Obligatory Retospective

So... 2013.

Not a great year. Lots of drama. Some personal, some professional, some just omnipresent and lingering like smog.

There were good points, certainly. It was quite the roller-coaster ride. Looks like 2014 will hold much of the same. Impossible to say if any of that will be a good thing or a bad thing.

However it all goes, I feel obligated to say farewell to car payments (yay!), adieu to so many friends who were part of my life for such a long time, and good-bye to a sibling with whom I had a complicated relationship.

I'm not going to go through the pantomime of resolutions. I'll adapt to 2014 somehow and hopefully better than I adapted to 2013.

Adios 2013 and bring on the new year! I've got a pint in my hand and a dapper hat to face the elements. I'm ready.

EDIT: Oh, and to any who read this, I wish you a very happy new year. May 2014 bring you joy and good fortune while leaving all the bad crap behind.

Review: The Time of the Doctor

So I saw it.

The final Matt Smith episode, "The Time of the Doctor" has aired and I have personal reactions. Spoilers follow, so be warned. I'll hide it under a deprecated font tag, which will do exactly jack for handheld devices, but I lack technical skill to hide spoilers properly and am too lazy to research so... here we go.



























































Still there? Seriously? Okay...












"The Time of the Doctor" starts with Smith's Doctor in orbit around a planet. He has a damaged Cyberman's head that he's talking to in the TARDIS while a fleet of every alien ever is answering a strange, untranslatable message from the forcefield-encased planet below.

Meanwhile, Clara is having Christmas dinner and has the Doctor drop by as her faux-boyfriend in an entirely immaterial side-plot. That gets Clara on-board the TARDIS when the Doctor learns the message is transmitting that the mysterious planet below claims to be Gallifrey. It isn't.

The story then spins off into the normal navel-gazing incoherent nonsense that Moffatt usually pens. The planet is protected by the once-noted Papal Mainframe under the control of some woman the Doctor knew from before. The Doctor tricks the Papal whatsits to letting him go down to the planet where he finds another crack in time from Series Five that leads to Gallifrey beyond time-and-space. There's a "truth field" in place to make people speak the truth. The Doctor is being asked "Doctor Who" under the arbitrary logic that the answer will call back the Time Lords. Nobody in orbit wants that 'cause they think it will start another time war (huh?) so the Papal whosit woman starts the Silence movement to stop the Doctor. The Doctor lingers on the planet in a town called Christmas where... um... you know, don't dwell on the town. It's just meaningless and random. The planet is named Trenzalore and this is where the final battle is going down.

The Doctor sends the TARDIS to take Clara home, but Clara hangs on the TARDIS and somehow comes back to Trenzalore only centuries have passed and the Doctor has started to age. Everyone and their cousins up in orbit is fighting and some of the Papal people have gone back in time to do the whole Silence mystery thing that was the plot of series five. Turns out those Silence wonks? Gene-engineered confessors. Yeah... okay.

The plot takes weirder turns and the Doctor with the Papal people are fighting everyone to stop them from... um... I dunno. Killing the Doctor so he can't call back the Time Lords? That's only one of many plot points that wind up making no sense at all.

In the end, the Doctor is dying of old age. Through very creative math, it turns out the Doctor is on his last incarnation, having had his twelve regenerations. Clara talks the Time Lords from beyond into helping somehow and they manage to send him a new life-cycle while opening and closing the time crack at will. So the Doctor's new regeneration blows up the Daleks (the only enemies standing) and turns him into the... um... next Doctor? The 14th incarnation or 13th regeneration or whatever.

Plot points that make absolutely no sense at all:
- How was the Papal Mainframe able to stop the TARDIS from doing anything? Isn't Gallifreyan technology more advanced than everyone else?
- How did the Silence movement blow up the TARDIS in series five? That was never, ever addressed.
- Really? That regeneration-into-the-hand thing is going to count? Seriously? Fuck you guys.
- So if the Time Lords are now not-bad (still an open question) why would letting them return be a bad thing? I mean, everyone seems okay with the Daleks hanging around and they're homicidal to the extreme. What the hell?
- Why the hell do the Time Lords need the Doctor's "real name" to return? Why not just have the Doctor use the TARDIS to respond?
- If the Time Lords can get through the crack, why not send an expedition from their side using their substantial technology? I mean... seriously?
- If Clara was able to get them to help the Doctor, it seems the Time Lords got their reply that all was well. If they could move the time crack (and they clearly could) why not just pop into reality at a different point? Why fuck around at Trenzalore?

So, yeah. It was an entertaining episode, I suppose, but it was incoherent nonsense. Moffatt should hand off the reins to someone with a better sense of details and focus on "Sherlock". My two cents.

Tis the Season

Happy Rod Serling's birthday!

We get the Doctor Who holiday, too! Happiness abounds!

I know the answer

Shoggoth.

Wherein I ramble on a Thursday morning

I can't believe how crazed this week has been and it's only Thursday. It's not just hyperbole that I cannot wait for the end of my workday on Friday.

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Still flummoxed by the alterations that resulted in The Desolation of Smaug. I'm trying to parse out why Jackson opted for some of his more bizarre elements (vague spoilerish statements follow): Did Beorn really have to look like Wolverine's even-more-freakish taller brother? Did Bard really have to become a Han Solo-esque character? Was that painful-to-watch romantic subplot really have to happen? Did the Dol Guldur scene really have to be a rehash of something we've already seen in one of the LotR films?

I'm also wondering what happened to Jackson's sense of pacing and style. In the various Lord of the Rings movies, the fight scenes were complex and hectic without feeling frenzied and crowded. In the two Hobbit films thus far, all the fight scenes feel like badly-paced video game scenes.

---

Xmas shopping. I hates it. I hates it a lot.

Smauggy day

Saw The Desolation of Smaug. I finally understand what Peter Jackson is doing. He's done a filming of a video game of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign he did based loosely on Tolkien's books.

This second installment of "The Hobbit" has nothing to do with the book with the same name save that there's a few characters that share names. Oh, and tiny people are called Hobbits when they're not Dwarves. Otherwise, there's no resemblance at all to the book. Once you accept that, it's pretty easy to digest Tauriel the "She-Elf" and the appearance of Legolas all over the place.

I wonder what kinds of slashfic Jackson's got on Legolas? No, I don't want to know. Not really.

Smaug was pretty awesome, and it was an entertaining movie once I realized what it was. Worth admission, but purists will claw out their eyes.

Tarragoatmeal Explained!

So I have a (terrible) excuse for the "tarragoatmeal incident"! I was coming down with a cold!

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Two nights of Nyquil mixed with naps seems to have shaken the bug before it took hold too much. I was pretty much back to 85% on Saturday and fluctuating between 70% and 90% on Sunday.

I feel about 95% today, which is pretty amazing considering it's Monday.

Still haven't seen The Desolation of Smaug yet. I may try mid-week and give the crowds a chance to calm down a bit.

Tarragon with the wind

On cold mornings, I like to have some oatmeal. I usually spice the bland food up with some honey and cinnamon.

For whatever reason, I had trouble sleeping this morning. I suspect this has something to do with some files I lost when my PC crashed, but that's not really relevant.

As the Beatles song goes: I got up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Then I realized that last bit was really silly. Moving on... so I started to put together breakfast. My motor skills in the morning work on a very basic routine that's essentially muscle memory. I can't do anything significant or analytical until I've had that first cup of coffee. So anything that disrupts my pattern is just not acceptable to the automatic functions that run my shambling form until coffee has entered the system.

Apparently waking up early was a disruption.

I put together my oatmeal, nuke it, then add honey and grab for the cinnamon from my spice rack.

By "spice rack", I mean "that collection of spices I have glommed-together in one place in a cabinet". I just grabbed the bottle closest to the front. No worries. Cinnamon is my most-used of my spices by far.

Uncapped the spice bottle and shook it to get some cinnamoHMYGOD!!!! WHAT THE HELL??? WHAT IS THIS STUFF??? Is that... tarragon??? WHEN DID I GET TARRAGON IN MY SPICE COLLECTION???? HOW THE HELL DID I...?

Breathe. Breathe. Okay, what the hell? This is tarragon. And there's a lot of it in my oatmeal.

Memory, inspired by adrenaline, returns. Yep. Used up the last of the open container with cinnamon yesterday. I have a second, but it's sealed.

I need coffee.

Nuked water. Created coffee. Dumped the tarragoatmeal. I'm just not open to experimenting like that this early in the morning. Re-made breakfast.

This is just going to be one of those days. I can already tell.

Agents of Y.A.W.N.

Saw the mid-season finale to "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." last night.

While sitting through the predictable and somewhat navel-gazing plot, I found another problem with the show just jumping out and waving its hands at me for attention.

The plot moves along to gradually reveal a shadowy character called "The Clairvoyant". When the heroes learn about that, they quickly dismiss the idea of clairvoyance as "impossible". "It's not in the index", they say (meaning it's not a "real" superpower).

And therein lies a huge part of the problem with this show.

"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." is riding on the tails of success for the Marvel films (most noteworthy, "The Avengers"). Films rife with superpowers and grandiose crazy shit. Now you'd think that "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." would have a fair amount of superpowers in its lineup, but instead the show seems to go out of its way to close doors in its world and say that certain powers are "impossible". Telekinesis? Impossible. Not in the index. Clairvoyance? Impossible. Not in the index.

Now I get that there's rights issues involving mutants, the X-Men, and all that, but really? You're going to dismiss the superpowers that would be easiest to have on a TV show budget? Seriously? Instead we get tepid kickboxing fights with super strength. One guy who can throw fire. And... yeah. Okay, we're done.

I'm not saying the show has to devolve to "superpower of the week" like "Smallville" did, but for the love of the FSM, stop painting the show into a corner! Learn from (FSM help us) "Arrow"! Sure, "Arrow" had the premise of no superpowers at all, but they never announced that on the show! So now they can sneak in weird super-treatments that will inevitably lead up to a TV series for "The Flash".

Oh, and "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." writers? Really? The end was your big twist? You guys need help in the worst way.

Just how many regenerations now?

I'm calling bullshit on Moffatt.

This gets vaguely, kinda, maybe spoilery. Read at your own risk.






























You were warned.








So apparently Smith's Doctor is now considered the Thirteenth incarnation in the renumbering.

How in the hell is that possible, you ask? Well, here's what the fan wonks have to say on that topic:
Hartnell - First
Troughton - Second
Pertwee - Third
Baker (Tom) - Fourth
Davison - Fifth
Baker (Colin) - Sixth
McCoy - Seventh
McGann - Eighth
Hurt - Ninth (this was the first re-ordering)
Eccleston - Tenth
Tennant - Eleventh and this is where the reordering gets weird. He's also the Twelfth because of that weird "his hand regenerated" bullshitty side-story.
That makes Smith the Thirteenth Doctor.

By tradition (as established in "The Deadly Assassin", you can't have more than twelve regenerations (and thus, thirteen incarnations) of any one Time Lord without cheating (see Rassilon and the Master for how that's done). So Capelli's Doctor will actually be the Fourteenth, by this counting.

So how is this bullshit? Really? They're going to count a decapitated hand becoming a weird clone thing as a regeneration? Um... No. That's just... no.

No, no, no.

Toys

Got my new PC yesterday. Spent the balance of the evening loading programs and configuring stuff. That's going to be a process for a while. Probably won't take as long as last time. This PC is ridiculously-faster than the last one. Now to budget for a new laptop...

Signs of Old Age

• You thank the liquor store clerk for carding you.
• You get "Senior Singles" spam.
• You feel weather in your joints. For real.
• You look at some modern trends and think "what the fucking hell?".
• You stop getting shocked by seeing grey in your hair.
• You can't eat the crap you used to eat.
• You can't drink the swill you used to drink.
• You remember commercial jingles for products that are sold as "vintage" in specialty sites on the Internet.

Moons and stuff

• How are we not dead yet?
• Does anyone else think "Skynet" when you hear about Amazon delivery drones? Is it just me?
• There's a new TV show - "Intelligence" - coming out about a superspy with a chip in his head giving him super hacking powers. Wasn't that "Chuck"? And what the hell is it with the brain-implant-super-chip meme?

Also: Moons!

RIP Nelson Mandela

Rest in Peace Nelson Mandela. You will be missed.

Infodump 2889

• I neglected to post anything as a follow-up, but I have dodged jury duty again. YAY!
• Goddamn cold this morning. Had to find a scarf and bust out a wool hat. Oh the humanity.
• About 3/4 through "This Book is Full of Spiders". David Wong remains insane and awesome.
• The Holidaze are upon us! Things to do: 1) Avoid malls. 2) Avoid "The Little Drummer Boy" song. 3) Avoid Xmas specials. 4) Watch the credit card glow.
• I keep looking for a full moon to explain or justify the amount of crazy I've been encountering lately, but I think I'm looking at the wrong cause. It's December. That's reason enough.

Excitement! Fun! Jury Duty!

The exciting and fun part is that I don't have jury duty... at least in the morning.

Never ones to completely let people off the hook, the court has me calling in later to see if I have to make the trek in for an afternoon appearance. I'm hoping to dodge the bullet.

In other news, I've got the PC working completely now, save for one program. And I just learned that a recent Windows change means that the program is no longer supported for Windows 7, so that's that.

To take advantage of the Cyber-Monday deals, I bought a new desktop anyway. I figure the old one is working fine, but there's damage that's eventually going to erode performance. I can already tell it's a bit more sluggish than it was before the power supply crapped out. Never hurts to have a backup.

Gettin' a mite cold in the mornings now.

My new hobby...

... is reinstalling a corrupted program on a dodgy computer and having it fail 'cause I can't completely uninstall the corrupted program.

The fun is non-stop.