Anna and the Bunches

This post is spoiler free! Just kidding. Spoiler Warning.One of the stock modes of operation of Doctor Who is, of course, the collision of genres and genre elements. Sometimes this simply takes the form of colliding Doctor Who itself into another genre. Other times, the Doctor wanders in on two genres in the act of colliding.A Town Called Mercy is, of course, a Western. It is also a space opera. The two are blended fantastically, with the warring aliens taking on roles out of a traditional Western, with the outlaw and the target of his anger.

Customary Spoiler Warning.It was pretty clear going in that this episode was going to be a fairly light-hearted comedy romp. The episode title is a Snakes on a Plane parody. The trailers made it clear we were in for ‘fun’ and not ’epic storytelling’. I mean, more broadly, there are dinosaurs. It is hard not to just sit back and smile when there are dinosaurs.And we got that light-hearted whimsical story, but we also got a lot of interesting complexity - there’s a lot packed into this episode both structurally and narratively.

Spoiler Warning, though I should really stop giving these on Doctor Who posts. Really, you should know better anyway.Shortly after I heard the title of Asylum of the Daleks, it occurred to me that ‘Asylum’ could mean two different things: a place to keep those deemed unfit, or a request for aid and protection. Since the first definition is more common, I assumed the reference would actually be to the latter.

Can we still talk about Skyrim? I mean, I know it’s been out for a while now, and a lot of people have moved on. But I’m still playing it, and enjoying the vast explorable terrain, hundreds of quests, and terrible, hilarious bugs.As I’ve been playing, I’ve noticed that they’ve really tried to turn the production values up to eleven. The terrain feels a lot more detailed, the voice acting is improved (and there are more voice actors), the quests are more detailed and varied, and the game is sprinkled with non-human languages.

The day begins early - much earlier than most Sundays. I’m out the door at 8:15, for a tournament that starts at 9:00. I usually sleep in on the weekends; I didn’t even know Sundays had a 9 o’clock.The day is rainy and grey, but bright in that clean Spring way where the contrast between everything is sharpened and it feels like you can see forever. I drive in the rain to NC State campus, a twenty minute drive through the odd combination of semi-urban and rural landscape that makes up Raleigh.

If I have anything like ‘regular readers’ (I’m not certain from the traffic patterns on the blog whether or not that’s true), you’re probably wondering where I’ve been. The answer is, basically, the same as it ever is: writing code.I’ve also been playing a lot of Go, and doing some tabletop roleplaying. My latest programming projects are related to those hobbies. Today I want to talk about pygo, my new Go game client.

You can watch the episode here.Spoiler WarningThis episode deals mostly with Shūichi forming a romantic relationship with Anna (and the resulting fallout). It is told in an interesting nonlinear fashion; we see the two of them interacting, but not the beginning of the relationship. The story then cuts to someone teasing Anna (who is older than Shūichi) for dating him, which causes the other characters present to react with surprise. This is clever, because it aligns the character reactions with the audience reaction - it is as much a surprise to us as it is to them.

You can watch the episode here.Spoiler WarningWhen I transitioned, I took all of my men’s clothes, put them in trash bags, and gave them away. This was a very cathartic experience - the moment I left the lie behind forever. I’ve noticed that a lot of trans women are sentimental like that.So, when Yuki puts on a men’s suit to attend the play, it struck me as odd - keeping that kind of reminder of my past life around is something that I actively avoid, and I know the same is true for many trans women.

Every year, hundreds of people travel to MIT during the Independent Activities Period for the MIT Mystery Hunt, a popular puzzlehunt. This year was my second Hunt. This is a review, analysis, and/or postmortem of it. It contains some of the solutions, so if you want to go play with the puzzles yourself (as they are all posted online), be forewarned!How does this thing work, anyway?First, since most of the people who read this site probably aren’t puzzlers, a brief description of the flow of the Hunt.

This post was originally posted in February of 2011 here. It has been updated substantially.You can watch the episode here.Trigger Warning: this entry contains discussion of cissexist slurs, in particular the T-word. If you want to skip that, start reading below the ‘End of Trigger Warning’ messageAlso, Spoiler WarningI’m going to start in the most obvious place: the subtitles in this episode use the word ‘tranny’. In fact, the word gets used several times in the series, but this is the first occurrence.