Doctor Who: The Unicorn and the wasp

I really enjoyed this episode. I can't even be bothered to find nitpicks. It was fun and funny -- the best moment was the miming scene.

Wikipedia says the writer bore in mind advice from Douglas Adams, "a danger one runs is that the moment you have anything in the script that's clearly meant to be funny in some way, everybody thinks 'oh well we can do silly voices and silly walks and so on', and I think that's exactly the wrong way to do it", which rang very true to me. It was very funny, but it did try to be serious for the characters, rather than just slapping a laugh track on, which always works best for me.

Nitpicks

The backstory and science were stupid. But there was nothing specific I could be bothered to demolish at length.

"Ziphead" and "Haylp" tags

Hm, in retrospect, maybe my "requiring help" tag should have been "ziphead", not "haylp". "Haylp" is probably funnier, but "ziphead" is geekier. Most of the time, "help me" posts are actually seeking a small bit of information or calculation, like "what's this word" or "does anyone have a program to do foo", when ziphead (a computer system including excessively focused people to do the intuitive thinking, useful when you need partly computer-fast access, and party human-random access) exactly describes what I want.

But some of the time I need genuine physical help, eg "anyone give me a lift" or "who wants pizza in return for heavy lifting". Maybe I should have two different tags?

Today's question

Anyway, todays question is: "What word means something that acquires a large and totemic importance, typically in a negative way" eg. "We'd avoided talking about the subject so long it had become an X.". And sounds a bit like "shibboleth"?

Did I confuse Shibboleth with another word? Or pick up an incorrect meaning of "shibboleth" from context? Or does "Shibboleth" mean that but I failed to find it on dictionary.com? Or did I just invent this?

I hope there's a really easy answer?

Illuminati

On Saturday, I joined sonic, mobbsy, martin and pseudomonas for board games, and Mobbsy introduced us to Illuminati. This was something I'd heard about, and always felt I should play at some point, and it turns out it is pretty fun.

I've got a feeling there wasn't quite the full experience; we took a little while to get used to the mechanics, and so there wasn't as much cut-throat action as is possibly normal, but it's funny, and fairly easy to get into: the rules are somewhat complicated, but less so than many games and quite intuitive. And it took quite a while to get through a game.

But it didn't feel like a long time, it never dragged, and was definitely fun.

Thanks to Mobbsy for explaining the rules to us all, that's always a little uphill (especially if you feel constrained in your ability to play evilly and make backstabbing deals by having to compromise with the need to explain to people what's going on and what might be fair and what might not.)

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