Please consider voting for The Travelling TARDIS in this years Aurora Awards. Voting ends tomorrow at midnight.
I’d also like to suggest you vote for Nothing Without Us for best related work and Nathan Caro Fréchette for Best Artist (Nathan is nominated for covers done in 2019 including Everdome.)
Voter’s Package
The majority of nominated works are available in the voter’s package now. Simply make an account, pay $10, and you’ll have access to a wonderful library of Canadian Science fiction and fantasy.
The Travelling TARDIS isn’t part of the package because you can access it for free on this site but Nothing Without Us is available.
The Travelling TARDIS
The Travelling TARDIS moves, with the power of timey-yarney crochet, through time and space visiting and taking pictures with cosplayers, landmarks, celebrities, and cute babies.
The story follows the usual time travel tropes. I like that the main character isn’t the main time traveller. The story is happy, uplifting, and something I’ve needed lately, hopeful. It’s a bubble filled retro-futuristic happy future.
This is an incredibly easy movie to watch and it’s one of my comfort films. It was one of the first movies I saw in theatres with my wife.
All that being said, there are parts that haven’t aged well. Mostly little humour things. They use a lot of ableist language when it comes to mental illness, the whole thing with the future wife saying “I’m always right, even when I’m wrong” is weird, and the puppet aunt who beats her husband is a sad reminder that even now male spousal abuse is played for laughs. There’s also a few fat jokes. All of these come off as dated rather than purposefully hateful, but it’s still cringy.
Score: 0.5
Characters
The characters are lovable and relatable, mostly. I have a soft spot for Bowler Hat Guy, I too so love checklists. DOR-15 is one of the most terrifying villains in Disney. The interactions between Lewis and Wilbur are excellent.
I’m not a fan of some of the secondary characters. Both for what I said in the previous section and because they feel weird and cooky just to be weird and cooky. That’s not a good character motivation and makes them irrelevant to the plot. You can replace each of of them with any other similar family and you’d get little difference but the bit-gags.
I did enjoy that the lady taking care of the orphanage was a nice person who genuinely cared for her charges. It’s a nice break from the “Evil Orphanage” trope.
Score: 0.5
Dialogue
From, “Keep Moving Forward!” to, “I can’t take you seriously in that hat” this movie has a lot of quotable dialogue that just hits the perfect tone between silly and insightful.
Score: 1
Visuals and Music
This movie was pretty. The animation was okay for the time but not great. We watched the blu-ray edition and it did some upgrades to the rendering that make it stand up pretty well. Overall it’s a pretty and colourful movie.
The music in this is fantastic. Danny Elfman did a great job with the music. It’s a blend of 50’s sci-fi and Disney that works. The soundtrack includes a great list of late 2000’s bands doing great songs.
Score: 1
Fun
This is an immensely fun movie. It’s never too cringy, and is funny. I can watch this one over and over without getting bored or annoyed.
Score: 1
Overall
This a movie I really enjoy. Even more so for the nostalgia of having seen it with my wife when we were first dating. It’s a time travel story plot with a great, hopeful message. Some aspects didn’t age well but they’re secondary to the main story and message.
We thought these lamp posts were fascinating. They’re probably designed this way so that large trucks can get down narrow streets, but the aesthetic is pretty cool too!
We had a blast at Virtual Nerd Con this past weekend and there are a few codes left. Each code was limited to 5 uses so hurry and get the coffee you want. Unfortunately, you can only use one code per order. (Square’s rules, not ours. Contact us if there’s a combo you want and we can try to work something out for you!)
The codes give you 30% Off a specific coffee.
MCC30 – Mint Chocolate Chip
CIN30 – Cinnamon
PCH30 – Peach
PPM30 – Peppermint
PMK30 – Pumpkin
A medium roast with mint chocolate chip flavouring
The event is held in a virtual environment inside a program called Virbela. Once you’ve made your avatar in the program, you’ll spawn in a circle with a podium to your left. Click on the podium and enter the code on your ticket to enter the convention.
Our booth is all set up and we’ll be vending Saturday and Sunday from 11-5.
Flash Sale
We will be holding flash sales over the weekend. They will be:
Saturday 11-2, and 2-5
Sunday 11-1, 1-3, and 3-5
Each sale will have 5 coupon codes for 30% off a specific flavour. If there are some still left over after the flash sale we’ll put the codes on our social media.
The story for this movie is so generic that I and everyone who re-watched it together had forgotten it. Other than the anachronisms and the ridiculous physics, there was nothing that stood out in this movie to make you remember it.
It’s what you’d have expected from an adventure movie in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s, including the sexism and useless damsel.
Score: 0
Characters
The characters were so basic and under-developed as to be boring. If it wasn’t for the exceptional cast they would have been unlikable. Stanley Tucci could probably make any roll watchable and I love it when Ewan McGregor plays silly characters. The rest of the cast was good too, but the writing for these characters was just as generic as the story.
Score: 0.5
Dialogue
The dialogue is quite possibly the best part of this movie. It’s quippy and funny. It’s also the only part of the movie that does anything for the story. “Weren’t you in an oven an hour ago?” cracked me up.
Score: 1
Visuals and Music
Even after only 7 years it’s already looking dated. The CGI is pretty bland and not impressive for a movie of its budget. The scenery is lovely, but not worth the movie. The action is fun and over the top, but overly rushed.
The music could have been sampled from other adventure and fantasy movies and I wouldn’t have noticed.
Score: 0
Fun
It’s an exciting and action packed movie with fantastic actors hamming it up. It’s hard not to get distracted by the inaccuracies in tech or history considering the ending. It’s also hard not to yell at boob armour and the utterly useless plot device that was the female character. Also, why were there no female giants?
Score: 0.5
Overall
This isn’t a good movie, or a very memorable one. That being said it’s watchable and not too offensive.
A who’s who of Writers, Journalists, Professors, and other people released A Letter on Justice and Open Debate. It’s actually a fascinating read; one of those letters crafted with just the right level of language to seem reasonable and intellectual at the same time.
If you’ve read articles about the letter, you’ll notice they use “Free Speech” and “Cancel Culture” in the titles of those articles… That’s not in the letter. The letter is much too high class to lower itself to using those words.
If you want a logical and well thought out rebuttal and analysis of the letter, I recommend reading: ‘Cancel Culture’ Is How the Powerful Play Victim. It does a great job of explaining the hypocrisy of the letter.
Cancel Culture
The Letter makes reference to “calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.” This is another way of saying Cancel Culture. What does this mean? Cancel Culture is a term used to reference public outcry to stop listening or supporting people who have expressed or done bad things. Tumblr has a term for these people: “Problematic Fave”.
The letter makes it sound like this stifles free expression and hurts people who’ve made mistakes. This argument is pretty weak when you consider that Jordan Peterson, Joss Whedon, James Gunn, and J. K. Rowling are all still gainfully employed in their fields. (Also Trump… arg)
It’s an argument that is stated, often, by people who oppose the Me Too Movement or Black Lives Matter. The term is used as a cudgel against criticism.
Doing hateful things or expressing hateful opinions has consequences, not as many as there should be, but more than there was.
So advocates and us SJWs have been accused of cancelling people and destroying their lives. The signatories on this list remind me of conventions.
There was a convention I went to where someone who creates things that aren’t own voice (art created by those who have lived them) was angered and incensed by an advocate mentioning the harmful content they included in their creations. The creator moaned and complained and made a big fuss. They were not alone; similar creators did the same thing.
The advocate who complained participated in other events at other conventions and were told that they needed to tone it down. They were being too aggressive and making people uncomfortable. The advocate for their own rights was told that they needed to be calmer and not rock the boat. They were then told they wouldn’t be able to participate in those events.
This is the real Cancel Culture and it’s not new. Minorities have been told that they need to baby those in power and if they refuse, they are often shut out. Shut out of events, jobs, activities, etc.
My story is vague to protect those in it and because I have a small platform that is quite fragile, naming names would get me cancelled.
It’s not the rich and powerful being criticized that, “will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time”; its rich privileged people playing victim while minorities and victims are shut down that is what has been hurting our society for far too long.
