Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@social.cleverlibre.org

@mathew @lauren @kkeller

(Not that I don't love Straker and Koenig, but it was obvious that Paul and Sandra were really running Alpha leaving Martin Landau free to just Shatner the hell out of his scenes.)

@mathew @lauren @kkeller

Presumably that's also why so many ITV shows always insisted on having at least one (typically terribly miscast) American actor in every episode. As if somehow we can't enjoy a program without a proxy Yank marysue'ing for us.

@JohnShirley2023 perhaps that's the thing to do when you get a GOP majority in the House: keep them distracted with inconsequential rabble-rousing non-issues while the rest of the government gets on with actual work. Perhaps Hillary will take one for the team and volunteer to be "investigated" a bunch more times for Benghazi.

@JohnShirley2023 Honestly, recreate the Messerschimidt KR200 in carbon fiber, stick big horizontal fans at each corner, run it all on a standard drone microcontroller and you're done. You wouldn't even need mechanical driver controls, just an iphone dash mount and an app.

@lauren @ExadataDBA The space inside the tiiny building which was the exterior of #6's residnece (far too small and too oval to contain the apartment set depicted) was occupied by a shop selling The Prisoner merch. Of which there was a surprising amount. Staffed by a long-suffering bloke who endured my gleeful recitations of the requisite lines and responded in kind with dutiful resignation:

Do you have anything larger?
Only colour, sir. Much more expensive.
No, I meant more area.
Sorry sir. Local maps only.

@JohnShirley2023 Think they'd go well with Elon's AI toddler-hit-and-run algorithm, which so far is batting 1000.

@ExadataDBA @lauren When I visited Portmeirion I had my gf take a picture of me running away from the village toward the ocean.. it'd be amusing to 'shop in a weather balloon behind me but I've never bothered.

@lauren @kkeller Certainly it's too cute by half, and McGoohan didn't really do cute. I'm under the impression, and he may have said as much but I don't recall where, that the last episode was simply a deliberate defiance of people's desire for an explanatory conclusion. He wanted the series to be thought provoking, but not to tell anyone what to think.

@kkeller @lauren

Simplistically, you could go with "in the end it's all an utter farce, and no one is in charge -- but if anyone is, you are."

This goes along with an interpretation I've heard -- which there's no real reason to believe was intended -- of the voice-over dialogue which opened each episode:

...who are you?
The new Number Two.
Who is Number One?
You are Number Six.

That last comes across as an evasion and a non sequitur, but some commenters have interpreted it as:

"You are, Number Six."

Like I said, might not be what was intended but it sort of fits the thesis and the seeming "reveal".

@kkeller @lauren Yes. While it was clear that he wanted the conclusion to be allegorical rather than a clean wrap-up, I never really understood what he was specifically trying to do with it.

I see the series as a whole as a battle between personal integrity and sham ideologies that are simply fancy dress for misrule, corruption and the will to power, and most of the series does speak to that. But I've never been clear on how the last one does.

@NatlSecCnslrs He sure chooses his moment for being diligent about Presidential ethics investigations

@kkeller @lauren ISTR McGoohan only envisioned seven episodes, Lord Grade of ITV wanted a full series, and they compromised on 17. So some of the 10 additional episodes were a bit hasty, and it shows; and at least one was a repurposed old Danger Man script.

@lauren (Ackcherly I have The Prisoner DVD set but never ripped it. Fortunately I still have one working computer with a DVD drive in it if I ever decide to.)

@lauren

FINE. i can dust off an analog TV set but I'm damned if I can find recent drivers for this firewire to VHF adapter I found in Big Box O' Cables #7, let alone work out how to pipe youtube's semi-secret http stream chunking protocol to it

@lauren I was telling my wife the other day about Leela's tribe, the sevateem, being a corruption of "survey team", from whom they were the lost descendents.

@lauren Lazy-ass f*ckers coulda made it resizable in about the same amount of code it took to produce that "please note" shee-hat

@voidabyss @rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo I'm liberal as all hell but honestly, when someone on the street hits me up saying "do you support reparations" I'm all like "look, I come from a long line of white trash and grifters, trust me, we never had any slaves". You wouldn't believe the look they give me. Or, y'know, maybe you would.

When I'm in SF one of my favorite places to be is at one of those little tables in front of Orphan Andy's where the Market St streetcar turnaround happens. There's a live cam that points at it, it's very rainy there right now and it's creating a great ambience for my little PNW home office. Think I need to invest in a wall-sized TV for this sort of thing.

One of the most politic non-agreements I've ever heard came from a prominent doctor who served on a lot of boards and panels. He said:

"I do not share your confidence in that assertion, but it is a point of view."