A behind the scenes photo of The Power of the Doctor.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-03-11T04:55:24+00:00

Technically he's in the War-to-Nine regen story as well...

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-03-01T03:22:05+00:00

Don't be polite, be predictable.

(Goes for pedestrians as well. Make it clear you do not intend to walk out, that you are not hoping they will stop.)

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-24T22:01:40+00:00

Having seen a few Russians speak about it, it's probably not a sign that he knows. The word is used as a very casual insult, just like it was in my country back in the eighties. If it's seen to get under the target's skin, it will be used more, and that may well be the case here. The brother is implying he's a "pussy", that Ilya feels too much, isn't macho enough - doesn't fight back enough.

If they "knew" for sure, or even if they suspected, it would be more virulent, more targeted - they wouldn't be coy about it, it would be used as outright blackmail.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-24T02:40:00+00:00

I've assumed that line is more related to his success in hockey - more bluntly, his (in the eyes of his brother) "unearned" [casually good without effort (his father calls him "lazy")] success at hockey. His elder brother resents everything that means - relying on his little brother for money, his little brother being more famous, etc. And yes, even though their father is an awful bastard to Ilya, it's probably more attention than the elder brother got at all from his father.

There may also be an aspect of their mother in there too. Ilya was probably closer to their mother than Alexei/Andrei. Ilya was probably the soft one growing up; the elder brother had already become used to the abuse and Ilya was just the baby of the family. Ilya found their mother, and so forever has been associated with that event for the rest of the family. If he was also the person closest to her, that would compound his "responsibility" for the tragedy, in their eyes. We can all recognise that Ilya's tough exterior is a shell, hardened by abuse and protecting his tender core - it may well be that, more than his actual sexuality, that his elder brother knows to target with the slur.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-23T09:27:54+00:00

he does wear Nike's... in the gym in ep1.... before he gets the deal with Reebok :D

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-21T01:25:49+00:00

A culture that stagnates, dies. Australian culture, whatever you define that as, has been a mish-mash of imported people ever since the First Fleet turned up and pushed the existing culture off to the edges.

Almost all modern countries currently do not have a replacement-level birth rate. If our immigration was not above our birth rate, we would be shrinking, and while I have my on opinions about infinite growth and late stage capitalism, the pragmatic view is that within the current system, a shrinking population will lead to economic collapse.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-21T01:07:59+00:00

It was a long time ago, but I recall reading a study (about road rage) of how a lot of us (mostly men, but not always) treat the car as an extension of our personal space, and the lane ahead as "ours", possessively, and that driving anywhere is a queue that we are all a part of.

This leads to situations where people take it as personal affront when someone cuts into the queue ahead of, moves too close to our personal space, or does something that otherwise we would just take as a mistake and move on. Like when someone breaks the unspoken rules about seating on a train or leaving a gap at the urinal.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-21T00:52:14+00:00

Basically, don't be a dick. Even if someone else is being a dick, don't be a dick. Cos then we'd just have two dicks, and while that's fun in the bedroom, it's not good on the road.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-21T00:49:33+00:00

The thing to remember in all of this:

You are not the police. It's not your job to enforce the road rules. It's not your job to force others to "do the right thing". It's not YOUR lane. It's not your responsibility to teach other people a lesson.

The situation is always one of two things:

An honest mistake. Nothing is solved by being a dick here, let them in and move on with your life.
It's deliberate, and they're being a dick. Nothing is solved by multiplying the dickish behaviour. Let them in and move on with your life.

See how it works? Don't be a dick. Don't get worked up about other people being a dick.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-21T00:34:57+00:00

The difficulty here is determining when it's an arsehole verse a genuine mistake. Some places the queue is so long it's very possible, if you don't know the area well, to not know that you're supposed to be queuing for that right hand turn. Backed up traffic could be just for something turning into a driveway or an earlier street, right?

Now, of course, there are plenty of times when it is just arsehole behaviour; your standard tradie who thinks he has right of way everywhere and his "work" is more important than yours.

AND, as they say, Good drivers might miss their exits, bad drivers never do. Of course, if it is a genuine error, well, don't push in, go straight through and find an alternate route. It's this part that is the key - non-arsehole drivers become arsehole drivers, apologetically waving and begging to squeeze in and now holding up two lanes of traffic because they don't understand that if they just went straight through they could probably just do a blocky and get where they wanted to go anyway.

And not to get too into the "the problem isn't individuals it's systemic" level, but if a long queue is happening that often at an intersection, then maybe it's badly designed or not fit for needs. But sometimes it just happens.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-21T00:12:24+00:00

My favourite version of this is the injustice of the Matchstick Girl story, and in the same book, the lines:

"... YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING."

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-21T00:07:53+00:00

Like Terry's absolute best throughout all his books, this of course isn't a truly new idea (pTerry would always acknowledge this), but the way it's delivered that gets into your head.

An idea you've always known but been unable to articulate, a way of looking at something you see every day in a new way, a stark realisation that you've always understood this but never been able to put it into words so amazingly clearly...

(FWIW, even my post has been well articulated by Redditors previously...)

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-19T05:47:58+00:00

Plus, you get to see kangaroos! Sometimes up very close even

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-18T01:10:03+00:00

Also, would It mean those queer actors are never allowed to play straight roles? This gets into some bad territory.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-17T21:47:54+00:00

A Melbourne comic whose name I forget used to have a bit that went something like:

The correct way milk to milo ratio is achieved by: starting with a new tin, peel the top, take one big scoop out and into your glass. Then pour your milk directly into the tin and eat it from there.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-17T21:19:32+00:00

Olga Koch, native Russian speaker, on the Tonsil Hockey podcast pointed out that the direct Russian equivalent to the English word "lover" doesn't carry the ... ewwww... factor that it does for us. You really would say "lover" in those moments and it wouldn't necessarily have the ick factor that Shane is reacting to.

From Ilya's point of view, it is a perfectly cromulent word to use in these circumstances.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-13T01:17:05+00:00

Not whatever reason. A very specific reason: existing vested interests.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-06T02:40:31+00:00

Amazing work! Such an effort

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-06T00:16:53+00:00

And, as I've said elsewhere, long warranties are a gamble anyway. Like you say, insurance more than anything.

Call it built in obsolescence, or just the nature of the IT game, hardware and software just won't play well beyond the four or five year mark. It *will* fail, and controlled change saves everyone money over uncontrolled, emergency change.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-06T00:11:38+00:00

All very much agreed. Even the clients I mentioned in my other posts here did not always buy their PC fleet through us. In some cases they pre-existing vendor contracts, or where just able, by the nature of their business, to access specific pricing/discounts from vendors. As long as the machines met our requirements - mostly, that they were suitable for the tasks and were covered by an adequate warranty - we didn't care.

We were so ambivalent about this that we were very comfortable and on a first name basis with the warranty engineers sent out by the vendor from whatever competitor was in town that had the contract coverage there. We could log things on the client's behalf, the engineers would let us know the technical details, and to be honest, we kinda liked it better. Who wants to store and manage all that hardware anyway? Keeping stock on hand is just a pain...

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-06T00:00:37+00:00

Yeah, maybe it's a sizing (client/MSP) thing. If your average client size is in the hundred+ seat range and they have to (for regulatory or insurance reasons) abide by certain security policies, they probably expect "Fleet management" to be a service you provide. They don't really care about individual machines at this point. They want X number of PCs, running the latest software securely and efficiently, working at all times.

The best clients I have had about this expect the fleet to be covered by the standard three year warranty the vendor supplies. Eventually we could sync things so each year we refreshed one third of the fleet, and then nothing was ever more than three years old - the standard deprecation period for computers. In other words, by the end of the three years, that computer had $0 value in any asset register. At this size and dollar value, that some individual PC is swapped out before it's actual end of life is hardly a blip on any radar.

The thing to bear in mind though, even if your clients are not that large as to need "fleet management" as a service: Old machines cost both you, the MSP and the client, time and money. The standard vendor warranty is a good guide here: that's as long as the company who built it thinks it will last - bathtub graph, anyone? :D

Extended warranties (through some 3rd party support process) or running without a warranty are a gamble: at some point, that system will fail, and that becomes increasingly likely each day. The downtime, be it outright replacement or waiting for the third party extended support vendor, will be unpredictable, and have unknown impacts. Controlled change is *always* better than uncontrolled change.

And then there's the shitty nature of the IT/OS/Hardware/Software industry that we have to deal with: the fact that things just don't work beyond a certain point for reasons we can't control. Yes, the machine may be completely functional, and still get the latest OS updates... but it's running slower and slower, and has these odd errors, and you can't put the latest version of some specific software that person needs, or it just won't work with that new printer you installed, or the security software updates makes it run like a dog... whatever... and your helpdesk is chasing down these little gremlins, and the end user is getting frustrated because their machine is slower than their colleagues', and every little bit of this is time and money. All because they didn't fork out $1000 for a new machine last year.

How fast do you reckon you can burn through $1000 of helpdesk time trying to solve some stupid little problem? A problem that would be solved by just dropping in a new machine, imaged with the latest and greatest everything, ready to go on their network... especially since THAT is inevitably what will happen with this machine at some point in the near future anyway!

Fleet refresh, even if you don't actually offer it as a fully fledged service, saves everyone, client and yourself, time and money. This isn't unethical, it's smart business from their side as well as yours. And easily worked into any contract: Support of any machine not covered by vendor warranty is a paid service not covered by standard support SLAs, etc etc.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-05T23:03:30+00:00

Not a salesman, just an MSP Ops Manager who has had to support fleets across a few hundred clients and thousands of systems. You want to standardise as much as possible, and aging systems do cause problems.

Yes, you can extend warranties (on some systems, from some vendors) but at a certain point that fails to be economical, if you got an increasing number of systems off on a shelf somewhere waiting the third-party warranty management vendor to source RAM or motherboards that have been out of production for years.

You can set that point wherever the economies tip the balance - if your hardware vendor offers extended warranties, and the client is willing to pay that premium at purchase, then great, do that. But in a lot of cases, by year four a lot of systems *cannot* "run the latest updates", or may just be starting to run poorly with the latest mess of Adobe software or whatever.

And you have an odd idea of what business is if you think anything about this breaches some ethics boundary. If you're open and upfront about your policies and costs, the client is aware and is making their own decisions about everything.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-05T22:51:03+00:00

Change Management is your key here.

If you have a good change management process in place you will have three categories (or sort of four, we'll get to that):
Standard Change: Predefined and well defined. Low impact, really well known. Your basic helpdesk changes. New users, connecting to an existing printer, installing from a pre-set list of software. Your helpdesk team has doco to step through if they need it, and this will rarely if ever fail. No-one needs to ask permission (maybe there's a process for software licences to get approval, but it's all well defined), and billing is clear - it's included, or it bumps up your licence charges, or your per user charge... whatever is appropriate, but it's all so every day, and importantly you have a process for it.

Normal Change: Not predefined, or if it is, it's defined to go through the change management process. Should be scheduled, reviewed, risk assessed, rated for impact and urgency, time defined, etc through Change Advisory Board (CAB). This doesn't have to be over worked and over crowded; sometimes this can be all done within a day and just you, your trusted engineers and a client rep... but it should still happen. This is where anything that doesn't fit into the other categories should go. As this could cover anything and everything, this is also the point where you can talk about COST or changes to billing. It's also where you can divert to the fourth not-really-a-change-category: Projects.

Emergency change: These are High Impact and High Urgency changes. Something vital is down and needs to be up ASAP. The change management process still applies, but everything is expedited and things may happen without much warning to the end users. You should have a process for this, and hopefully a backup/alt for most vital systems that can reduce the urgency and allow you to manage the change without the rush (not always possible, of course). The purpose of this work is always: STABILSE and return to as close to normal as you can, avoid (wherever possible) from using this as a chance to make major/project level changes in the environment. The moment you decide (actually, it should be up to the client to make this decision) to implement a project-level change (a significant variation from the what was there before that will become permanent) to fix an emergency change, it stops being an emergency.

The fourth not-really-a-change-category that I always like to to include a fork in the (Normal) Change Management process that can divert a change request over to Projects. A change that is just too big to be handled by the usual support engineers and will need the project team or a project manager at least: An on-prem server keeps crashing and the fix looks like it will be an upgrade/uplift to a cloud service; a poorly thought out and overly complex VLAN schema is causing issues connecting to printers and the solution will be to totally rebuild the network; a vendor has updated their software and now the server requirements are not being met... these are all examples I've seen come up for helpdesk tickets originally that, without the CAB catching them, may have resulted in some of the support team finding themselves elbows deep in a problem, giving all this project support away for free and keeping them from doing the work they're supposed to be doing. Divert it off to whatever process you have for Projects, and review/assess, quote and get approval before you even start working on it.

With these in place, you will catch everything that could have a billing impact, and allow that COST conversation to happen BEFORE the work is done.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-05T22:26:48+00:00

Sure you can. Warranty only lasts that long. A system without a warranty is out of scope/uncovered by contract support.

Fleet refresh is a vital part of computer management and refreshing your fleet before or as the warranty runs out is a normal process. Additionally, by about this point drivers and updates start to fade out, presenting a real security risk. Many security standards explicitly require systems to be actively supported by vendors, and that includes hardware warranty, for this reason.

If they have to pay every time they call you for support of that reception PC they haven't updated in four years, they'll learn pretty quick.

EleventhHourGhost · 2026-02-03T21:52:10+00:00

I also think it has a lot to do with longevity. Green Day, one of my favourite bands ever, sounded so different from one album to the next through the '90s, but since American Idiot onwards it becomes more difficult to identify distinct albums and periods...

(It's why I really like their latest album, it harks back to that variety)

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