Anna and the Bunches

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 emulatorLet’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.

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.

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.

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.

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 interspersedI have also moved the blog from a self-hosted wordpress installation to wordpress.

So, Sony released a little game for the PS3 yesterday called Heavy Rain. Having already played the demo, I ran out and nabbed a copy. I got home, popped it in. I thought I would play for a little while, just to see the intro, you know?A very short while later, I heard this: “Hey, you know it’s almost 1 in the morning, right?"It seemed strange that a character in the game sounded so much like my wife.