Spoiler Warning

This 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. This is a very effective use of closed narrative, and it manages to drop a surprise reveal into a fairly straightforward story.

Puberty sucks for nearly everyone, I suspect, but being trans at puberty is its own special form of torture. So, here we have a continuation of that narrative: Shūichi gets a zit, and wants it gone. Shūichi’s concern over having a zit seems to be markedly (socially unacceptably) feminine, to the point that he has to debate and work up courage to ask anyone what to do about it. And when he does manage to ask someone, it is his sister’s friend, whom he hardly knows – probably the distance between them makes it easier to broach the subject without feeling weird.

So, Shūichi and Anna’s relationship blooms from Shūichi asking her for advice about skin care. Anna, counter to Shūichi’s concerns, seems to take this in stride; she doesn’t appear to think that there is anything wrong or deviant about Shūichi having these concerns. The social conventions that Shūichi is concerned about violating here are ones I came up against repeatedly in my own childhood, to the point that before I was Shūichi’s age I had already internalized the idea that any beauty regimen beyond the bare minimum of showering was unacceptably feminine, and was careful to cultivate an attitude of wanting nothing to do with any of it. But Anna doesn’t seem to care, casually accepting his behavior and not remarking on it at all. Given Shūichi’s trepidations, this doesn’t seem to simply be a cultural difference – Anna just seems to have a worldview slightly askew of the cultural norm.

This episode is the first time we see one of our gender variant characters (other than Yuki) dating someone (or showing any interest in someone) who doesn’t know about their gender variance, as well. There are a lot of topics this brings to mind, but for now I’d like to give a sense of what it feels like to date someone while struggling with gender identity issues. To put it bluntly, being trans ended one relationship for me and dramatically altered another. So, let’s switch gears from Shūichi’s narrative to my own.

I have been in very few relationships. Depending on how you count, I’ve been in 2, 3, or 5. A comparatively small number. At any rate, I’ve only had two long-term (> 2 years) relationships, and those were both touched by my struggles with gender identity. In the first case, I dated a girl throughout high school. I struggled with depression the entire time, which I now recognize was repressed gender dysphoria. I used the fact that I was in a relationship with a heterosexual girl to help me invalidate the feelings of wrongness that were getting stronger over time. Eventually this led directly to me ending the relationship. At the time, I didn’t really understand why I felt the need to end the relationship – certainly I knew that the fact that I felt like I couldn’t tell her I liked to dress as a girl was a major factor, but looking back on it, the only justification I had for that feeling was that she was straight. I recognize now that I was already unconsciously identifying my gender variance as not “cross-dressing”, but a more fundamental difference between my assigned gender and my gender identity.

The next relationship was more complicated. She was bisexual, and somehow this made me feel more comfortable telling her about my gender variance (the reasons for this are more obvious in retrospect). As it evolved (I eventually spent a lot of time introspecting and decided that I must be genderfluid. Looking back, I can see this had nothing to do with any actual masculine feelings, but was completely about me being afraid of change, since it let me confine my femininity to my private life), she was understanding and accepting. There were certainly problems, though – the biggest is probably the fact that we were married, and had planned to have children together. Adapting to the idea of not having children with me was tough (although being polyamorous was a real boon there). But on the whole, our relationship got better as I got less depressed.

My latter experience here is not necessarily common; I have heard many trans narratives in which bitter breakups come from coming out to partners. This, then, has to hang over Shūichi’s head. Mixed in with the happiness and trepidation and hormone-fueled irrationality that comes with a first relationship are complex fears and nagging doubts: Will she understand if I tell her? Will she freak out, turn on me, out me to everyone, to my parents? Is dating even worth it, when I have this complex and taboo secret?

Can anyone possibly want me once they really know me?

Spoiler Warning

When 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. This is, then, a great example of the fact that everyone’s experience is different. Exactly what being trans means to Yuki probably doesn’t match what it means for Shūichi, or Mako, or Yoshino. Or me. The show has been pretty good at conveying that already, actually, but this really drives it home for me.

This episode gives us several examples of the thing that this show does the best: presenting an understanding and empathetic portrayal of trans people without feeling heavy-handed or contrived. It is a glimpse into the lives of several trans people, how they think and feel and how they deal with navigating in a world of uncertainty. It’s the genuine sense of empathy here that keeps the show from feeling sensationalizing – the focus is often on the trans experience of these characters, sure, but it also takes great pains to ensure that the characters feel like actual individual people and not just something to gawk and giggle at. In other words, even though the show is explicitly about gender issues, it never feels like it’s all about gender issues.

Our first example is the one we already discussed above: Yuki feels the need to cross-dress to go back to her old school. This is something that I refer to in my own head as the Double Life Problem. See, the problem is that even a successful, pretty, fully transitioned trans woman can find herself buried by self-consciousness and doubt about her ability to pass the moment that history enters the picture. Obviously this is not a universal truth – see “everyone’s experience is different”, above. But for many of us, I suspect, our lives are divided into two sections: before we transitioned and after we transitioned (and of course, there’s the liminal phase of “during transition”, but that is, we hope, as brief as possible). And so our social circles can likewise be grouped into ‘people who met us before we transitioned’ and ‘people who met us after we transitioned’.

So when Yuki decides to dress as a man when going back into a group of people (her schoolteachers) that haven’t seen her since she transitioned, it’s safe to assume it is out of fear that she might be recognized. People in general will often go to great lengths to avoid embarrassment, and added to that is the dysphoria that would accompany someone excitedly calling you by your old name and then asking why you’re dressed like a girl. Yuki appears to have decided that it’s better to endure a little known dysphoria than to chance the possibility of a larger amount of dysphoria coupled with public embarrassment. This is not the choice I would make, personally – I refuse to pretend any more, no matter the situation. But that works well for me; obviously Yuki prioritizes differently. Either way, this is another insight into what it means to be trans on a very real and human level. The story is very clearly about these individuals and their experiences, instead of claiming to be about trans people as an entire group – yet at the same time it finds a way to hit on a lot of widely shared aspects of trans experience.

The next example we get of the show’s empathy and insight is a subtle part of a larger scene. Yuki comments that it’s “too bad” that Shūichi won’t be Juliet in the play. Mako, who is playing Juliet and who has gender identity issues of his own, is standing nearby and holding the dress he is going to be wearing. When he hears Yuki saying it is ‘too bad’ that he won’t be playing Juliet, Mako clutches the dress to him slightly. The camera lingers on this for just a moment, but it is the most expressive scene in the episode. This is very effective visual storytelling, evocatively highlighting Mako’s own gender identity issues, and the way they consistently take a back seat to Shūichi’s.

This moment is also the first time all four of the show’s gender variant characters are in the same place, and the gesture underscores the fact that they are all in different places with accepting and embracing their gender identities. We have Yuki, the role model of successful transition and passing as cisgender (ironically cross-dressing for the first time in years). Shūichi and Yoshino are both in a place where their gender identity is largely accepted (if not fully understood) by their friends, and are slowly becoming more vocal and confident about it. Mako, on the other hand, is still struggling to articulate his feelings. He isn’t as confident as Shūichi, to the point that he hasn’t even expressed to his friends how much having the role of Juliet means to him. His friends (well, Shūichi, at least) know that he enjoys cross-dressing, but they don’t have any clue about the extension of that into gender dysphoria (which, as we’ll see in a bit, Mako does seem to have). In addition, Mako feels that he is not “pretty enough” to be a girl, as he has explicitly mentioned in the past when contrasting himself with Shūichi.

At the opening of the play itself, Mako freezes, and he says (in internal monologue) “everyone is staring at me”. This is the first time Mako has ever dressed as a girl in public. He is duly shocked. Despite the social acceptability of this particular gender variance, Mako is very self-conscious. And this is a feeling I understand deeply. Being trans is often something that takes a long time to accept (that is to say, it gets heavily repressed and undoing that takes a long time), and that acceptance is an incremental process. Some (possibly many) trans people, myself included, identify as cross-dressers for some amount of time. Cross-dressing (although the term becomes a misnomer when you later find that you are trans) is typically a very private thing; it is something that social stigma drives us to do in private. So, to dress as a girl and then be seen in public is like having a deep and shameful secret suddenly exposed. Even if it is in a socially acceptable context, or if no one recognizes you. Getting over that internalized idea – that dressing like a girl was something I should only do in private – took a concentrated act of will. And it took time. Mako, on the other hand, hasn’t had any of that time to adjust. So he freezes.

Speaking of the play, let’s talk about its context within Japanese education system. Bunkasai (文化祭) means ‘cultural festival‘, and is an aspect of Japanese culture that has no analogue in US culture. So, the trappings and conventions here are a bit unusual to a Western audience. It is basically a sort of show-and-tell to the world, where students can provide some entertainment of cultural merit for friends and family. It’s not optional – all students are expected to participate as a requirement for graduation, although I get the impression that it isn’t graded per se. Bunkasai are held from the elementary level through university, although at the university level they are no longer mandatory. Plays are a fairly common choice for classes to present.

Another notable thing about the play is the way that it uses gender; all of the actors are intended to have the gender roles reversed, including the trans characters. In other words, Juliet (a trans girl) is meant to be played by a cisgender boy. Likewise, Romeo is played by a cisgender girl. This is a subtle nod to the validity of trans people’s gender identity. If a girl had been cast to play Juliet, it would have implied that Juliet was a male character; by putting a (ostensible) boy in the role, it suggests that the characters involved have no problem accepting Juliet’s gender identity as valid and true. That this choice goes unremarked throughout the show may imply an unrealistic world (in which trans acceptance is far more advanced than it really is), but it’s a welcome, validating nod all the same. After all, the show portrays plenty of social backlash at other times, so it’s nice to establish the play firmly as a narrative victory on this issue.

After the play, we get our first real sense that Mako is decidedly gender dysphoric as opposed to just a cross-dresser. He laments to Saorin that “all I wanted was for someone to see me as Juliet”. Shortly thereafter, Saorin does what may be the first genuinely nice thing the character has done: she gives Saorin some flowers (that had been given to her earlier), and lies, telling him that she was told to give them “to Juliet.” When he is then predictably flustered, she says “All that matters is that someone saw you as Juliet.” This explicitly acknowledges both that Mako has dysphoria and that Saorin knows it (and acknowledges his evolving gender identity as valid). This contrasts sharply with her refusal to acknowledge Shūichi’s gender identity, which just adds more evidence that she was simply being spiteful and jealous in her previous tirade.

While he’s still very much a background character, this episode gave Mako both definition and character development. And Mako resonates strongly with me, because his experience is a reasonable match for my own experience around that age, particularly the feeling that it isn’t worth trying to be a girl if you don’t already look feminine enough; that thought was one of the strong motivators that kept me from transitioning much, much earlier than I did. I’m glad that they gave this character more of a voice here, although unfortunately he will fade into the background again for the rest of the series.

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. Teams arrive and set up in pre-arranged headquarters (either a location near campus for teams that have them, or a classroom or two for any team that requests one). Everyone gets their stuff set up, then the hunt itself begins on Friday at noon with a kickoff presentation (traditionally in Lobby 7, which is functionally the ‘main entrance’ at MIT). Then teams return to their rooms and hit F5 repeatedly on the Hunt website (this year that was at borbonicusandbodley.com), waiting for the first round of puzzles to be released. Once they appear, the teams start trying to solve them.

Puzzles come in ’rounds’, which are unlocked over time or via solving puzzles in the rounds you already have. Exactly how these work has varied somewhat from year to year. Each round also has a meta-puzzle (or simply ‘meta’), which uses all of the answers from the round as the clues to some new (often quite difficult) puzzle.

Each year’s hunt also has a theme: a nominal reason for the teams to be solving puzzles. This year’s theme was related to the film The Producers, which led to a series of rounds based on ideas for terrible Broadway musicals (all of which were puns on existing musicals: A Circus Line, Okla-Holmes-a!, Into the Woodstock, Mayan Fair Lady, Phantom of the Operator, and Ogre of La Mancha). So, that was cute, and it made each round unlock produce a round of laughs and/or groans from the team.

If a team completes all of the rounds, they unlock the ‘endgame’, which usually involves some final puzzles and culminates in a runaround (a sort of scavenger hunt that involves actually running around MIT campus. Here is the beginning of one from last year). The runaround ends in the ultimate goal of the Hunt: finding a ‘coin’ (sometimes an actual coin, sometimes not). The team that finds the coin wins the Hunt.

There are also, at least in recent years, a number of ‘events’ during the hunt. Teams can send a couple members to these events, which are sometimes puzzle-oriented but can also be skill-based. The reward for the events are points that can be spent on puzzle answers. This is especially important strategic resource, and is mostly useful when you are working on a meta-puzzle and need more of the answers from its round to make sense of it.

A review

As a whole, the hunt was a lot of fun. I think last year’s (video game-themed) hunt was a better hunt overall – the multiple runarounds were especially fun. But this year had a lot of interesting puzzles, and I certainly performed better than last year. I can claim two solid solves, which I’ll discuss in detail later.

This year’s approach to round unlocks was, I thought, quite good – each round had a set unlock time (a time at which every team was guaranteed to have it), and the more puzzles you solved the more points you accrued. Your point total was fed into a function that decreases the time until the next unlock happens. There were also multiple unlocks per round – each round came in two halves, and there were, I believe, two unlocks for each half (so, 4 unlock points per round).

This was very similar to last year’s method, but more sensible – last year the unlocks were based solely on points, which accrued over time with a bonus given for solves. This made it a bit hard to get a quick estimate of how many solves your team had achieved. It felt like the points mapped more directly to how well the team was doing this year.

The result, for our team at least, was a fairly steady flow of new puzzles into the mix. This is good – it means that if a given team member didn’t have any insight into any of the existing puzzles, there was always something new for them to work on coming fairly soon.

Each round in this hunt had two meta-puzzles, and the round ended in a ‘production’, in which teams were tasked with writing and performing a short skit that included the meta-puzzle answers as elements. I wasn’t fond of this element – it strayed away from puzzling a little too far for my tastes. Luckily, there were enough people on my team that I didn’t really feel pressured to participate. Still, this mostly left me longing for last year’s runarounds through the tunnels.

I finally went to an event this year, as well, ‘Bringing Stars Together’. I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, the premise of the event was interesting: a logic puzzle (fairly straightforward, with 4 constraints) whose clues are discovered by chatting with the characters involved in the puzzle. This is a novel way to present a logic puzzle, and that part was a lot of fun. On the other hand, the effort vs. reward for this event was laughable – the event lasted more than an hour and a half, and was only worth 0.2 answer unlocks.

The hunt also seemed to have more ‘mini-events’ and puzzles that had physical components (that teams had to go and retrieve from various rooms around campus) than last year. I think I walked the entirety of the Infinite Corridor at least 10 times. One notably interesting one involved playing a game of Jenga to get the clues for a (very simple) puzzle. These were interesting and a welcome addition to the usual LAN-party feeling of sitting in the team headquarters staring at spreadsheets. Not that that isn’t a lot more fun than it sounds, of course.

Also, none of the puzzles made it necessary to spend a lot of time outside. In Cambridge in January, this is a welcome feature. On a completely unrelated note, I really need to invest in some Boston-strength clothing.

So, that was the hunt. Codex made an admirable attempt at matching the bar set by Metaphysical Plant last year. I’d say they nearly reached it. I look forward to seeing what the Manic Sages can follow up with next year.

Puzzle Logs

I worked on a number of puzzles, most of which were eventually solved. Here are some of my thoughts on some of my favourites (and least favourites), along with a description of how we solved (or tried to solve) them.

Blinkenlights

In this puzzle I quickly realized that we have ‘top’ rows and ‘bottom’ rows of lights, and that we could click any of the currently lit top lights to change the other lights in some sort of pattern (and I mapped all of the positional changes out pretty quickly). Furthermore, the bottom 8 lights for each group of 16 top lights was counting up in binary, every time a move was made in their ‘group’. At first it looked like each set of four lights were self-contained, but after finding a sequence that turned all 4 lights off, other lights in the group of 16 turned themselves on. I couldn’t find any pattern to this, until one of my teammates (Max) suggested that maybe each group of 16 lights (4 groups of 4) acted like a group of four – following the same pattern. And each 2 sets of 4 lights corresponded to a letter at the top of the screen.

After some legwork (a whole lot of clicking), I turned out all of the lights, revealing the message “SolveRestThenPluralizeTitleWord4″. Unfortunately, I didn’t see how to solve the ‘Rest’, as the entire thing was already solved. This is where I dead-ended, and eventually abandoned the puzzle (after about an hour of solid work on it).

The solution, it turns out, was to find the *shortest path* that turns out all of the lights (i.e. solves the maze), which leaves the lights in the bottom rows in a state that spells out “PATENT 2,417,786″ in ASCII. Finding the shortest path through this would have required both a lot of leg-work and some non-trivial programming (in javascript with greasemonkey, probably). I had considered this as a possible solution, but dismissed it as too much work to be practical. It’s good to know I was on the right track, at least.

Pure and Simple

This puzzle fell into a certain class of puzzles: a simple series of images presented with little to no context. I’m not historically that great at these, but in this case, I had the a-ha moment that led to the puzzle being solved.

Image puzzles are a lot like word association games with a visual element. The first step is usually to identify all of the images, and our team had done that by the time I looked at the puzzle. Initially I just glanced at the images, nothing clicked, and I moved on. In the lull after solving Revisiting History (see below), though, I looked at this puzzle again. Someone had identified the second picture on the right side as Brahms. Which is when it hit me: the last picture on the left side was a picture of 3 coke cans.

‘Cans and Brahms’, of course, is an instrumental track from Yes’ album Fragile, which consists of some brief excerpts from one of Brahms’ pieces arranged and played with synthesizers. From there the team was easily able to deduce that all of the images could be paired to form song titles separated by ‘and’.

I knew my near-encyclopaedic knowledge of progressive rock would come in handy some day.

Revisiting History

Ahh, the Doctor Who puzzle. I recognized what was going on in this puzzle at almost the exact same time as one of my team-mates – I turned to tell him about it (as he is easily the most knowledgeable Doctor Who fan I know) only to discover he was already beginning to match the descriptions to the companion(s), Doctor, and episode titles. We had that information down amazingly quickly, but extraction was difficult – nothing we tried seemed to work. Then another team-mate noticed that the word ‘who’ appeared in every clue. Using that as an index got us to the answer very quickly. I think this may have actually been our first solve – we had it within the first hour of the hunt, certainly.

Eek!

This puzzle was a lot of fun, and I am proud to say that I can claim most of the work for my team in solving it. It is, obviously, a 3-d maze. We took each self-contained ‘piece’ of the puzzle on each level and numbered them. Then, we mapped the connections between numbered nodes, and used this program (which took something like 10-20 minutes to write and test) to solve it:

#!/usr/bin/python

import networkx as nx
import sys

source = '44'
target = '3'

def parse_input(infile):
    g = nx.Graph()
    f = open(infile, 'r')

    for line in f:
        meta = line.split(':')
        node = meta[0].strip()
        edges = meta[1].split(',')

        g.add_node(node)
        
        for n in edges:
            other_node = n.strip()
            g.add_edge(node, other_node)

    f.close()
    return g


def main():
    infile = sys.argv[1]
    g = parse_input(infile)
    path = nx.shortest_path(g, source, target)
    print path
    print len(path)

main()

There were a couple of hitches: a small error in our mapping data being the crucial one. But we got a solution, then mapped it on the maze (with a highlighter). The result clearly said ‘side elev’ on the top row, so we took the thing and mapped it out with burr tools. We found the word ‘Love’ very quickly, but that wasn’t the answer. So, I shelved the problem and went to bed.

Looking at it again the next day (Sunday morning), I saw the trick: the flavour text implies that the path taken should be the negative space, not the positive space. With this as a clue, I re-mapped the solution in burr tools, inverting which blocks were solid. This led to the answer: the word ‘Love’ was still visible on one side, while ‘Etc’ was visible on the other. ‘LOVE ETC’, is, of course, the answer.

JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS

We didn’t solve this puzzle, but I want to include it because it is very clever. I almost solved it, too. I looked at the keyboard, typed out the phrase (which took a while, because I’m used to typing in dvorak), but I didn’t spot any obvious patterns, probably because I was focusing too much on remembering qwerty. So close.

Sounds Good to Me

This was my absolute favourite puzzle of the hunt. It was delightful in every way. The cluing at the beginning sets the tone: in greek characters is the latin phrase ‘nota bene: non sequitur lingua Iaponica!’. Which is to say, basically, ‘what follows is not Japanese’.

Instead, it is toki pona, a constructed language (conlang) with, according to Wikipedia, 3 fluent speakers. This wonderfully obscure language is fairly light on vocabulary (120 root words and a smattering of loanwords where necessary). One of my team-mates got the hiragana transliterated into latin characters, and another team-mate identified it as toki pona (he recognized it because of a passing acquaintance with the creator of the language).

An automated translator for toki pona -> English exists, but doesn’t work very well (as we quickly discovered). Instead, I translated most of the entries by hand, learning toki pona vocabulary and grammar as I went. This felt very much like my recent Old Norse translation project, and like all translation, was enjoyable for its own sake. As I translated, it became clear that the toki pona text was providing definitions of words or phrases in other languages. Eventually I found that the words at the end of each paragraph were language names in Toki Pona (the ‘official’ dictionary doesn’t list these, as they are loanwords). After we figured out a couple of these clues, it became obvious that these were phrases or words that were used in English but were actually loanwords from the given languages.

These clues gave us the acrostic DANKESCHOENINJAPANESE. Of course, Japanese has a lot of ways to say ‘thank you’, but the 7/9 at the bottom of the page clued us into a 2-word phrase that, in Latin characters, would give us 7- and 9-letter words. So, ARIGATO GOZAIMASU was the obvious choice.

I often describe myself as an ‘amateur linguist’. Philologist might be the better term. I really love Language. Learning languages and playing with language are both hobbies of mine. Most of the time, this isn’t terribly useful, mainly because I never devote enough time to any one language to learn it thoroughly. However, in this case my exact sort of language skills and knowledge were perfectly suited to this puzzle. If any one puzzle next year is half as fun as this one was, it will be well worth the trip.

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’ message

Also, Spoiler Warning

I’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. So, let’s talk about language.

When I read that subtitle, I winced; I’m particularly sensitive to the term, and even hearing it used in a reclamatory sense makes me cringe. I’m just not a fan of this word at all. It offends me. But more importantly, it is a slur – actively harmful language. To understand my perspective on this, I actually recommend something written by someone else – Kinsey Hope’s excellent post on words and offense. In fact, for the purposes of this discussion I’m assuming you’ve clicked that link and read her post.

So, Kinsey has hopefully established to your satisfaction that slurs are bad. If not, well, the rest of this discussion probably won’t do much for you, and I’m honestly surprised you’re reading my blog in the first place. However, in a fictional story designed to be roughly representational of reality, slurs can have a function. If slurs are used in contexts that demonstrate the bigotry of the speaker or challenge their usage, then they have a place in the story. And, of course, words used in a reclamatory context are as acceptable in fiction as they are in reality.

Before we can consider how the word is used in Wandering Son, though, we need to consider that this is a translated work. So, let’s investigate the Japanese world being used here, and see whether the translation is accurate. The Japanese word that is being translated as ‘tranny’ is ‘okama’ (おかま). Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC, an all-around excellent Japanese language resource for English speakers, has this to say about the word ‘okama’ (only the relevant part of the definition is provided):

(n) (colloquial, often derogatory) male homosexual; effeminate man; male transvestite

While gay men and transvestites are certainly insulted using the word ‘tranny’, as a slur its function is to attack trans women. As a result, this definition and the translation chosen didn’t really sit well for me. So I did some more research, and found this book, which discusses the use of ‘okama’ and gay male culture in Japan. The overall sense I got from this book’s treatment of the term is that the dominant cultural elements in Japan often conflate gender identity and sexual orientation (this is unsurprising, as it is true of straight culture in the US as well), and while GLBT culture in Japan distinguishes between the two more accurately, there is still some degree of conflation between the two. I suggest reading the excerpts available from the book for a more detailed look at this.

The upshot of all of this is that I get the impression that the translation here is accurate in context; at least, it is accurate enough for our purposes. Given the target and the speaker of the word each time it is used, I believe it was always translated so that it is accurate after adjusting for American cultural expectations. I am by no means an expert on Japanese language or culture, however, so I acknowledge that this argument may be flawed. At any rate, I’m proceeding with the understanding that the translation can be taken at face value.

With that said, I think the usage here is fair, narratively speaking. The first usage we see is of a somewhat confused boy using it in disgust; another use is by a character who is well-established as cissexist and bigoted. The word is also used reclamatively, and almost accusatively, by Yuki (more on that in a later post). These instances of the word serve to present cisnormative reactions to the idea of transsexuality, and so help establish the narrative of the broader culture in which Shūichi is struggling to define himself.

End of Trigger Warning

The episode as a whole was pretty uneventful. It almost feels like an intermission. A couple of things do happen that I want to talk about, though.

First, this episode finally touches on the subject of ‘outing’: Shūichi is outed to all of his friends as a cross-dresser (which, while not necessarily accurate, is typical of the tendency to conflate all gender variance). While shocked at the time, Shūichi later seems to be somewhat relieved at having the truth (or an approximation of the truth) presented by someone else. Yoshino, on the other hand, responds to the person who outs Shūichi with hostility. This leads Shūichi to realize (via internal monologue) that Yoshino is willing to get angry on his behalf. Later, while talking to Mako, he says “People laughed at me. In grade school, they said I was girly. But you and Takatsuki understood me, so I knew everything would be okay.”

Watching those scenes, I realized something that hit me pretty hard: I never had anyone like Yoshino and Mako. Throughout my childhood, I had friends, but I was never close enough with anyone to tell them about my gender confusion. It wasn’t until I met my wife that I would find someone I was really comfortable being myself around. If I had had friends like that, I may have come to understand myself years earlier. Those years feel wasted in hindsight – years spent not being true to myself.

This kind of regret is common amongst trans people – at least, it is common amongst the trans people that I know. I transitioned at the age of 27. Looking at average life expectancies, that means I spent one third of my life lying to myself and to everyone else. Being in pain, and depressed, and not even understanding why for most of it. It is hard not to feel regret over that.

Wandering Son, of course, doesn’t really touch this particular problem; Shūichi is still very young, and the story (in the anime, at least), doesn’t progress far enough to deal with the actual issues of transition. But it drudges up those feelings just the same.

Also in this episode, the students are assigned their roles for the upcoming play. Notably, they are assigned the roles by lots; Mako ends up being Juliet, while Saorin gets the role of Romeo. This is certainly an interesting plot development, since the normal Western narrative structure here would be to give Shūichi and Yoshino those roles (as that would parallel the overall theme of the show, and set up the classic Happily Ever After ending). Instead, we get Mako, who has some gender confusion of his own, and Saorin, who certainly wanted to be Romeo, but only because she wanted to use it as a platform to profess her love for Shūichi.

And Saorin, for her part, remains as unsympathetic as ever. She broods, whines, and is unselfconsciously self-absorbed throughout the episode, and ends the episode by asking Shūichi (out of earshot) “Why art thou Juliet?”. While this certainly serves to underscore the play-within-a-play structure* that the Romeo & Juliet play represents, it serves even better to underscore Saorin’s selfish, cissexist attitude towards Shūichi. Instead of wanting Shūichi to be happy, she wants him to be hers, and her heterosexual identity means that, as a consequence, she wants him to deny his gender identity for her benefit.

This is another narrative that is common in the transgender experience. Spouses and lovers of trans people often struggle to accept their partners’ transitions. This frequently leads to divorce, and is frequently accompanied by a selfish desire for the trans person to be cisgender. Some trans people choose to suppress their trans identity to keep their marriages together. Speaking partially from personal experience, I suspect that this rarely solves the problem, instead leading to resentment and depression. Saorin, here, seems to want to found a relationship on this dynamic.

* The extended homage to Shakespeare built into the first half of Wandering Son deserves analysis, but is outside the scope of this series’ focus. I’ll just leave it at ‘obviously, an extended homage to Shakespeare is going on here’.

There are only two episodes of Doctor Who that have ever made me cry. The first one was Forest of the Dead – River’s death scene was amazing, Alex Kingston sold the idea of a woman who had loved the Doctor so well that I couldn’t help but feel that the Doctor had lost something tremendous. It remains one of my very favourite scenes in the show.

The second episode that made me cry aired a few days ago, and I just got around to watching it last night. The tone of The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe is like the last three scenes of Forest of the Dead stretched out over an entire episode. To be clear, and to keep from burying the lead: if you didn’t think this episode was good, you are wrong. You must have watched it wrong. Maybe your TV was broken.

Claire Skinner and Matt Smith absolutely shine in their scenes together. The emotional pitches that they hit are simply stunning, and Moffat’s dialogue is some of the best it’s ever been. Moffat’s stories often have sentimental notes, but here it is turned all the way up. And Skinner sells her grief so well, it is impossible not to empathize with her.

The title is an obvious reference to C.S. Lewis, of course, and the episode certainly contains thematic parallels: a father lost to the war, a family staying in the country to get away from the bombing, an old house and a strange box that leads to another world (and a snowy one, at that). But where it gets interesting is where the story deviates from, and especially where it actively rejects and subverts, the ideas of Lewis. In the title, the Doctor takes the place of Aslan/Jesus, and Madge is in place of the witch. The TARDIS, of course, is the wardrobe – it’s even lampshaded as such. But while the Doctor could conceivably be a Christ figure (even if he makes a better Odinic warrior), he doesn’t serve that role in the narrative here. Instead, he instigates the adventure and serves as a sort of tour guide / expository force. The action is centered around the Arwell family, and rightly so. Smith is channelling Troughton again here, lingering around the edges of the story and never taking center stage.

As for the other titular character, Madge is far from a bitter antagonist – she is the heroine of the story. And that leads us to what I’m going to call a tie for the best refutation of C.S. Lewis’ sexism that I’ve ever found (the other is The Problem of Susan). Lewis made it clear that women existed to support men – this motif is played out repeatedly between the brothers and sisters in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Of course, women have another option: they can be evil, literally frigid bitches. In other words, women are either weak or they are abhorrent.

Moffat, on the other hand, explicitly rejects this; the forest calls men ‘weak’ and women ‘strong’, and both female characters are at the center of the action, with Cyril, the son, playing the role of peril monkey. Lily gets the crucial scenes where she and the Doctor are looking for Cyril, and Madge gets… well, everything else. Coming to the rescue in a giant mech, running through acid rain, saving the population of a planet. And backing all of her actions is the distinctly feminine concept of motherhood. This is made explicit repeatedly, with the Doctor even making the inevitable ‘mothership’ pun. Madge draws her motivation and her power to the story from aspects of her identity that are intrinsically tied up with being female. This is Feminism in the tradition of the Female Mysteries of modern Paganism (and without even the biologically essentialist attitudes that are unfortunately common there). And speaking of Paganism, the carved/grown tree-people (and accompanying tower) have a distinctly Anglo-Saxon Pagan feel to them, which serves to make the story an even stronger counterpoint to Lewis’ work.

So, we have a very Pagan Christmas story with a theme of the fundamental power of womanhood. But the real focus of the story is on the importance of family, of celebrating life with people you love. It’s the sort of feel-good, heartwarming message that you might find on ABC Family. But we are saved from Seventh Heaven with Druids (Seventh Ogham?) by the superlative writing and acting. At no point does the theme feel heavy-handed or contrived; it flows naturally from the narrative.

But this is identifiably a holiday story, in the sense that it is themed along traditional holiday motifs. And, in that tradition, the Arwell family gets their presumed-dead father back. Frankly, I’m torn about this choice – I was annoyed when the very touching scene where A Mother Explains to Her Children About Their Father’s Death is interrupted for “oh, he’s not dead after all”. On the other hand, the subsequent scene is just as touching, with Skinner once again rising to the acting challenge and effectively conveying the amazed joy of someone who finds their lover isn’t dead after all.

No, I take that back. I’m not torn. Let the Arwell family have their father back. Maybe leaving him to die would be a stronger narrative, more raw and emotionally evocative. But it’s Christmas. Let’s embrace the aesthetic of Happily Ever After, at least this time. Just this once, everybody can live.

And now, about the Doctor. I said before that Smith was channelling Troughton in this episode. But his other seeming muse, Sylvester McCoy, is completely absent from this one. The Doctor has no great scheme here – he is simply trying to do something nice for a sad family. But significantly, the Doctor is shown to be much more human here than McCoy’s Doctor. Which isn’t surprising – one of Moffat’s key themes (and Tennant before him) is humanizing the Doctor. We have watched the Doctor learn how to love through the course of the new series. This is a sharp contrast to, well, all of the classic Doctors to some degree. But McCoy’s Doctor was the real cornerstone of this mode of being. Perhaps the best expression of the difference is from Human Nature, by Paul Cornell (the New Adventures novel, not the new series episode):

‘I hope that one day, when I’m old, when my travels are over, and history has no more need of me, then I can be just a man again. And then, perhaps I’ll find those things in me that I’d need to love, also. not love like I do, a big love for big things, but that more dangerous love. The one that makes and kills human beings… It’s a dream I have.’

The new series answers this quote by having the Doctor fall in love without ending his travels. This takes the form of romantic love twice, obviously. But this episode shows a distinctly platonic love towards Amy and Rory. The Doctor repeatedly talks about ‘happy crying’ as a human trait, and then does it himself when he realizes how much Amy and Rory care about him. This is the sort of emotional investment in a companion that we haven’t seen since Rose, and really didn’t see before that at all (sure, there was Susan, but frankly I have a hard time believing Hartnell’s Doctor loved anyone). Even Ace, who the Doctor seemed very paternal toward at times, was used by the Doctor as a pawn repeatedly.

The point is that the Doctor is a lot less Time Lord and a lot more Human than he used to be. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing – he’s still a mythic figure, and subject to the narrative and aesthetic rules of mythic figures. But he also has the capacity to enjoy Christmas dinner with his family. Let’s let him have that, too. It’s Christmas, after all.

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

This is the first episode that made me cry.

Sure, each of the other episodes made me get teary-eyed at least once, but this one actually gave me a need-a-tissue, tears-streaming-down-my-cheeks crying fit. It did this by being painfully sweet. But we’ll get to the scene that made me cry a bit later. First, I want to talk about swimming.

I fondly remember the days when throwing on a bathing suit and going swimming was straightforward, or even possible. As my gender dysphoria increased, and I started shaving the hair from areas that gave me the greatest bodily dissonance, swimming slowly became more and more awkward, until it was basically impossible for me to comfortably go swimming in public. Now that I have transitioned, swimming is still awkward. It is difficult for me to find a bathing suit that doesn’t make me feel exposed, and even then my body’s shape makes me feel very uncomfortable when it is that obvious. So when this episode opened with the cast swimming at school, I winced inwardly.

The scene is used to show more of Shūichi and Yoshino’s dysphoria. Shūichi is visibly envious of Yoshino’s figure, and Yohsino is distinctly self-conscious when she is complimented as looking ‘womanly’. And this leads us to another aspect of trans experience that this show portrays very correctly – the unknowingly harmful comment.

Speaking for myself, as always, I know that as I began transitioning, offhand comments directed at me while I was dressed as a boy could often hurt, even when there is no ill intent (or special knowledge) on the part of the speaker. A good example occurred when I was at the bank. The teller attempted to compliment me by saying “Your hair is so cute! Girls must be jealous of it.” While it is good to know my hair is cute, the way the comment put me solidly on the ‘boy’ side of the line stung. (Edit: Luckily, this is no longer a problem for me. It remains, however, an experience common to many trans people.)

The episode gives us another example of this, too. When Shūichi gets out of the bath, his sister comments “A boy shouldn’t take such long baths.” In this case, though, it is possible the comment may be more intentional. Even given only the evidence seen so far in the series, Maho would have to be pretty oblivious not to suspect that her brother is gender variant at this point. However, the show hasn’t really given us any indication that she is aware of Shūichi’s struggles, and actually implies an active lack of empathy towards him. When Maho’s friend Anna* makes Shūichi cry, Maho’s response is “It’s fine, he does that all the time.” This is both callous and suggests that Shūichi is suffering from depression, likely caused by dysphoria.

We also see a little more of the show’s fourth trans character, Yuki, in this episode. Yuki is a grown trans woman who has befriended Yoshino. She has a boyfriend (Shi), whom she has known since childhood, and he was “the only one who never bullied [her].” Yuki comes across as a very warm and genuine person, as well as being pragmatic. She also represents a trans success story – she is a successful, confident, attractive woman who survived being teased and bullied. She’s a representation of the It Gets Better narrative, which has been criticized (rightly) for being naive. But where the It Gets Better campaign feels like it is encouraging a complacent ‘just wait, and everything will be alright’ attitude, Yuki’s character doesn’t bear that connotation (she doesn’t strongly oppose it, either – we simply don’t know enough details about her story for that to be any part of the narrative here).

The touching scene in this episode (the one that made me cry) comes when Yoshino and Shūichi are alone and talking to each other. Yoshino offers Shūichi her name, in exchange for his. The impact of this hinges on another thing that is fairly unique to the trans experience. Names are important things for a lot of trans people. We cast off our birth-assigned names when we cast off our birth-assigned genders. This is a deliberate act, and choosing a new name also has to be a deliberate act. Here, Yoshino is offering Shūichi a name. I have been in something similar to Shūichi’s place, here; my name was given to me by someone I hold dear (although it was not offered as an exchange). Even so, Yoshino’s actions here made me realize just how precious that gift really is. I felt like I had taken it for granted, when I should be treasuring it.

So, that scene made me cry, for deeply personal reasons. And now that I was good and tearful, though, the next part of the scene just fed the cry fest. So, moving on…

Shūichi tells Yoshino that he wants her to be Romeo in the play, and for him to be Juliet. He says “I want you to see me as a girl… because I see you as a boy.” This seems to be both his way of giving Yoshino a gift in exchange, as well as an attempt to tell her how he feels. “I see you as a boy.” I remember the first time someone said to me, “You are a girl.” The words came at exactly the time I needed them. Simple words; to cisgender women, it is a statement so obvious as to be not even worth saying or hearing. But every time I feel bad, every time I feel too much dysphoria and I’m trying not to hate myself, I remember those words. “I am a girl” is easy, for me. But knowing that someone else sees me the way I see myself… that helped immeasurably. That simple second person pronoun makes all the difference.

When Shūichi returns home, he repeats to himself “Boku no namae wa Yoshino.” He is still using the masculine pronoun ‘boku’, despite the fact that he is clearly starting to come to terms with his identity as a girl. This makes sense, though – it takes time to clear all of culture’s gender essentialism out of your brain. I still misgendered myself, in my own thoughts, for quite a while when I began to transition.

The other scene worth commenting on from this episode is a meeting between Saorin and Shūichi. Saorin asks him to come over, ostensibly to talk about the play. That is where it starts; Shūichi added to the play the idea that Romeo and Juliet could give each other their names, and Saorin offers Shūichi her own name. On learning the origin of the scene in the play, Saorin feels slighted, but Shūichi explains to her that he doesn’t want to become a girl for Yoshino’s sake, but for his own. Saorin responds with a selfish tirade that includes a lot of gender essentialism. She equates GRS with gender, saying “[without an operation], becoming a girl is impossible… It’s all just an act.” She also says that she doesn’t want Shuuichi to become a girl, because she is in love with him (presumably as a boy).

At this point, Saorin has very little to redeem her character. She contradicts herself a lot (and this seems intentional, as she seems very confused about her own feelings). She is consistently portrayed as selfish. She seems to fetishize Shūichi’s gender variance on the one hand, and be terrified of it on the other. She seems, in short, to be deeply cissexist, but her feelings for Shūichi make her willing to encourage his dressing as a girl. When the idea of it being more than that, however – when the idea of Shūichi actually being a girl comes up – she reacts with defensive hostility.

* So, as a character shares my own name in the show, I feel obliged to comment on that. I really want Anna to be a good character! She seems to have the potential to be; at least, she felt remorse after making Shūichi cry.

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

In this episode, it feels like the show is finally reaching its stride. It combines the strengths of the previous episodes; the pacing is as good as the second episode, and the overall emotional impact and thematic cohesion is on the same level as the first episode.

So, like the episode, let’s start by talking about bras. For a young and not-so-budding trans girl, bras occupied an odd position in my mental landscape. I was consciously envious of the cis girls around me that were developing breasts. At the same time, though, I had already developed a knee-jerk defense mechanism against anything with a feminine connotations (at least in public). We’ll come back to this in a bit.

In the episode, though, the character contemplating supportive undergarments is Yoshino, who expresses terror at the thought of having to wear one, and asks Shūichi if he has ever wanted to wear one. This leads to both of them admitting envy of each other’s bodies. This is a touching scene, and seems to me to be deeply insightful about a very particular part of trans experience. Here the characters deal with it awkwardly, but that makes sense – the characters are still very unsure of themselves and still discovering their identities.

Near the end of the episode is another scene where Yoshino tries on the bra she bought. It ends with her throwing it off in disgust, and hugging her boy’s uniform to her chest, sobbing. This is an utterly heartbreaking moment, and it is so well portrayed that I felt slightly embarrassed, as if I had accidentally walked in on someone at a private moment. It is also a very powerful scene, and it nearly made me cry. As a trans woman (as opposed to a trans man), I can’t pretend to understand exactly what that moment is like, but the show succeeds in evoking empathy, which is quickly becoming its basic mode of operation.

Continuing on the theme of approaching puberty, Mako (Ariga Makoto) points out to Shūichi that their voices are going to change soon, which is upsetting to both of them. He further suggests that they record their voices “before it is too late.” This is also used as a pretext for them to dress up as girls together. This solidifies the subtle hints in the last episode that Mako is also gender variant. He seems much more excited to dress up, and seems to view it as a social activity, a way to bond with Shuuichi over a shared experience.

Anyway, I am describing this scene because it gives me a chance to talk about Japanese language and gender. When Shūichi begins recording his voice, he begins “Boku no namae o…” (My name is…). Mako stops him, saying “be more feminine.” He starts over, this time saying “Watashi no namae o…” (My name is…). The difference here is in the first person pronoun used, and it is something English doesn’t have an equivalent construct for. ‘Boku’ is an example of a masculine word – not masculine in the sense that words in some languages have gender (the Romance languages being readily available examples), but in the sense that it is a word typically only used by men. ‘Watashi’ is considered gender-neutral, but my suspicion is that, since ‘boku’ is used so predominantly amongst boys, ‘watashi’ is probably viewed as feminine by comparison. Unfortunately, this distinction is not caught in the subtitling.

Everything I’ve discussed so far are the sub-plots of the episode, and the episode’s core is worth remarking on as well, which centers around a play that the characters’ class is planning for the school’s cultural festival. Saorin suggests that the class do a ‘genderbender play’*, or a play in which the boys play the girls’ roles, and vice versa. This idea is enthusiastically accepted by the rest of the class.

Saorin submits a script idea that is a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, while Shūichi comes up with the idea of writing about boys who want to be girls, and girls who want to be boys. This seems to be a huge leap forward in Shūichi’s thought process – he is, in a way, openly admitting that he wants to be a girl, not just dress like one. Whether or not he will eventually consider the distinction between wanting to be a girl and the idea that he might already be a girl remains to be seen; so far, the show has kept to the potentially gender essentialist language of “a boy who wants to be a girl”**. Shūichi’s words here mirrors my feelings and understanding of myself at his age, actually; having never really encountered the idea of gender variance, that was the way I framed the thought, when I wasn’t running away from it at full speed.

After the play is announced, there is a scene where the girls from the class are talking excitedly about the idea. They see it as a simple way to break social rules, and talk animatedly about it. The three trans characters, however, are all visibly uncomfortable. Here we have yet another interesting insight into trans experience. When I was a teenager, whenever someone mentioned cross-dressing, or any kind of gender variance, I felt a mixture of embarrassment and shame. This even extended to topics that were stereotypically feminine but without the gender variance context – any conversation that mentioned makeup, nail polish, or women’s shoes was likely to make me blush. As a result, I spent a long time actively avoiding anything feminine, even to the point of harboring a deep aversion to the color pink.

At the time, I didn’t even know why I felt embarrassed. I recognize now that it was the same thing I see in the characters in this scene – they are afraid that if they show too much enthusiasm, someone will know. That they will see into your soul and find the truth you’ve tried to hide from both them and yourself.

Shūichi and Saorin’s teacher suggests they combine their scripts, and at Shūichi’s suggestion, the play becomes a version of Romeo and Juliet with the lead characters both being trans. What is more interesting, though, is Saorin’s behavior while they work on the script together. She invites Shūichi to come work on it at her house, and he agrees after she promises “not to do anything weird this time.” However, she immediately breaks her promise, and gets very excited about the idea of Shūichi wearing one of her dresses.

Saorin’s behavior here feels very creepy, and it certainly borders on chaser behavior. What’s more, it is clear that she has done this before. Shūichi is obviously uncomfortable with her taking such an enthusiastic interest in his gender identity, and yet she persists. Whether this behavior is an attempt to create a bond similar to the one Shūichi has with Yoshino, or whether the behavior drove Shūichi away from Saorin (and towards Yoshino) in the first place is uncertain.

Saorin also notes the parallel between their play’s Romeo and Juliet, and Shūichi and Yoshino. She suggests casting Shūichi as Juliet, and Yoshino as Romeo. Her suggestion is tinged with bitterness, but she seems to have a moment of genuinely wishing for Shūichi’s happiness. Interestingly, this casting upholds the original point of the play (which was to reverse the gender roles of the actors relative to their characters) in a surprising way: it casts Shūichi as a trans man, and Yoshino as a trans woman, so that they are still playing, functionally, the opposite gender.

* The translation ‘genderbender play’ didn’t really sit well with me, so I did some checking. Luckily, Shūichi writes down the phrase during the episode, so I was able to find the kanji: 倒錯劇 (tousaku geki). The dictionary meaning of this phrase would be ‘inversion play’ or ‘perversion play’, which don’t really convey the subtitled meaning at all. My assumption was that this is a particular phenomenon in Japan, but the only results I can make any sense of on a google search for the phrase are related to Wandering Son. If anyone with more knowledge of Japanese culture can confirm whether this is a cultural thing I am missing, I would be grateful.

** I am aware that some trans people see themselves as having been their birth-assigned gender before transitioning, and this complicates the language I use when I talk about this element of the show’s dialogue choices. My personal experience is that I was always a girl. Society’s gender essentialist memes convinced me otherwise for a very long time, and this leaves me with an unfortunate reflex reaction that tries to categorize phrases such as ‘I am a boy who wants to be a girl’ as cissexist. However, giving in to this reflex would be erasing of trans people whose experiences do not match my own, so I am trying my best here to use language that doesn’t do that.

OpenGL gives us a few different ways to draw things, which I’ve talked about before. When we were using the fixed-pipeline functions (glBegin(), glEnd(), etc), I could draw a circle the same way I drew it in SDL: draw a bunch of same-sized rectangles, shifting the coordinates around a central point so that they overlap. Do enough of them (using small enough increments), and it makes a very smooth-looking circle. I never did this in OpenGL, but the SDL code looked like this:

void DrawUtils::draw_circle_filled(SDL_Surface* dest, Sint16 int_x, Sint16 int_y, Uint16 int_r, Uint32 colour)
{
    float x = static_cast<float> (int_x);
    float y = static_cast<float> (int_y);
    float r = static_cast<float> (int_r);

    SDL_Rect pen;
    float i;

    for (i=0; i < 6.28318531; i += 0.0034906585)
    {
        pen.x = static_cast<int> (x + cos(i) * r);
        pen.y = static_cast<int> (y + sin(i) * r);
        int w = static_cast<int> (x - pen.x);
        int h = static_cast<int> (y - pen.y);

        if (w == 0) pen.w = 1;
        else if (w < 0)
        {
            pen.x = x;
            pen.w = abs(w);
        }
        else pen.w = w;

        if (h == 0) pen.h = 1;
        else if (h < 0)
        {
            pen.y = y;
            pen.h = abs(h);
        }
        else pen.h = h;
        if (pen.x >= dest->clip_rect.x &&
            pen.y >= dest->clip_rect.y &&
            pen.x + pen.w <= dest->clip_rect.w &&
            pen.y + pen.h <= dest->clip_rect.h)
            SDL_FillRect(dest, &pen,
                         SDL_MapRGBA(dest->format,
                                     (colour >> 16) & 0xff,
                                     (colour >> 8) & 0xff,
                                     colour & 0xff, 1));
    }
}

I was pretty proud of this code when I wrote it. The magic is at the top of the for loop: from 0 to 2π, it increments a tiny bit and finds a new rectangle that has one vertex at the center of the circle, and the opposing vertex at some point along the circle. It does this 1800 times per circle, which isn’t terribly efficient, but it got the job done.

With OpenGL and the shader pipeline, we *could* still do that. We could do the following in a loop, 1800 times:

    GLushort Quad::rect_elements[] = {0, 1, 2, 3};
    GLfloat buffer_data[] = {x1f, y1f, x2f, y1f, x1f, y2f, x2f, y2f};

    GLuint vertex_buffer;
    glGenBuffers(1, &vertex_buffer);
    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertex_buffer);
    glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(buffer_data), buffer_data, GL_STATIC_DRAW);

    GLuint element_buffer;
    glGenBuffers(1, &element_buffer);
    glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_BUFFER, element_buffer);
    glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_BUFFER, sizeof(rect_elements), rect_elements, GL_STATIC_DRAW);

    glUseProgram(program); // the shader program, created earlier
    glUniform4f(shader->uniforms.colour,
    GLUtils::convert_colour((colour >> 16) & 0xff),
    GLUtils::convert_colour((colour >> 8) & 0xff),
    GLUtils::convert_colour(colour & 0xff), 1.0);

    // Put the vertices in an attribute
    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertex_buffer);
    glVertexAttribPointer(shader->attributes.position, 2, GL_FLOAT,
                          GL_FALSE, sizeof(GLfloat)*2, (void*)0);
    glEnableVertexAttribArray(shader->attributes.position);

    glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, element_buffer); 
    glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 4, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, (void*)0);

    // Clean up the GL state machine 
    glDisableVertexAttribArray(shader->attributes.position);

Now, that’s a lot of fairly hairy OpenGL code. In my actual program, that’s abstracted out into several function calls within several different classes – a Quad object inherits from Drawable, and uses a GLUtils library to create the vertex and element buffers. The actual render code is in Drawable, but it calls a subclassable sub_render function that helps it know how to draw a rectangle specifically.

But we don’t want to call that code 1800 times for a single circle – where it was a bit inefficient in SDL, here we’re making 1800 separate calls to the OpenGL hardware system (well, actually more as we copy data into GPU buffers and such, but 1800 glDrawElements() calls). That’s 1800 different writes into GPU memory. It’s ugly. It’d be a horrible idea.

Luckily, we can draw a circle with a *single* call to glDrawElements(). The secret is in ‘GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP’. OpenGL defines several different methods it can use to interpret the vertex data we send to it. In ‘Triangle Strip’, it uses the first three vertexes to draw a triangle. The next vertex you add creates a triangle from it and the previous two vertexes (the last two of the previous triangle). If you 6 vertices in your vertex buffer, and the element buffer was just 0-5, it might look something like this:

We could use THAT to draw a circle too, but it would be cumbersome. Instead, we’ll use GL_TRIANGLE_FAN. Like GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, the first three vertices are used to make a triangle. Subsequent vertices, however, use the previous vertex and the first vertex to form the next triangle. In effect, this gives you a ‘center point’ and lets you draw triangles outward from it. Its drawing pattern looks like this:

This lets us do some really elegant, simple drawing of curved shapes.

Of course, we still need some trigonometry here:

for (unsigned int i = 2; i < 122; i+=2)
{
    unsigned int j = i/2;
    float rad = j * 0.104719755; // 2*Pi / 60
    buffer_data[i] = x + (cos(rad) * rx);
    buffer_data[i+1] = y + (sin(rad) * ry);
    element_data[j] = j;
}

But that logic is much more concise and easy to understand than any of the previous approaches. I’ve chosen to use 60 points around the circle somewhat arbitrarily – using more of these will the circle look smoother, but cost more in terms of rendering power. Even 1800 points would probably be pretty trivial for the program in its current state, but better to form good optimization habits now, I suppose. Also, the circles look pretty perfectly smooth at 60 points.

And most importantly, it works!

Of course, this still doesn’t look quite the same (or as good) as the SDL version. I have some positioning issues to work out, and a lot of stuff still isn’t implemented that I had there. But I’m definitely on the right track.

Of course, as I said at the top of this post, I’ve had this project shelved since July. There may be some new updates in the future, but this is probably the last Project TreeWars post for a while.

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

This episode switches gears and focuses mostly on Saorin. It also gives us a much-needed flashback that provides the backstory on the relationship between Shūichi, Yoshino, and Saorin.

Near the end of the previous episode, Shūichi runs out of his house, distressed, after an encounter with his sister. I didn’t get around to talking about that scene in that entry, so let’s touch on it here. When I was still struggling to understand my gender identity, I mis-identified the desire to be a girl with the concept of cross-dressing (as did a number of other trans people that I know). So, for years, I cross-dressed when no one was around (the fact that this is an amusing phrase in light of my current understanding of my gender identity does not escape me – I eventually realized that ‘cross-dressing’ was what I was doing when everyone was looking at me). And like Shū, fear of discovery was a huge thing. I waited, always, until I was home alone, or the rest of my family was asleep. I always feared a sudden knock on my door. I think Shūichi’s flight is best viewed in that context, in the mixture of shame and fear that is hard to escape when you feel like you are doing something deviant, something that your loved ones would disapprove of.

In his haste to escape his sister, Shūichi leaves half-dressed in only an undershirt and a skirt, and runs into Yoshino on a bridge. Yoshino offers her hoodie, commenting that Shūichi looks like a girl with a hoodie and a skirt on. This marks a reparation of their friendship. Which leads us to Saorin.

Saorin, up to this point, has only been seen briefly, and was then depicted as mostly quiet but emotionally unstable and prone to violent outbursts. In the first episode, she assaulted a classmate who insinuated that Shūichi and Yoshino had a relationship at one point. In this episode, we learn that she harbors a lot of resentment toward Shuuichi and Yoshino because of a love triangle that imploded at some point before the narrative picks up. Some time ago, Saorin expressed interest in Shūichi, only to find that Shūichi had already expressed interest in Yoshino. Saorin confronted Yoshino about it, and they both ended by expressing hatred for each other. Your basic love triangle story. I’d suggest maybe this is poly-fixable, but I’m pretty sure Saorin is way too unstable for that. More implicitly (and more importantly for our purposes), Saorin also seems to feel that she had already been left out because Shūichi and Yoshino had their trans experiences in common, and had bonded over them until Saorin felt like a third wheel.

Saorin comes across, in this episode, as fundamentally unsympathetic to the viewer. At the beginning of the episode she calls Shūichi and Yoshino ‘filth’ as she passes them in the hall. She also nearly assaults Chii’s friend Shirai Momoko (Momo), and when Yoshino expresses that they should perhaps set their differences aside, Saorin refuses.

Despite this, the episode ends with Saorin tentatively making peace with the rest of the group, after Sasa Kanako (Sasa), who has been trying to remain friends with both Saorin and the others, gets angry at their bickering and refuses to speak to them. So, it requires the coercion of her only remaining friend for her to stop being an asshole to the rest of her former friends. Like I said: unsympathetic.

The premise of the episode, though, seems to be that we should sympathize with Saorin. Ariga Makoto (Ariga) sums it up thus: “She’s got a rough life”. However, when juxtaposed to the issues the other characters are facing, Saorin (as portrayed so far, at least) comes across as whiny and privileged by comparison.

So, enough about Saorin, then. We don’t have time for whiny privileged girls who hold grudges. Let’s talk about Ariga, whom we just mentioned for the first time. He plays a slightly more prominent role in this episode, and seems to be Shūichi’s only (or at least closest) male friend. We also get a suggestion that he is also gender variant; Shūichi gives him a clover hairpin to match the one he bought in the first episode. In the same scene, they spend time chatting about private matters – notably, about the fact that Ariga feels he may be attracted to boys. This is the first explicit mention of sexual orientation on the show. Leaving aside gender variance (since all of the gender variant characters are still discovering their identities in this regard), Ariga thinks he might be gay. The line is a throwaway – we don’t dwell on it at all, but rather move on. Presumably, we will return to this later in the series.

On the subject of Shūichi and gender, the first relevant moment in this episode comes when Shūichi is called ‘a little girl’ as an insult by one of his male classmates; his response (unnoticed by everyone except Ariga) is to blush and then smile broadly. A similar scene happens when he takes his lunch to his older sister; one of her classmates says “he looks like a girl”, leading Shūichi to repeat the phrase, “I look like a girl”, with a happy look on his face.

These scenes, more than anything we’ve seen before, really work to differentiate Shūichi as being solidly transgender (as opposed to, say, a cross-dresser in the common understanding of the term). His response to being called a girl is joy, and I suspect it is stemming from a sense that it is the correct thing for him to be called.

On the whole, this episode is much more solidly put together than the first one – it has more cohesion between scenes, and the pacing is better. However, emotionally, it comes across as weaker. The first episode used a effective narrative repetition, with the ‘What are little girls/boys made of’ motif repeated through the episode, and the scene early on where Shūichi and Yoshino each narrate the phrase ‘I/we have a secret’.* The music and the dialogue are still top notch, but the overall narrative feel of this episode did not have as powerful an impact on me.

* The subtitles translate the phrase ‘We have a secret’, but since pronouns don’t indicate number in Japanese, it could potentially be translated ‘I have a secret’ as well. Or ‘I/we have secrets’, for that matter. I certainly think the translators chose well here, though.

Spoiler Warning, and possible Trigger Warning for description of internalized transphobia

After watching the first two episodes of Hōrō Musuko (放浪息子, “Wandering Son”), I have decided to start a running review/commentary of the series here. This post will review the first episode. You can watch the episode online at crunchryroll, and I highly recommend watching the episodes before reading the review, because otherwise you’re likely to be a bit lost. They’re about 22 minutes each.

First, personal background – I’ve long been a fan of anime. However, my understanding of the nuances of Japanese culture is somewhat lacking. I am white. I am native to the US. So, while I will try to avoid ethnocentric creep, there may be some in these reviews. If anyone sees problematic spots and wants to point them out to me, I will be most appreciative.

I am also a trans woman, currently in the midst of transition (edit: I completed transitioning socially in April 2011). So, this story is very relevant to my interests, and I am particularly interested in the way that gender variance is presented.

A note on pronouns: I am defaulting to masculine pronouns for Shūichi and feminine pronouns for Yoshino. The characters themselves, as they are still struggling with their identities, probably still associate with these pronouns (it has not come up so far). At any rate, the characters in the show consistently give them these pronouns, so it is also a concession for ease of mapping the review to the story.

The title of the episode, “Onna no Kotte, Nande Dekiteru?”, translates to “What are little girls made of?” So, right from the beginning, we’re not pulling any punches. The title echoes the struggle with identity in the face of gender essentialist preconceptions that I (and, I am certain, many other trans people) have to deal with both internally and from others. What is gender? What does it mean to be a boy or a girl? The series jumps straight into these questions with very little build-up.

The episode opens with a voiceover from a character we will shortly know as Nitori Shūichi*, who delivers the title line. This line will be repeated several times throughout the episode at introspective moments. We then move on to a scene with a still camera pointed at Shūichi, while he shifts uncomfortably in his seat and describes the discomfort he feels in his new school uniform. He is clearly trying to look happy, even though he is out of sorts. This is all delivered over a haunting, melancholy piano piece.

At the beginning of the episode, we have powerful, evocative storytelling. Visually, this is very compelling, and the narration is characterization at its best; I am already getting a strong sense of who this person is, and I am starting to empathize deeply with him. The music is stirring, and precisely on-point for the emotions the show is trying to evoke. It underscores the fact that this character (and, subsequently, all of these characters) are less happy than they are trying to seem.

The next sequence felt a bit jumbled to me the first time I watched it. We are introduced to most of the characters as they head to their first day of school (6th grade for most of the characters). Even before we have enough exposure with the characters to identify them readily, we establish that most of these characters already have relationships with each other. The show gives us the feeling that we’ve been dropped right into the middle of their lives with no exposition. Which, of course, is exactly what has happened, both diegetically and in a production sense (more on that in a moment). Several past events are alluded to, including a close friendship between Shūichi, Takatsuki Yoshino, and Chiba Saori (Saorin), that ended abruptly after some sort of unspecified romantic drama occurred.

This sequence also alludes to the fact that Yoshino is also transgender. She is clearly uncomfortable when someone says she looks cute in her uniform, and envious of the fact that Chii (who we will come back to in a minute) is wearing a boy’s uniform. Now, these factors could easily be observational bias on my part, but the show validates my theories: as the episode progresses, a friend buys Yoshino a boy’s uniform, which makes her ecstatically happy.

So, the show begins with interpersonal tensions already in place, but it leaves it up to the viewer to infer more information about those tensions. This is unsurprising, since the manga actually begins with the characters in 5th grade; the anime has chosen to start later, but include all of the omitted story as part of its background (as far as I can tell – actually, after reading the manga I think it may just include some of the broad strokes, and rework some of that material into its own plot). This is an interesting choice from a storytelling standpoint, and has the opportunity to fail miserably. I certainly felt a bit lost during the first half of the episode or so. But this seems to be intentional; as a dramatic piece with a fairly serious tone, this sudden burst of information makes us feel like we are intruding on someone’s life, and left to pick up the context ourselves. By the end of the episode, it is clear who all of the characters are, and most of their relationships are established. As a slice of life piece, it works very well; we really get the impression that we’ve just come in at an arbitrary point in the characters’ lives.

As the episode progresses, we meet Sarashina Chizuru (Chii), an extroverted and impulsive girl who wears a boy’s uniform to school just ‘because she feels like it’. In a story about gender identity, it is interesting to see that we also have a character clearly treating gender as presentation. Unlike Shūichi, Chii has the privilege to do this without the nervousness, shame, guilt, and embarrassment that often accompanies actually struggling with a transgender identity. Whether and how the series will treat with this privilege disparity remains to be seen.

The episode had a few stand-out moments for me. The first came during a scene where Shūichi dresses in a girl’s uniform after school, and spends some time wandering around town on his own. Narration by Shūichi establishes that he has never done this before, and usually only dresses up at home. During this outing, a girl in a shop suggests Shūichi buy a hairpin because, she says, “You’re cute, and this will flatter you”. This scene depicts such a small thing – having someone treat you as the gender that feels right to you. This is something that cisgender people experience every time they interact with someone – it is so commonplace that it goes completely unnoticed. But if you’re trans, this is often something you have gone large portions of your life without ever experiencing.

I clearly remember the first time that I was treated like a woman by a stranger, completely and without hesitation. It was a wonderful moment for me, validating and uplifting. I may have been projecting, but it seemed to me that Shūichi’s reaction was similar. It is important to note here that the writer of the original manga, Shimura Takako, is a cisgender woman (to the best of my knowledge). But (and this is assuming the anime follows the manga fairly closely) she has written an amazingly accurate and empathetic portrayal of what it feels like to live as a trans girl. She gets the little details right, and the animators and voice actors deliver here too – Shūichi’s character is imminently believable to me.

The other stand-out moment in this episode is at the end. Shūichi wakes up from sleep with a shock, to discover he has had a wet dream. He delivers in voiceover – “What are little boys made of? Snakes and snails…”, a bitter refrain of the episode’s title. The story is set as the characters enter puberty, and this is a visceral example of how puberty, for many trans people, is a time when our bodies turn against us. I know that puberty, for me, felt like my very physiology was denying a truth that I already felt ashamed of. I was constantly disgusted by my body, and it was the only time in my life I thought seriously about suicide. I didn’t really understand all of that at the time; that is, I didn’t connect the feelings that I should be a girl with the disgust I felt about my body. Mostly, I think, because I had buried the former as deeply as I could, and thought about it as little as possible.

This conflict of gender identity with puberty is a thematic trend I expect will be fundamental to the show as it progresses. I remain hopeful about this show – it is a narrative with a lot of potential to help cisgender people understand the perspective of trans people a little better.

* a hopefully correct extended footnote on Japanese names: Japanese names are written (and spoken) surname first, given name second. It is common for someone to be referred to by their surname by everyone except their closest friends and family. For the purpose of clarity here, especially since the show has multiple members of the Nitori family represented, I will introduce characters with their full name, and then only use their given name unless the show gives them a clearly more recognizable nickname. Confusingly, this conflicts with how the names are presented in the show. Anime subtitles are inconsistent from one show to the next about how they choose to translate names. Some shows get subtitled with the given name always used, others with the surname always used, and that’s not even getting in to honorifics. I believe Wandering Son has been providing the name as spoken (sans honorific) instead of converting consistently to the given name. Also, the subtitling is inverting full names when they are spoken, so if someone says “Nitori Shŭichi-san”, it gets subtitled as “Shūichi Nitori”. Which is fair enough, but it forces me to make a decision about how to transliterate here. So, there it is.

So, at this point, I think I’ll state it more or less officially: this blog is about anything that can be broadly classed as ‘geeky’. I’ll post on any subjects where I feel like I have sufficiently interesting things to say.

I will also likely be pulling more personal (and by extension, more Feminist and Activist, given the maxim that The Personal is Political) material into this blog. In particular, I have a personal-reflection-heavy review series of Wandering Son in the works. Since Phil Sandifer recently described me as a Feminist blogger and this a Feminist blog, this seems fair enough.

Don’t worry, I’ll try to keep posting sufficiently interesting material to match my current level of ‘interesting’, whatever you think that happens to be.

Geek guys perpetuate this sexism, too. Every time we see “tits or gtfo” in a forum our multiplayer game, every rape threat we get in our xbox live inboxes (trigger warning), and every “are you looking for something for your boyfriend” from a comic book store employee sends a message: geek boys don’t want us in their clubhouse.

And the creators of (for lack of a better term) geek-targeted content perpetuate the problem. Every time a game assumes a masculine gender onto an unseen protagonist, that pushes women a little farther away. Sure, we can roll our eyes and move on, but it all contributes to a culture that delivers a resounding message of “we don’t want you here.” Really, it’s been one long chain of Marios rescuing Peaches for decades. And notably, when Peach finally got her own game, it had to fall back on the tired trope of women being overly emotional.

Even Braid, which is a fantastic game and worthy of heaps of praise, is fundamentally about a man and his obsession with a princess, albeit a metaphorical one. And Portal, a game with literally no male characters (the companion cube seemed to have a distinctly feminine presentation to me, gods rest her soul), managed to bring fat shaming into its sequel.

And yes, there are exceptions. We have Buffy, and Samus, and Ellen fucking Ripley. And of these examples that sprang to my mind, 2 of the 4 have scenes that seriously compromise the strength of the character in ways that are flatly uncharacteristic: Samus in the entirety of “Other M” and Buffy in the pointlessly rapey scene in The Pack in which she is suddenly incapable of fighting back the moment the situation becomes slightly sexualized (by contrast, the much later scene in Seeing Red handles sexual assault and its aftermath much more impressively, with the actual ramifications of the scene explored in detail. But that gets into the oddly difficult to navigate world of Buffy‘s feminist politics, which is too large in scope to deal with here).

And even more often, we just get male characters, with the female characters in minor or supporting roles. The argument goes like this: men are the target audience, so protagonists have to be male or the audience won’t identify with them. This argument, of course, is broken on at least two levels: male geeks loved the Alien trilogy, and a very large portion of geeks are, in fact, women.

Which brings me to Avatar: The Last Airbender, a children’s television show that underestimated its target audience by about a decade. It was a great show, with humor that worked well for both children and adults, serious themes that were not sugar-coated, beautiful artwork and a well-researched, interesting and unique setting. If we are very lucky, Avatar will do for western animation what Birth (by Ōshima Yumiko) did for shoujo manga – present it as a serious storytelling medium that deserves recognition alongside other visual arts.

And one of the core characters was a strong female character, portrayed with depth and nuance. Several minor female characters were likewise independently motivated, steering women. Of course, the protagonist was still a boy. Because this is a show with martial arts and fireballs and armies, so it’s obviously for boys, right? There’s no way a girl would be interested in an epic struggle against impossible odds, right? The best we can hope for is to inject a little feminist thought as a side issue.

Except now, we have a sequel series: The Legend of Korra. A story by the same team, with a female protagonist. Here’s a trailer. There are several promising things about the trailer: the music, artistic direction, action sequences and the little hints we get about the story and setting are right in line with what we expect from the team that brought us The Last Airbender – this is going to be quality. But the thing that really strikes me is how practical her outfits are: they actually look like clothes someone might fight in. And, despite Korra being visibly several years older than the main characters of The Last Airbender (she looks closer in age to Zuko), the artists have resisted the urge to (consciously or otherwise) sexualize her appearance. Visually speaking, she is clearly a girl, but being a girl is clearly not her sole defining attribute. She is also strong and athletic, and dresses practically. From the (admittedly a bit emo-looking) scenes of her sitting alone, she is also torn or driven by something. And apparently she’s not averse to knocking someone through a shop window. All in all, she looks pretty bad-ass. A Strong Female Character in the Ellen Ripley tradition.

This is something we need more of: female role models in geek media. It lets young, potential geek girls know that it is okay to enjoy this stuff; that it is for them, too. And it gives those of us who have struggled to carve a place for ourselves a sense that we’re finally being heard.

And if anyone reading this doubts that sexism in the geek community is a real problem (that is, if you still can’t see it), let me share with you this youtube comment from the above trailer:

chicks with muscles are just creepyyy. i take it that you’re a girl, and if you like “women muscle” then get some muscle for yourself and see how many guys like it. i mean for me i like when a girls body is nice and soft, not hard and strong. don’t you understand that that’s a turnoff for most guys?

See, what fanime1 has done here is to assume that the central purpose of women is to be ‘nice and soft’, to be appealing to men. A vast majority of our media supports this idea – most women in media, geek media included, fall into a pretty narrow band of ‘conventionally attractive’ body types, because they are written (and cast) primarily for men (more specifically, for the Male Gaze). And girls absorb this idea: that women have to be attractive to have worth.

This is what I mean when I say we need more things like The Legend of Korra. Korra is a rarity: a character for us.

At the very top of my personal list of improvements to Steam would be “native Linux support”. And I know, I know, I’ve heard all of the conventional wisdom: There isn’t a big enough market to justify porting it. Even if there was, there aren’t enough Linux-native games to make the service very useful. Everybody knows Windows is the OS for gaming.

But sitting here staring down that conventional wisdom is Desura. I’ve known that Desura existed for a while – the Frozenbyte Bundle and the Humble Bundle 3 both had options to acquire ‘Desura keys’, so it was obviously a Steam competitor. Until recently, though, I had just dismissed the product – obviously, I thought, any Steam competitor is going to lag far behind in available games and basic feature set, given Steam’s popularity. Faulty logic, but there it is.

So when a friend told me that Desura works in Linux, I was pretty stunned. I had gotten used to not being the ‘target audience’ for game companies. And now, a few hours later, I’ve got Desura installed, my humble bundle keys redeemed, and I’ve purchased Amnesia: The Dark Descent (which was on sale at the time, and I’ve been meaning to buy for some time anyway).

Desura’s (native Linux!) install is smooth and painless, and its (native Linux!) interface is pretty nice. It has some rough edges, to be fair: most of what it does is load websites that are skinned to feel like part of the interface (much like Steam does), and some of those pages are still obviously works in progress. On the other hand, everything works quickly and smoothly. The main options menu is accessed by clicking the Desura logo, which doesn’t look obviously like a button. So that’s a design flaw, but it didn’t take too long to work out. Redeeming gift keys is more streamlined than in Steam (once you find where to do it!).

Now, Desura certainly isn’t perfect, and it lacks very useful features that Steam has had for some time. One problem I noticed is that it lacks Steam’s resume-after-closing feature; I started to install Amnesia, absent-mindedly closed the client later, and it didn’t auto-resume after I opened Desura again. Desura doesn’t track how much time you’ve sunk into a given game. It also doesn’t have any way to access your save games from multiple locations (a la Steam’s cloud sync), and while their developer info mentions achievements, I haven’t seen any games implement Desura-specific achievements, nor would I even know where to look to find them.

Another feature that both Steam and Desura need are tags, or some sort of organizational system for your games. Right now all Desura has are ‘all games’ and ‘favorite games’. Steam has a categories system, but it doesn’t always save that information across accounts, and you can’t tag games with multiple categories. A proper tagging-based sorting system would be great.

So, Desura has a spartan interface, but it’s also still very young. And more importantly, it runs flawlessly in Linux, which makes it very appealing to me. If you game in Linux at all, check out Desura. It’s already a great service, and it looks like it’s only going to get better.

I didn’t read K&R while I was in college (I did read it after, and it’s a great reference. Anyone who wants to understand C better should have a copy). C was not even the first programming language I learned: that was C++. But the two are intimately related, and most Computer Science programs that teach C++ start with programs that are very C-like (and depending on how you do I/O, may be indistinguishable from C). The idioms and quirks of C are synonymous with the very idea of programming to me. And I owe many of those idioms and quirks to Dennis Ritchie.

C and C++ took my kindled interest in programming and stoked it into a towering inferno of inspiration. I don’t think I would have been nearly as charmed if my introduction to programming had been Java, or even Python or Perl, which now make up the majority of the programming I do (and perl certainly owes much of its syntax to the C family as well). C has a certain low-level beauty to it. It’s more elegant than assembly, and is minimalist and clean in a way few other languages are.

30 years ago, Dennis Ritchie said hello to the world. And now the world says goodbye.

Tick tock goes the clock
He gave all he could give her
Tick tock goes the clock
Now prison waits for River

As 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. Well, they were right, and we managed to get both a metaphorical wedding (of all points in time) and a literal wedding (what we can presume is a Gallifreyan wedding ritual). So, that was a nice bit of wordplay.

But on to the episode. We get some wonderfully fun spectacle scenes in this episode, especially in the opening act, with some wonderfully whimsical quotes, my personal favorites being “Holy Roman Emperor Winston Churchill returned to the Buckingham Senate on his personal Mammoth” and “Pterodactyls are pests. Please do not feed”.

And that sets the stage for a quick drop into the plot: time is frozen on April 22nd, 2011, at 5:02 in the afternoon. Which is, obviously, the day the Doctor dies. So it’s apparent from very early on (basically the moment the camera shows Churchill’s clock) that River Song broke time. Which, frankly, seems like exactly the sort of thing she would do.

There were a lot of stand-out moments in this episode, so I’ll just summarize what I thought of it all at once: the pacing was brilliant, the dialogue and acting was all exactly where it needed to be, the visuals were stunning, vibrant, varied, and very interesting throughout. From a production standpoint, I can’t complain about a single moment of this episode.

We also have more overtones of the Second and Seventh Doctors in the portrayal of Eleven. First, the Live Chess game, aside from being a clever pun, brings to mind the Doctor in The Curse of Fenric. Fenric says of the Doctor:

He pulled bones from the desert sands and carved them into chess pieces. He challenged me to solve his puzzle, I failed.

The image of the Doctor playing chess (which is also an apt metaphor for the manipulation the Seventh Doctor was famous for) is something that is not only reminiscent of the Seventh Doctor because of Fenric, but more broadly because it is very easy to imagine the Seventh Doctor ‘pulling bones from the desert sands and carving them into chess pieces’. Because the Seventh Doctor is an Odinic figure. He is not afraid to use his allies without explaining their purpose in his plans (and this frequently leads him to be quite cruel to his companions), and he never does anything without purpose. Paul Cornell made the Odin connection even more explicit in Timewyrm: Revelation, with what amounts to a spiritual journey culminating in the image of the Doctor hanging from Yggdrasil.

And in a very similar way, the Second Doctor bears more than a passing resemblance to Loki, with his fickle smiles and air of mischievousness. He is the playful, whimsical side of the Eleventh Doctor, the impulsive one who isn’t afraid of getting into trouble without a plan already prepared.

Of course, others have discussed the Doctor as a magical figure before, and the show has even commented on it directly (“I hate stories about good wizards. They always turn out to be him.”). But the Second and Seventh Doctors are easily the “most” magical Doctors, with very overt occult references attributed to them in various media. And the Eleventh Doctor’s character is clearly inspired heavily by both of these previous incarnations. He’s even inherited the Second Doctor’s propensity for staring out of cameras and video screens.

Which, of course, brings us to the real topic of this week’s post. The revelation that not only makes the end of The Wedding of River Song make sense, but will change the way you look at Doctor Who and become the predominant theme of at least the next series of Doctor Who (at least, I hope it will). What is this massive reveal? It is this: The Doctor is fictional.

No, I’m serious. That’s a huge revelation. The Doctor, and the entire universe(s) in which he has adventures. All of his companions, and enemies, and acquaintances, are fictional.

What? You already knew that? Well, of course you did. The better question is: did the Doctor?

Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this. And I think the evidence is overwhelming. First: the Doctor is fictional. Diegetically, I mean. The evidence is pretty straightforward: the “oldest question in the universe, the question that has been hiding in plain sight”, is “Doctor who?”. The only way this makes sense is if, basically, the universe was created in 1963 by Sidney Newman. If the universe was crafted and fleshed out by Terrance Dicks and David Whitaker and Douglas Adams and Steven Moffat. If the universe follows the laws of narrative instead of the laws of physics. If the Sonic Screwdriver really is just an overly literal Plot Device. If the Doctor is literally the most important person in the universe.

There have been other clues as well. The biggest clue that this was becoming a plot element was in Closing Time, when the Doctor is talking about coincidence: “it’s what the universe does for fun”. As he says this, a coincidence that seems to be a bit much even for him is unfolding right in front of him. Swap ‘universe’ for ‘writers’ and you have a meta-narrative here.

And then there are the Silence. This episode made it clear that the Silence are aware of the narrative. At the very least, their leaders (the memory-proof Silence) are. They know they are fictional. The biggest indication of this is when they encounter Rory: they call him “Rory Williams, the man who dies and dies again”. By and large, Rory’s deaths have occurred in dreams, or in pocket universes, or in other places that the Silence shouldn’t be able to know anything about. The only way they could possibly know that Rory has ‘died’ repeatedly is if they are aware of the narrative – if they can watch the show.

And with that revelation, The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon can be viewed in a new light. I remarked at the time on the amazing narrative techniques that Moffat was employing, by showing us the Silence sometimes and omitting their presence other times. Knowing that the Silence are aware of the story, it becomes obvious that they have control over the narrative itself when they are present.

Of course, their control isn’t complete. In particular, the Doctor also seems to exert some control over the narrative: we can think of the show hiding the fact that the Doctor is in the Tesselector until the end of the episode as the Doctor actually trying to hide that fact from the Silence. So, the story then becomes one of the Doctor and the Silence playing an elaborate chess game using the narrative itself as the board. The Seventh Doctor would be jealous. Although actually, there’s precedent here – in one of the New Adventures novels, Conundrum, the Doctor is trapped in the Land of Fiction. The novel is framed so that the story is written by the Master of the Land of Fiction, and the Doctor actively wrests control of the narration away from him. So, this idea has been flirted with before.

Now, the Eleventh Doctor doesn’t seem entirely aware, or at least not entirely sure, that he is inside a Narrative universe instead of a Physical one. If anything, he suspects it is true – the Troughton-esque look into the camera in the last shot of this episode shows that he is aware of this on some level. Now, certainly there have been nods to the fourth wall before – again, in Conundrum, there’s a quip about the extradiegetic world – but it’s never been played as anything other than a cute throwaway. It has never, if I may use that forbidden word, felt canon before.

So, then, how does the Doctor control the narrative if he’s not aware of it? Well, that’s simple. He’s the protagonist. Obviously, the narrative has to bend around his will and his actions. He doesn’t need to be aware of that fact to take advantage of it. This explains why the ‘fixed point in time’ at Lake Silencio could be fooled by using a robotic copy of the Doctor – we’re not dealing with the laws of Physics, but the laws of Narrative. Appearance is everything.

A better question is this: are the Silence going to be fooled by the Doctor’s trick? If they are capable of viewing the narrative extradiegetically, then that means they know they have been tricked. They saw the same things we saw. It’s possible, though, that they stopped paying attention to the narrative once they thought the Doctor to be dead. Of course, that gives us a new question:

Why do the Silence want the Doctor dead?

If the Silence are meta-aware, and they know the question and its implications, why do they want to prevent the Doctor from asking it? One possibility is that they fear presenting the Doctor with proof of his diegetic nature will destroy the narrative, bring an end to Doctor Who, and thus an end to their existence. I’m certainly not the first person to mention the idea of narrative collapse in Doctor Who before. But wouldn’t killing the Doctor also result in the collapse of the narrative?

Not necessarily. It would provide an end to the narrative, but that does the opposite of collapse it – it solidifies it. Hamlet is not a story of narrative collapse, even though the protagonist dies at the end. No, the death of the protagonist solidifies the narrative. And even with a dead protagonist, we can continue to tell stories. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead demonstrates this well for the Hamlet example. The protagonist realizing his diegetic nature, on the other hand, poses a different problem. In the Doctor’s case, it could lead him to attempt to escape the diegesis and enter the extradiegetic (read: our) world. Certainly this is what happened in The Mind Robber – the Doctor escaped from the Land of Fiction, and in the process he destroyed it. And the result of this is that even if we try to create new stories, they risk feeling contrived – the suspension of disbelief has been shattered.

The Silence’s story, then, is The Mind Robber taken to a higher level of the narrative. Or, if you prefer, it is the same story told without the conceit of a metaphor: instead of the Land of Fiction to represent the Doctor’s fictional nature, this story uses the Doctor’s actual fictional nature itself.

To the fans, then, the Silence are arguably the heroes of the story – they want to preserve the universe in which they exist, and thus the universe from which we get Doctor Who stories. If the Silence fail, the narrative structure of Doctor Who, the ability to tell new Doctor Who stories, is threatened.

Silence must fall.

And he did. In fact, ‘pretty good’ is a very appropriate adjectival phrase for the episode. It wasn’t brilliant. It doesn’t risk dislodging The Lodger as Roberts’ best episode. But it was a fun, light-hearted romp involving Cybermen with some very interesting moments. I was particularly amused by the Doctor’s conversations with Stormageddon, and the return of the Cybermat.

But there’s not a whole lot more to say about the episode itself. Well, maybe a few things. What made The Lodger work so well was the way it thrust the Doctor into an ordinary life and watched his reaction to it; we see the Doctor trying to be (and thoroughly enjoying the idea of being) a regular bloke. He plays football, he has his own room in a flat, he interjects himself into the drama of Craig and Sophie. At times it feels like the Doctor has been dropped into the wrong show, and at other times it feels like he has fallen out of the Mediasphere altogether and landed in a day in someone’s life. And the Doctor in these situations creates a wonderful, postmodern story about a mythic figure interacting with the ordinary world, and which highlights the advantages and wonder that can be found in mundane life.

And Closing Time tries to replicate that feeling, with the Doctor emphasizing that he’s just there for a visit, and later with his getting a job at a department store. But it doesn’t pan out; I’m not certain if it is because his motives are too clearly otherwise, or simply because the tone of the story isn’t quite right, but the Doctor doesn’t feel convincingly a part of everyday life this time.

Aside from that, the pacing in this episode is interesting. At first it felt like the pacing was off – like the story was progressing too slowly. But by the end of the episode, I realized that the slow pacing was, if not intentional, then well-chosen; along with more classic-feeling Cybermen (see the Cybermat) we get a classic series sense of pacing condensed into 45 minutes. The result is quite enjoyable, and a nice bit of a breather after the intense episodes we’ve had so far since the series picked back up. It feels like the calm before the storm.

Speaking of the storm… it’s time for

The Wedding of River Song Speculation

I have to apologize to Night Terrors. I didn’t realize the creepy rhyme the dolls sing was actually tied into the overall arc, rather than shoehorned in as a last-minute arc connection. I definitely have to give the episode a bit more credit in retrospect for weaving that bit in.

So, let’s have a look at that rhyme. Kovarian has given us the end of the first stanza, so the dolls’ version goes something like this:

Tick tock goes the clock
And what now shall we play?
Tick tock goes the clock
Now summer’s gone away

Tick tock goes the clock
And what then shall we see?
Tick tock until the day
That thou shalt marry me

Tick tock goes the clock
And all the years they fly
Tick tock and all too soon
You and I must die

Tick tock goes the clock
We laughed at fate and mourned her
Tick tock goes the clock
Even for the Doctor

Tick tock goes the clock
He cradled her and he rocked her
Tick tock goes the clock
Even for the Doctor

The first stanza is a little vague, although it’s easy enough to see a metaphor between summer and youth – neither the Doctor nor River are particularly young any more. After that, though, the parallels to the Doctor and River are pretty straightforward. I wouldn’t normally do this line by line, but I’m in the mood to be thorough. So…

‘Thou shalt marry me’ is an obvious reference to the finale, given its title.
‘You and I must die’ – well, we know that River dies in the library, while the Doctor (presumably) dies at Lake Silencio in, well, the series opener and probably again in the finale.
‘We laughed at fate and mourned her’ again calls to mind Silence in the Library, where the Doctor laughs at fate by saving River’s life (sort of) while still mourning her. Although, it could be a foreshadowing instead (see my budding theory/observation further down)
‘He cradled and he rocked her’… well, we know about the cradle. And while I may have an especially dirty mind, I think that ‘he rocked her’ might be exactly what it (euphemistically) sounds like.

Now, Madame Kovarian’s version (plus the sing-song stanza added at the very end of Closing Time) gives us a bit more:

Tick tock goes the clock
And what then shall we play?
Tick tock goes the clock
Now summer’s gone away

Tick tock goes the clock
And all the years they fly
Tick tock and all too soon
Your love will surely die

Tick tock goes the clock
He cradled her and he rocked her
Tick tock goes the clock
‘Till River kills the Doctor

Which gives us the new lines ‘Your love will surely die’ and ’till River kills the Doctor’. Now, one thing that I find interesting about these rhymes is that none of them preclude the possibility of ‘the Doctor’ being River Song. In fact, at the end of Closing Time Madame Kovarian even makes a big deal of pointing out that ‘they made [River] a doctor today’. Now, practically speaking we know River doesn’t die in the next episode (because she dies in the Library), but it’s a fun theory because it very nearly fits the poem. And River could very well die and be revived, much like the Doctor seems to have done in Let’s Kill Hitler.

I don’t in any way expect this theory to pan out. Also, I appear to have been wrong about River killing Rory, which is a shame, because I liked the misdirection that would have been at play if it were true. Oh well.

Oh, and finally, the prequel for the Wedding of River Song gives us:

Doctor, brave and good
He turned away from violence
When he understood
the fooling of the Silence

This rhyme is interesting. The combination of the Doctor ‘turning away from violence’ and the Silence being fooled implies that the Silence are pawns in someone else’s game (Madame Kovarian is certainly a good contender). So, we’ll see where that leads; I really like the idea of the Doctor working *with* the Silence; that image is striking and appropriately mythic, somehow.

Oh, and one more note: even Kovarian’s recited legend can be made to fit my River-kills-herself theory:

By Silencio Lake, on the plain of size
An impossible astronaut will rise from the deep
And strike the Time Lord dead

Since River is somewhat analogous to a ‘Time Lord’, as per both the Doctor’s comments and our observations of River.

Still, this is all admittedly and intentionally far-fetched, and I don’t care to do a lot of actual prediction for The Wedding of River Song. I want this one to just surprise me, and to sit back and enjoy the ride. And from the trailer, it looks like it will be a fairly light-hearted action-filled ride instead of a dark, scary, tense story like the opener was.

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. They are often very difficult, but I managed to get this one in about an hour and a half (45 minutes for the crossword, 45 minutes for the meta).

A couple of notes on how I handle crosswords:

I use xword, and I use its timer feature, which pauses (and hides the puzzle) when you go to another window. As a result, I know how long I spend actively working on the puzzle, even if I’m multitasking while I’m working on it. For instance, I did this puzzle in 2 sessions over 2 days, and the total time I was nominally working on the crossword was an hour and a half. But only about half that time was spent actually working on the puzzle.

You could argue that my mind is still pretty engaged with the puzzle during the multitasking, though. So, if you prefer, I spent 1.5 hours in wall time on the puzzle, and 45 minutes of game clock time.

I also use Google, but only as a last resort; I prefer to use the other clues available to fill in unknowns. But when all else fails, I will google a clue that satisfies both of these conditions:

1. I know I will never guess the answer on my own.
2. The entry is in a position that will help me continue to solve without further googling.

I do occasionally refer to googling answers as ‘cheating’; I’m not denigrating anyone who solves their crosswords that way, it just feels to me like I’m cheating myself a little bit.

And on that note, this week’s MGWCC was brutal. I had to cheat 5 times, which is unusually high for this size puzzle (15×15). There was very little short fill, and lots of obscures references. The NE and SW corners were really hard to break into, and that’s where most of my cheats came from. At least there was almost nothing sports-related (I’m rubbish at those), though. And the clue “Palindromic play” with the answer RUR made me squee a little.

Other fun answers were OJIBWA, ANTARES, and SECRETES. SWE took me far longer than it should have, given that I know how crosswords and abbreviations work. I’m definitely out of practice. Also frustrating were the three entries all clued ‘Dot follower’, all 3-letter entries. Clearly DNS TLDs, but which ones? When I saw those length 3 entries, I was hopeful for some fill to help ground the rest of the puzzle, but those were literally impossible to solve without getting crossings on them first.

But other than that, this was a pretty straightforward 45-minute puzzle for me. Fun to solve, but on the difficult side of things. The meta, on the other hand, was a blast.

The meta clue (given in each week’s write up) is “a European capital I’ve never laid eyes on”. The puzzle title and the long entry BLINDCROSSING clued that this had to do with blindness. BRAILLE suggested trying to read the spaces as braille, but I couldn’t make that work (and I tried a lot of different rotations, encodings, and far-fetched interpretations of braille).

So, then I thought that the clue ISEEA could be involved. I found all the clues with the letters S, E, and E, and removed those letters (taking away the ‘SEE’ing). Those clues were:

ISEEA
SECRETES
DESSERT

which gave me:

IACRTESDERT

Which is an anagram for CREATES DIRT. But that is not a European city, as far as I know.

Then I spotted ‘HOMER’ as one of the answers. Homer (the Greek poet, who incidentally isn’t the person referenced by the clue) was supposedly blind. And Ray CHARLES and Stevie WONDER are in here too! Let’s find all the blind people:

John MILTON, Art TATUM, Louis BRAILLE (duh!), and SAMSON.

None of the clues reference the blind individual who shares the name; that would have made the meta too obvious. But the meaning of BLINDCROSSING is pretty obvious now, because of these 7 names, we have 3 pairs that cross. I think someone is missing. CHARLES doesn’t have a cross.

NEDLER and CHE cross CHARLES. NEDLER was a bit of a guess, so I go back and google this one (technically a 6th cheat, but I don’t usually count corrections during the meta. Metas are a different class of puzzle and googling doesn’t feel like cheating on them to me). Turns out the name should have been KELLER.

Taking just the 4 letters where these names cross, we have: MERO, or as it is more commonly known, ROME.

Well, that was a lot of fun! I may have to start doing one of these every week.

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.

But it’s also very clearly not his best work – there are moments where the pacing lags significantly, and the story feels disjointed at times, especially in the early episodes. The latter portions of the series have their own problems, with enormous plot holes opening up beneath the narrative in a way that really gives it problems. For instance, Mrs. Utterson’s motivations are never really clear, especially in light of Jackman’s mother’s assertion that ‘Hyde is love’. And Tom’s children being able to ‘swap’ is never really explored in a meaningful way; I’m not normally an advocate for Chekhovian minimalism, but that just feels sloppy. However, by that point the pacing has picked up enough to gloss over a lot of the plot holes, and with characteristic Moffat lines (‘Trust me, I’m a psychopath’ was especially brilliant) to distract us, the story manages to just barely hold itself together.

The ending, though, and by that I mean the final frame before the show cuts to black, was utterly terrifying. It was a clever subversion of what we expect in narrative; after we thought we were safe in the denouement, we’re given a sudden jolt of adrenaline right as we cut to black. It takes away the feeling of satisfaction and leaves the audience with a slightly disappointed feeling. And it seems to do this very intentionally; I’m reminded of the similar subversive techniques I talked about in The Girl Who Waited. In fact,

Oh dear, I’ve reviewed the wrong series again, haven’t I? Terribly sorry about that.

The God Complex has a very interesting relationship with fear.

I didn’t expect Jekyll to be scary. So I urged my wife to watch it with me. And when it turned scary, I had to apologize to her, because she really dislikes scary television, and will be jumpy (and nightmare-prone) for days after a scary scene. It’s why she doesn’t watch Doctor Who. And she asked me why anyone would want to watch things that are meant to scare them.

And the answer to that question parallels some of the elements in this story. Basically: we watch scary things because it lets us master them. Television and film let us take our fears, reduce them to two dimensions – to a medium where we know they cannot touch us – and then face them. So what we’re left with (those of us who like scary stories, anyway) is the adrenaline rush without the real terror, and a sense of elation and power. We can practice being brave without any real danger. And when we’re done, we can leave the scary stuff behind, safe in the Land of Fiction. And we can laugh at it, and joke about it, and reduce it thereby. (Of course, it’s never really gone. The Dark is always scary, and always real, and stories are just a lie we tell ourselves to feel better)

In The God Complex, we have a creature that takes the thing we’re most afraid of, and confronts us with it. But unlike most stories that start out with that premise, this creature doesn’t feed on our fear, it feeds on our faith, on the things we fall back on to make ourselves feel brave. It takes the very reason we watch scary stories and perverts it, and devours us. This is what makes the jagged transitions between the linear narrative and scenes of the victims laughing and screaming so effective.

This link to television is echoed in the repeated use of black-and-white camera feeds throughout the story. This feels very much like the Second Doctor, with his penchant for staring out of cameras and right at the viewer. The feeling is especially strong in the scene where the Doctor is talking to Rita.

On the subject of past Doctors, this is very much another Seventh Doctor story. And it’s easy to see it coming, but it’s still played very well. Specifically, the climax of this story bears an uncanny, unmissable resemblance to the climax of The Curse of Fenric. Except, as a friend pointed out to me, it is crucial to note that in Fenric, the Doctor didn’t believe the things he said to Ace. But he very clearly does believe every word he tells Amy. It is one of the most emotionally powerful scenes in Moffat’s Doctor Who to date. (Well, obviously “I stole your childhood and now I’ve led you by the hand to your death” isn’t true in the present tense (since his goal was to destroy Amy’s faith in him), but it does reflect the fear that leads him to stop travelling with Amy and Rory.)

So, it is a shame that it is marred by an obvious flaw. And that flaw is the phrase “Amy Williams”. I have no idea how that line of dialogue got out of the gate. I mean, it is clear what Whithouse is trying to say here: that it is time, basically, for Amy to grow up and stop having adventures with the Madman in a Box. It is meant to contrast with Amelia Pond, the little girl who wasted her childhood waiting for the Doctor.

But that’s not how it comes across, for a couple of reasons. First, the changing of surnames for women is culturally loaded. What we get instead is a paternal figure performing the ancient ritual of ‘giving away’ his daughter. It reeks of a transfer of possession, and objectifies Amy in a very direct way.

On a more significant, personal level, it is a reversal of an established story device that seems to have been unceremoniously dropped at some point in series 6. Amy’s role as a fairly dominant force in her relationship with Rory (in a way that very nearly has D/s overtones) is well established in series 5, and there are even references to Rory taking Amy’s name (so, Rory Pond, not Amy Williams). It is, in fact, the Doctor who establishes Rory as Rory Pond in the first place:

The Doctor: Amelia, from now on, I shall be leaving the… kissing duties to the brand new… Mr. Pond!
Rory: No! I’m not Mr. Pond. That’s not how it works.
The Doctor: Yeah it is.
Rory: … Yeah, it is.

This is further referenced in the Christmas Special, with the Doctor’s missive ‘Come Along Ponds’. But, at some point, Rory started being Rory Williams again. I suspect this might be related to Amy becoming pregnant/captured/a mother, in which case it is doubly troubling, because it echoes a cultural narrative that tells us that motherhood is the defining line where women have to ‘grow up and settle down’, which is equated in this narrative to ‘stop being assertive’.

So, here the Doctor seems to invert an observation he himself made about Amy. I think the intent may have been to demonstrate that he is trying to undo (some of) the changes he made in her life, but it comes across as a statement that she should be less assertive. And why not? That’s what we expect of women who have grown up, after all.

In short, they really missed the mark they were trying to hit with that line, and subverted an established aspect of Amy’s role as a strong female character.

And while we’re talking about criticisms, at first I felt that the character development from The Girl Who Waited was completely dropped. It felt like everything from that episode was suddenly water under the bridge for the three companions. There are a couple of points where this is not true: certainly the Doctor’s anguish about not wanting to kill his companions was influenced by the death of old Amy. And, and a friend pointed out to me, Rory’s use of the past tense when talking about travelling with the Doctor makes it clear that he is done with the Doctor and is just waiting for Amy to agree. But Amy, whose ‘Where is she?’ was the last thing we heard in the previous episode, seems to be relatively unaffected by those events. It’s an unfortunate tonal mismatch with the previous episode, given how well this episode works otherwise.

And the episode really does work. The visual storytelling here is fantastic, playing with techniques that aren’t seen much (if at all) in Doctor Who. We have the psychological scenes that break from the narrative to cut-up clips of text and disjointed images of the victims. There’s the use of cameras and camera feeds to structure the narrative and emphasize the nature of the danger. Throughout the episode we get a distinct downplaying of the monsters in the rooms and even the Minotaur; instead, the fear is purely psychological, with the lingering shots focusing on the victims as they are driven mad. Whithouse really knows how to write a Doctor Who script, and Moffat’s production team is doing unparalleled work here.

Praise Them.

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. She owns every major expansion that’s been released, as well as The Sims Medieval and its expansion.

So when her Sims 3 update failed halfway through, leaving the game in an unlaunchable state, she was understandably distressed. The game plus all of its expansions requires a lot of effort to reinstall; we’d be looking at several hours of installing, with user prompts spaced just far enough apart to make doing anything else impractical.

So, we researched the issue and discovered that the EA Download Manager needed to be updated before The Sims 3 could be updated. Now, EA doesn’t make it terribly clear that the Download Manager is a separate application; it is usually launched from The Sims launcher, and is skinned to look like any other menu in The Sims when this is done. So, we found and updated the EA Download Manager.

And it turned into EA Origin.

Again, nothing told us this was going to happen, it just popped up an EA Origin installer, without telling us what Origin was, why we needed it, or why it started installing it when we were trying to update EA Download Manager.

Some further googling revealed that EA Origin is the new replacement for the Download Manager, and that it (gods help us) is “our new digital playground”. Apparently it is EA’s attempt at Yet Another Online Distribution System. With social features! Look, EA, I hate to break it to you, but Valve already one that battle conclusively. We need another Games For Windows Live about as much as we need arsenic.

The fact that nothing told us, at any point during this process, what EA Origin was or why it was being installed is a huge oversight. The user shouldn’t have to use Google to figure out what the product you’re giving them is. This is a terribly sloppy user experience.

But it’s still not insurmountable. So, rolling our eyes, we proceed to install it, and then we go back and launch The Sims 3.

It launches EA Origin instead.

Why has this happened? Perhaps Origin serves as the new launcher? Okay, that’s fine – another crappy application sitting in the system tray, but we can at least live with this. Let’s just launch The Sims 3 through Origin.

What’s worse, EA Origin wants us to create a profile before it will let us do anything. This is obnoxious – yesterday, The Sims 3 would just launch and let us be happy. Plus, we already have a login on The Sims website, which is where you go to purchase downloadable content for the game. So this is Yet Another Login to Remember, and that’s annoying. With absolutely no warning, EA has added a ton of requirements that prevent us from playing a game that has worked fine on its own. Still, whatever. Let’s make this profile, get this over with.

Now we can just launch The Sims 3 from here, right?

Click. Click. Nothing happens.

Did we do something wrong? Is our profile not acceptable? Is EA just not that into us any more? We close origin, launch it again, try The Sims again. Still nothing. After a few more minutes of troubleshooting, we give it the old Windows solution – we reboot the machine.

When we get back to Windows and launch The Sims again, it launches perfectly, without seeming to care about EA Origin. It’s like nothing ever happened, and everything works just fine. The old Download Manager interface is even still there, and allows us to update the system. Apparently it just wanted Origin for authentication, or something?

But even though this story has a happy ending, there are still troubling implications here. EA did a very poor job of informing the user about what was happening here, leaving us to guess and google and hope that things would end up working. This was a very stress-inducing experience, which is not what you want when you sit down to play a game.

Also, the fact that they retroactively tied a single-player game into an online distribution platform seems both unnecessary and potentially problematic. When we bought the game, we did not do so with the understanding that an Internet connection was necessary for authentication or activation, for instance. We didn’t agree to have the game tied in to an account that may prevent us from updating if it is ever suspended or deleted for some reason (and these things happen; no system is free of errors). While we don’t have any reason to suspect that the game would become *unplayable* in the absence of Origin, this is still troubling.

In a post like this, I would, at this point, customarily make a plea to the company in question to be better, to stop disappointing its users, to be more transparent and try to foster trust. But I’m not going to bother. Because EA has proven themselves time and again to be unwilling to hear those pleas. Instead, I’m going to close with a question.

EA, what happened to you?

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.

And I felt justified in this impression. After all, Tom MacRae’s previous effort for Doctor Who was The Rise of the Age of Steel Cybermen, a disappointing romp to a parallel universe that re-introduced the Cybermen to New Who. This didn’t bode well for a story in which the central premise appeared to be ‘Amy needs to be rescued’.

But, look… Mr. MacRae, I’m sorry I doubted you. I’m sorry I judged you on Rise of the Cybermen. Because you most certainly can write a good episode of Doctor Who.

This episode is good. On a lot of levels. The dialogue is unrelentingly dark, tense, urgent; the only comedy we get is in the first act. After that it is a downright brutal story. Because MacRae took a story that looked like (and could have been) “Amy needs to be rescued” and he turned it into “Amy doesn’t get rescued”. The result is what feels, to me, like an attempt at a Feminist critique of the Damsel in Distress story. And it does a pretty good job.

So, Amy doesn’t get rescued. Instead, she spends 36 years stuck in a Tower, not being rescued. And this Tower has an endless supply of faceless robots that want to kill her. So she does the only thing that anyone who could survive for 36 years alone in a Tower of Death could do: she gets tough. She may still be trapped, but she saves herself.

And the Amy we get to see here gives us a lot to admire. She can fight, she can hack (I’m using that term very charitably here. After all, computers are bound to be a bit wibbly-wobbly in Doctor Who), build a sonic probe, and she seems to be a genuinely strong female character. The fact that she is filled with bitterness and hatred towards Rory and the Doctor comes across as a realistic consequence of spending three decades in isolation. The venom with which Karen Gillan utters the phrase ‘Raggedy Man’ really sells Amy’s hatred of the doctor, and her later conversation with him really illustrates her character:

And there he is, the voice of God. Survive, ’cause no one’s gonna come for you. You taught me that… Don’t you lecture me, Blue Box man flying through time and space on a whimsy. All I’ve got, all I’ve had for thirty-six years, is cold, hard reality.

Then we have Rory’s reactions. The narrative makes it clear that he is torn between the young and old Amys. The line “Leave her and take you?” is voiced with outright contempt, but shortly after that, he appears more sympathetic, and by the end of the episode is heartbroken at the prospect of leaving her behind.

But, crucially, he does leave her behind. And this brings us to the Feminist overtones that this episode takes on. A core message that you can extrapolate from this story is this: If you trust men, they will lie to you and betray you. Especially if there’s a younger, prettier option nearby. They may feel bad about doing it, they may have so many justifications they’ve sold themselves, but in the end, they betray you. The men here don’t just fail to save Amy, they actively refuse. And why? Why does Rory choose young Amy? Because an Amy with decades of resentment and anger is less compatible with him. Because it isn’t his Amy. The implication is clear: a woman’s personhood is worth less than a woman’s utility to her man.

Another thing to consider is why it is Rory’s choice in the first place. The Doctor emphasizes that Rory has the choice. He could choose his young, perky, conventionally pretty wife, or his old, disillusioned, angry, bitter wife. And the Amys have no agency in the decision. This is Rory’s choice, because it’s Rory’s wife we’re talking about. Despite all the talk of Amy Pond as a fierce, independent, and wilful character, here she is conveniently scripted out so that the men in her life can decide which version of her gets to be saved.

The thing is, the story manages to pull all of this off. Yes, this has strongly sexist underpinnings in a way that makes all the other Feminist complaints about Moffat’s Who seem to pale in comparison. But MacRae doesn’t shy away from them. Rory knows he’s being a selfish ass. Darvill delivers a superb performance here, and Amy’s final line in the episode (and the way we cut away from it abruptly) underlines it. We are not supposed to feel like Rory and the Doctor are the good guys here. This is a bold statement, and it is complex and morally ambiguous storytelling in a way we haven’t really seen in Doctor Who since Sylvester McCoy.

And speaking of Sylvester McCoy, well. This whole episode has a very strong Seventh Doctor underpinning, the same way The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People was a modern Second Doctor story. Matt Smith is playing a much darker, harder Doctor here. I was reminded of this line in the New Adventures novel Conundrum:

“But that’s the whole point, though, isn’t it?” said Ace. “To the Doctor, it did mean nothing. Just another of his games, another upset in the universe to be dealt with and then chucked.”

That quote summarizes the Seventh Doctor better than any description I could possibly muster. Notably, that isn’t the totality of the Doctor, but it is an accurate description of his practical relation to, and effect on, other people.

And here, Eleven acts in much the same way. Rory’s accusatory “You’re turning me into you” validates this reading; in the same novel, Ace explains that the reason she stays with the Doctor is that she’s gotten a taste for the same manipulative games the Doctor plays.

In this story, there is notably an entire scene that happens off-screen: when old Amy has the glasses, she has a conversation with the Doctor (in which she cries) that we are not privy to. I suspect this is the tie-in to the ongoing story arc for this episode: the Doctor tells old Amy something, and I suspect it is about the events prior to the tuxedo scene in Let’s Kill Hitler. Whatever it is, it makes her cry, and I have a suspicion that it is the thing that convinces her to accept death at the end of the episode.

Because that’s the one strange beat to this episode; old Amy eventually accepting her betrayal seems outright unlikely to me. So either that’s a weak character beat, or she has learned something about young Amy’s (potential) future that makes her change her mind. I’m hoping for the latter, because it will make this story feel that much stronger once the ongoing arc plays out. And there are no other ongoing arc references in this story, which was good after the heavy-handed, tacked-on reference at the end of the previous episode.

So, in the final analysis, I think this story is good on every level. The things I haven’t talked about – pacing, dialogue, camerawork – have only been omitted because they all functioned well for the story. There’s nothing there to criticize. There’s actually quite a bit to praise, especially regarding the cinematography and visual aesthetics in this episode, but this review is already feeling a bit hefty, so I’ll leave off here. See you next week!

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.

The Escapist (well, Themis Media) is a company. Companies exist to make money. Basic economics. Themis media makes money by selling advertisements; the more advertisements they can get to viewers, the more their advertisements will be worth to advertisers, the more advertisements they can sell, and the more money they make. Again, nothing ground-breaking here, just basic mathematics.

There are two basic ways to get these ads to the eyes of more viewers (and thus up their potential value, increasing profits): show more or larger ads per page, or attract more viewers (to create more page views). As a company that wants to Maximize Profits™, ideally they want to do a whole lot of both of these things.

The problem is that these two goals are counter to each other. The more (or more obvious) ads you display, the more people will start to say ‘too many ads, see you later’. Like I did in my previous post on the subject. The trick, and the thing that most websites eventually figure out, is that there is an equilibrium – a quantity and size of advertisements that will not produce a significant hit on the number of viewers you attract.

Now, the way to actually attract more viewers is to have content that people want to view. And the Escapist has been damn good at this. They have a great deal of very good content, much of which is very popular. They have attracted a lot of grade A talent to work for them. And that may be the problem – they’ve got such good content, their equilibrium point has tipped so far that they can pull off obnoxious full-screen ads without driving away a significant number of users.

However, at some point, the volume of ads you display becomes anti-consumer. There’s a point where you are failing your customers, where suggesting that what you are asking is a ‘reasonable price to pay’ for the content is farcical. Many modern magazines have fallen prey to this: I flipped through a fashion magazine recently, for instance, and counted 12 pages of ads before reaching the table of contents. That’s patently absurd, and what it shows is that the company that produces the product cares more about money than they do about the consumer’s experience.

But all of that was an overly long prelude to what I really want to talk about: Themis is now being accused of being anti-creator as well. Extra Credits, one of the Escapist’s video features, has left the Escapist, with some very troubling accusations about Themis’ payment practices. Basically, the Extra Credits crew says they haven’t been paid for a long time, and that Themis is claiming that Extra Credits owes *them* money from a fund raiser that they ran to keep the show alive (and to finance surgery for their artist).

Now, in fairness, Themis has some counter-claims, which are enumerated at the second link above. However, given Themis’ anti-consumer ad practices, I don’t have much difficulty believing that they might be willing to cheat their creative people as well. Of course, this doesn’t constitute proof of wrongdoing on their part, but it is certainly useful to observe that they already have a pattern of preferring money to delivering a good experience.

Of course, the upshot of all this, for us consumers, is that Extra Credits is no longer encumbered by the horrible pit of a website that is The Escapist. So I watched the most recent episode. Based on this one episode, it seems like a pretty good show: smart and engaging, with enough humour scattered throughout to keep it from feeling dry. They point out a lot of things that may be obvious to (some) people in the industry, but that many individual gamers are unlikely to have ever had reason to consider.

I’ll probably watch it regularly now that I don’t have to risk a stress headache just to watch it.

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. Although, to be fair, a Dalek asking “WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?” might be one of the greatest single moments in Doctor Who history, and if Victory of the Daleks was conceived around that image, then I forgive it for everything else.

Looking at his track record, I get the impression that Gatiss is at his best when he tries to write creepy stories. The problem is that, with Night Terrors, he is trying to write a creepy story. But try as it might, this story absolutely fails to be creepy. The wooden dolls just aren’t compellingly scary, and the dollhouse doesn’t have the atmosphere of ‘creepy haunted house’ that it needs to make them so. The only time the dolls are ever creepy is the first time we see one – that is, when it is inanimate and standing alone in a closet. The monster is less scary when we can look it in the face, and the longer we hear creepy noises and get suggestions of scary things, the more suspense and tension is built. Here, though, Gatiss fails to build suspense for the monster, so its reveal feels about as frightening as the Slitheen in Aliens of London. Even the build-up to the Silurian reveal in The Hungry Earth was creepier than this episode.

With scary out the window, let’s look at the rest of the episode. This is the first episode since The Doctor’s Wife that isn’t heavily invested in the story arc (even if we didn’t know how tied to the story The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People was, in retrospect we have to count them as fundamentally ‘part of the ongoing arc’ episodes), so I had high hopes for a nice, self-contained, Doctor-to-the-rescue story.

And the opening let me keep hoping. Gatiss writes the Doctor brilliantly. The sequence in which the Doctor and company wander about the tenement has some fantastic dialogue. And every scene with the Doctor interacting with George and Alex is brilliant as well.

But these scenes are interspersed with the dollhouse. And the way the dollhouse is used destroys the pacing and tension of the episode. At the end of the episode, it felt like not very much had happened, and what had happened was inconsequential. The big runaround gets resolved, essentially, by actors coming on stage at the last minute. It’s trying to be a clever twist, but it ends up being an anticlimax.

And the story arc tie-in at the end felt a bit weak, too. I mean, we get some creepy child-like singing that is, presumably, supposed to evoke the monsters that were just defeated. But even if we set aside the fact that they are, y’know, defeated, they have absolutely no apparent reason to know or care about the Doctor’s death. They’re figments of an alien child’s imagination. It felt like that was added just for the sake of having some reminder of the overall story arc. Whether that was added by Moffat or Gatiss, it is a weak bit of storytelling.

One thing it does do is tell us that the storyline surrounding the Doctor’s death will probably be dealt with in series 6, and not carried over to series 7. At least, assuming Moffat is following the contemporary format of series-spanning story arcs; dropping repeated hints about the same plot element almost always means that element will be dealt with in the series finale. Unless, of course, the series finale ends on a cliffhanger. But Doctor Who is uniquely ill-suited to the Dallas-style inter-series cliffhanger, because the Christmas Specials interrupt the dramatic tension period.

There is one other thing I do want to praise about the episode, though: George has a dollhouse, and no one thinks this is odd, or makes disparaging remarks about it. That struck me as a nice nod to gender-neutral parenting.

Next week, we have The Girl Who Waited, which I will admit now I’m not looking forward to, given that the plot appears to be ‘Amy is captured and’. After A Good Man Goes To War, I had really hoped we would be able to stop putting the girl in the fridge quite so often. But it looks like the writers still can’t seem to work that out of their system, so here we go again…

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. Otherwise, read on! It’s sure to be fun…

Review

I’ll lead with the most obvious point: this episode was good. Really good. But that’s just what I’ve come to expect from Moffat, so let’s talk about what makes this episode really shine: Moffat repeatedly uses juxtaposition and playing with the audience’s expectations in order to heighten the emotional impact of the story.

There is some really impressive cinematography here. My favourite is that the recap is actively used to set the tone. We start the episode with a pretty intense recap, and then drop into the first shot: a dramatic, colourful, and completely still row of wheat. It flips from reminding you how exciting the show can be to giving you an image that, while visually striking, is also very sedate. It’s effective – it gives the viewer an adrenaline rush, then asks them to reconcile that with wheat. It makes the wheat somehow exciting, all on its own. It takes the image from striking and cranks it up to breathtaking. But we can’t get away from that for long, so we switch to high-speed crop circle off-roading, so the excitement stays in place.

Another trick Moffat uses is turning the episode into a completely different story halfway through. They build this framework: a fun-loving early River incarnation wants to take the TARDIS on a past-wrecking joy ride. Even if you spot that Mels is River, it looks like the rest of the episode is going to involve the Doctor dealing with Mels, and the robot filled with tiny people, and trying not to change the past too much. Instead, the show turns into River Song (the one we know and love) actively trying to kill the Doctor. And succeeding. What starts out feeling like a fun-filled romp of an episode becomes very heavy, and dramatic, and suspenseful. It’s brilliant, and the emotions are, again, heightened by using the audience’s expectations against them.

One more interesting technique: Mels’ introduction. Here we have a new character that Amy and Rory have known all their lives, tossed into the story mid-stream. This is a very interesting sudden interjection, and it feels jarring. As a bit of backstory, it is perfectly reasonable; after all, there are plenty of good friends in my past that don’t really come up in conversation, and I imagine this would be more true if my conversations tended to revolve around temporal paradoxes and saving the world from Daleks. But still, from the viewer’s perspective this seems to come out of nowhere, and I suspect that’s intentional; it has the effect of unbalancing the viewer, giving you a vague sense that something is just slightly out of place, which pays off when Mels is revealed to be Melody.

Reveals / Plot Analysis

So, let’s talk about the reveals, and what they could mean in terms of the ongoing story. First, the Timehead (i.e., the little girl in the spacesuit) is River Song. That’s pretty clearly established at this point: Mels stated that her previous regeneration had been in an alleyway in New York, and had involved becoming a toddler. This lets us establish a loose chronology of events for the life of River Song, which I’ll elaborate on in a bit.

Another thing is the sudden introduction of Mels – as I mentioned above, this seems to be a narrative technique to off-balance us as viewers. However, it could also (simultaneously) be a hint that someone is Meddling with Time*.

On the subject of The Eventual Untimely Death of Rory Williams, this episode gives us another misdirection, “I’m looking for a good man”. I still think that Rory is doomed, however, and my newest bit of evidence is from outside the show itself: the title of the series finale has been announced, and it is “The Wedding of River Song”. Recall that in Flesh and Stone, River said that she killed “A good man, the best man I’ve ever known”. If Rory ends up being best man at River’s wedding (after all, Rory isn’t just her father, he’s also a dear friend she’s known for years. They grew up together!), well, wouldn’t that be interesting?**

Also, we have some very interesting unanswered questions at this point, both new and old. A few that occur to me, and some possible thoughts on them:

• The most obvious one: What is the question (that will cause silence to fall)? The first thing that popped into my head here was The Question, i.e. “Will you Marry Me?” (or, alternately, “Do you take this man…”). Just like the above theory, it’s a little far-fetched, perhaps. But it would fit interestingly with the wedding theme we’ve had throughout Moffat’s run. I mean, he used “Something old, Something new” as a crucial plot element, so I think it’s a fair possibility here.
• What is the relationship between the Silence (that is, the creepy faceless aliens) and Kovarian’s alliance? They seem to be working toward the same goal, and it’s easy to assume the Silence (the organization as opposed to the species, unless they are more tightly coupled than we know, a la the Headless Monks) are manipulating Kovarian, but does she know that? Is she working with them intentionally?
• Why did the Silence kidnap FleshAmy in Day of the Moon? I would have plenty of good theories if it had been the real Amy, but they presumably knew that the Amy they kidnapped was flesh, so why do it? What did they stand to gain from that?
• Who was in the spacesuit on the beach? It seems less and less sensible that it should be River. Everyone believes the Doctor dies on that beach. It’s even a fixed point in time according to the tiny men inside the time-travelling robot. However, Mels clearly thinks she still needs to kill the Doctor – surely she would remember doing it on the beach, and assume his death was inevitable, right? So why does she try to kill him in Let’s Kill Hitler? Is that an adult River, her kill-the-Doctor programming becoming impossible to resist? Or is it someone else entirely?
• How long does it take Alex Kingston to get her hair looking that fantastic? I’m cursed with the unmanageable nightmare that is curly hair, and I really wish I could make it look half that good.

Timeline of a Timehead

There’s decent evidence that River only regenerates twice, i.e. has three incarnations. The evidence is as follows: We can surmise that the little girl in the spacesuit is Melody (the first body of River Song), because, well, she seems really childish. She is clearly very scared and confused; she doesn’t seem to be any older than she actually appears here. I’m taking this as evidence that this is her first incarnation. We know that incarnation turns into Mels, because of the line “last time I did this, I ended up a toddler in the middle of New York”. And, well, in Let’s Kill Hitler she regenerates into the River we know and love, and we know that is her last incarnation, because we’ve seen her die.

So, with that evidence in hand, here’s an outline of the Timehead’s life in chronological order. There may easily be gaps where all sorts of interesting and story-relevant things happen in between many of these points, and some of the ordering and events are admittedly speculative:

1. Melody Pond is born on Demon’s Run.
2. Madame Kovarian secrets Melody away to an unknown location.
3. Melody comes to live in Graystark Hall Orphanage, which is infested with Silence.
4. Melody is put into a spacesuit in which she may or may not kill the Doctor. She definitely has the encounter in the warehouse though.
5. Melody sneaks away from the orphanage, going to New York (somehow) at this point.
6. Melody regenerates into Mels, possibly as the result of a bullet wound inflicted by Amy.
7. Mels comes to live near Amy and Rory, grows up with them, gets into lots trouble, and is obsessed with the Doctor.
8. Mels meets the Doctor, and the events of Let’s Kill Hitler occur. She regenerates into River, and gives the Doctor the rest of her life essence.
9. River becomes a doctor of archaeology.
10. River and the Doctor get married.
11. River Song kills her father, Rory Williams.
12. River is imprisoned at the Stormcage Containment Facility.
13. At the end of the battle of Demon’s Run, River shows up and reveals her identity to the Doctor, Rory, and Amy.
14. The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon.
15. The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang.
16. The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone.
17. The Doctor takes River to the Singing Towers of of Darillium, gives her the sonic screwdriver.
18. River Song dies on the library planet.

If anyone sees any obvious, provable errors, please let me know, and I’ll edit the post!

* note that I am not claiming The Monk is involved in this story arc. It simply amused me to link to that story when using that phrase.

** This theory is somewhat tongue-in-cheek; as evidence goes, I realize it’s pretty weak. But that quote came back to me when I read the title of the final episode, and I couldn’t help but speculate.

But, at any rate, I’ve checked every function call I make against the ones used in the tutorial. They all match. Everything is exactly the sa…

Oh. Wait.

One of the things you create when using shaders is an index buffer (also called an element buffer); a list of what order the vertices of your polygon should be drawn in. From the tutorial:

static const GLushort g_element_buffer_data[] = { 0, 1, 2, 3 };

And the equivalent line from my code:

GLfloat Renderer::rect_elements[] = {0, 1, 2, 3};

I got so used to things being GLfloat type that I made my index buffer floats, even though that doesn’t make any sense (you can’t have vertex number 0.5, after all). Not only does it not make sense, OpenGL requires that the element buffer be composed of integers. Even better, if your element buffer is of the wrong type, OpenGL fails silently: no error message, no crash. The rendering simply doesn’t happen.

So, a couple hours of debugging, down to one simple line of code. I really wish GLSL had a way to report meaningful errors back to the program using it. At any rate, after I fix the line:

I’m back to where I was several days ago. But this time, I’m using shaders, which are both less deprecated and more flexible; I’ve set up a framework that will allow me to do more interesting things later on.

Now, on to the next challenge: rendering text. In SDL this was fairly easy; the SDL_ttf library made it pretty simple to render text to the screen. In OpenGL, however, rendering text is a bit trickier. There are a few libraries out there that do it (FTGL seemingly the best option), but they all use the fixed-pipeline functions. I’d even be willing to settle for that, and worry about ripping the code out later and putting in something more shader-friendly, except switching back and forth between Shaders and the fixed pipeline seems to be a bit tricky.

So, my options are:

1. Figure out how to switch ‘out’ of the Shading pipeline properly and render text with FTGL, or
2. Use freetype2 directly and implement my own font loading, render the text to a Framebuffer Object, then blit that to the backbuffer (the buffer that represents the next visual frame).

The first option might be easier in the short term, but the latter sounds more robust, all things considered. The problem is that stopping to get font rendering working without any deprecated functions could take quite a while (I’m not even sure on a good estimate for the time). So, I hack FTGL into working and move on.

Now, I’m ready to get things back to the way they looked before I decided GLSL was something that needed to happen. I just need to figure out the best way to draw a circle with GLSL…

So, in the tradition of Solving Really Hard Puzzles, I’ve decided to post logs of some of my puzzling efforts here. These may only be of interest to a very few people; feel free to ignore them if this is not up your alley.

Today’s puzzle is one that Dante Shepherd posted on twitter in this tweet. Puzzles that are simply an encoded string of characters always intrigue me, so I dived right in. It took me about half an hour to solve, and it was a lot of fun. I created a log of the process by simply periodically noting the time and writing down my thoughts, especially when I got somewhere new, such as the aha moment at 15:00. In the future, I may look for (or create) some software that will make logging a bit easier.

Also, here is the original puzzle, for the link-averse:

L 45, R 270 L 225, R 270 L 225, R 180, L 90, R 270 L 225, R 270 L 90, R 225 L 90, R 270 L 225, R 225 L 135.

Spoiler Warning: if you want to solve this puzzle yourself, don’t read my log. It contains spoilers for the intuitive leaps as well as the solution.

14:45
Okay, puzzle is gridded. What do we have here? These are obviously rotations; L and R for ‘left’ and ‘right’, and the numbers are all < 360.

14:50
Oh, they’re all multiples of 45 degrees. So, they’re all nice, even angles, and they are paired off.

15:00
Aha! It’s Semaphore. For the two that are missing part of the pair, I’m assuming the angle is 0. Let me just look up a semaphore chart…

15:01
Oh crap. Is 0 at the top or bottom? Is L the sender’s left or the receiver’s left? Now I have to work out the coordinate system Dante used. At least we know that the low numbers map to the L side, and the high numbers map to the R side.

15:10
Tried 3 coordinate systems – 0 at top with L == left arm, 0 at top with L == viewer’s left, and 0 == right, coordinates going counter-clockwise (trig coordinates). All that’s left for reasonable systems is 0 on the bottom.

15:13
And solved. The solution is GOODFORYOU. It was the last coordinate system I tried, of course – moved 0 to the bottom, but got L and R backwards the first try.