amateur bird photographer | tech sometimes | mid-30s
I saw this QR code in the latest episode of Doctor Who and obviously tried to scan it. This fails; the three big squares in the corners should all match, with a smaller filled square inside them. Only two of them are right. Additionally, and you might have to zoom in for this, the smaller square in the fourth corner should also have a little square inside it. So, I edited those in, and it links to...
I really like this as a way to use QR codes in a show — it looks the part (I am a big nerd who regularly spots bad QR codes IRL, and did not notice anything amiss) but won't immediately scan, and if you do fix it then it does something nice. I do hope this wasn't a "he put it in on his own and the production demanded he reroute his personal website" situation, but that seems unlikely given they also broke the code — you'd just CGI in a different code, right?
Yeah it piqued my interest since they only showed it briefly, but didn't really have any reason to show the table at all. I thought it might be a little easter egg.
But somebody saved it in the Internet Archive at 05:20 GMT, which was four hours after the episode went out, and it didn't redirect. So I'm starting to genuinely think that nobody noticed until today, and that's why it's still there. And why his entire personal website is completely inaccessible.
Just found someone talking about it on Reddit right after the episode went up and sounds like his site was working then https://old.reddit.com/r/doctorwho/comments/1czz9u3/doctor_who_1x04_73_yards_postepisode_discussion/l5jszd7/
love the idea that this guy just ddos'd himself by forgetting that doctor who fans are massive nerds
tbh the production staff should just adopt a standing policy that from now on if you need a qr code then come to russell and he'll give you a cryptic line to encode as plain text
imagine if it was a fully valid code and when you scanned it it just said "the stratagem is working, proceed to phase gamma"
