Anna and the Bunches

Today’s post was going to be a review of Braid. But Duke Nukem Forever was released yesterday, and, well… I have comments. So, next week: Braid. Now: Angry Feminist Rant.

Trigger Warning: descriptions of rape and violence ahead. Please do not read if these things may be harmful to you.


First, the backstory - Duke Nukem Forever was released after a decade of anticipation and shifting release dates, with the game being dropped and picked up by development houses and publishers along the way. And now that it is out? Almost every review of Duke Nukem Forever has been negative. It has an abysmal metacritic score (although higher than it deserves, it seems to me). Many of the reviews have pointed out, in addition to poor graphics and boring gameplay, the blatant misogyny that fills the game in place of interesting content. Even Destructoid, which doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to sexism, lambasted the game for its immaturity and offensiveness.

The game doesn’t just support rape culture incidentally by propagating misogynistic tropes, though; it absolutely revels in it. According to the Destructoid review:

…at times, the game’s attempts to be funny come off as downright horrific. One level in particular takes place in an alien nest where Earth’s women are being inseminated by giant penises. The women writhe and moan in a fairly humiliating fashion, and they regularly sob with no small amount of implied misery. In essence, the women look like they’re getting raped. In fact, they are. That’s the big joke of the level. The aliens are raping the women to create babies… By the time Duke Nukem finally makes a “You’re fucked,” joke, which he makes in front of two girls who are about to die in the process of getting sexually assaulted, Duke does not come across as cool, witty or likable in the least. He comes across as a vile, callous, thoroughly detestable psychopath.

I was speechless after reading this. This is simply heinous. It completely falls flat as humor. Even for people who are regularly amused by harmful, offensive humor, I suspect this just isn’t funny. It’s sad and disgusting that the writers of this game felt the need to use violent sexual assault as a setup for an excruciatingly bad joke.

In light of the bad reviews, The Redner Group, the PR agency responsible for sending out review copies got angry and lashed out on twitter, saying:

too many went too far with their reviews… we are reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom

So, if someone writes a massively harmful misogynist game that includes the premise ‘rape is funny’, and you have the audacity to point that out, you deserve to be punished by losing access to review any game from that publisher. I mean… look. While Feminists often talk about the silencing tactics that people use to keep rape culture intact, we don’t usually get such a blatant example. You’re blatantly saying “if you speak out about this, we will blacklist you”. It is a direct threat to damage the career of anyone who calls you out for your misogyny. If nothing else, Redner Group, thanks for such an illustrative example.

The Redner Group isn’t the only group that has issues with the negative reviews. We have some fine apologetics going on over here on Kotaku. One user in particular, with the outstanding handle of 0LunarEclipse0, had this to say:

Just because you can’t handle shock humor does not make it not funny. Everything can be funny. I’ve laughed at some of the most racist and disgusting jokes. Maybe that makes me a horrible person… Just because something pushes you to far doesn’t mean it pushes everyone to far… Nothing should ever be off limits. If we sacrifice freedom we sacrafice [sic] life.

The very fact that this offends you is more truth that it should be defended. Because you want it silenced. Censored. Well freedom means free. Regardless of how much something offends you, we can say and do what we want. Because your feelings don’t matter.

I don’t support rape and this joke goes a little to far even for me. But I beleive [sic] in freedom. So nothing ever should be off limits.

Okay, 0 (can I call you 0?). There’s a lot wrong with this - it’s basically a giant mess of privilege denial - so let’s take it a piece at a time. Frankly, I don’t care whether you’re offended. Offense is not the point. When I say that Duke Nukem Forever should not exist, I don’t say that because I think it is offensive. I say it because it will cause material harm. It reinforces - undeniably and strongly - the cultural narrative that rape is acceptable. Because when something is made into a joke, it is normalized. It is established as a set part of our culture. This will inevitably make it seem more reasonable, or justifiable, because it is normal. That is what rape culture does - it makes rape seem normal, inevitable, and by extension, acceptable.

So let’s lay out what we’re really talking about here. Duke Nukem Forever normalizes rape. It contributes to and propagates rape culture. To defend this game is to defend the act of rape. So no, I don’t care who is offended by Duke Nukem Forever. I care about who it is going to hurt.

On to the next premise: “freedom means free”. First, I don’t know what Randian faux-Utopia you live in, but in the reality I’m accustomed to, society puts certain limits on freedom. For instance, you are not free to kill another person. But i digress - let’s talk about what’s really on your mind. You’ve erected a strawman argument here that suggests the game’s detractors are trying to say the game should be pulled from the shelves, or banned, or something similar. I don’t know if reviews have been suggesting that - I can’t find any that have. I, at least, am not going to suggest that.

Certainly, the case could be made that this game should not be allowed to see release. My discussion of its harmful nature above edges in that direction. But I would rather err on the side of letting something harmful be created than that of censoring something worthwhile. So, I’m going to say this: Certainly, 2K games is free to develop and publish a game with this content. But I stand by my assertion in this post’s title, as well: the game should not exist. The world is not made a better place, in any way, by its existence. In fact, as I have suggested above, I hold that the world has been actively made a worse place by this game existing. It should not exist in the sense that decent human beings should know better than to create something this full of hate. But none of that is to suggest that the game shouldn’t be allowed to be released, or should be banned or censored, which is what the strawman argument says (although I would suggest that, if we’re going to have a rating system at all, the ESRB’s rating of M is dismissive of the seriousness of rape; this game should absolutely be AO). Rather, I’m suggesting that it is a negative mark for our entire society that we produce people capable of producing this game.

Moreover, you are applying your freedom conspicuously in only one direction. If the developers should have the freedom to make this game, why shouldn’t reviewers have the freedom to express their opinions about the game? It seems more a little hypocritical to complain about people exercising the freedom you’re so insistent on. So which is it? Do we ‘believe in freedom’, or not? Or does that freedom only apply when it lets you laugh at women being raped to death, and not when people suggest that maybe that’s a little bit fucked up?

One last thing I’d like to talk about is this claim:

I don’t support rape

By defending this game under the guise of ‘humor’, you do support rape. You may claim to have taken some abstract stand against rape, but you are contradicting that claim with your words. The same goes for anyone who would argue that this game has any redeeming value. The game contains content that is tantamount to hate speech against women. You are free to purchase and play Duke Nukem Forever - as you say, freedom is an important thing! However, if you do choose to support this game, you are supporting rape culture. So just, you know, keep that in mind.

In D&D Post-mortem, I talk about my experiences running D&D 4e games, about 4e as a whole, and about collaborative storytelling in general.


When D&D 4e was launched, I was highly skeptical. I joined the vocal legion of gamers who saw it as a move towards MMO-like game mechanics and immersion-breaking shallow gameplay, and as little more than a money grab by Wizards of the Coast. However, after reading several posts by Alexandra Erin on the subject, I decided to give it a try. Her insight into the game’s design decisions convinced me that there might be something worth trying.

As I began playing around with the rules, creating sample PCs, NPCs, encounters and sketching the rough framework for several stories, I began to see that 4e had a lot of promise. I spent a good deal of money buying source books, and started looking to get a game together. I finally got a game going, albeit with a very small number of players (only two of them!). I set this game, as I do all of my D&D games (dating back to 2nd edition), in my homebrew setting of Yord.

So, we finally got together and played what I am going to affectionately refer to as our first two gaming sessions. In practice, this was actually four shorter sessions, but I digress. Here are some impressions of 4e, and things that I learned from these first sessions.

I don’t really know how to structure skill challenges. My character-driven approach to running games means that building skill challenges in advance is difficult, at least early on before the story has begun to take shape. Building them on the fly is difficult, too, and they tend to end up feeling contrived and kludgy, not to mention a bit of a slog to get through. Hopefully designing these well will become easier as I gain experience with the system.

Combat encounters, by contrast, are a joy to design and to run. It is easy to scale back encounters to account for fewer PCs, and encounter design in general is faster and less haphazard than in previous editions. It gives me more time to focus on making interesting tactical scenarios, place difficult terrain and other interesting aspects of the encounter.

I also love the game’s focus on making traps and hazards into part of an encounter. Lone traps always seemed tedious more often than they are interesting, and this makes it easy to put in the requisite traps to make a dungeon feel like a dungeon without leading to the depressing “disarm the next pit” slog. Interesting traps that deserve time to allow the PCs to pore over and tinker with them can still be encounters of their own, but most traps can now be seamlessly incorporated into combat, where they actually make things more interesting.

Another thing I love about 4e, and this is something that D&D has needed for a long time, is the concept of Power Types and Combat Roles. The roles neatly encapsulate what the ‘core four’ classes have always done - fighters look big and dangerous so that the fight will concentrate on them, rogues slip in to deal tons of damage to single targets, clerics provide buffs and healing, keeping the party alive and together, and wizards mop up the smaller targets so that everyone else can focus on the bigger threats. Someone at Wizards finally realized that these four roles, while important and useful, were somewhat arbitrarily tied to their class concepts. In 4e, the ‘Power Type’ has been divorced from the Role, so that there are classes that encapsulate the cleric’s healing and buffing abilities, but are rooted in martial or arcane themes.

This makes it a lot easier to create a character concept first, and then implement it according to the game mechanics. The general effect is that 4e makes it very easy to provide your own flavor without affecting the game balance - in general, the de facto rule is that ‘anything that doesn’t affect the game mechanics is fair game, unless your DM disapproves’. This encourages much more creativity and narrative flair than previous editions.

And yet, for all of the flexibility and useful decoupling of combat roles vs class theme, the system excels at ensuring that a given character is basically functional, and has a cohesive set of powers. This is something I noticed while running battles; they did a pretty good job of making sure everyone can be useful in combat. No more ‘I was a wizard but now I am tired’ effects, to steal a quote. This is an advantage over more piecemeal systems like GURPS, Savage Worlds, or D&D 3e - it’s pretty hard to build a useless character.

So, those are my general impressions of 4e after a couple sessions of play. Now let’s look at some anecdotes from my session.

During character creation, both of my players settled on Arcane classes - a Wizard and a Warlock. I rounded out the party with a DM-controlled companion character; a gnomish Arcane Leader. He is basically a Bard, but I chose his powers to play to the Gnome Illusionist trope. This party seems to work pretty well; I used a kobold raid on the town to test-drive the combat system, and things went well. I then used the companion character to drive a simple story - he offered looting rights in exchange for helping him recover a statue from some nearby goblins.

An aside on my DMing style here: I play a heavily character-driven style. Where some DMs would railroad the party for the sake of the story, I will sacrifice the story for the sake of the party’s actions. If they had chosen to turn Mim down, he would have gone his way while they continued on theirs. This DMing style has its disadvantages (notably, it requires a lot of improvising!), but it has some strong advantages as well. It creates the feeling from the outset that the characters’ actions actually have an impact on the story. I build the story around those actions, largely in terms of causal consequences. I do begin to practice a subtle railroading as the story develops - it often becomes easy and logical to put the story in front of the characters, and then simply observe how they deal with it. At any rate, most people seem to like this style of game, based on the feedback I’ve gotten in the past.

So, our next combat encounter occurred at the entrance to the goblins’ den. A few goblins were guarding the entrance; the party fought them off, but at least one escaped into the complex. Reasoning there was probably at least one other entrance, and that the bulk of the goblins would be through the main entrance, the party Wizard decided to blast the cave ceiling with magic missiles until it collapsed. This was my first serious blunder as a DM in 4e, I think - I said no to this idea. In retrospect, it was narratively interesting, tactically interesting, and there wasn’t a terribly good reason to say no. Given the imminence of goblin reinforcements, it was actually a great time for a skill challenge - Arcana and Dungeoneering checks to bring the cave down. After realizing this, I (much later) retconned the encounter and allowed that the cave had been partially collapsed.

These first couple of sessions were promising, and 4e looks like a system that is well-designed. It leaves a lot of room for creativity without being so free-form as to lose its sense of cohesion.

If you want to learn more about my homebrew setting of Yord, or follow the antics of the PCs, check out my campaign at Epic Words.

I have been playing tabletop roleplaying games since a fateful day when I was 13. I had gone with a friend to play Magic: the Gathering at a local video game shop that also happened to sell Magic cards. One of the players mentioned a gaming group starting up at the local Media Play.

Curious, my friend and I got a ride over to Media Play. There, I found a pretty large group of people playing Magic. I also saw an interesting sight: some people with books, funny shaped dice, and little painted figures arranged on a square grid. I watched for a few minutes, and quickly got the gist of what they were doing. I asked if I could join. The response? “Sure, we need a cleric."

Thus began a hobby that has spanned half my life and cost a great deal of money. I have played a number of systems: World of Darkness, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, Rifts, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars (the older edition that used d6s), homebrew systems created by various friends. But I always come back to D&D. It was my first system, and it remains my favorite through three editions of the game. In a lot of ways, it has grown with me.

In the last few years, though, I haven’t had many chances to play D&D. I was skeptical of 4e at first, and then spent a lot of money buying 4e books after Alexandra Erin convinced me of its merits in her repeated, impassioned blog posts about it (all of those links are excellent reading, even if you already know you like 4e). I sat on these purchases for months, planning games, even getting some people to make characters. But no game formed; the other players either didn’t have free time, or I didn’t have free time, or we were too far away.

The Search for a Gaming Table

Eventually I found a little free time to bring a game together, and since I couldn’t solve the problem of my friends’ lack of free time, I started looking to solve the problem of people who had free time, but were too far away. So I started looking for a solution to playing D&D over the Internet. Namely, what I needed was something known as a virtual tabletop. I started out with simple requirements: free is good, open source is even better. Since there was no good overview or comparison of the existing virtual tabletop options, I decided to make one. I’ll describe, briefly, why I didn’t pick each one (until I get to the one I did pick, of course).

OpenRPG - frustratingly deprecated

Years ago (about 10 of them), I tried using WebRPG as a virtual tabletop. I remember it having a somewhat cumbersome and over-engineered interface, and being frustrated with it on many levels. Still, it was the first thing in my memory, so it’s the first thing I looked up. Turns out it went open source a while back, and is now called OpenRPG.

Unfortunately, this was a non-starter. OpenRPG is written in Python (yay!), but doesn’t work with Python 2.7, which is the de facto standard in Fedora. I didn’t want to maintain a separate Python install for just one program (this is possible, but would be a pretty big hassle to set up), so OpenRPG was a bust.

Screen Monkey - expensive and cumbersome

The next program I discovered was Screen Monkey. Once again, Alexandra Erin was instrumental in this - she mentioned using it for her online games. Screen Monkey has one big advantage - for the players, it is browser based, so only the DM needs to install any client software. Unfortunately, that software only runs in Windows. So, I found an old install disk for Windows XP, and installed it as a virtual machine using KVM. Then I installed Screen Monkey Lite.

More bad news, though. Screen Monkey Lite turns out to be rather light on useful features. The biggest problem is that you can’t save your work - you have to buy the $35 version of the program to save and restore a session. The tools for hiding what the players can see was also fairly awkward. Awkward, in fact, is the word I would use to describe the program’s feeling as a whole. NBOS are terribly proud of their software ($35 proud) only to be outdone by multiple free and open source competitors. Sounds like some other software companies I know.

Gametable - RIP

Gametable looked promising, but doesn’t seem to be actively developed (there was a sourceforge project available a while back, and remnants of it are here, but it seems to be dead now), and it didn’t work very well for me.

Fantasy Grounds - pretty, but overpriced

Next up is Fantasy Grounds. I didn’t even try the demo once I saw the price tag - $40 for the DM-capable client, and $24 each for the players’ clients. One of my hard requirements is that my players not have to spend any money on the solution, so this one was right out. For a more affluent group, though, it might be a great solution. I will concede that it is gorgeous, and looks very well polished. Certainly a better contender for your money than Screen Monkey. And it has acknowledged, if unofficial, plugins for various game systems, including D&D 4e.

MapTool - the right balance

Eventually, I found MapTool, one of the applications created by the RPTools team. MapTool originally didn’t impress me - it seemed cumbersome and unwieldy. After working with it for a while, though, I found that most of its design decisions make sense, and that it is very powerful. Like most powerful toolkits, it is subsequently pretty complicated, and using it effectively took some practice. However, once I got the hang of it, it’s unbeatable. It’s more stable than any of the other open source offerings, and it runs well out of the box. It lets you use fog of war, individual player views (based on available light sources), and it lets you make maps in advance but have them hidden from the players until you are ready to show them.

Also invaluable was Dorpond’s 4e framework. This is a set of configuration settings and macros that work together to make MapTool work well with the D&D 4e rules. I have modified his macros a bit to fit my particular play style (notably, I prefer to let players roll their own initiatives), and am continuing to do so as I playtest them. You can find my latest version of the framework here.

Also, three caveat with maptool:
1. The network functionality doesn’t work with OpenJDK. Linux users will want to install the Java JRE instead. In Fedora, I just installed the jre RPM from Sun’s website, then edited MapTool’s startup script and added ’export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/default’ and ’export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH’ near the top of the file.
2. When starting a server, if you do not select ‘Use Individual Views’, the GM will not see an accurate version of the player’s view.
3. When you have tokens in the initiative list, players can only move their token on their own turn. Trying to move when they don’t have initiative will send them into an annoying endless loop of NullPointerExceptions. I’m hoping this gets fixed soon by the MapTools team, because it’s an obnoxious bug. Luckily, MapTools is Open Source - I may take a crack at finding that bug myself.

D&D Virtual Table - still cooking

Wizards of the Coast has recently announced a beta version of their own virtual tabletop - called, simply enough, D&D Virtual Table. It is only available to select D&D Insider subscribers. And, since D&D Insider is not worth the price for me personally (a topic worthy of an entire post unto itself), I have no idea whether it is any good. It would also certainly require every player to have their own D&D Insider subscription, so it breaks my stated rule. Still, it might be something to keep an eye on.

Adding Voice

So, now that we had a game table, we needed a way to talk to each other. Luckily, there is a readily available, cross-platform solution to this: TeamSpeak. Now, TeamSpeak isn’t open source, and it is not free if you want to host multiple teamspeak servers on one machine (or have more than 32 clients connected). But it’s great for a D&D game, which would never need those resources. It’s dead simple to set up the server in Linux, and the permissions management is very intelligent (and again, dead simple).

Let’s look at the options I didn’t choose for voice chat: Skype relies on a central server, and has a history of iffy privacy practices. Ventrilo offers a Linux server, but no Linux client. And the voice chat available in various Instant Messaging programs is either unreliable, or doesn’t work in Linux either. So, TeamSpeak it is, and it works great.

Passing Notes

The last thing I needed was a way to present textual information to the players. I do a lot of world-building and writing background material, and I want to make sure that is available to the players (at least, the publicly revealable parts). I also want to be able to give them things like notes that they might acquire, and possibly conduct some roleplaying between sessions if a session ends during downtime.

There are plenty of ways to simply share files, and these would be adequate. Dropbox could be used, especially for image files. Google Docs seemed like a pretty good way to share documents with players. After considering it for a while, I discovered a site called Epic Words. Epic Words gives you a journal system, so players can post in-character summaries of game sessions; this also works well as a means to deliver chunks of story-based text such as notes, riddles, etc. in a way that the players can easily access and remember.

Epic Words also has wiki-like functionality, and lets you define “references”, including NPCs and places, that will be linked automatically when mentioned in a blog post. This is an especially useful feature, because it lets me, as the DM, add content to the players’ writings without actually changing their creative work. It also gives you a private forum, which is perfect for the kind of between-session downtime roleplaying I have in mind.

Epic Words’ biggest problem is that it only allows you to run a single campaign without either upgrading, ‘retiring’ the existing campaign, or deleting it. And even with the upgrade, there doesn’t appear to be a way to share references / wiki content between campaigns (I don’t know this for sure, because I can’t really test that, but it appears to be the case). If I were running multiple campaigns, there is a slew of generic world history and other setting information I would like to share between campaigns. If you could make wiki pages independent of campaigns and then ’link’ them in, that would be ideal. As it is, I happen to only be running one campaign at the moment, so I will have to cross that bridge if and when I come to it.

Final Thoughts

In the end, I ended up using three tools to interact with my players: MapTool, TeamSpeak, and Epic Words. I like this solution because it is very Unix-philosophy friendly - each tool serves one purpose. MapTool acts as our tabletop, TeamSpeak is how we communicate, and Epic Words gives us a handy place for wrap-up/reference/between-session play. The overall experience is pretty excellent; this is a good way to play D&D. It is better than I was hoping for, and even surpasses actual face-to-face play in some ways (I would love to find a way to use MapTool with a projector for face-to-face play).

Well. That was certainly an intense hour of television.

Absurdly Huge Spoilers Ahead!



Let me jump right to the end, and then backtrack. River Song is the Timehead, who, it turns out, was originally named Melody Pond. As I mentioned on Friday, this is mildly disappointing because it was the most obvious solution given the current evidence. But while the reveal was a bit predictable, it was delivered well. Melody’s name is dropped into the story in the first few seconds of the episode, but her identity as River is not confirmed until the very end, which creates a lovely tension in which the viewer spends the entire episode actively engaging with the story, trying to work out whether River and Melody are the same person, or whether this is a misdirection. As an example of that engagement, when River said her name was written on the cradle, I was, for one brief moment, convinced that River was Susan (the Doctor’s Granddaughter, see An Unearthly Child). This came from speculating about who the cradle was originally made for, of course.

And that brings me to one of the unanswered questions this episode left us with - where DID that cradle come from? If it has Melody Pond written on it in Gallifreyan, and simultaneously is very old, where did it come from? My assumption is that it really is the Doctor’s (or Susan’s? or one of Susan’s parent’s?) cradle, with Melody’s name written on it recently (as in, immediately prior to that scene) by the Doctor, eager to play godfather. That seems like the most likely explanation, although it isn’t explicitly spelled out in the narrative.

Of course, the Melody/River reveal is only a small part of the story; the Battle of Demon’s Run comprises the majority of the episode. And it was epically delivered. By that I mean that this story makes a conscious effort to be epic. Look at the scenes of the Doctor building an army; he is clearly preparing for something big, and the various reactions to his call to arms make it obvious that something big is about to happen. This is the Doctor in his Oncoming Storm aspect, terrible and mighty and unstoppable. And the 11th Doctor doesn’t even consciously realize that he is doing this; all he knows is that he is angry, and is doing what he must to save someone he loves.

Another way the episode builds an epic feeling is by focusing on monologues; every recurring character gets at least one powerful dramatic monologue. The Doctor always gets to monologue, of course, but here, Rory, River, and Amy all get chances to shine. Amy’s monologue in the pre-credit sequence is especially interesting, because it employs the same fake-out we saw in Day of the Moon. And the subsequent scene with Rory and the Cybermen is one of the most impressive moments Arthur Darvill has had so far. These monologues give the impression that the characters are talking directly to the viewer rather than to any character in particular; this lends an epic, larger-than-life feeling to the narrative.

And at the center of it, the story being told is still an intensely personal story. Rory and the Doctor are turning the universe upside down, and storming this fortress with all of their allies, to save one girl and her child. To save the people they love. This is Doctor Who doing what it does best - making the personal epic.

There are some less epic personal moments as well - in the characters of Fat One, Thin One, and Lorna. Unfortunately, these are overshadowed by the epic sweep of the story, and they come across as weak points in an otherwise fantastic story. The characters simply don’t get enough screen time to make us care about them deeply.

Something this episode highlights - and I hinted at it before - is a major difference between the 10th and 11th Doctors. Ten knew he was a dangerous, potentially frightening force. The fact that death follows him was something Ten was keenly aware of. Eleven seems genuinely surprised that people would be afraid of him, and what he stands for. When he learns that people are waging a war against him, he is devastated. The Pandorica was different - even when he thought all of his enemies were arrayed against him, that made sense - these were all people whom he had given a chance, and then destroyed when he felt he had no further choice. But here, he is confronted with people who simply fear him, and have organized to destroy him. It takes him a few minutes to process this information, but after he does, he seems to be his old self again. He seems to have resolved his inner turmoil about being so hated by people for reasons unknown to him.

And most importantly, he has a plan.


Edit (2012.07.25): I recently rewatched this episode, and the scene with the cradle that confused so many of us is actually pretty clear on a second watch. The Doctor looks down at the inside of the cradle, and River’s line about the writing on the cradle being in Gallifreyan pretty clearly implies “that’s not the writing what I’m talking about”. But it confused enough people that something about that delivery must be off, although I can’t spot the something anymore.

Since the previews for A Good Man Goes to War have promised that the Doctor will learn “who River Song really is”, this may be my last chance to go on the record with some wild speculation about what the reveal will be.

Spoilers!



Let’s start with the most popular fan theory: River Song is the Timehead. Certainly, this theory fits the available evidence well enough, and nothing directly contradicts it. It would add a selfish element to River’s admonition to Amy that killing the Timehead would create a paradox.

There are only two problems with the theory. The first is that one of the pieces of evidence for the theory indirectly contradicts it. When the Doctor says that he suspects the Timehead “will find them”, he is looking at River. Proponents of the theory say this is a pointed, knowing look. The problem is, if he already knows River is the Timehead, then “the day the Doctor finds out who she is” has already come. Granted, this is a somewhat weak complaint. River may not know that he knows, after all.

The other problem with this theory, in the words of Phil from the TARDIS Eruditorum, is that Steven Moffat is cleverer than that. It is a somewhat obvious resolution from a man whose resolutions tend to be more surprising than that. So, at any rate, it would be somewhat disappointing if that were the extent of the reveal.

Phil’s favored theory (and the only other theory that feels plausible to me) is that River Song is simply River Song, a particularly amazing woman the Doctor falls in love with. This would make the preview a clever bit of misdirection and hype-building, and while it would probably disappoint many fans, I think it would be a satisfying solution. And this leads me to what is, to me, a more interesting question than who River Song is: what is the context of her statement?

Is River going to directly tell the Doctor who she is, or are we dealing with a scene she has foreknowledge of? “This is the day…” scans (in the context of Doctor Who) like something a character might say if they had travelled back in time and were observing their own past. Showing such an encounter to, say, Amy and Rory would be a nice way to tell us more of River’s story without waiting years for the Doctor to get there on his own.

Of course, this leads to another question: why go out of the way (both diegetically and from an audience perspective) to show us such a scene if there isn’t something radically important about River’s identity? This takes us back to the River-as-Timehead theory, which seems to have a whole lot of circumstantial evidence supporting it.

I’m not going to say that I actually buy in to the theory, but it is a somewhat interesting one. At any rate, it is a short wait; we’ll find out tomorrow whether either of these theories are correct, or whether Moffat has yet another truly surprising reveal in store for us.

Edit: After I wrote this, I noticed Steven Moffat said the following on twitter:

yes, you will find out who River is tomorrow. Thing is though - was that what you were REALLY asking?

And, well, no, it isn’t what we were asking. What we have really been asking is who did River kill, and why? So, River being the Timehead isn’t a terribly interesting answer to any of that, and the only reason anyone started framing the question as “Who is River Song?” was that the trailer for Series 6 included Alex Kingston delivering the line “This is the day he finds out who I am”. So, the real question is “will we find out who River killed?” Of course, the ‘he’ could feasibly not even be the Doctor. Intentionally misleading us is, after all, Moffat’s modus operandi.

I like playing games. My 1600-word review of Portal 2 should have been at least some indication of that. I enjoy console and PC video games, tabletop roleplaying games, and board games. But today, I’m talking about playing PC video games in Linux.

wine is not an emulator

Let’s start with the basics (then probably skip the middle ground and jump straight to the advanced stuff). Programs written for Windows or Mac OS can’t be run natively in Linux. By ’natively’, I mean you can’t just click on a Windows application, or type its name on your terminal, and expect it to work. You’ll get an error like this:

bash: ./windowsprogram.exe: cannot execute binary file

There are a number of reasons this doesn’t work. The first and most fundamental is that Windows and Linux use different binary file formats; that is, the actual program code is structured in an entirely different way.

So why not just create a tool that can take one binary format and convert it to another? Well, to begin with, that would be pretty complicated, and probably fraught with problems; these binary formats are actually pretty complex, and include things like how to dynamically access libraries. Libraries are big chunks of code that are written separately from the program, then used by the program so that software developers don’t have to repeatedly write the same code to accomplish common tasks.

And that leads us to the real problem - Linux and Windows have fundamentally different sets of libraries available. Each OS has a large collection of system libraries that developers can use to interact with the Operating System in different ways. And there is very, very little overlap between these libraries. A prominent example of a library that exists only in Windows is Direct3D, which is used by a lot of game developers; it contains code that makes it easier to do a lot of complicated things with the graphics card, thus making it easier to make pretty, visually involved games.

So, if you want to run a Windows program in Linux, you would have to create a tool that could take a Windows program, make it “think” it is running in a Windows environment, and then take its library calls and somehow convert them into a set of library calls that Linux can understand. Direct3D calls, for instance, might be converted into equivalent OpenGL calls in Linux. This is exactly what the wine project does.

Wine has been around for a long time, and it has aged well (these are the jokes, folks). The latest wine codebase does a great job handling a ton of Windows applications, including a great many games. This article is an overview of my experience using wine to play games on Fedora.

blizzards and steam valves

My journey begins with wine-1.3.18, the version packaged with fedora 13. Wanting to play Starcraft 2, I ran the installer, which executed without a problem. The game itself also ran great, without having to make any tweaks at all to wine’s configuration. So, Starcraft 2 was an easy win. Blizzard’s games, in general, work great under wine. I’m not sure if Blizzard just avoids strange API calls, or if wine has a lot of developers interested in making certain Blizzard’s games work. Either way, this one was phenomenally easy.

The next thing I tried was Valve’s Steam client. If you’re somehow reading this from the past, or Steam no longer exists in the future (or you have recently emerged from a coma), Steam is a game distribution platform. You can buy electronic copies of games, install them in steam, and play them. Many games also support achievements and server-side syncing of your game data. This makes gaming on multiple computers really nice (as long as you’re the only one using Steam, that is). It also has community features; you can see what your friends are playing, join them in multiplayer games, etc.

So, I have quite a few games on Steam, and before I can try to run the games under wine, I have to get Steam to run. This was a little bit trickier than running Starcraft 2. First, the Steam installer is a .msi file, which requires the msiexec tool to run. Luckily, recent versions of wine come equipped with an open-source clone of the msiexec tool. So, all I had to do was:

msiexec SteamInstall.msi

Once this was done, Steam launched, but I ran into a new problem: every time I move my mouse over the Steam windows, they would flicker, making it hard to see what I was doing. This was solved by using winecfg to set the ‘Windows Version’ to Windows 7. Problem solved.

The next problem I encountered with Steam was that, when I drag a Steam window, it continues to move around after I release the mouse button, as if I’m still holding it. I have to click on another Steam window to make it stop. This problem remains unsolved in the latest version of wine (1.3.21 as of this writing).

Having Steam running, though, I was able to try a few games. The first thing I discovered was that every game I tried had major problems until I unchecked ‘Enable Steam community in-game’. Once I had done this, Plants vs Zombies and Darkstar One both worked great ‘out of the box’, with no tweaking required.

Portal, on the other hand, was not as great. Every few seconds of game play (not exactly precise, and it happens more when portals are open) the game will stutter for a moment. I spent a lot of time tweaking wine to try to fix this, but the problem remains in the latest version of wine. In addition, in wine 1.3.20, an even worse problem appeared - instead of stuttering, the game would act as if the mouse had been moved a random distance in a random direction periodically.

The last game I tried out was Team Fortress 2. It refused to start until I added an override for hl2.exe (in winecfg) disabling gameoverlayrenderer.dll and changing the Windows version to NT 4.0 (who knew Windows NT was a good gaming platform?). After this, the game worked with a stuttering problem similar to Portal’s, but more dependent on how much action was happening on screen. This was probably my most disappointing experience with wine, and 1 problematic game out of 5 isn’t bad.

So far, I have a (let’s say) 80% success rate with running Windows games under Linux using wine, with comparatively little effort required on my part. This is a fantastic result compared to even 2 years ago, and I look forward to watching the wine project enable ever more games under Linux.

tips, tricks, caveats

If you’re using Fedora, you may run into problems with pulseaudio. I recommend disabling it completely, via the following:

yum remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
echo > ~/.pulse/client.conf << EOF
autospawn = no
daemon-binary = /bin/true
EOF

Then, reboot your machine (or make sure you kill all running pulseaudio processes). Wine works a lot better this way. You’ll probably also want to run:

setsebool wine_mmap_zero_ignore 1

To make SELinux play well with games in wine.

Something I wanted to do but was unable to achieve was run native Linux games directly from Steam, and have Steam keep track of them. After asking on the wine-users mailing list, I learned that the way wine emulates Windows process handling makes this impossible. So, instead, I created steamstub, a Windows program written specifically for Steam under wine. To use it, add it as a non-steam game to Steam, then edit the game’s properties and change the name to a native Linux game of your choice. Now, before you go play your Linux game, click ‘Play’ on this game in Steam. Steamstub will deliver a small popup, and to your Steam friends, it will look like you are playing a non-steam game until you click ‘OK’. This lets you advertise what game you are playing, even when Steam can’t launch it.

One more thing you may find interesting is a tool I developed called wino. It lets you keep track of multiple wine prefixes (virtual Windows environments), so you can keep your programs separated. This makes it easier to recover if something in your drive_c directory gets broken; you only have to worry about reinstalling at most one program. If you make heavy use of steam’s ’non-Steam game’ functionality, like I do, then this is not as useful for you. However, wino also does a lot of other useful things, like allow you to have a default command assigned to a wineprefix (so you could just run ‘wino steam’ to launch Steam.exe). It can also run winecfg (and a lot of other tools) on a prefix via ‘wino prefixname –config’.

The Rambling Review is a new series where I review games, books, movies, and TV series, both new and old, in a rambling, disorganized style. It will contain scores, but they are absolutely and utterly meaningless. It is nominally inspired by Phil Sandifer’s Nintendo Project, but it is orders of magnitude less ambitious by design.

This post contains spoilers for Portal and Portal 2. Please do not read if you have not played these games and intend to.



Several years ago, a game called Portal came bundled with Valve’s Orange Box. It was, along with Team Fortress 2, bundled with Half Life 2: Episode 2 as a sort of apology for how long Episode 2 took to release (which makes you wonder exactly what is going to come bundled with Episode 3, a title that is quickly gaining Duke Nukem Forever-like mythic status as a delayed release).

At the time, Portal seemed to be all anyone could talk about, to the point that it eclipsed the main title of the Orange Box (HL2: Episode 2). And everyone told me that I just had to play it. “It’s a puzzle game, and it’s hilarious!” Eventually I scraped together enough money to spend $50 for a 6-hour game (to this day, I haven’t actually played Half Life 2… maybe some day. I did, at least, get some enjoyment out of TF2 after I’d had the Orange Box for over a year). I did not regret a single penny of that purchase. Portal remains, to this day, one of the absolute best games I have ever played. The pacing, the atmosphere (provided almost entirely by the sense of isolation and the slow realization that GLaDOS isn’t just a quirky and humorous gimmick there for comic relief, but rather actually wants to kill you), the gameplay itself - Portal gets every single thing it does right. And it was practically a throwaway game - a little side project of Valve’s that clearly wasn’t given anything like the funding that went into, say, the Half Life 2 series.

Of course, praising Portal is a lot like saying “hey, Democracy is pretty good!” in the US¹. It would take some effort to find someone who disagrees with me on the point. So let’s move on to something a bit more controversial (at least among the people I know who have played both Portal and Portal 2):

Portal 2 is not as good as Portal.

Let’s start with the characters. The voice acting in Portal 2 is superb. You couldn’t ask for better. However, the inclusion of more characters lessens the psychological impact of the game. In this game we have the addition of the Emergency Testing AI, Wheatley, Cave Johnson, Caroline, several new turrent personalities. All of this makes this game feel positively vibrant with personalities; I rarely felt the sense of loneliness and isolation that crept in during the original game. The original Portal only had 5 characters, and 3 of them were silent (with one of them being entirely absent): GLaDOS, Chell, the turrets, the Companion Cube, and Rattman. Portal 2 more than doubles the number of characters. Sure, some of them are present only in pre-recorded messages (Emergency Testing AI, Cave, and Caroline), but they still feel more present than Rattman ever did, and they decrease the game’s sense of isolation where he increases it.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this inherently. Not every game is or should be about creating a sense of isolation, and if they had tried to just do more of the same, the result would probably have been far worse. However, atmosphere in general is important for any game, and the emotional context and atmosphere created in the original Portal is powerful, and it drives the game forward. Portal 2, by contrast, relies on the progression of the narrative to drive the game forward.

This is the point where anyone who knows me just did a double-take. Did I just criticize a game for being driven by its story? It’s true, I love a good story, and I’ve been vocal in my opinion that games need good stories to thrive. My criticism comes from a couple directions. One of them is has already been well-covered by Shamus Young the tendency for games to get bogged down in a gameplay-cutscene-gameplay-cutscene cycle. Portal allowed you to move at your own pace, and the narrative was woven into and around the game as  you progressed. Portal 2 still retains some of this (more than many games, certainly), but has significantly long sequences in which, while you still retain nominal freedom to move about, there is no gameplay accessible to you until you sit through some amount of dialogue or cutscene (the opening of the game is a good example, as is Wheatley’s “about to jump off the management rail” monologue). In the original Portal, the only ‘cutscene’ I can recall - that is, a moment where your ability to progress the game is interrupted - is the opening, where you wait to get out of the initial chamber. And that can be forgiven somewhat, as it serves as a chance to get used to the controls more than anything else.

Another reason I criticize Portal 2’s approach is that I’ve come to realize that obvious and overt narratives - that is, traditional narratives - are difficult to do well in video games. Games that focus on such narratives are usually not playing to the strengths of the medium. Video games thrive in immersion, in creating a sense of atmosphere. The more focus a game puts on that aspect, the more compelling I tend to find it. Video Games can be a fantastic mode of storytelling, and they can be really fun to play, but a compelling atmosphere gives both of these things a critical boost that makes video games capable of standing out from both traditional stories and traditional games. The best two games of the last decade - Portal and Braid - were light on actual story, leaving you to fill in gaps and speculate much of the time. The subsequent atmosphere that develops, and is sustained through several hours of gameplay, leads your mind into creating a memorable, branching, and somewhat fuzzily defined narrative experience. This forces the player to engage with the game in a way that books and films really can’t.

Of course, games can have both atmosphere and a more direct narrative - both of my examples above have a progressing narrative, and Braid even gives you medium-sized chunks of text that you must stop and read. The problem is that, without the first, the second will fall flat - you just end up with a story you could have told more effectively in a different medium. Video Games give us a unique opportunity to create a specific sort of immersion in our storytelling that other mediums are incapable of, and it is a shame to squander it. It doesn’t matter what the atmosphere that the game immerses you in is like, as long as it dips you into it as deeply as it can and keeps you there. That is what makes a gripping gaming experience, to my mind.

(As an aside, a game can even create a compelling atmosphere without telling a story. Games with very little story can use art direction, such as visual cues and music, to make the games much more immersive. Katamari Damashii is a good example - there’s no story worth mentioning, but the game’s consistently quirky and unique art and music make it a compelling experience.)

Portal 2 has moments that are still quite brilliant, though. The Different Turret is a particularly impressive bit of atmosphere-building, and there are a number of scenes, especially in Chapter 6, where the scale and the haunted feeling of the environment bring back that sense of bleak isolation from Portal. But it doesn’t deliver atmosphere as consistently, and that is the key thing that makes it less successful as a game.

Another thing I have to criticize about Portal 2 is the addition of bigotry to the humour. After playing Portal 2, I played back through Portal for comparison; there is no overtly bigoted dialogue in the game, or even any subtle bigotry as far as I could see. In fact, the game consists of two strong female characters in conflict, with nary a man in site. It blows the Bechdel Test out of the water.

On the other hand, Portal 2 resorts to ableism, sizeism, and sexism (by way of appearance/body shaming) for some of its humour. What’s more, there are subtly sexist assumptions underlying the jokes; GLaDOS plays the part of the stereotypical “woman betrayed by another woman”, and is thus written as needing to attack Chell in a way that will make her feel insecure about herself. And, obviously, the best way to make a woman feel insecure is to attack her appearance. “You’re fat, and your clothes look bad.” Because clearly (goes the sexist thought pattern), all women care about is their appearance, and thus such a jab would make any woman feel insecure.

Portal 2 is the multi-million dollar blockbuster sequel to a compelling, cerebral, and very weird independent film, and it shows. The thing is, it is still an absolutely fantastic game, with beautiful and well-designed visuals, great writing and acting (the line ‘Caroline Deleted’ was a pitch-perfect delivery, in particular), fun gameplay all around, and some pretty decent puzzles to solve. And it is the only sequel Portal could have had - it was this or nothing. Because you can’t do a compellingly weird independent sequel; it would diminish the original by attempting to imitate it.

Final Score: Potato

¹Note that I am not actually claiming, here, that Democracy is good. It was just an example<sup>2

2</sup>Note that I am not actually claiming, here, that Democracy is bad. It was just a clarification.

Spoiler Warning: If you haven’t seen these episodes yet, River Song would disapprove of your reading any further. I’m pretty much going to spoil every spoilable part of the story.



I haven’t seen a lot of classic Who. I’ve seen a reasonable amount, though, and I have read the excellent discussions of the Troughton era so far over at The TARDIS Eruditorum. And so, when I watched The Rebel Flesh, it was pretty clearly not just a base under siege story, but an homage to Troughton. And it does the base under siege in new Who style fantastically. And the thing that new Who does well consistently is to take a very personal, human story and make it feel epic. Or, occasionally, to take a very epic story and make it feel personal and human. Here what we have is mostly the former.

The story manages to make us empathize alternately with the humans, who are callous in their treatment of the gangers, and the gangers, who want to kill their human counterparts and replace them. Playing a character and an almost-but-not-quite-identical version of that character is an impressive feat, and all of the actors in this story are up to the task.

Rory continues to grow on me, as he has been steadily since he came back to life as a Roman. Arthur Darvill’s performance here is superb; he’s grown as an actor noticeably throughout his stay on the show. More impressive, though, is Matt Smith’s performance. I’ve said before that he is a great Doctor, but simply not as good an actor as Tennant. While I stand by that generally, in this episode he delivers an amazing performance. In particular, the scene where he speaks on behalf of the flesh, getting angry at Amy and begging not to be asked to die again was chilling. It recalled Eccleston’s screaming at the Dalek in Dalek, and was wonderfully delivered.

There were only a few weak points in the story. Foremost was the absolutely atrocious child actor brought in near the end of The Almost People. It was actively hard to suspend my disbelief and accept that this kid was Jimmy’s son, and it was the one moment that really pulled me out of the narrative. The other weakness the story had was a general sprawling feeling in its pacing; it felt a bit less focused than the rest of this season has. But this wasn’t a serious issue by any means. The emotional content of the episode carried it through the rough patches.

But now, let’s talk about what everyone wants to talk about - the reveals.The first reveal - that the Doctors had switched places, and thus Amy had told the Doctor of his impending death, was fantastic, even if it was a bit predictable. More importantly, it didn’t seem to surprise him - either he was too committed to pretending to be a ganger to let his surprise show, or he already knew about his death on the beach. Either way, that suggests that the Doctor knows more than he has let on. And, as I’ll explore below, he definitely seems to have a plan.

So, the second reveal was totally unexpected. I absolutely didn’t see it coming, at least, and anyone who says they did is probably lying, or has stolen Moffat’s production notes. To recap: the Amy travelling with the Doctor and Rory has been a Flesh copy since (presumably) her capture in the orphanage in Day of the Moon. What’s more, the Doctor already knows, and has probably known for a while. Throughout the episode he tells Amy things that suggest this: to ignore Eye Patch Lady, to ‘breathe’, and ’to push, but only when she tells you’. What’s more, the reason he came to the monastery in the first place was to learn enough about the Flesh to sever its connection to Amy as humanely as possible.

This suggests he has known that Amy wasn’t human since he first scanned her and learned about her pregnancy in Day of the Moon. He also seems to know more about her present situation than he has any right to. The question that remains is why he chose this moment to make this move. The only reason I see that he would have waited before making this move is that he didn’t want to tip the Silence off that he had seen through their ruse. So why tip them off now? I suppose it is possible that he has not had time; if this season has occurred with no significant gaps, this is the first story since Amy was replaced in which the TARDIS has landed intentionally; in both episodes between Day of the Moon and this story, the TARDIS was trapped in some way.

The other possibility is that he knows something has changed; perhaps the fact that Amy’s pregnancy is nearly over is relevant. Or perhaps the Doctor possesses (or has inferred) some knowledge that the viewers lack. In general, we have seen a lot of scenarios from Moffat’s Doctor that are reminiscent of the seventh Doctor stories where the Doctor shows up at a location with a plan fully hatched, or even already underway. I suspect we will see more of this trend with the series 6 arc itself.

Edit: Phil had some corrections to mention about my chronology:

The switch has to be before the orphanage. She sees eyepatch lady before being captured in the orphanage. Since the implication is that eyepatch lady has been looking in at Amy’s actual body and Amy’s mind just conflated the image into one, the switch must happen in the three month gap between Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon, or in the gap between A Christmas Carol and The Impossible Astronaut.

Rewatching Impossible Astronaut, I am of the view that it happens between seasons. I think the Doctor knows when she steps into the TARDIS. Look both at the look he gives after her as she goes under the floor of the TARDIS and at how he approaches her getting him to trust her - asking if someone is making her say that, and demanding she swear “on something that matters” to get her to show that she’s really Amelia, not just some Amy impersonator.

Good points! I totally mixed the whole sequence of events in Day of the Moon up in my head. So, how long has Amy been FleshAmy? We could suppose that she’s definitely been Flesh for the entirety of Series 6.

This, of course, leads me to ask: assuming the Silence is behind Amy’s kidnapping, why also steal FleshAmy? If the Silence knew Amy was flesh, why would they go to so much trouble to kidnap her, and scare her, and, well, all the rest of the things she went through in the series opener?

One possibility is that Eye Patch Lady isn’t working with the Silence, and the Silence didn’t know Amy was really FleshAmy. They may have wanted Amy for reasons related to her pregnancy, and then been confused when they found she wasn’t pregnant. In other words, the Doctor and the Silence may have a common enemy here. Is this a strong possibility? Not really. but it’s interesting.

That paragraph actually led me to theorize that we know roughly when the swap happened - FleshAmy must have been created before Amy became pregnant, and the swap happened shortly after Amy realized she was pregnant. Otherwise, FleshAmy would have been pregnant as well. Unless the Silence kidnapped FleshAmy to extract, deliver, or kill the FleshTimeHead.

I use BitTorrent a lot. Most Linux distributions have torrents available, and I have gotten a lot of Creative Commons-licensed music, such as the work of Jonathan Coulton, via BitTorrent. It is a great way to deliver content.

However, I have a problem with (most of) the available BitTorrent clients. Given what BitTorrent does, which is allow you to download and subsequently seed content, it should really run like a service - quietly running in the background handling your torrents. However, most of the clients for Linux work like Windows applications. They sit in your system tray, giving you “helpful” popup notifications. More importantly, they die if you logout. Luckily, I have found a solution.

Enter transmission-daemon

Transmission is one of the bittorrent clients for Linux that works like I described above - it’s a desktop application. However, it comes with a variant, transmisison-daemon, that can run in the background, as a dedicated ’transmission’ user. This is much nicer.

Setting it up in fedora is pretty easy. Install the transmission-daemon package. Edit /etc/sysconfig/transmission-daemon to suit your needs. You can change TRANSMISSION_HOME to whatever directory you’d like your completed torrent files to live in (you do not need to modify the actual home directory of the transmission user, but do make sure TRANSMISSION_HOME is owned by that user).

Now, start transmission-daemon, then stop it again:

service transmission-daemon start
service transmission-daemon stop

That step created the transmission configuration files, which you can now find in $TRANSMISSION_HOME/.config/transmission-daemon/. The file you probably want to edit is settings.json. Edit this file to suit your needs, then start transmission again. To tell transmission to automatically start at boot, run:

chkconfig transmission-daemon on

transmission-remote - for all your transmission-related needs

So, now you have a daemonized BitTorrent client, running unobtrusively in the background. But how do you use it?

The answer is transmission-remote. This tool is an administrative front-end for transmission-daemon that lets you add, remove, start, stop, and view your torrents, and a lot more besides. To add a torrent, you can use ’transmission-remote -a’ on either a local .torrent file or a URL, like so:

transmission-remote -a /path/to/file.torrent
transmission-remote -a http://example.com/file.torrent

Once the torrent is added, it will automatically start. You can get information on all your torrents with ’transmission-remote -l’. Note that each torrent has a numeric ID assigned to it; you use that ID with the ‘-t’ option to tell transmission-remote to perform actions on the torrent. For example, to stop the torrent with ID 42, you could run:

transmission-remote -t 42 -S

transmission-remote can do a lot more; check its man page for details. In particular, the -s, -i, and –remove-and-delete are useful flags to know.

Making things easier - the watch directory

The problem with the approach I have described is that the command line, while great for interacting with your local torrents, is not the place most people go to look for torrents in the first place. More often, you find a .torrent file on the web, and having to open a terminal and run a command is an annoying extra step.

To make things easier, you can set up a watch directory; any .torrent files placed in that directory will automatically be added to transmission-daemon. To set up a watch directory, edit settings.json and add the following:

watch-dir-enabled: “true”,
watch-dir: “/path/to/watch/dir”,

(I have found it is best to always stop transmission-daemon before making changes to settings.json. It often overwrites settings at shutdown)

One caveat about the watch directory: when transmission-daemon is started, every .torrent file in there will be added. While this has no effect on torrents you are still downloading or seeding, torrents you have already removed will be re-added to transmission-daemon. For this reason, it is a good idea to routinely delete the files in your watch directory. You can use tmpwatch and/or cron to periodically delete the files.

Torrents from anywhere - using Dropbox with transmission-daemon

Dropbox is a fantastic tool for always having access to important files. Any files you put in your dropbox directory get automatically synced to every machine you use dropbox on. There are also Android, iOS, and web interfaces, so you can really get to your files from anywhere.

What does this have to do with transmission? Well, you can put your watch directory inside your dropbox directory. Any .torrent file you add to that directory - from any computer or phone - will automatically be started on the computer running transmission-daemons. This means you can start your torrents whenever you come across them, no matter where in the world you happen to be.

And if you have multiple people in your household who might all like to use one machine for BitTorrent, you can simply share your dropbox watch directory with all of them.

The way computers should behave - the world according to Anna

User interface design is a complicated thing, and a lot of research has gone into it. What a lot of UI discussions miss, though, is that everyone has different needs and preferences. The setup I have described here works the way I personally like best. It is transparent; that is, it gets out of your way and just does what it is supposed to do, with no fuss. It is powerful and flexible. For a Linux power user who prefers to use the command line where she can, it is hard to imagine a better BitTorrent solution.

Has it really been over a year since my last post here? It has been ann eventful year, that took me in directions directions that didn’t quite fit the aim of this blog. You can read more about those changes in my life on my tumblr, although they are bound to affect the tone of this blog as well. Some things you can expect here now:

• me talking about Doctor Who

• increased analysis of video games from the perspective of social justice

•  bulleted lists that only contain two items with actual substance, and a third item that is self-referential

• posts about an increasingly diverse set of topics, including social justice, politics, and anime

• strangely organized sets of information, with self-referential lies interspersed

I have also moved the blog from a self-hosted wordpress installation to wordpress.com. nearlyfreespeech is a fine web host, but their recent decision to charge a daily fee on a per-site basis put them just on the wrong side of affordable for me. Also, wordpress.com has a lot of nice convenience features, and I don’t lose any features that I was actually using.

So sit back and enjoy the blog. I know I intend to.