Happy birthday! (And I’m still within a few years of you…)
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Happy birthday! What are you doing to celebrate?
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We’re taking my eldest to Phantom Peak for their 16th (with 4 of their friends) this weekend (their birthday is in two weeks) and then our friend’s son is also 16 (his birthday is also today) so we’re going to the cinema for that. Then next weekend… I’m going to The Stuff of Legend Live and meeting TARDIS Guide people in REAL LIFE! And then some more friends are coming round on Sunday.
So two extremely crazy weekends!
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Happy, Happy Birthday 
Are you being celebrated properly?
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Carol Vorderman reacts to Kemi Badenoch’s campaign promise to stand up to Doctor Who:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C_dLjthIRLZ/
Fun (?) facts: Jay - the one in yellow - ran for Parliament in 2019… for the Brexit Party. And her sister-in-law (her brother’s wife) is Marcella Detroit from Shakespears Sister.
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If it helps, you can choose what format to download with yt-dlp. For instance, if I run: yt-dlp -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tWxvpqFDvc I get:
Typically, I want H.264 and AAC, not VP9 or Opus (they’re technically better codecs but way less compatible), but the highest bitrate available for each one. So I would then run:
yt-dlp -f 270+140 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tWxvpqFDvc
But if you wanted the video that’s around 600 MB instead of 2 GB, you could instead run: yt-dlp -f 399+140 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tWxvpqFDvc
That being said, YouTube’s compression sucks, so you may be better off downloading the biggest size possible and then re-encoding with ffmpeg (or HandBrake or avidemux) anyway.
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That does help! I’ll admit I haven’t explored the options for yt-dlp that much, and I’m usually downloading full playlists with it.
I’ve actually been going through a lot of my video collection gradually and reencoding with ffmpeg because a lot of the time, I can get the size down a bit without reducing the quality too noticeably for me.
Of course, admittedly, I just got a new NAS and bigger hard drives for it, so I’m not in as much of a size crunch as I was… (My old one was literally by a company that no longer makes NASes, bought from a store that no longer exists.)
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Happy birthday to @deltaandthebannermen - keep being our awesome Godfather of Doctor Who! I hope you have a great weekend ahead of you!
Happy birthday to @PalindromeRose - keep embracing us with your thoughtful and original reviews and I hope you have a great year ahead of you!
My wife’s birthday is on Thursday and our 5th wedding anniversary is on the 14th. September is NOT a good month for my wallet 
(Why oh why did I agree to marry her on her birthday month? I have been fooled!!)
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Snap! My wife’s birthday and our wedding anniversary are exactly one week apart! (Although it span the end of July and the beginning of August)
We dread September every year because it’s packed with birthdays of relatives and friends and October and November aren’t much better and then it’s Christmas!
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Swiftie-level theorizing about future releases:
The Celestial Toymaker Blu-ray/DVD included team First Doctor in the “Doctor Who The Collection escape room.” There is one team for each of the first seven Doctors; team Seventh Doctor will be on the s25 Blu-ray. From this, I think we can safely draw two conclusions:
- Seasons 1, 3, and 4 aren’t coming to The Collection anytime soon. Otherwise, why include this explicitly Collection-branded feature on a non-Collection release?
- The movie isn’t being reissued in the immediate future either, or they’d have had a team Eighth Doctor. (Pity, as I’d really like a wilderness years Collection with the movie, The Curse of Fatal Death, the BBCi webcasts, and the various documentaries.)
Now here’s where I start theorizing:
- I think the next release is going to be season 21. Partly this is a gut instinct, like the one that told me s25 was coming next. But it’s obviously what the Fifth and Sixth Doctor escape rooms will be on, since it’s the only unreleased season for both. In fact, The Twin Dilemma is Sixie’s last remaining story. It’s also the only release that would let them knock two Doctors out with one stone, aside from s4, which, see above.
- Releases for the Second, Third, and Fourth Doctors must be impending as well. Clearly for the latter two that’s s7 or s11, and s13 or s16, respectively.
- For the Second Doctor, it could be s5 or s6, or it could be an animation of The Highlanders, The Wheel in Space, or The Space Pirates (or possibly a new animation of The Moonbase, The Ice Warriors, or The Invasion). If it’s one of the full seasons, I’m laying my bets on s6; I think they’re trying to avoid reissuing The Web of Fear again until they find the missing episode.
Back in the world of reality, for anyone interested, these are the teams:
- Peter Purves, Maureen O’Brien, Lisa Bowerman
- Frazer Hines, Margot Hayhoe, Graeme Harper
- Katy Manning, Daisy Ashford or Sadie Miller (?), presumably a third person not shown
- Matthew Waterhouse, Toby Hadoke, Michael Briant without his glasses
- Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton
- Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Terry Molloy
- Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie Langford, Sophie Aldred
Why Graeme and Lisa are in the wrong eras, I don’t know. I do wonder (back to Never Never Land we go) if Carole and/or Anneke was meant to participate but pulled out, so they reshuffled the rest.
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Colour me intrigued - do you have the image or can point us to where you saw this?
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I can post a screencap when I get home, but that’s all from quickly pausing during the opening of the one on The Celestial Toymaker.
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Big exam today, feeling pretty nervous for it 
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Good luck 
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I passed!!
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You did it! (as my old boss would always say)
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Okay, looking at it again I think it’s Michael Briant without his glasses:
The reason I’m not sure about Katy’s partner is that she’s moving throughout both shots of her, so it’s not possible to get a screenshot that isn’t blurred:
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Yeah that’s Michael Briant. Not sure about Katy’s partner - my first thought would maybe be Sadie Miller or Daisy Ashford but it doesn’t look like either of them.
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Q: What’s the difference between a seal and a sea lion?
A: The seal’s honest, but the sea lion’s always lyin’
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