Doctor Who Series 11

So, with this season of Doctor Who over and done with, I thought I'd write out what I thought of it.  First of all, I thought Jodie Whittaker did a pretty good job as the Doctor.  She played it a lot like David Tennant's 10th Doctor, just a little more scatter-brained.  David Tennant was my favorite of the new Doctors, and Jodie Whittaker is a close second for me.  I also like how they handled the Doctor being a woman.  She wasn't constantly commenting on it, she only really said anything when she was faced with something sexist that brought her up short.

The writing, for the most part, was a hell of a lot better than anything out of the Moffat years.  The worst of Chibnall's first season was better than the best Moffat ever achieved.  Mostly, because Chibnall knows how to structure a story, where Moffat doesn't know the first thing about it. 

Most of the episodes were a little mediocre.  They would start out good, and then they'd just get a little dumb once the villain was revealed, and kind of grating when it came time for the moral of the story.  There were some extremely good eiposdes in there,  The Demons of Punjab was probably my favorite, with Witchfinder being second.  But, overall the season was more mediocre than good.  But, again, Chibnall's mediocre is lightyears better than Moffat's best.

Previous show runners on the new series have limited historical episodes to one per season.  Which has been more than fine with me, because the historical episodes were some of the worst episodes of the season.  There were three in this season, and two of them were my two favorite episodes of the season.  The third was the aboslute worst of the season.  Not because it was really all that bad, but, more because it was extraordinarily lazy.  It was the laziest episode of the entire season.  That would be Rosa.  Look, Rosa Parks is an American hero.  She deserves a better tribute than a  terrible Doctor Who episode.  It was like the writers were all together, brainstorming ideas, and someone said, hey, let's do Rosa Parks.  Everyone said, yeah, that's great.  And that was all the thought an effort that went into it.  The thing is, though, that Chibnall was EXTREMELY proud of this episode.  In every interview he gave, this was the episode he brought up.  And it was just awful.  It was boring.  It was badly written.  It wasn't exactly all that historically accurate.  And, kind of worst of all, is that Rosa Parks only succeeded in taking her stand, because of the efforts of a white woman. 

Another problem that this season had, was that it wanted to have a message.  The problem was that the messages were usually extremely heavy handed, and they weren't very well incorporated into the stories.  What you basically got was a five minute or so stretch in almost every episode where the canst would pretty much look at the camera and say, and this is today's moral of the story... GET IT!?!?!?!  It's really kind of distracting, and it makes episodes that would, otherwise, have been decent, possibly good, kind of not all that great.  I have no problem whatsoever with social justice messages.  What I have a problem with is when the entire story grinds to a screeching halt so that we can address the moral of the story.  It should be integrated into the story in such a way that it's not popping out in your face.  The characters shouldn't take time out of the story to tell you , hey, look, this is the moral or the story.  It should be woven seamlessly into the story, and it just wasn't.

So, all in all, it was an okay season.  It's the best season since Russell T. Davies left by a very long shot, but it did have it's problems.  While a few of the episodes were excellent, most of them were just sort of mediocre and okay.  If I could give Chibnall one piece of advice for the next season, it would be to tone down the social justice a notch or two, and better integrate it into the story.  It's really jarring when all action and forward motion in the story comes to a halt so that we can discuss the moral of the story.  It needs to be better woven in than that.  I get that it was kind of his schtick when it took over, but there's for more compentent ways to do it than the way it was done here.  It was an okay season, with a great new Doctor, some very good new companions, but it really needed some work on the writing.

NaNo day 20

Woohooo!!!  I hit 50k.  Now the rest of this moth can be a stressful miserable horror without the added bonus of feeling like I have to spend every waking moment home from work writing.  I'm a little over 95k words on the first draft of Shadows of What Might Have Been.  I'm somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the way done.   I'm expecting the full first draft to end up around 130k words at the moment, unless something drastic changes and I need to add more in.  BUT with my day job, and the Christmas season, it's probably going to have to wait until after the new year to get finished up.  We're more shorthanded than we ever have been in all the 15 years I've worked for the Post Office this Christmas, so it's looking like a heck of a lot of really, really long, gruelling hours and little time else to do anything but eat and sleep.  So yay for that.

NaNo day 13.

13 days in and I just hit 30k.  It's my day off, so I haven't seen the horrors which work has in store for me this Christmas season yet, but if past years are anything to go by, it's going to be ugly.  I think my supervisor tried to call me in to work today, but I wasn't about to answer.  The day after Veteran's Day is the absolute worst day for mail out of the whole year, and there's no way I'm giving up my day off to work it.  I like my job, but I don't like it that much.  Just 20k left to go, and 17 days left in the month.  I only need about 1100 words a day to finish.  Hopefully I'll be able to find the time between work and everything else to get at least that much done for the rest of the month.

NaNo day 9

9 days in and I just passed 21k.  I'm doing ok.  Work has been better these last few days since the election, but, unfortuantely, the Christmas season officially starts at Veteran's Day for the Post Office.  So I don't expect to have a whole lot of time to write after that.  That's why I usually try to power through the whole 50k before the day after Veteran's Day, but that's not looking like it's going to happen this year with my slow start.  We'll see if I'm able to pull through.  I'm ahead of schedule.  I only need about 1300 words a day to finish by the 30th, which seems doable, but Christmas seems like it gets worse every year as more and more people do their shopping online, so, we'll see.

NaNo Day 4

Uhg, I'm usually so much faster than this during NaNo, but work is just wearing me out this year with all of the extra election mail.  It's literally adding 2-3 hours to my every day of work.  It's freaking horrible.  I did still hit 10k today, which isn't bad for a 4 day total.  I'm still averaging about 2500 words a day so far, which is well above the 1667 NaNo daily goal.  So, yay, I guess.  Hopefully I'll be able to get a lot more done a lot faster once the election is over.

NaNo Day 2: The slightly further along than day 1ening

So NaNo is happening, and I'm working on Shadows of What Might Have Been, book 2 to Memories of What Never Was.  Thanks to next week's election I've been completely buried at work this week, and haven't been able to get home with much time to spend writing.  Hopefully that will change after Tuesday next week.  But I am still overachieving a bit by NaNo standards.  You're supposed to get at least 1667 words per day to hit the 50k by the end of the month, and I've gotten a little over 3000 these first two days.  Also, this story is a little more complex than the ones I usually write, which takes a bit more time to write, so not only do I have less time this year to write in (so far) I'm also writing slower because there's a lot more elements that have to go into the story.  It's all good though.  I'm still way ahead of the goal for day 2 with 6086 words.  To be honest, though, I doubt I can finish the first draft of this book in 50k words.  I already had 45k written, but I think this one is going to end up somewhere between 150k and 170k when it's done.  Anyway, expect more pointless posts this month about me saying how awesome I'm doing.

So, there I was, at Walmart...

So, there I was, at Walmart, refilling my prescription for anti-anxiety pills, and low and behold, I saw, sitting atop the $10 bin of crap movies and video games that no one wants: Final Fantasy XV Royal Edition.  I've avoided Final Fantasy XV until now for a few reasons.  First, the trailers and the playable demo that I got with another game, just didn't interest me.  I don't really care about dudebros on road trips, and that's what the game was made out to be in literally ALL of the advertising.  I could practically smell the toxic fumes of axe body spray coming off of the ads.  Second, I had the misfortune to spend money on, and play, Final Fantasy XII and XIII.  Both of which were kind of crap in comparison to what the series used to be.  Of the two, I preferred XIII, but that's like saying, "of two hot pokers in the eye, one of them burned a little less."  Third, I didn't like the whole season pass thing.  They released an unfinished game, and then expected me to pay more to fill in what should have already been part of the game at release.  And last, I don't really care for action RPGs.  I'm kind of more old-school.  I prefer the old turned based RPGs to the new stuff that's more about graphics and fast paced action, than it is about story or thoughtful game play.

But there it was, for 10 bucks, the edition that included all of the season pass stuff.  I figured I might as well.  So, let me first say, that the royal edition is very, VERY lazy.  It's just the base game with a download code for all of the extras and updates that were part of the season pass.  This was a 50GB download.  That shows you how unfinished the game was at launch.  I was annoyed that I had to wait overnight for the updates to download and install before I could play it.  But the next day I sat down after work and tried it out.  The story of the game isn't really all that central to playing it.  It seems like it's more vaguely happening in the background, rather than being an active part of the game.  I play games for the story.  It is literally the only thing I will play a game for.  I don't care about difficulty.  I don't care about playing dress up.  I don't care about the challenge.  I don't care ab out pointless side content, or multiplayer online battles.  I do have preferences on game play, but if the story is good, I don't really care if the game play is crap.  All I really care about is the story.  And, well, the story of this game might as well be non-existent. 

And yet, I find myself oddly still playing it.  It's weird.  The game really does not fit what I like in a game, and yet, here I am, still running side quests that I would normally skip completely in any other game, and running out to do monster hunt quests.  I even found myself getting annoyed when I was pulled into story sections of the game.  The combat is kind of mind-numbing.  All you do is hold down R1+Triangle, and your guy will warp around and murder every enemy.  You don't even have to look at the screen.  The characters are either boring, douchey, or annoying.  And god forbid one of them actually be a girl, or anything.  I don't get it.  I should hate this game, but I don't.  It is weirdly addictive, and I don't know why.  I just keep scouring the map for new side quest markers, or new diners to pick up more kill quests.  I'm like lvl 65 just off of all of the side quests I've done and I haven't even finished chapter 3 of the story.  Maybe it's my history with MMOs that's pulling me in, because all the running around, side-questing, and hunting down specific monsters feels like a single-player version of a MMO.  They tried doing that with Final Fantasy XII, and it didn't really work for me, but here, it kind of is.

I dunno, I only spent $10 on it, and it's kept me entertained for a couple of weeks.  It's definitely not the best game ever.  It's not especially well made or written.  The characters are kind of unlikable.  But for what it is, it's weirdly engrossing.  If you can find it as cheap as I did, maybe give it a try.