December Round-Up Plus Doctor Who Deleted Scene, Wholock, RPG Superstar, and Funny Searches

So, 2013 has come and gone. December was not my most productive month ever, but certainly not my least. My big regret for the month is that I was not able to watch the remaining episodes of the second series of Wizards Vs Aliens, and likewise review them. The season has ended now and I am placing watching and reviewing them as a top priority for January. I will get to them!

December was another big month for Doctor Who, of course, as Matt Smith’s time as the Doctor came to a close. In the lead-up to his departure, a couple of trailers for his final story arrived, as well as three separate clips. Just before the Christmas special aired, I wrote a piece expressing my concerns over the Doctor’s loss of regenerations. Then, on Christmas day, Matt Smith took a bow in “The Time of the Doctor”. You can read my review of that here. In the days following the airing, BBC America released a deleted scene from the episode, which you can watch here:

Although Doctor Who Christmas specials have become a standard since the series returned in 2005, there weren’t any during the original series’ run. However, in 1965, Doctor Who’s regular schedule fell on Christmas Day. The episode that aired, “The Feast of Steven” was the seventh episode of the epic twelve-part story, “The Daleks’ Masterplan”. Yet this episode stood apart from the remainder of the story. It didn’t even have any Daleks appear in it! Instead, the Doctor and his companions get caught up in a couple of light-hearted mini-adventures on modern day Earth—on Christmas day. The episode is infamous for its closing moments when the Doctor breaks the fourth wall and wishes all the viewers a merry Christmas. The episode is sadly lost from the archives, but like other missing episodes, the audio survives. Here’s a fan animation of the closing moments using the existing audio:

Today, January 1, 2014 marks the long awaited return of Sherlock. I haven’t actually seen the first episode yet, but will be watching it soon. I hope it’s good! But to help build anticipation for it, a prequel, “Many Happy Returns” came out last week. For people interested in the idea of a Doctor Who/Sherlock crossover, here’s a phenomenal fan video called “Wholock”:

In the world of roleplaying games, the Advanced Class Guide Playtest came to an end this month. We now need to wait until August to see the results! Paizo’s annual RPG Superstar contest also started this month. Although the deadline for entries was today, it’s now possible for the public to vote in the contest. Each round of the contest will narrow the number of competitors down until the final one wins a commission to write a Pathfinder adventure module.

I reviewed three Pathfinder products this month: Bestiary 4, Demon’s Heresy, and Towns of the Inner Sea. There are several more waiting in the wings. Expect the first, Magical Marketplace, to appear tomorrow.

Finally, I thought I’d round things off this month with a selection of the latest bizarre search terms that have brought people to this blog. As always, any spelling errors are repeated exactly.

best pens for doctors – Well, with pen in the blog’s name and lots of Doctor Who stuff, I can understand it, I guess.

google steven moffit sexist - I just found this humorous because whoever did the search felt the need to include the word google in it.

doctor who sex games – Yeah, I still don’t know why people looking for sex keep ending up here.

matt smith’s boner lets kill hitler – Um, does he have one in “Let’s Kill Hitler”? I’m afraid to go back and check.

dices that communicate with demons – No comment.

ford transmissions - I have absolutely no idea.

Happy New Year everyone!

August Round-Up, Reign of Winter Poster Map Folio, and a Few More Funny Searches

These days, months seem to go by really fast. It feels like I only wrote July’s monthly round-up a few days ago, but here we are at the end of August. It was an interesting month and fairly productive for me on the blog—apart from the past week, when a hectic schedule kept me from making as many updates as I would have liked. It was the best month ever for views though, with more than twice as many people visiting the site than in the previous best-ever month!

The month opened with the BBC announcing that Peter Capaldi would be stepping into the role of the twelfth Doctor after Matt Smith leaves in this year’s Christmas special. As with all new Doctor announcements, this one was met with lots of praise and just a little bit of criticism, some justified, some not-so-justified. As happy as I am with the choice (and I do believe he will be a great Doctor), I had to admit to a couple concerns with the casting process myself. More exciting news came a couple of weeks later with the announcement of the discovery of a lost William Hartnell interview. It’s not quite the discovery of lost episodes, but a significant event nonetheless. Also, for a bit of fun, Doctor Who fans discovered that the TARDIS is on Google Maps. Finally, I have begun my own preparations for the upcoming 50th anniversary of Doctor Who by looking back at my own experiences with the show throughout my life. Each week until the anniversary, I’ll look at one of the Doctors, and finally at the spin-offs. It’s a little bit of self-indulgent nostalgia, and I hope people enjoy it.

In the world of Pathfinder, I continued to make my way through my backlog of products to review. I didn’t get through as much as I hoped this month, but I still made good headway. Reviews this month included Castles of the Inner Sea, Dragons Unleashed, the Dragonslayer’s Handbook, The Witch Queen’s Revenge, the Reign of Winter Player’s Guide, and The Dragon’s Demand. Coming up soon, I’ll be getting to products such as The Worldwound, the new Wrath of the Righteous adventure path, and the hardcover release, Mythic Adventures.

Although no one’s actually enquired about it, it occurred to me that people might wonder why I review the player’s guides for adventure paths at the end of the adventure path and not at the beginning, which is when the guides are released. This is because there have been legitimate criticisms of past player’s guides that they don’t adequately prepare players for the entire adventure path, leaving players with characters unsuited for sudden shifts that occur later in the adventure path. As such, I leave reviewing the guides until after all the adventure path’s instalments are out so that I can evaluate how well the guides prepare players for the whole experience.

Last month, I included a couple of very brief reviews with my monthly round-up, and I’d like to include another such one this month. With every adventure path Paizo has published, they have also published a map folio to go along with it. Early ones were just a collection of important maps from the adventure path, but later ones have been a selection of full-colour, poster maps that are useful for the adventure path but can have more generic uses as well. Since these folios are published in the Pathfinder Campaign Setting line rather than the Pathfinder Adventure Path line, they need to be useful to people who get the one and not the other. It’s also nice not to have to get a set of maps you already have. I don’t normally review the folios since they are just maps and I haven’t felt I could give them the in-depth coverage I like to include in my reviews.

The Reign of Winter Poster Map Folio contains three poster maps: one of the country of Irrisen, one of its capital Whitethrone, and one of the region of Iobaria. Each map is in a somewhat different style, with the map of Irrisen being the most visually stunning. In many ways, it’s more like a piece of art than a map, and indeed, it’s perhaps not the most useful map as a result. Still, it show the locations of sites throughout the country, and would work especially well as a representation of a map that people actually living in the game world might see and use. The other two maps are more typical of the gaming maps of most use to gamemasters. There was a poster map of Whitethrone in the City Map Folio from a few years ago, but the one here is larger and more detailed. Overall, the Reign of Winter Poster Map Folio contains three good maps that will be useful to people running games in the northern reaches of Golarion.

A couple months ago, I listed some of the most unusual search terms people had used to find their way to this blog. Since then, I’ve collected a few more. These ones aren’t quite as bizarre and it’s easy to see why this site might show up as a result, but they made me chuckle. As before, all spelling and grammar errors are replicated exactly:

girls withdigtits – I really want to know why porn searches bring people to my blog. Could it be because the word sexism shows up here and that has sex in it and thus, porn? Or just because?

sarah jane smith hot – I understand the sentiment, but it seems an odd search to me.

of dice and men sexism doctor who – This is clearly a direct search for this site with either a typo or a misremembering of the blog’s name. Either way, the error is rather ironic.

sexist doctors nowadays – I have no idea what to say.

children girl doctor things – Still don’t know what to say.

left 4 dead original character models – Until this very sentence, I have never once mentioned Left 4 Dead on this blog. I don’t play video games these days (mainly because, if I do, I know I’ll never accomplish anything productive ever again) and so I barely ever mention them on this blog, if ever. No idea why Of Dice and Pen came up in this search.

Anyway, that’s all for this month. Have a great September, everyone!

Orbiting TARDIS Funded, Funny Searches, and Monthly Round-Up

I’m starting something a little new this month, which is basically a month-in-review. On the last day of each month, I’ll take a look back at the entire month, both things that I’ve commented on, and reviewed on the site, as well as possibly a few other things in the month that have caught my interest.

June was a fairly slow month overall, but it opened with the news that Matt Smith is leaving Doctor Who in this year’s Christmas special. This led to much speculation about who might be the next Doctor, but that speculation seems to have simmered off for the time being.

Although I haven’t written a post on it (because there’s nothing concrete to write about), there have been tons of bizarre and often conflicting rumours over the past couple weeks about more missing episodes having been found. Numbers as high as 90 are floating around. Another popular (and perhaps more believable) number is 17. Of course, even the find of one missing episode would be exciting news, if true. Whether there’s a kernel of truth to this particular round of rumours remains to be seen.

With the TV show off the air until November, there were no Doctor Who episodes to review this month, but I did review the book Queers Dig Time Lords.

A couple weeks ago, I posted about this Kickstarter campaign to place a TARDIS in orbit. The campaign closed yesterday having raised $88,880, passing their second stretch goal after an initial goal of $33,000. I’m very curious to learn when the actual launch will take place!

I’ve fallen a bit behind on my Pathfinder reviews, meaning I only got to three this month (Doom Comes to Dustpawn, Ultimate Campaign, and The Frozen Stars). This means I’ve got a backlog of products to get through, so expect lots of those over the next couple of weeks. I’ll also have some reviews of the newest products for the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space game, which have finally been released!

For some time now, my wife has wanted me to do a post about some of the unusual search keywords that bring people to this site. The vast majority of search keywords are pretty normal and self-explanatory, such as “steven moffat sexist” or “doctor who sexist” or various things referring to Pathfinder products. Some others are a bit unusual, but you can generally understand how they came about, such as the website address as keyword (presumably from people entering the address in the wrong field of their browsers). However, every now and then, I see some search words that are a little more bizarre. Sometimes, I’m not even sure how those words led people to this site. So I’ve been keeping a list of some of the best to share. Here they are (all spelling mistakes are replicated exactly):

but then moffat – I can see how this would bring people to this site, but it’s the arrangement of the words I find amusing. But then Moffat...what?

female doctor dices – This is possibly a direct search for this site, just with a misspelling of dice, but it does create an interesting image in my mind. What exactly is this female Doctor dicing? Tomatoes perhaps? Cucumbers?

docrors looking at girls with dig tits – I’m actually impressed that somebody looking for porn would forgo the porn and come to this site instead!

dr sexist children delivery thank you – Okay, the dr sexist part I can understand. The rest? Uh...

why does everyone hate act 6 – Act 6 of what?

And my favourite:

dead people