michelel72

Hello, world. I don't post much; I haven't been doing much. But I figured I'd make some notes of recent things as evidence to myself that I do anything.

Writing: I've been making stop-and-go progress on a story that I never meant to exist; it's ... 69,700 words so far, and it has so much left to go, and I need it to be in place for something else I wrote that follows it, and ... sigh. Why am I like this.

Beware of very mild spoilers beyond this point. Note also that I haven't been in an overly receptive headspace lately, so please know that I don't mean to denigrate anyone's favorites here.

( Books, Movies, YouTube )

Before yesterday, I probably would have been vaguely amused by something like a phone app to find your car in a parking lot. Sure, it'd be useful for some people, but I don't tend to go many unfamiliar places. And it's not like I would manage to lose my car in the garage I've been parking in several times a week for FIFTEEN OF THE LAST SEVENTEEN YEARS or anything. Especially not in 10-degree (F) weather.

Sigh.

(The problem was that I was listening to a conference call as I parked that morning, and the confusion of disconnecting my phone from the car's hands-free system and getting into the building, all while following the technical conversation, meant that I wasn't paying nearly enough attention to where I'd parked. And apparently my key fob's "unlock" works just fine, but the "emergency horn" either doesn't work or has a trick to it.)

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In random other news, I've dropped "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." I'd only seen three episodes and my DVR space was getting critical, so B and agreed that was the show on the block. I decided to check it out a little more alone, on the off chance it might have improved, but I couldn't get past the 15-minute mark of episode four. ( Squee-harshing within. )

The news coverage of the New Jersey bridge closure scandal is frankly far more entertaining, anyway ....

(* I admit that giving the van the code name "short bus", in relation to their transport plane being "the bus", was pretty amusing, though.)

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Apparently I wrote 14,336 words (possibly including some amount of notes/outlining) in 2013, 4700 of them in December. That's ... not nothing, at least.

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I've been trying to do more non-internet reading lately, as well as checking out more shows now and then. Two recent works have been outside my comfort zone in different ways.

(I've tried to avoid spoilers for the works discussed here.)

( 'Redemption in Indigo' by Karen Lord ... )

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Meanwhile, for probably over a year now I've been reading the "reviews" and many of the comments at the Mark Does Stuff sites. (Without those sites, I might never have discovered the Newsflesh series or Tamora Pierce's books, just for two book examples. I can't read at his posting pace — see my comments about WIPs above — so if a book he's currently processing interests me, I read ahead and then follow his slower pace for the discussions. I don't have the same problem with visual media, fortunately, though re-watching Buffy and Angel as he discovered them for the first time was highly entertaining.)

He recently covered the short anime series ( Puella Magi Madoka Magica )

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I don't read or watch much outside my comfort zone of standard English-language narratives. Whedon's trope deconstructions (and similar) are about as adventurous as I tend to get, and I've felt ... disappointed lately by the books and TV series that don't give me the resolution I'm expecting. I've always felt a little bad that my narrative consumption tends to be so culturally "sheltered", but I rarely have the time or energy or knowledge to get into works from other cultures or traditions.

In some cases, there are "other-culture" narratives that are tailored to cater to the inexperienced; I think Redemption in Indigo is one such. But for those that aren't, I think I need the "book club" approach to walk me through it. It's odd; I don't tend to go seeking out communities, for the most part.

But I'm glad when I come across these experiences anyway. The works deserve appreciation on their own merits, and working to appreciate them is good brain exercise.

Is anybody watching the new US television shows "American Horror Story" (FX), "Once upon a Time" (ABC), or "Grimm" (NBC)? (I don't know if they're available internationally yet.)

( Vague spoilers for all three within: AHS through 1x04, OUAT through 1x02, G only to the degree the Wikipedia article is spoilery. )

"Anyway, I'm sorry, but that just happens to be how I feel about it. What do you think?"

What is this? I'm liking stuff? Who am I and what have I done with ... me?

Doctor Who 6x10 "The Girl Who Waited": (No real spoilers) I kind of hate the open (primarily for the false! urgency! and the brief appearance of the Idiot Ball), but other than that, this episode works for me. Interesting, fascinating character dynamics, bad-ass-ness and devotion in rewarding distributions, dark elements. My DVR choked on the recording, and I'm glad I managed to track this episode down regardless. (I always forget I have OnDemand, because it never seems to have anything useful ... until now.)

Eureka 4x11 "Liftoff": ( Cut for minor spoilers )

So, anyway. I liked stuff for a change! There may be hope for me yet!

I haven't been around much; I haven't had time. Most of that is work; I adore my job, but it's exhausting, and nights/weekends really aren't enough for me even to keep up with the day-to-day, much less reading (I haven't read half the SGA Big Bang archive; I haven't read any of last year's Atlantis Big Bang; I have over 400 fics, fic indexes, and other works tagged as "to be read"; the ReverseBang just went live and the GenFicathon is about to), much much less writing. Which is frustrating. I simply need more time than that to switch from programmer-mindset to writing-mindset.

( A brief (for me) whine about the State of the Writing. )

With reading and writing fic, as well as keeping up with my rlist/flist, I spend a lot of time on my computer. My ISP is Comcast, who provides Symantec's Norton Security Suite free to its customers, and I have to wonder what the hell they're thinking. Norton was once the gold standard for computer utilities, if I recall correctly, but it's been worse than a joke for years. Why in the world would Comcast encourage its customers to use a product that makes Comcast's service seem unusably slow? I'm not exaggerating — when my browser takes 48 seconds to process a simple page-down command (yes, I timed it, twice; yes, the response time is unmeasurably quick with Norton uninstalled), I may be savvy enough to blame the add-on software, but not everyone will be, and they'll blame Comcast's speed. Inexplicably stupid marketing/support choice.

Not much else to report beyond that, so I'll close out with a huge batch of …

( TV mini-reviews (and two bonus fic recs) )

And that's that.

Well, that was crap. I could dwell on ( spoilers ), or even the Doctor suddenly using "virus" and "bacteria" interchangeably because it's so in-character for him not to know the difference, but ... meh. This one found the strange intersection between dull and annoying.

ETA: Actually, that last item might be an artifact of Eleven's speech patterns rather than his truly using them interchangeably; I certainly don't care to watch again to check. But I left out ( another spoiler )! Why oh why do people write science fiction if they can't be bothered to follow through with the implications of the elements they introduce? It's like this whole season is a showcase for privilege-and-centrism fail. Bah.

Well, it's official: "Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior" is Not Good. There's no need to get into too much by way of specifics, so I won't bother with a cut. Sarah Bunting is pretty on-target in that first paragraph, particularly when noting the "dialogue that assumes neither the viewers nor the characters themselves know anything about the field in which the characters work, therefore requiring exposition to explain the most elementary aspects of profiling or detective work". The characters act as if they met one another only two days ago, and the ways in which the fragments of their backstories are "worked in" are laughably clumsy. The dialogue in general is clumsy, for that matter; the line readings make me think the actors are reading literally cut-and-pasted scripts for the very first time. There is no flow, no rhythm, no tone modulation. And as violetcheetah noted while we watched the (wretched) backdoor pilot, a ragtag elite FBI team is a stupid concept. (A pardoned murderer? Right.) How did this show ever get Richard Schiff as a recurring guest?

I watch "Criminal Minds" because I like the characters a lot and I love the team. (Sidebar: Fie on all the people who put blatant spoilers for the latest episode, 6x18 "Lauren", in their open-comm-posted fic summaries and even disclaimers! I'm glad the mods are cracking down, finally.) In CM:SB, I don't care about any of these people beyond a vague annoyance ... though seeing that one actress react to a child's tearful embrace as though she'd swallowed a huge bug was on the amusing side. (Shame it was supposed to be emotional. Or something.) I don't really give a rip about the cases themselves, particularly not when they're recycling twists — not just plots, plot twists — from CM itself. The snippets we get of Garcia aren't enough, especially since they aren't bothering to synch her character with the developments in the primary show. That may be due to a scheduling snafu, but I don't care: I'm done.

I'll post some more positive media reactions soon, promise. I even thought about doing one per day for the duration of this week-long vacation (Destination: Living Room!), but part of the point is not holding myself to any deadlines, and I want to do the positive stuff justice. So, coming soon: Chuck! Mumford & Sons! Garcia! Mike Holmes! But for now, a couple of "meh" reactions ... from the "late-alphabet single-character title" division, heh.

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( Cut for tl;dr spoilers for all of 'V' )

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( Cut for slightly less tl;dr spoilers for 'Y: The Last Man' )

I love me some Joe Flanigan, but wow, this movie is so bad. (That is in no way his fault.) I figured it would tickle that part of me that has a weakness for old-school "warm" films, the kind I can only enjoy now if I don't really think about the obnoxious and/or offensive normativities they parrot, but no — it's just not good. It's just so profoundly false throughout, I can't even.