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Geeky ramblings 9 June 2008

Posted by kaitharshayr in Entertainment, Gaming, TV.
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I went to Leicester with C this weekend to meet up with a friend to celebrate her birthday, much geeky talk and fun was had. :) My friend is doing a Phd at Leicester uni, and was doing a shared bday meal on the Saturday with a friend from Leicester uni’s role-play society, and then the RP soc had their geek ball on the Sunday. And I’m really too tired to write anything really coherent about what we got up to, we ate food, met up with fun people, went to a ball, that about sums it up. The rest of this post is on rather geeky stuff, I didn’t intend to write a long post, but I do seem to have generated one all the same. :)

D&D 4th ed came out, and on the Sat, my friend’s bf bought a copy of the players guide, over the weekend we all had a look through, and we all decided that it was rather sterile and not very interesting. They’ve changed the races, half-orcs are out and dragon kind (kin?) are in, ok so I find that kind of cool, I do like dragons after all. But then flicking through to some of the other races, there are Eldaren (sp?) AND Elves, and to be honest there isn’t really that much different about then, hmm ok the eyes for both races might have been ever so slightly different but not much. Now I’m not an elf hater like a few people I know, but still Eldaren, Elves and half elves? It’s just getting silly.

And the classes? they’ve thrown out many of the interesting ones, no more druid, or bard and just introduced more combat type classes, and a slightly new type of arcane magic user class. In fact everything is MUCH more combat based, theres no more summoning, illusion, enchantment or necromancy. In fact speaking of necromancy, there is nothing that allows players to be even a little evil, everything is aimed at players having to be good people.

Also there is no more negatives, everything gives bonuses with bigger numbers, so no more ‘lows’ for players. Generally speaking we realised that it is basically an MMO but for a pen’n'paper game. C and my friend’s bf finally decided that the only thing 4th ed would be good for would be a tactical squad based war game, where each player would command their own squad exploring dungeons. Cause otherwise for a role playing game, it does feel rather sterile.

So I guess if I do play d&d, and lets be honest I’m not a big fan of d&d, although I was looking forward to 4th ed, it did sound like it had some good stuff, but as you can probably tell I’m not very impressed with it, but yes if I do play d&d I think I will stick to 3.5. :)

Also got discussing with my friend and another friend who came for the geek ball too about whether I should try and re-ignite my Stargate Sg-13 game. Then I moved on to say maybe I could run a Buffy related game instead, and the idea of BuffyGate came up. I’m really not sure who came up with the idea first, but anyway my two friends and C all seem to think that some crazy Buffy and Stargate crossover would be a good idea(?!) I’m really not sure how it would work, have an SG team with a slayer(s) in it? Make hellmouths into some strange type of stargate? Um.. hmm no, I really don’t think I want to try and make that work. C thinks I lack imagination because of that :P .

Although it reminds me that after reading the Fray comic it did make me wonder a few things. And to warn you up coming is a bit/rather spoilerish for season 7 of Buffy but anyway. Assuming the end of Buffy doesn’t happen, and there is still only just 1 slayer… or.. two? Because in s7 they do go on about how Buffy dying will trigger the next slayer, but isn’t Faith supposed to be the ‘current’ slayer.. so maybe there are two lines of slayers now, but anyway I digress from the point I wanted to discuss. Assume there is only 1 slayer, what happens when humanity gets to that point where they have space travel, and colonies on other worlds etc. What happens then? Do other worlds have hellmouths to spawn demons etc? Or are there only such things on worlds where life has spawned (and not worlds which have been terraformed?). What would the slayer do if there were? Or would it only be Earth? And if so would that mean that the Slayer would never be allowed to leave Earth?

And obviously this got me to wondering what aliens do, I mean do aliens have their own type of vampires & demons (or because demons tend to come from another plane of existence, could not the same demonic race inhabit other alien worlds?) and if aliens do have such things, how do they combat them? Their own slayer types? Or some kind of Initiative type? What? It does make me wonder.

Babylon 5 s5 30 April 2008

Posted by kaitharshayr in TV.
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So me and C have been working our way through Babylon 5, we’ve flown fairly quickly through seasons 1-4, (although holiday time and such helped with that) and we’ve enjoyed it. Actually I have seen Babylon 5 before and I do like it, its not one of my fave TV shows but I like it. However now we’ve hit season 5.. and progress has sort of stopped, the first half of season 5 is just.. some of the most annoying TV ever. I mean I’ve always known S5 wasn’t good, and I have actually watched it before, and I can’t have been paying much attention then because it didn’t annoy me nearly as much as it is now. I mean the whole issue with the Telepaths is a good one, it had potential as a story line, but the execution? Gah.

Byron and his bunch of hippy telepaths? Byron may be a charismatic leader, but he doesn’t come across as being much of a planner. I mean let’s go blackmail all the alliance ambassadors with their state secrets to try and get our own telepath homeworld. I mean what? I mean firstly why did he never even try to speak to Sheridan after he found out Telepaths are the Vorlons fault, its just a straight, we should get our own homeowrld thing. And then, how exactly is this homeworld thing going to work?! I mean the kids of two telepaths are necessarily going to BE telepaths. So what are you going to do with mundanes on this telepath world? They’ll just become some sub-slave race? Or will they be rejected and sent back to Earth?

Then at the end of ep 11, when they are arresting the leaders of Byron’s hippy telepath rebellion, the prisoner’s suddenly pull out guns when Bester and his blood hounds turned up. Er WHAT?! Who the hell lets prisoners walk around with guns, why weren’t they searched. Its not like these were all small easy to hid guns, one of them was suddenly wielding a PPG rifle? *sigh* I know there was more silly stuff, I just can’t remember it all.. I may be blocking it from my mind.

Thank goodness all this sillyness is intermixed with brilliant Londo and G’Kar interaction, I love those two, always have they are such brilliant characters, and G’Kar is especially funny. :) And thank goodness that this telepath story line is pretty much done with, although I still think my least fave episode is the very last one on season 4.

Edit to add: Just been discussing this with my friend and I thought I’d just quote what he said about season 5.

“It was because the network (Fox, are you surprised?) had told them “S3 would be the last” “Oh, OK, you’re popular, you can have ONE more, Finish it now” “S4 was awesome, you can have your last season after all!”"

Ahh Fox, the destroyer of great TV.