The Stochastic Game

Ramblings of General Geekery

More first impressions on The Avengers: we know that Emma Peel, played by the forever wonderful Diana Rigg, is everybody’s favourite, but her predecessor, Cathy Gale, played by Honor Blackman, is super awesome too! And probably even more groundbreaking for the time!

Steed and Gale having a toast, with Gale showing a rare smile. Apparently the showrunners told Blackman to smile as little as possible, because Gale isn't supposed to like Steed! Steed is supposed to be annoying!
A signed picture of Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale.
Cathy Gale in a full leather outfit. Emma Peel got that from Gale, it seems! Gale was supposed to know Judo, and so Blackman had to learn it. She did most of her own fighting, and had trouble with her wardrobe. That's when she decided to wear leather, and that decision seems to have had long-term repercussions all the way to the present with characters like Black Widow!

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Another old TV series I’m (re)watching is “The Avengers”. I skipped season 1 since almost all episodes have been lost, and headed into season 2. Episode 7 has Steed being tortured by Nazi dentists! Almost 15 years before Marathon Man! Amazing.

"The Mauritius Penny" has a pretty cool plot: a stamp collector gets murdered because he sees an ultra-rare stamp on a delivery list, gets excited and starts talking about it... only that stamp was just a code-name for a clandestine delivery of weapons for an underground neo-nazi group! Simply picking the "wrong" code-name triggers a series of events that brings the group to the attention of our heroes, Steed and Gale!
Steed gets tortured by neo-Nazi dentist women! He goes undercover as one of the Nazi group's members from another chapter, but they see through his ruse when his teeth don't match the records! As the woman proceeds to threaten Steed, she lists all the different cavities that Steed has and that the other guy didn't :D
The neo-Nazi group having a meeting to organize the take-over of Britain.
Steed and Gale are looking at some stamps or something.

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I’m a few days late but I finally got around to do it this year! The younger kid helped, too.

The picture of an apple pie, with the sign for "Pi" engraved in the top crust. Pi-Day (3/14 in the wrongly ordered American dating notation) was just a few days ago.

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We still have some pretty spectacular hair-ice here every now and then. That is, until the good fluffy boy completely destroys it.

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Firefly and Serenity were good. Buffy was good. I don’t need reboots or sequels or whatever. What I’d rather have are original and diverse new premises and stories. In the meantime, I’ll be watching old stuff I missed.

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When someone points at problems with the excesses of late-stage capitalism, there’s always some dumbass who replies “well what do you want then? make everything free?!” and half the time it’s somebody you thought was actually educated 😬

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A few weeks ago, the good fluffy boy and I were up in Squamish and we found an off-leash park that apparently doesn’t really “end” anywhere as much as it leads up out in the wild and onto the mountains…

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I should be more like Conan when I read articles about regurgitative AI and other stupid new tech trends.

An excerpt from a Conan The Barbarian story: "Murilo realized that the priest must be centuries ahead of his generation, to perfect such an invention; but Conan put it down to witchcraft and troubled his head no more about it."

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The MacBook Neo is interesting because it’s named like something from, I don’t know, the ASUS marketing department or something. Usually Apple uses common nouns/adjectives for its products: Shuffle, Magic, Pro, Air, Mini, etc.

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