Unsolicited Advice

You should always assume that at some point in your college career, you're going to break your fancy toys. College students live an annoyingly nomadic existence. You have to haul all manner of things around on your back from class to class every day, and then they chuck you out of your dorm at the end of the year. So one of your priorities, when buying electronics for school, is to either get something that will survive  anything short of thermonuclear war, or something that can be repaired  easily and cheaply. Survival largely depends on brand; some brands are good at making things rugged, some brands produce dainty fragile devices that quit working if you unexpectedly turn them sideways. Macbooks are notoriously hardy, especially if you spring for a Macbook Air with almost no moving parts. IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads are heavy as hell and not for moving around, but are constructed like tanks. Dell also has some Inspiron models that are intended to be "desktop replacements", ...

The only way to move painlessly is to own absolutely nothing. The next best way is to pay someone a lot of money to do it for you. Since you are about to be a college student, neither one of these options is tenable, so you're going to be stuck doing it yourself. First: Buy real luggage. You will thank me later. It can be cheap clearance luggage, but the idea here is to get a set of nesting suitcases which can be disengaged and filled with things for transport, and then reassembled into a matryoshka that takes up no more space than the largest piece in the set when they're all empty again. The wheels and towing handles will make your life much easier when you inevitably end up filling one of them with heavy things like books or shoes or your collection of lead scrap. The smallest one, usually overhead-bin size, will also come in handy on those rare occasions when some class project requires you to haul a lot of presentation materials across campus in the rain. Most sets also ...

People ask you all kinds of nosy personal questions when you show up out of the blue. You are not required to answer them. People get really distressed about this sometimes, but in an amazing coincidence, this is not your problem. You don't need to know anything about other people to help them. They don't need to know anything about you, either. You do kind of need to figure out what they need helping with, however, before you make the mess worse. You can fix an astonishing number of things with a screwdriver and some string, as long as you also have ingenuity. Never assume something is out to kill you unless it is, right at that exact moment, actively trying to kill you. Better to start out with greetings rather than exchange of fire if you can manage it. Unless they're Daleks. Then you run like hell until you can find a gun that gets through dalekanium. Always make sure that your overcoat has as many pockets as you think you'll need. And, whenever possible, at ...

I sat down and marathoned the Clara arc last night. That was... not bad. Particularly after Amy and Rory. A marriage made of "I love you more" vs "You couldn't possibly love me" is not one the Doctor should have been trying to save, but I guess there are some lessons even the Doctor never learns. Clara stuff under the cut, because the finale went out a month ago, there's more in the 50th Anniversary special, and I don't need the internet to throw things at my head.

One of the reasons I find it irksome when someone's main story arc is "desperately wants to make out with the Doctor" is that I have a long-running bone to pick with media in general about depicting romantic love as the only kind that counts. Finding someone to love  is excellent character development; it needs conversations, maybe some verbal sparring, glimpses into the armored bits and vulnerable places of the characters involved. It gives people motivation. It informs their decisions in a way that (ideally) furthers the plot. Deciding to have an intimate relationship with someone else explores matters of choice and experience and emotion and how they intertwine, and how blind circumstance can shape lives. Bonding with someone as a mentor, a surrogate sibling, a working partner, or a best friend is no less influential in this regard than bonding with someone as a lover. But falling in  love with someone is depicted as the sine qua non  of character development, as i...

So far, the new crew seems to be hewing to the old canon wherever possible; the books and audios don't seem to come into it yet, if ever. There've been strong hints in the expanded universe that the novels and audios take place in divergent timestreams, which seems to solve the problem quite neatly. There's a fair amount in the classic series about Time Lords and regenerations and whatnot that new fans don't always seem to be aware of, though. Clearing firstly out of the way something wot annoys my friend David a lot: Time Lords get twelve regenerations . Twelve second chances, essentially. You've got to regenerate from something the first time, which means that, assuming no jiggery-pokery, we've got room for thirteen  Doctors. It's used consistently this way throughout the classic series, and the math squares up in stuff like Mawdryn Undead  where the Doctor talks about how many lives other people are trying to steal from him. I don't recall if it...

I really ought to sit down and watch through the rest of the Eleventh Doctor stuff. I've skipped a lot of it. Karen Gillan and Matt Smith are horribly endearing to watch backstage -- they like to sit squashed together and pick on each other like they've been friends for much longer than they actually have, it's adorable -- but the whole Doctor-or-Rory-or-possibly-Doctor- and -Rory thing went on far too long and eventually got right on my last nerve. I mean, from a perspective within the fandom, I know full well why everyone wants to snog the Doctor, but for pity's sake, why  does everyone want to snog the Doctor? He's nine hundred years old, alien, and weird , you'd think that would make at least a few people go, "...oh good God, no, I never thought of it like that ." I've also skipped a lot of the Tenth Doctor, despite loving Tennant in the role. Catherine Tate irritates me. I'm not sure if it's a personal preference or a cultural diffe...