Where to get your Who, Part 6

Once more, for those playing at home, here is Wikipedia's list of Doctor Who episodes, which is also linked below:

Doctor #5:

Season 19 (1982)

Serial 116: Castrovalva, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 117: Four to Doomsday, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 118:Kinda, available from Daily Motion, and maybe nowhere else.
Serial 119:The Visitation, available on DVD and instant play from Netflix.
Serial 120: Black Orchid, available on DVD from Netflix, and online from Daily Motion.
Serial 121: Earthshock, available on DVD and instant play from Netflix.
Serial 122: Time-Flight, available on DVD from Netflix.

Season 20 (1983)
Serial 123: Arc of Infinity,available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 124:Snakedance, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 125: Mawdryn Undead, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 126: Terminus, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 127: Enlightenment, available on DVD from Netflix, online from Daily Motion.
Serial 128: The King's Demons, I have not yet found this available except as a used VHS.

Special (1983)
Serial 129: The Five Doctors, available on DVD from Netflix and online from Daily Motion.


Season 21 (1984)
Serial 130: Warriors of the Deep, available on DVD from Netflix, and online from Daily Motion.
Serial 131: The Awakening, available online from Daily Motion.
Serial 132: Frontios, available online from Daily Motion
Serial 133: Resurrection of the Daleks, available on DVD from Netflix, and online from Daily Motion.
Serial 134:Planet of Fire , available online from Daily Motion.
Serial 135:The Caves of Androzani , available on Instant Play and DVD from Netflix.

Where to get your who, part seven

When Tabletop Gaming became Unaffordable

I am a second generation D&Der. My son is a second generation edition AD&Der, and a third generation Dungeons and Dragons player. My gaming experience resume is several pages long, running through the D&D boxes (which we own, from a garage sale) from the blue-cover first edition of AD&D, to second edition, which we didn't really see as a new "edition," as we'd been using the optional proficiencies, etc., for a while, and the switch from combat tables to THAC0 is really easy to understand. Every so often when I'm cleaning, I come upon my first character from my High School gaming group...the one who rolled two 18s on her stats and 00 for psionics the first time I rolled a character...the first time I rolled percentiles... I'm not sure how she gets out there...she gets put away, but she reappears...

I still own the second edition AD&D Players Handbook and DMG I bought after I stepped on four stray $20 bills on my way to the mall, just after the books came out. I own about $1000 in gaming books, at cover value, probably several times that in collector's value...about 1/3 of them are AD&D. As a teen, I lived briefly in a homeless shelter, and in my trashbag of stuff I owned was a PHB and my dice. I wrote three high school papers and a college statistics paper on gaming...suffice it to say I am a big, fat D&D nerd.

Since I'm Wiccan, I've been told it's because I'm a gamer. Forget for a moment that I was Wiccan before I was a gamer, and I've taken years off gaming, but I've been Wiccan the whole time. Of the hundreds of people I've gamed with, three were Pagan, and about 30 were atheists. (Two were Mormons, a third a fundie Christian, 10 or so were 'cake-or death' or 'comfy-chair' Christians, but that's just an aside.) If there is a correlation between being Wiccan and being a gamer, I bet it has more to do with the correlation between Wicca and high IQ and the correlation between gaming and high IQ.

I just wanted to get those points aside before I made many of the following observations, because I imagine it will be something seen as terribly socialist, evil, or what have you.

I won't lie when I say that everything after the Tome of Magic and Forgotten Realms Adventures (AD&D 2e) is pretty much dreck to me. I own the "Player's Options" books, and the hardcover ones are such awful abortions that I'm glad they only exist with the red label that looks exactly like 3rd edition... I threw 4e down in disgust after I saw preview copies. The entire reason for 3, 3.5, 4, and however many more, is to make money, not to play the game, and they bog down the game so much as to become unusable... I sincerely believe this is because the game is now managed by a company that makes its money on the need of children to collect things.

I grew up pretty damn poor. If AD&D had required me to collect books to get full functionality out of the game I would have been prohibited from playing. If I had been prohibited from playing AD&D I would not have gotten an S on the writing sample of the MCAT and aced all those standardized tests as a teen. I know for a fact that professor who wrote in a review of my work that I had an "intuitive understanding of statistics and randomness" that made my experimental designs "airtight, and at a level beyond what [he saw] on grant proposals," would not have written that if I had not gamed. AD&D improved my math, reading, writing and even handwriting abilities. It taught me logic, spatial reasoning and more. It got me reading Machiavelli when my character ended up running a town. When I started DMing, it taught me how to think on the fly.

When I later was tested for "problem solving ability," I broke the test. Honey, ain't nobody in Buffalo a better Problem Solver than me, and although they think I'm a prick, you can take those words to our local "Creative Problem Solving" merchants and bank on it. To them, I'm an enigma, wrapped up in a burrito, covered in Salsa Verde. Honey, I've generated so many ways to use a ton of peanuts in 3 minutes that I've run out of post-its and given myself writer's cramp... I have never had more cognitive dissonance than going to school to learn to use a problem solving method that is a thousand times slower and less effective than my own....but this is very much stream of consciousness here, as all good blog rants should be...

AD&D benefited me in hundreds of thousands of ways. It benefited my life, my career and my emotional health. I have never been as physically and mentally ill as when I was working too many hours to game. It keeps my brain fit in ways I only barely understand. It provides social structure I only barely understand...and that bare understanding is with a degree in anthropology and another in psychology.

AD&D encouraged a subgeneration of young adults to create map-making software, art, new spell ideas, new random generators and more when the internet was new. It created a vast wealth of resources and trained a huge group of people in seeing the real world, the one we live in, as something that can be broken into parts and explored. It is a game of scientists and engineers, a game about using all those "products of your imagination." Most of those generators, at least the ones Wizards of the Coast hasn't tracked down and destroyed yet, are still out there on the net, or in the Wayback Machine. AD&D handbooks are the first thing to appear on file sharing services-they were the first things to appear on usenet, or gopher.

Think of an entertainer, author or English-speaking scientist under the age of 50 that you see as witty or clever. Delve into their history...you'll find D&D, and often AD&D specifically. It was something that helped to make the US, and to a lesser extent, the UK, great... well, those of us who were allowed to play.

[This tangent calls for its own rant, but I'll just state the following fact: Between AD&D and "Second Edition AD&D," demons and devils were removed and then restored as deballed figures with silly names. I'm playing a character right now who is a proper summoner, using imps, demons, devils and the rest, and I'm having to look stuff up in books just a little less old than me. During the time from when the demons were removed to now there was an upswing in teen violence, and virtually none of those engaging in teen violence were gamers. You took our demons to punish us, didn't you? End Rant.]

I sincerely feel that allowing kids access to gaming at low cost is as important as providing public access basketball courts and parks. I think a generation of stupid kids-or more importantly, a generation without as many exceptional kids-has much to do with a lack of low-cost gaming resources as a generation of fat kids has to do with a lack of safe public parks and gym classes.

I believe that every gaming manual that is over 20 years old and is currently not supported by a current publication of said system should be considered 100% copyright free and open source, and I don't mean the stupid d20 license. Hell, if I had my way, every time a new edition came out the previous edition of the game would become free...give gamers a reason to support your edition.

I mean that everyone who is interested in gaming should have access to user-generated books, even customizable books of their own creation, as long as the currently published system is no longer supported. You guys know we're already doing this stuff, right? How many people playing mages have a print-out of every spell they use instead of needing to open the PHB? Since most, maybe even all, of said books are 'work for hire' books, the decision to release the books from copyright in toto would be a corporate one.

I say this not because I don't think authors should be paid for their work, but because I don't see value in punishing creativity when the soft-core gamers are still going to buy your big collection... the kids will always want the latest equivalent of Pokemon cards.

Dear Wizards of the Coast-
Free AD&D. Seriously Free it completely. I'm sick of trying to turn the shades of my childhood idols, as I'm clearly not high enough level. Seriously, free it completely. Set it free. Tell us all we have to do is say that we grabbed this from a book from 1989 and let us rip books and publish them via cafepress without fear of persecution. People are doing it already, so make it right.

And, as an aside: When you're ready to make mad money off of it, I mean serious money by creating a world environment game where people interact with human DMs, give me a call, or drop me a line. Give me a decent programming team, let me hire some of the kids I see DMing at tournaments and cons, and I'll give you a MMORPG that will be addictive. Better than life. You'll make a few billion dollars, and probably be sued, unsuccessfully, for providing a game that is as addictive as crack for some people....the first MMORPG where learning to role play is a more important currency than gold...

It will have higher overhead than WOW or SWG, but you'll have people who are willing to pay more by far....

You know how to find me.

The Boogieman of "duotheism": An invention of ignorant reconstructionists

There is a reoccurring silly movement in some reconstructionists, to exclude Wiccans from their rites at all costs by prohibiting or limiting the practice of "duotheism" in their presence or making other such goofy statements. Often, this is simple prejudice, and more often than not when one seeks the source of it, it's the result of hearsay, or blatant lies. I could even relate the story of the ignorant "reconstructionist," who went on to post a giant rant on his blog when some Wiccans "hiding" (his word) on a reconstructionist list had the AUDACITY to correct him when he posted a screed comparing reconstructionism to Wicca in which every line of "what Wiccans believe" was wrong...oh, teh nose! teh Wiccans is lurking! Teh Wiccans! Teh Wiccans who was invited to join when teh organization was just starting and were here from the beginning! teh Wiccans are in-full-tratin us! oh, teh nose!

At this point, I won't get into how far from reconstructed a rite would be that had a belief litmus test for members. Most forms of reconstructionism are reconstructing civil religions that were practiced at the city (town, city-state) level, and welcome to anyone who believed in said gods, regardless of what individual cult movements they belonged to...

I'll also leave off here on the easy discussion of how lame it is to spend your whole time as a member of group A lying about what group B teaches. This is lame whether it's an ignorant reconstructionist lying about Wicca, an ignorant Wiccan lying about Christianity, whatever. Same stuff, just as lame...

The lie I'm going to discuss, and I don't care who is lying, whether it's the person coming up with it in the first place or his/her minions spreading it, is that there is a such thing as duotheism, and that it's what Wiccans believe, and that it's not polytheism...

Actually, let me back up for a minute, and say how this was at the start...

In the early days of (Non-Germanic*) Reconstructionism, the ignorant claim about Wiccans from those Recons who set themselves up as experts on how reconstructionism differs from Wicca claimed that we Wiccans believed that ALL GODS WERE ONE GOD.

The problem with this claim is that you can pretty much see immediately in the Wiccan liturgy, the published BOSs, the rites all around you, that we have, at the least, both a god and a goddess.

So, the "we're the real polytheists and Wiccans are not," thing went from "all gods are one," to "all gods are one god, and all goddesses are one goddess."

Now, I am certain there are some Wiccans who believe that all gods are one god and all goddesses are one goddess. There are some people who believe just about anything. This view, however, is still polytheism (poly=multiple.)

But let's talk about the "proof" for duotheism versus the 'proof' of Wicca being polytheistic:

'Proof' of Wicca's duotheism The Charge of the Goddess says the Great Mother has many names.

Proof of Wicca's Polytheism Gardner says Wicca's god and goddess different from the Christian God, implies Xtian god also exists. (at least 3) Oak King and Holly King + any goddess=3 Fates invoked as "three sisters." In descent of goddess story, goddess' mom not in underworld when she is, god in underworld not her dad (at least 4.) Maiden-Mother-Crone (itself not in all Wicca) given different names. Different Early Wiccan groups with different local gods working together invoke all, not just "different names." etc.

That's right. The sole proof that Wicca is not polytheistic, but "duotheistic" comes from a piece of liturgy that doesn't find its way into Wicca in the form it is being criticized for until fairly late in the game... and we don't all even use that form...and it only implies, sort of, one goddess....not one god.

"Duotheism," is a myth. It is a boogieman that only pops up when people want to criticize Wiccans.

Instead of sticking a (fake) label on a people, why not call them what they call themselves. Revolutionary idea, no?

*Asatru pre-dates all of us and is not involved here. There have been more than their fair share of Asatru screeds making claims about Wicca, but these come from a slightly different perspective I'm not going to discuss here.

Too sick to do much more than play civ... so, here's my finger....

Black Magick – Only homies know it!

Black Magick – Only homies know it!


OMFG, I swear I know this dude's twin.

How to shovel light and fluffy snow.

My morning began today around 9am, with the sound of the neighbor's snowblower. We're having a small blizzard right now, enough for Buffalo to end up on the news and the weather channel. It's falling at a rate of over 1 inch an hour, and it's bloody cold out(for Buffalo), 14F, according to The Weather Channel. As per usual, my hometown of Syracuse is getting four times what we are. We've had something like four inches in Riverside, and we're supposed to get more...

Unlike our big, fat, wet, It's a Wonderful Life lake effect flakes that we see when the weather is in the 20s, this is lake-effect fluffy, fluffy, powder. It's great for downhill skiing (I actually like stuff with more grit to it for Xcountry,) and it's total shit for snowblowers.

A snowblower is, essentially, a snow thrower. Without getting inside baseball about it, a snowblower picks up the snow and moves it from place one to place two, and when the snow has the weight, consistency and texture of glitter, and it's windy out, all your snowblower is doing is making you, the snowblower wielder, look like a guy inside a snowglobe.

I shoveled over an hour ago. There are a couple of [<1ft in diameter spots] on my sidewalk and driveway that need touch up, and I'll probably go out in the next hour and touch up those spots, but, unlike snowthrower dude, my sidewalk is down to the concrete, and likely to stay that way, because while this snow is deep, it is almost devoid of water..it's OVER 90% air. This is snow that will vanish, miraculously, the moment it's over freezing.

The first thing you need to do in this weather is not wait for the snow to stop falling. Go out and shovel *now,* because as pedestrians, dogs, raccoons, elephants or whatever walk on your snow they are going to compress it to ice, and it will be harder to shovel. Right now, with only light foot traffic on your fluffy snow, it will lift up really quickly, it took me, an out of shape person, less than 15 minutes to do an entire driveway, porch, sidewalk and the rest...

The moment you've got the snow up, and there is less than a sugar cookie-top dusting, sprinkle liberally with an ice melter (I use a higher-end pet-friendly stuff, but you could use cheap rock salt, as long as it's above about 5F.) Remember, even if you have a snow blower, you're going to need to do this...but a snow blower is going to make the snow blow around you and the weight of the machine will compress some of the snow that lands behind you. The act of shoveling is compressing the snow before you throw it on the lawn, not adding more air to make it fly further only to have it land on top of you... Imagine yourself as a big snowplow and salt truck.... going vroom vroom, wearing a flashing light and burying neighbors is optional...

This ice-melter is going to mix with your sprinkle of snow to form a protective saline barrier that melts the new snow as it comes down. If you wait an hour, you should be able to tell where you've missed with your ice-melter, and go shovel those spots and resprinkle....

What you will have is a miraculous-looking sidewalk-through the snow that, unlike the snowthrower's walk, seems to repel snow magically...

Remember, this fluffy stuff is almost completely air. It melts quickly when it encounters your lightly-brined sidewalk, without washing away the salt. If the snow should turn to something more substantial, you'll need to shovel again, but you'll find it's not sticking to your sidewalk, coming up easily, and, if you need a snowblower, it will remove the snow, not just fluff it.

Now, as snowblower guy gets back to work, for a total of 3 hours I've watched him, I'm off to shovel and sprinkle my spots. It should take under 3 minutes, with my second best shovel (we haven't brought the big one out of the basement yet this year.)