Traipsing the Ergosphere

Where heaven and hell turn out to both be corrupt bureaucracies?

And only one human prophecy turns out to have been right all along?

The one with the unlikely group of friends who band together in the face of bigger forces trying to destroy them? 

With the slutty and the neurotic soulmate? 

Who find each other in a hundred different lifetimes and always bring out the best in each other? 

Doug Forcett

And Shadwell

Hi hello could we please make sure that no one watches this and that it flops. Moffat can’t get back on his bullshit in 2020 let’s all leave him back in the 10s thank you very much.

Just a few reminders

joked about the Ninth Doctor sexually assaulting Nancy from the Empty Child (watch the behind the scenes, he openly jokes about it, and basically calls Nancy a tramp for having been a teen mother, despite the hinting that the situation wasn’t one of choice), 

wrote Madame du Pompadour as a sex fiend when she suffered from vaginismus and suspected endometriosis to the point that she would barely even kiss Louis – the King kept her because he was in love with her mind, but none of that came across – this would be a fact the Doctor knew well, because he fucking reads,

said if RTD hadn’t put Rose in another Universe he would have killed her off because she was not classy enough or good enough to be the Doctor’s wife, 

said Rose was the sort of character you were shocked wasn’t teen pregnant but had clearly been around, 

said he chose Karen Gillan for Amy when he saw her in the hallway, and she was more attractive and skinny than the actress that had hit the mark in her audition

calls women he finds unattractive ‘dumpy’

is fatphobic

is racist

is homophobic

is misogynist

joked about Rose’s abusive ex boyfriend ‘’just being sick of her’’

joked that her being lost to Pete’s World was “convenient” for the Doctor, so his cloying needy girlfriend could be gone from him, 

said that the most romantic part of the Time Traveller’s Wife, the problematic book that he based River Song off of, was when she purposefully met the Time Traveller before he ever met her so that she could lie about him marrying her and make it so that he purposefully continued meeting her thinking she was his wife out of love – and. look. what. he. wrote, he literally said “if you watch it, you’ll see that he never actually married her, River isn’t the Doctor’s wife but he just lets her think she is” 

said the part in the Time Traveller’s Wife where she had sex with him before his vasectomy so she could get pregnant by him despite his insistence to her that he didn’t want children ever is ‘so women, right?’

is rumoured to have been handsy on set with his female actresses,

made multiple comments about how women try to trap men

wrote a scene where the Doctor forces a kiss from a lesbian woman

joked about Amy Pond not being as sexy if she was poc

joked about how the Doctor was supposed to save the universe if she was menstruating

made abrasive comments about Jodie being cast as the Doctor

called David Tennant ‘overrated’

made all of his actors sign an agreement that they could never reprise their roles on DW without his express permission

joked about asexuality not existing re: sherlock, saying it was an excuse

said he only casts female actresses that he finds attractive

called his wife a whale and said she deals with everything to do with the kids because that’s her job

joked about bisexual people being selfish

joked about lesbians still liking men

I know this is meant to be a funny but funfact! The lotus set in Magic: The Gathering is bar-none the most expensive set in history, getting a whole set for a 60-card average deck would easily cost more than the car pictured. This card alone is worth nearly 20k, with some others costing several thousand dollars.

First, this set was released in 1993.  The cards from it are so rarely in good condition anymore that the ones that are in mint condition are disproportionately valuable.

Second, there is, of course, the nostalgia value of this being the first set ever released for the game.

Third, Magic: the Gathering was the very first trading card game.  Richard Garfield, the designer, had no idea how popular it would get, and there was literally nobody else on the planet who had experience balancing a type of game that had never existed before.  These days, TCGs are a whole industry, and you can look at the past efforts of other designers for your cues.  In 1993, this was completely unexplored territory.  As a result, the set this came from is completely imbalanced.  Cards they thought would rule the game were regarded even then as nearly useless; cards they thought were fairly balanced or that would be rare in a neighborhood due to people just buying a box or two instead snapped the game in half.  There’s a really famous combo using only four cards, all of which are in this set, to kill your opponent from full health before they even get a turn.  Black Lotus is part of that combo.

As an addendum to the balance issue–Black Lotus, which gives you free “mana”–which you use to play other cards–at a rate better than literally anything else in the game, is considered the single most powerful card ever printed, because things that generate resources are generally more useful than the things that USE those resources.

Fourth–and this is a point of contention even to this day–Black Lotus cannot be reprinted due to legal issues.  After the unexpected popularity of the game took off, Wizards of the Coast released a set called Chronicles that reprinted a lot of cards that were hard to find…which tanked the value of their original printings.  Collectors threw a petulant hissy fit, and Wizards made the ill-advised decision to publicly commit to a “Reserved List” of cards that they would never reprint.

The Reserved List stopped getting new cards put on it after a couple of years, but the damage was done.  Sure, some of these cards can’t be reprinted in certain competitive environments because they’re too powerful, but it’s been so long since they were last printed that they’re extremely hard to find even if you have the money to buy them.  They’re so hard to find that officially sanctioned tournaments that allow those cards often allow a certain number of stand-in “proxy” cards just to make it so that people can play the game.  Wizards releases anthology sets on a more regular basis, now that the collector’s market no longer has a stranglehold on the game, but they would be sued to oblivion if they abolished the Reserved List, despite the vast majority of players hating it.

So to sum up–Black Lotus was a “rare” card in the three limited-run sets it was printed in, it can’t ever be printed again, it was last printed twenty-five years ago in sets with extreme nostalgia and symbolic value, and it’s the single most powerful card in the entire game.

Poland, 2019