Columbus Circle, 2:38 P.M.

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

A New Calf Has Arrived in Brooklyn

Julie Larsen Maher/Wildlife Conservation Society Prospect Park Zoo's new calf, photographed here on Dec. 6 with his mother, Tetley.

Brooklyn's bovine population has grown by one: a calf was born at the Prospect Park Zoo, officials announced Monday.

The calf, a male who has not yet been named, was born earlier this month and is the offspring of a milking cow named Tetley; he is the first calf ever born at the zoo, officials said.

Tetley is a relative newcomer to the zoo who replaced Aggie, who died last year.

The calf weighed 84 pound s at birth and is growing quickly. He can be seen in the zoo's barn area along with geese, goats, sheep and a turkey.

In Performance: Alice Ripley of \'A Civil War Christmas\'

“A Civil War Christmas,” Paula Vogel's play with music, is set during the grim holiday season of 1864. Alice Ripley, who plays Mary Todd Lincoln and other characters, sings a medley of “Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Ain't That a Rockin' All Night.” The show runs through Dec. 30 at New York Theater Workshop.

Recent videos include Tracee Chimo in “Bad Jews” and Jackie Hoffman in her holiday show “A Chanukah Charol.”

Coming soon: videos from Baba Brinkman (“Ingenious Nature”), Will Chase (“The Mystery of Edwin Drood”) and others.

Game Theory: Shooter Games Get Easier, and That Makes Change Harder

Square EnixSleeping Dogs, published by Square Enix is about an undercover detective infiltrating a Hong Kong gang and finding his loyalties divided.

Dear Stephen, Chris, assorted friends and frenemies,

Like you, Chris, I have a strong stomach for violence. But at times, as I blew the head off my hundredth pirate of the week, I began to wonder: Why shooting in particular?

If the terrific martial-arts-theme game Sleeping Dogs (think of Grand Theft Auto in Hong Kong) showed us anything this year, it's that even violent games can be a lot more fun if they don't always involve gunplay. So why do so many big-budget games still revolve around firearms?

A big part of the reason, I sense, is simple: Games feature a lot of shooting because the industry has gotten very good at making games that feature a lot of shooting.

Much of, if not most, game design is still about problem solving. Not big, high-level problems like “What are we really saying about the human-alien conflict here?” but more practical problems like “Every time this character tries to open that door, he falls through the floor, and the game crashes.” Making realistic gunfire in a game is a relatively easy programming problem to solve, if only because it has been solved so many times before.

On the flip side longtime players have gotten good at using guns. We've all learned how to aim, how to fire, when to flank and when to reload. It's easy to embrace our respective roles , because we've been embracing them for so long.

It can be difficult for some to imagine change.

This year some forum posters dug up an old interview with the BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler in which she mentioned how she would be interested in seeing her employer's Mass Effect games include an option to skip combat sections and focus exclusively on story. What a fine idea. The strength of the Mass Effect games has always been their believable characters and dramatic story lines. For merely suggesting the option to remove violence Ms. Hepler was met with a hysterical, coordinated online hate campaign.

Despite the mainstream games industry's tentative steps toward alternatives, shooting games continue to get incrementally better, and critics - myself included - often laud them for that. The assault ri fles in this game “feel good”; the shotguns in that game are “punchy and satisfying.” This year Rockstar's Max Payne 3 was the go-to example of a well-made shooter, regularly spitting out slow-motion action sequences so balletic and brutal they inspired in me potent feelings of awe and revulsion.

Yet 2012 also gave us a wealth of outstanding nonviolent games. Stephen, I'll second the recommendations on your list, particularly the life-affirming, wondrous Journey and add a call-out to Thirty Flights of Loving, a fascinating little thing from Blendo Games that crams more story and intrigue into its 15-minute running time than an action game like Far Cry 3 manages in 25 hours. I also enjoyed < a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/ftl-faster-than-light/">FTL (Faster Than Light), an addictive starship-management simulator that is perhaps best described as “Star Trek” meets Oregon Trail.

And then there's the game you both have already mentioned: The Walking Dead, from Telltale. (And might I add, referring to a game about zombies as a “no-brainer?” Well done, Mr. Totilo.)

Rarely have I been so affected by a video game story or so haunted by the consequences of my own lackluster decision-making skills. Stephen, you mention the reverence with which The Walking Dead treats life. I think that ties in with something crucial to the game's success: it's violent, but the violence feels consequential.

Not all video game violence is created equal. It's a concept that the game designer Steve Gaynor calls “specific violence,” and it can be instructive in understanding why some game deaths affect us more than others.

In so many games enemies are dehumanized. They charge at us, copy-pasted zombies, pirates and zombie-pirates, dying at our feet by the dozen. They're not really people; they're obstacles to overcome. (This happens in movies too. Think of the countless anonymous dudes offed by, say, Rambo.) But the moment we put a name and a face to a character, violence against him or her becomes specific, more meaningful.

The Walking Dead never resorts to the sorts of killing sprees that undead hordes can make so palatable. The zombies here are never faceless cannon fodder. They exist at the periphery, a framework for a more interesting human story.

What violence there is in The Walking Dead is certainly specific, often heartbreakingly so. Every character has a name and a back story, and over the course of the game's five epis odes I grew to like or loathe them all as they supported, failed, relied on and betrayed me. Each time one of them died, I felt real loss.

It seems fair to concede that violence in games is, if not a problem, certainly an issue worth discussing. But is the issue video game violence in general, or the nature of that violence? Is the problem that our chess pieces bleed and cry out, or that we're being conditioned not to mind when they do? And if more game makers find a way to move beyond the shooting galleries of the present, won't the games of the future be stronger for it?

Kirk

Join the discussion here.

An E-mail for Santa

Dear Diary:

When my grandson was 4 years old he was terrified of Santa Claus. As the Christmas holiday approached he became more and more worried. Finally my daughter suggested that they e-mail Santa and tell him how he felt.

So he dictated the following letter:

Dear Santa,
Don't stop at my apartment. Leave my presents with the doorman.
From Jackson

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Game Theory: Caring About Make-Believe Body Counts

Brendan Hoffman for The New York TimesWayne LaPierre, vice president of the National Rifle Association, blamed violent video games, among other things, for the shootings in Newtown, Conn.

Dear Chris, Kirk and the rest,

Let's talk about violent video games and the year's most surprising backlash against them.

I'm not referring to the recent argument by Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association about the “dirty little truth” of a gaming “shadow industry” that “sows violence against its own people.” In the same speech, in which he said adding more armed guards in schools could stop m assacres like the one in Connecticut, his main attack on games involved showing a scene from a crude, obscure Web game called Kindergarten Killer that was apparently made by a teenager 10 years ago. Mr. LaPierre scolded the news media for either not discovering it or for suppressing knowledge of its existence.

Though Mr. LaPierre railed against violent games and movies, he found himself with few allies. Even State Senator Leland Yee, a California Democrat who took his fight against the legality of selling children violent video games to the Supreme Court (where he lost on First Amendment grounds), called Mr. LaPierre's move against games “mind-boggling.”

It's not that everyone but leaders of the N.R.A. suddenly loves violent games. Many, includin g Mr. Yee, remain troubled by the abundance of violence and cite disputed studies that claim violent, Mature-rated games might make children more aggressive. That there are tens of millions of violent games sold in America each year and yet a blessed paucity of mass shootings ruins just about any argument that the games inspired the shootings, yet the more general concerns persist that games are often coarse and part of a culture that ignores real violence while casually championing lurid fake violence.

The N.R.A.'s attack on games wasn't the surprise.

In June, however, it was a shock to see those who play them or make them rail against them. The occasion was E3, the annual showcase of the biggest Xbox, PlayStation and Wii games. The loudest voice yet from the industry's mainstream was the respected veteran game designer Warren Spector, who cast his gaze across the show and told GamesIndusty.biz: “The ultraviolence has to stop. We have to stop loving it. I just don't believe in the effects argument at all, but I do believe that we are fetishizing violence, and now in some cases actually combining it with an adolescent approach to sexuality. I just think it's in bad taste. Ultimately I think it will cause us trouble.”

Mr. Spector's allies were abundant, as critics tabulated the body counts in the game trailers that ran at E3 and wondered whether ultraviolence in games was, if not the enemy of peaceful society, at least an obstruction to sophisticated artistic expression.

It helps to remember that video games are forever evolving, and that few people who make or play games consider the medium to be mature or even far past the zygote stage. While the critics who write overviews of the year in movies or music can casually measure offerings to canons of classics, people who appreciate video games live with both the woe and the excitement that most of humanity's best games have yet to be made. This allows creators, critics and players to wonder if any new gaming development or tired cliché is actually a useful part of the form's evolution or a Neanderthalic dead end. Some debates, like whether it is beneficial for characters to talk - for them to emit sound rather than express themselves through on-screen text - may be familiar to aficionados of other forms of entertainment.

Those familiar with games who debate the medium's violence now commonly assume that games may have become too violent. But they don't assume that games should be free of violence. That is because of fake violence's relationship with interactivity, which is a defining element of video games.

Simulated violence is, arguably and perversely, an efficient means to generating fun through interactiv ity. Nongamers may be horrified by that statement, but those who have tried Pac-Man, Tetris, Angry Birds or Super Mario Bros. will recognize that a player's agency in an interactive game is best conveyed through the act of obliteration.

To put it in the terms of a nonvideo game: There is clear satisfaction in figuring out how to get my chess piece to wipe your chess piece from the table. A problem with violent video games, and the thing I think Mr. Spector was reacting to, is that many are created in such a manner that the chess piece is programmed to scream and bleed and explode and entertain its player through some sort of punctuation of gore.

The game is created with the assumption that the interaction alone won't please the player, and therefore the interaction must end with a gruesome thrill. Even a video game with guns and soldiers can and often is strategically interesting to play. But at E3 and afterward I heard a rare chorus of creators, critics and fans wondering, more or less, if too many chess pieces were bleeding and if it was not really helping games be any more fun or tasteful. I expect that query to have more impact on the nature of violence in future games than any pressure from the outside.

A screen image from Letterpress.

There may well be people, however, who simply wish to play games that don't contain violence. For them I'd say 2012's best games include:

¶Super Hexagon, a hypnotic phone or computer puzzle game that more or less charges the player with weaving a triangle through an ever-constricting spinning drain of psychedelic colors.

¶Letterpress, a multiplayer word game played on phones that turns Boggle-like rules into a competitive land grab.

¶Journey, a video game version of a hike through a dreamscape, rendered exclusively on the PlayStation 3.

¶Dys4ia, a brief and, unusually, autobiographical Web game about a game designer's experience starting hormone replacement therapy.

¶Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, a mystery story for the Nintendo 3DS that is advanced by completing brain teasers; it packs oddball side games, including one that charges you with teaching a rabbit to act in stage plays.

But if you want to play a 2012 game that has something to say about violence this year or that at least treats violence as something we should have a reaction to, one of Chris's standouts, the Walking Dead, is the no-brainer. In this game, guns are as horrif ying as they are useful. All life is treated with reverence. And killing, in a rare but healthy turn for video games, is no amusement.

Stephen

Warhol\'s Mao Portraits Banned from a Show in China

Even though Mao's face can be found in work by many Chinese artists, government officials in China have nonetheless vetoed the inclusion of Andy Warhol's famous rendition of the Great Leader in a retrospective of his work traveling there, Bloomberg reported. Eric Shiner, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, said that when he heard last month that officials in China's Ministry of Culture objected to displaying 10 Mao portraits, he asked them to reconsider.

“My argument was that in contemporary Chinese art today, using imagery of Mao is very common practice,” Mr. Shiner said, “but that did not sway or change the opinion.”

Mr. Shiner helped organize “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal,” an exhibition of more than 300 works that opened last week in Hong Kong and will travel to Shanghai and Beijingâ€"part of an Asian tour that c oincides with the 25th anniversary of the artist's death. Warhol created the portraits after President Nixon visited China in 1972, and visited the country himself in 1982.

Mr. Shiner said that exposing the Chinese public to Warhol's work was more important than the exclusion of any particular piece of art. But he added that he hopes “that one day, they'll make their debut.”

Because You Watched Live Theater: \'The Netflix Plays\' Coming to Ars Nova

To date, a Netflix subscription may not have done much more than killed valuable hours of your free time, caught you up on missed episodes of “Futurama” and turned you on to the suggestions of its enigmatic recommendation engine. (Enjoyed vintage reruns of “Sesame Street”? Why not try “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3″?) But now that video service has inspired its own dramatic series, “The Netflix Plays,” which will be presented at Ars Nova, the not-for-profit Manhattan theater, by its Play Group, from Jan. 30 through Feb. 9, its press representatives said on Monday.

As with previous Play Group programs that have taken their inspiration from modern technology and Internet culture (see past offerings like “The Wikipedia Plays,” “The Urban Dictionary Plays” and “The Wii Plays”), “The Netflix Plays” combines live music with short dramatic works by 12 up-and-coming pl aywrights.

The titles of these plays, at least, should instantly conjure the experience of aimlessly wondering the Netflix interface for something you haven't already seen, including “Because You Watched Weekend at Bernie's 2: A Kantian Morality Tale” by Josh Koenigsberg; “Because You Watched Sherlock: Jack of Hearts” by Rachel Bonds, “Because You Watched Downton Abbey: Violently Overstated British Period Drama for ages 19-100″ by Dipika Guha; and “Because You Watched Frasier: BECAUSE YOU WATCHED FRASIER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” by Michael Mitnick.

Other participating playwrights include Sarah Gancher, Sarah Burgess, Bess Wohl, Sharyn Rothstein, Jon Kern, A. Zell Williams, Nick Gandiello and Stephen Karam. The plays are directed by Jess Chayes, Wes Grantom, Jesse Jou and Portia Krieger.

Because You Watched Live Theater: \'The Netflix Plays\' Coming to Ars Nova

To date, a Netflix subscription may not have done much more than killed valuable hours of your free time, caught you up on missed episodes of “Futurama” and turned you on to the suggestions of its enigmatic recommendation engine. (Enjoyed vintage reruns of “Sesame Street”? Why not try “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3″?) But now that video service has inspired its own dramatic series, “The Netflix Plays,” which will be presented at Ars Nova, the not-for-profit Manhattan theater, by its Play Group, from Jan. 30 through Feb. 9, its press representatives said on Monday.

As with previous Play Group programs that have taken their inspiration from modern technology and Internet culture (see past offerings like “The Wikipedia Plays,” “The Urban Dictionary Plays” and “The Wii Plays”), “The Netflix Plays” combines live music with short dramatic works by 12 up-and-coming pl aywrights.

The titles of these plays, at least, should instantly conjure the experience of aimlessly wondering the Netflix interface for something you haven't already seen, including “Because You Watched Weekend at Bernie's 2: A Kantian Morality Tale” by Josh Koenigsberg; “Because You Watched Sherlock: Jack of Hearts” by Rachel Bonds, “Because You Watched Downton Abbey: Violently Overstated British Period Drama for ages 19-100″ by Dipika Guha; and “Because You Watched Frasier: BECAUSE YOU WATCHED FRASIER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” by Michael Mitnick.

Other participating playwrights include Sarah Gancher, Sarah Burgess, Bess Wohl, Sharyn Rothstein, Jon Kern, A. Zell Williams, Nick Gandiello and Stephen Karam. The plays are directed by Jess Chayes, Wes Grantom, Jesse Jou and Portia Krieger.

A Political Insider Who Knows His Way Around the Holiday Buffet Table

Yana Paskova for The New York Times Alan Flacks, center, a political activist from the Upper West Side, spends much of the holiday season attending parties hosted by local political clubs in order to partake of the free food.

Alan Flacks got the inside tip from a law clerk.

“There's a beautiful ham on one side, and great Swedish meatballs on the other,” the law clerk said.

This was no courtroom sidebar but rather a sidewalk encounter outside a holiday party being held by the Broadway Democrats political club in a West 111th Stre et apartment building in Manhattan recently.

Mr. Flacks, 70, had walked up from his rent-controlled apartment on West 100th Street. Naturally he had not eaten. A big reason anyone goes to these parties â€" as Mr. Flacks can attest â€" is the food, which is free and usually good and plentiful.

It was certainly true at this party. Inside, elected officials and club members gathered around a large buffet table. Within moments of entering, Mr. Flacks was sampling the ham - the meatballs were gone - and making the rounds, chatting with politicians, including Scott Stringer, the Manhattan Borough president.

On the Upper West Side, Mr. Flacks is well known as a gadfly, activist and political junkie who publishes a regular newsletter â€" a feat, given that he does not own a computer and often works with a borrowed cell phone.

A lifelong bachelor, Mr. Flacks is trained as a lawyer, but devotes his time to unpaid activism, and live s off a modest savings. Of course, volunteer activism has its perks, and this time of year there are many holiday parties held by political clubs in Manhattan, and they offer plenty of food.

Drinking and networking are popular at these parties, but Mr. Flacks, a frugal man with a keen palate (and a non-drinker), keeps close tabs on the food. In fact most of his meals come from a buffet table, on a paper plate with a side of politics.

“There's no need to go to the supermarket except for fresh milk,” said Mr. Flacks, whose political newsletter, “The Flacks Report,” is sent to an e-mail list of about 300 people, mostly in the news media and in political circles in Manhattan. In December it turns into an information sheet on parties, including names of restaurants and whether there is a fee (there rarely is). In November, club officials often ask Mr. Flacks to publish their party information. Even elected officials contact him, asking for party information, h e said.

“Schumer's office called me the other day asking me about the Three Parks party,” he said, referring to Senator Charles E. Schumer, and the name of Mr. Flacks' political club, the Three Parks Independent Democrats, which held its party in early December with a big buffet table and a bigger open bar. “I told them, ‘You missed it by two weeks.'”

Clubs usually send out invitations to members, and rely on word-of-mouth to attract non-members in the hopes of coaxing them into joining.

“The more people, the better your food, the more honor and glory you get,” said Mr. Flacks. “They want new members. They want to be popular. And of course, they're hoping the big shot politicians come.''

Mr. Flacks is out every night in December. One recent weeknight he went to a party hosted by Prime New York, a political consulting firm in Greenwich Village.

“Let's see: chicken breast in cream sauce, baked ziti, shepard's pie,” said Mr. Fl acks recounting the buffet like a waiter reciting the daily specials. After that party, he and others stopped in to another party for dessert, which Mr. Flacks said were “regular Christmas cookies.”

One another weeknight, Mr. Flacks popped into a party hosted by the Lenox Hill Democratic Club at a Second Avenue bar and said hello to Councilwoman Jessica Lappin. The food â€" mostly fried bar snacks, by the time he arrived - was all gone. Mr. Flacks had filled himself at an earlier party anyway. He walked a block away to a restaurant where the Lexington Democratic Club was holding its party. He said hello to United States Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney and tried to order a soda at the bar but the bartender told him that the open bar had ended. Mr. Flacks complained to several club members that it was outrageous to be charged for a soft drink at a political holiday party. Soon he had the soda in his hand.

“The club president got it for me,” he said, and went back to schmoozing.

Game Theory: A Year When Real-World Violence Crept Into Play

ActivisionA scene from Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

Dear Stephen, Kirk, gentle readers and online trolls,

Welcome to the first edition of Game Theory, a conversation about the year in video games. Some introductions for the uninitiated: Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming news site Kotaku.com, and he also writes about video games for The New York Times; Kirk Hamilton is the features editor at Kotaku; and I'm the deputy editor of Yahoo News, as well as reviewing video games for The Times. The three of us will be bickering - I mean, coming to a friendly consensus - about the year's best games, the year's worst games and about what 2012 indic ated about the state and future of this creative medium.

We'll be joined here and on the ArtsBeat blog by some distinguished guests: Rich Moore, the director of “Wreck-It Ralph,” by my lights the finest movie about video games ever made; Lucy Prebble, the British playwright of “Enron” and “The Effect,” now onstage in London; Gavin Purcell, the supervising producer of “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” probably the most prominent place in pop culture that evinces an interest in new games and their creators; Helen Lewis, the deputy editor of The New Statesman, a British current-affairs magazine; and Jenn Frank, whose essay at Unwinnable.com (“Allow Natural Death”) about her mother, video games and death might have been the most widely circulated piece of online writing about games this year, as measured by cursory glances at my Twitter feed.

It's hard to talk about video games and 2012 without addressing the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and the inevitable debate over violent games that emerged from the entirely predictable discovery that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old gunman, played Call of Duty games. (Perhaps he also ate Big Macs; he's in that core demographic too.) There's no evidence that video games cause - or even correlate with - violence, and that can't be stated often enough. And one of the most pleasurable aspects of playing in 2012 was how many tremendous games had nothing to do with shooting people in the face.

But I do think gamers are overly defensive about the news media's focus on video game violence. Video games, or at least some of them, are horrifically violent. Tom Bissell, writing for Grantland this year, phrased it this way: “Why do gamers want their puzzles to bleed and scream?” It's worth at least engaging with the question.

I have a pretty strong stomach when it comes to violence - I intend to see “Django Unchained” and expect to enjoy it mightily - but I have to admit that I'm a little tired of all the killing in m y video games. No, games don't turn people into killers. But since the day when 28 people died in Newtown, I have craved games (and other things) with more beauty and less blood.

Newtown struck home, in part, because in my personal life 2012 has been about fatherhood: My wife and I welcomed our second daughter. But parenthood kept creeping into my games in 2012 too (and not just because I couldn't help noticing the similarities between raising a child, walking a dog, and playing a video game). In a continuation of the phenomenon that Stephen has called “The Daddening of Video Games,” the past 12 months were filled with games that led me to reflect on the relationship between a father and a child.

Lee and Clementine in the Walking Dead game series are not biologically related, but over the course of the five episodes she becomes something close to a daughter to him. The stunning final moments of the Unfinished Swan (for my money the greatest credit sequence in gaming history) are a meditation on how having children - in the words of Joel Lovell, the deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine, in another context - simultaneously saves and destroys your life. And most of all, Papo & Yo - my favorite game of the year - ended once and for all the tedious debate over whether a game can make you cry, or whether you should be ashamed if it can.

Video game players can be a pretty ungrateful lot, and while I think that 2012 will not be remembered as the finest year in the medium's history (and it was certainly underwhelming when it comes to blockbuster releases), it's worth remembering that there is much to be enthusiastic about : Sony's Vita hand-held and Nintendo's Wii U console show great promise; the Nintendo 3DS has new version with a much-needed bigger screen; and, best of all, downloadable games have finally arrived, en masse, as full-fledged rivals to the best of what the big game studios offer.

For what it's worth, my wife and I don't let our daughters play video games. The older is only 2 1/2 and can't master Slap Jack, much less Candy Land, much less Angry Birds, much less Call of Duty: Black Ops II. But Michael Abbott's essay at The Brainy Gamer on playing Skyrim with his 4 1/2-year-old daughter gave me something to look forward to, and one of these days she'll be ready.

Until then, it's a little sad that I find myself quickly hiding some of the games that arrive in the mail for my perusal, because their cover art is too frightening. Yes, many games are about something other than carnage. But merely by looking at pictures on boxes, a 2$-year-old girl has figured out that more often than not these things - and she doesn't even know what they are - are about fighting and physical violence.

It's tough to believe these three things at once: 1. Video games are a uniquely powerful medium of communication. 2. They have a negligible effect on behavior, whether promoting violence or aggression or hugs or butterfly collecting. 3. Children should be shielded from violent games (and from all violent media) for a very, very long time, and the 10-year-olds who are playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II (or going to see “The Dark Knight Rises”) are being failed by their parents.

I believe all three arguments are correct. But I'm not sure I can explain how they logically cohere.

Stephen , Kirk, readers: Any ideas?

Chris

\'Game of Thrones\' Is Named Year\'s Most Pirated Show

Helen Sloan/HBO Peter Dinklage in a scene from the HBO series “Game of Thrones.”

Some fans of the HBO series “Game of Thrones” may not be willing to pay a premium-cable subscription fee to watch it, but short of besieging a fleet of ships with a magical explosive chemical they'll do just about anything else to get their hands on it. “Game of Thrones,” the HBO fantasy drama adapted from George R. R. Martin's “Song of Ice and Fire” novels, was the year's most pirated show, according to the Web site TorrentFreak. TorrentFreak said that an individual episode of “Game of Thrones” had been illegally downloaded some 4.28 million times according to data compiled from BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing services and other sources (the particular episode that drew this many downloads was not specified).

The volume of piracy, TorrentFreak said, may result from the fact that HBO does not make its shows available through commercial video sites like Hulu or Amazon Prime, but only on its own online platform, HBO Go, which is available only with an HBO subscription. (HBO has said it does not plan to offer HBO Go as a standalone service in the United States.) Or it may be that viewers in international markets cannot wait for “Game of Thrones” to air in their countries, after it has already been shown in America. (Tor rentFreak said that more than 80 percent of television piracy happens outside of the United States.)

Ranking second on TorrentFreak's most-pirated list was the Showtime thriller “Dexter,” with 3.85 million downloads for a single episode, followed by the CBS comedies “The Big Bang Theory” (3.2 million) and “How I Met Your Mother” (2.96 million), and the AMC drama “Breaking Bad” (2.58 million).

A Tuesday Like Any Other Day, a Holiday, for an Exonerated Woman

Letter by letter, Cathy Watkins removed her name from a roster it should never have been on. This was a list of two dozen prison inmates, their names entered on a board maintained by Centurion Ministries in Princeton, N.J. Centurion advocates on behalf of men and women like those on that board, people it believes were locked up for crimes they did not commit. People like Cathy Watkins.

In a brief ceremony the other day, she pried her name free, a letter at a time, affirming with a physical act what had already been settled juridically. It was, she said later, a moment fraught with emotion.

“That felt really liberating,” she said. “It showed me that it's actually over.”

“It” was her nearly two decades behind bars for the murder of Baithe Diop, a Senegalese immigrant shot to death in January 1995 as he drove his livery cab in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bron x. In 1997 Ms. Watkins was found guilty of the killing along with four men, and sentenced to a long prison term - no less than 25 years, possibly for life.

Normally, that would have been that. But a federal investigator found reason years later to look deeper, and he concluded that the actual killers were former gang members with whom Mr. Diop had had dealings. The investigator's findings were persuasive. In late October, Ms. Watkins and another defendant, Eric Glisson, were provisionally set free. Early this month, the Bronx district attorney agreed that all the convictions should be thrown out. And so it was done, though the other three defendants remain in prison for a separate killing related to the Diop murder.

“It just feels good to know that now everybody knows that I was actually telling the truth over so many years,” Ms. Watkins said on Sunday. “I don't have to constantly keep saying, ‘I'm innocent, I'm innocent.'”

This is a season when people typically take stock of their lives and assess what may lie ahead. For Ms. Watkins, inevitable uncertainties loom.

At 45, she needs to figure out where to settle down. She has a daughter and three grandchildren in Augusta, Ga., but she doesn't see herself moving there. For now, she lives with friends in upstate New York - she preferred in a phone conversation to keep the location to herself - but she may relocate to New Jersey if a job at Centurion Ministries materializes.

What she might do long-term is an unknown, including how to put to use the college degree in sociology that she earned during her years at the Bedford Hills state prison for w omen in Westchester County.

More immediately, there are basic tasks, like the computer skills that must be learned and a driver's license that has to be obtained. Saturday for her meant five hours in a driver's education class.

And there are changes in quotidian life to absorb. We're not talking here about a Rip Van Winkle effect. Still, after being away for years, Ms. Watkins was astounded by “the huge variety of things” on supermarket shelves, and mystified at “seeing people walking around so distracted with this telephone business, these cellphones” (not that it takes years of being locked up to make one wonder why so many people feel compelled to be digitally connected every waking moment).

She has her faith to get her through the transition, and beyond. She belongs to the Jehovah's Witnesses, a denomination that she says she embraced at Bedford Hills. “First and foremost was my spiritual development there,” she said. “Being spiritually grounded is what's helping me to endure.”

As a Jehovah's Witness, Ms. Watkins doesn't celebrate Christmas, but, she said, “it's like every day is a holiday for me now.” She also said she harbored no ill feelings about a criminal justice system that thoroughly failed her.

“It doesn't justify anything that was done to me,” she said. “When you have people who are put in positions to uphold the law, that's what should be happening. But I've learned that I'm dealing with imperfect people, fallible human beings who are going to make mistakes.”

“Some people just do things wrong and don't have good hearts, but I couldn't let that embitter me,” she said. “You have to forgive. Holding anything against them would just kind of poison my soul. I had to let go of that. But I never let go of hope, because my truth was the truth. I always trusted that one day it would prevail. And it has.”

A Chocolate Hater Offers Holiday Cheer

Victor Kerlow

Dear Diary:

On Dec. 10, taking the F train to Manhattan, something rather odd happened. I sat on one of the light-blue benches, still warm from its previous occupier, squished with every other New Yorker on the train.

Looking around as I normally do, trying to find a place to set my eyes where I'm not starring at someone's stomach, crotch or, even worse, straight into their eyes, I found myself looking at one lady who appeared to be rather crabby. She had this mean, “Don't even look at me the wrong way or I'll slap you,” kind of look on her face.

I would say she was about 24, give or take a few years, but she definitely didn't look as if she wanted to be stared at, so I quickly loo ked away, praying she didn't notice.

After about five minutes, two men walked in, maybe in their 20s, and they didn't even wait for the doors to close before they screamed, “Free chocolate! Free chocolate, only $2!” Immediately I looked at Crabby Lady because I knew that she was just waiting to blow up on someone, and to my surprise she cracked a smile and signaled one of the men to come over to her.

They did, and I overheard her say, “Listen, I really hate chocolate.” The man wore a stunned face that read “Then why did you call me over here?”

However, she continued: “But I'm going to give you $10, enough for five chocolate bars, and when you get off this train or if you see someone on this train and they look like they could really use a chocolate bar, you give it to them. Promise?”

Sure enough, the man said, “I promise,” and made his way to the next car. It's weird, isn't it?

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