- As probably most folks here know, there's a lot of things you can do with text to convey tone that've just happened over the years
- Emoji (and sometimes emoticons) basically work the same way as gestures when you're talking, and so there's different types of emoji usage (the "emblems", where the thing is basically operating like a word, and the usages that are more like the hand motions you naturally make when you're talking)
- The well-known result about how teenage girls are generally the most linguistically innovative seems to be a combination of how people learn words more when they first join a social group (as confirmed by a lot of forums) and girls having more weak ties than guys in a lot of cases
- A lot of places on the internet, like, say, the PPC, are acting as the same kind of social space that coffee shops, pool halls, and clubs are (and an interesting experiment about how people tend to leave positive, constructive comments on things if that's what the previous comments are like, and similarly for nasty ones)
- Getting a meme is basically a marker of being in a particular culture
- Overall, language is a lot more fluid than we've thought of it as being over the last few centuries, and that's good

- Tomash

Got a huge list of potential subjects as well, so that'll be fun. I do enjoy our little wanderings through trivia so. =]

Don't think I've seen you around before. Sorry if I have and don't remember you! Welcome back!