Shipping: The Doctor and River Song

A huge warning to anyone not yet caught up with Doctor Who, or anyone who haven't watched the show, but are considering it, or have even the slightest inkling they might want to watch it at some point. There are going to be spoilers, and speaking as a Whovian, if there is one storyline you do not want to be spoiled for, it's River Song. Ask anyone else who's watched the show, and it'll be the one thing they do not want to reveal to you. As the woman herself put it; "It's a long story, cannot be told, has to be lived..."

Because part of the fun with River Song's storyline is trying to piece together in your mind who she is, why she expects the Doctor to know her, only to be heartbroken to learn he is merely meeting her for the first time. Every time we meet her in the show, she's at a very different point in her own timeline, and the more we learn about her story, the more questions we have, the more theories we have. So, if you read ahead of this paragraph and get spoiled, don't say I didn't warn you.

Why I Keep Winning at Bandu

Since there were no new games for me to try out this time at my table top group, I'm afraid there won't be any first time playing this week. Instead, I'm going to let myself be inspired by what happened when one of the other players decided to challenge me for a rematch in the stacking game, Bandu. I was introduced to the game within the last couple of months and have only played it a handful of times. I tend to win it, not because the other players aren't great stackers - in fact, I would say they are quite impressive in their ability to make the most insane combinations of blocks fit, probably even better than me. Still, I win in the end, not for my stacking abilities (which are pretty decent, don't get me wrong), but because of my very specific strategy. You see, I play the game like an asshole. 

Why You Should Watch: The 4400

Choosing a lesser known show for my second recommendation. The way I started watching it was actually pretty random. I found the first season at a second hand store for next to nothing and recalled vaguely at the back of my head that someone had mentioned in passing that this was a great show. I bought it, took it home and quickly fell in love with it. Sadly it became one of the shows that fell victim to the timing of the 2008 Writers' strike, and was cancelled before its time. A real shame, considering the show kept getting better as the seasons progressed.

What I'd Love to See in a Fourth Fable Game

If you know me, you'll know that Fable is one of my two very favourite gaming franchises of all time, I might even be pressed to say it is my very favourite - just slightly ahead of Legend of Zelda (I realize fellow Zelda fans are going to kick me for that comment). Just a few days ago Lionhead Studios released a trailer for their upcoming game Fable Legends, which is meant to be a prequel in their Fable franchise. Naturally the announcement of a new game in the franchise will always be a welcome one (even if it is on the X-box One, which have been taking a lot of flack from fans since the initial reveal), especially when the announcement is for a proper game, and not just another attempt at making the kinnect 'cool'.

I do, however, have slightly mixed feelings as Legends seems to be making a lot of changes (at least that is my initial impression of the trailer below and the official statement from Lionhead about it).

Jailbreaking my Kindle: Simplifying the Process

Now, I'm extremely grateful to the tech-geeks, who manage to figure this stuff out and is so generous to share their findings and solutions with the rest of us, but holy hell, sometimes you just end up tearing your hair out in frustration trying to find that one solution that actually works for you...

This was the case when I decided I wanted to jailbreak my Kindle for the sake of changing the screensaver images from those provided by Amazon to those of my own choosing. It seemed simple and straightforward enough; download the install-bundle, find the one applying to the specific firmware version my Kindle was running (which you find by going to the Settings page on the device). Except the specific install I needed wasn't included in the main bundle.

How to become a Doctor Who fan

This is completely unrelated to my regular column 'why you should watch' for the mere reason that I want to focus that column on shows of the past rather than current ones. And it's not as much that I don't have the patience to wait until Doctor Who is completed before I write it an entry in that column, rather than that I think that history has already proven Doctor Who will never truly ever be over. Even if the current show reaches an end, there will be more in some way shape or form, it's a continuous franchise not likely to ever truly die out.

First Time Playing: Havana

So, at table-top night this week there were several new games I could sink my teeth into, three to be precise, but Havana seemed the most promising out of the three, and it won the vote. The game is not all too hard to get into for a first timer. You have a set of cards in your colour (every player has the exact same deck of cards, just in different colours). Each card represent a type of action you could do. Some cards help you get money (from supply, from the table, from other players), some cards help you get resources (from the bag, from the table or from other players), some cards help you get workers, some cards help you in other ways (guard you from theft, reclaim already played cards, discard buildings) and some cards allow you to sabotage for the other players (remove resources).

Why You Should Watch: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

So, my first recommendations in my new featured column is no other than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the television show version of the movie with the same title which flopped back in 1992 (man that movie sucked). The show aired from 1997 to 2003, resulting in a total of 144 episodes, divided into 7 seasons. It also got a spin-off series, Angel, which ran parallel to it from season 4 onwards. 

Granted, it's a predictable choice, and I bet a lot of people will see it as unnecessary as it already is seen as a very popular, critically acclaimed and influential show (after all there are specialized college studies that focuses on this show). But, there will always still be people out there that haven't seen it. Some might have meant to at some point, but just never got around to it. Others might have written it off because of the (purposively) silly title or the vampire theme (which has definitely been getting flack lately with Twilight becoming a phenomenon) or some other unknown reason.

Fandom: "Why You Should Watch"

If anyone were to ask me what my favorite medium is, it would have to be television shows. That's where I have most of my fandoms. There's just something about being able to follow the characters season after season that really speaks to me. But with the vast amount of shows being made each year, I don't always discover my favourite fandoms right away. Discovering a show after its completion can both be a good thing and a bad. The good is that you don't really have to wait for another episode, you can binge-watch to your heart's content. The bad is that what you see is what you get. You know exactly how many episodes will be left until it's all over.

I'm not modest or self-deprecating, alright?

One of my main hobbies, both within fandom and out is writing fan fiction and making fan videos. And a natural process of this is to share it with friends and other fans. A part of this hobby is to receive and respond to feedback, and I'm not going to lie, like any other self-respecting writer and vidder, I love getting feedback, especially praise (although I do also appreciate criticism as it really does help me learn to get better at my craft). However, some people just take it that one step further.

The Concept of "Shipping"

Shipping has got to be one of the most polarized aspects of fandom, regardless of fandom. Beloved and embraced by many, it can be the source for a lot of devotion and passion. On the flip side it can also potentially be a huge source for conflict, like shipper-wars (competing shippers antagonizing each other, especially on online communities and forums), and also a thorn in the side for a lot of non-shippers tired of relationship elements taking over a fandom (like characters starting out as colleagues, friends, or even enemies eventually getting involved romantically or showing clear signs of having romantic feelings for one another).

A Basic Guide to Conventions

A convention is a kind of gathering where fans of a particular movie franchise, television show, etc. get the opportunity to meet some of the people responsible for making their fandom a reality (like actors, writers, behind the scenes people, etc). It's been around for decades, but has become more popular in more recent years. Seeing as conventions are one of my biggest passions (plus I've received a lot of questions about my pictures, how I met those people, etc), it just makes sense to try to convert as many of you to the idea as humanly possible. So with that in mind, I've written a guide for the uninitiated to help them understand this phenomenon and perhaps even help them get started themselves.

First Time Playing: Terra Mystica

Wednesday night is table-top night for me. This is when my table top club has its game night, and I try to make it every time. The club has a collection of games that we use, but people are also welcome to bring any of their own, which happens quite often. The way we decide what games to play is through bringing forth suggestions and voting. We vote on the two games we would most want to play and whichever games get the most votes, those are the ones we end up playing. 

This Wednesday, one of the games winning out was Terra Mystica, a game that most of us hadn't played before. From the sheer number of different pieces, tiles, resources, scales and the like, I could tell this game would require some time to familiarize myself with. And I was right.

The Geeky Influence In My Life

Everyone comes into geekhood at different times and in so many different ways. Some are raised geeks from birth, some encounter their geeky influences later in life. Some are introduced to it through other people, others have more of a solitary discovery of it. But what I think every geek have in common is that one defining factor, that one moment, experience, fandom or whatever that got the ball rolling. For me that factor was a person.

First Time Playing: Carcassonne

This Sunday I decided to do a pretty strange thing - I entered a tournament for the game Carcassonne. The reason this could be considered strange is that I had never played or even seen the game before, I literally learned the game ten minutes before the tournament actually started. One of the other contestants taught me the game through playing a practice session with me, the whole time explaining her moves, the rules behind every tile she placed, what scoring options they gave her, and advised me on my moves. I fully recommend every newcomer to learn this game this way as it's a very quick and efficient way to familiarize yourself with the moves you have available and you can more quickly develop a strategy for your game play.

People I do not get

So, the one thing all geeks can relate to, regardless our passion or fandom of choice, is how often we have to hear from non-geeks just much they simply don't 'get us'. We hear it from family members, to classmates, to colleagues, to random strangers... we simply cannot get away from it. We're told how we 'have no life', how our interests are 'just a phase’, we have to defend and/or explain all kinds of aspects of our interests pretty much on a regular basis. Yet, we are always expected to see the non-geeks' point of view. I think pretty much every geek in the world is aware that not everyone shares or understand their passion and interests, but it doesn't seem like non-geeks realize that their interests can be just as baffling to us as ours are to them. So, with that in mind, I'm going to make a list of people/interests that I simply do not get...

Greetings geeks and nerdcurious

Ta-da! New and shiny blog to completely neglect and forget about once the novelty wears out... again. Why? Because some part of me clearly loves beating a dead horse, and I'm too lazy to fully resurrect my old blog, as it belongs under a different e-mail log-in than my youtube account, and I hate having to log out of one just so I can log into the other (rinse and repeat). Thank you, google, for making our lives so much easier (read: harder) with your insistence to gather everything under your banner!

Not gonna make any grand presentation of myself, as I think the two key words in my blog title pretty much sums up the most important aspects of myself. If you're into that - cool, enjoy your stay. If you're not, but you're curious - ask away, and I'll see if I can win you over to our side (we have cookies). If you're neither, then why did you click this link in the first place?