Anna and the Bunches

Spoiler Warning, Speculation Warning, Postmodernism WarningTick tock goes the clockHe gave all he could give herTick tock goes the clockNow prison waits for RiverAs far as series finales go, this one was thoroughly satisfying. And I have a lot to say about it, which is good, because this is probably going to be my last Doctor Who entry until late December.Let’s start with the name: at least one person commented to me that ‘wedding’ can have many meanings, and such word play is right up Moffat’s alley.

The Lodger was brilliant, easily Gareth Roberts’ best contribution to the series up to that point and one of my favorite episodes. So, when I heard about a “sequel” story involving Craig and written by Roberts, I was excited. When I learned it had Cybermen in it, well… Cybermen don’t have the best track record, but I trusted Roberts to deliver a pretty good Cybermen story.And he did. In fact, ‘pretty good’ is a very appropriate adjectival phrase for the episode.

I have a strange relationship with crossword puzzles. I like the idea of them, but I’m often rubbish at them. However, after solving a very fun, simple(ish) crossword in 7 minutes the other day, my desire to solve them was rekindled. So I decided to tackle Matt Gaffney’s latest Weekly Crossword Contest.The MGWCC is a weekly crossword, fairly difficult as non-cryptics go, that always has a meta-puzzle at the end. He publishes them on Friday and accepts answers to the meta (via email) until Tuesday.

Spoiler Warning. You know the drill.Jekyll is a very dark series. It possesses Moffat’s characteristic witty one-liners, and his characteristic brilliant building of dramatic tension. It even has a few moments that directly parallel some of the storytelling techniques Moffat has used in Doctor Who - in particular, the scene where Jekyll and Hyde talk to each other via video camera has echoes of the Doctor’s conversation with Sally Sparrow in Blink.

I don’t play The Sims. The premise holds a certain amount of appeal for me, and the franchise’s quirky sense of humour and artistic style agree with my aesthetic sense, but something about the gameplay - the ebb and flow of action and the effort/reward cycle the game creates - doesn’t quite gel into an experience that I enjoy.But my wife, she loves The Sims. She has sunk at least as many hours into The Sims 3 as I have in Starcraft 2 and Civ 5 combined.

As always, Spoiler Warning.I didn’t have high hopes for this episode. From the previews, I got the impression that the story was going to go something like this: Amy gets trapped in an accelerated time stream. The Boys™ repeatedly try (and fail) to save her, while she repeatedly grows older, until finally they use techno-magic to undo the ageing and fly off into the Time Vortex toward their next adventure. In the middle, we would get some action sequences and some Rory-and-Amy-love-each-other-so-much-and-isn’t-that-just-so-fucking-sweet sequences.

I’ve talked about the Escapist before. Specifically, when I mentioned I would no longer be visiting their website. My reasons then were essentially practical - they had simply made viewing content more annoying than it was worth.Recent events, however, are making me re-evaluate that post. In that post, I didn’t really analyze why the Escapist had such awful ads. But now I think it’s worth doing. The most obvious explanation, which was more or less implicit in my earlier angry rant, is that the annoying, screen-filling, content-swamping ads didn’t show up because of incompetent programming or oversight, but rather through a complete disregard for the consumer.

As usual with these posts, Spoiler Warning.Oh, Mark Gatiss, you’ve done it again. You got my hopes up, and then dashed them against the rocky shore of poor plotting.Let’s start with a recap of Gatiss’ contributions to (televised) Doctor Who: The Unquiet Dead, The Idiot’s Lantern, Victory of the Daleks, and now Night Terrors. So, out of his previous contributions we have one very, very good (and fairly creepy) episode, one that is, for my money, an absolute dud, and one that is a fairly clever idea with a weak execution.

We interrupt our month-long, unannounced, unplanned hiatus to bring you: another post on Doctor Who. That’s right! Because Doctor Who can motivate me to write when nothing else can. So, here we go!Oh, and Spoiler Warning!. I’ll be discussing the details of Let’s Kill Hitler in this post, as well as speculating on the next plot reveals / bits of continuity that have only been hinted at / etc. So, if you haven’t seen Let’s Kill Hitler and you hate spoilers, or if you prefer to speculate without letting other people’s ideas influence you, then don’t read this post.

In my last post, I re-implemented all of my rendering code to take advantage of Shaders. After doing this, nothing rendered. Despite the fact that I was following a tutorial, more or less. I have been modifying it to fit my project, which has a lot of code around the rendering code already and is in C++ instead of C, and also modifying it to do something that will actually be useful for me down the line.